On Giving Thanks During the Holidays
By: Julia E Hubbel
Tags: Life Lessons, Black Women, Race, Gratitude, Diversity

Christine Brown, by Julia Hubbel

Some gifts keep right on giving. This is one of them.

I had two mothers. My second “Mom” was Christine Brown, the last child of a 75-year-old Florida plantation slave. Christine was closer to me than my birth mother. She came to work on my father’s farm when she was 32 and I was a pre-adolescent. Her four kids were part of my extended family, and I spent untold hours standing next to her as we sorted eggs, culled chickens and talked about life and God and faith and just being human.

I found Christine right about the same time my big brother found out how to sneak through my bedroom window at night. I found a devil and an angel at the same time. I never told her, but she was my safe place, in a world where I could tell no one. Christine knew suffering. She knew it when she saw it, and she also had the kind of wisdom not to ask but simply to be present in the face of pain. She had plenty of her own, but she ever had room to take on someone else’s load.

For those of you who read my writing, you’ve heard me speak of her. This is my only photo of Christine, the remainder of them tossed by my big brother upon my mother’s passing. My birth mother was the keeper of the family photos, and they were discarded by my brother when she passed, as I lived six hours away. So this is how I recall Christine, before diabetes laid her low, and took her from us in 1996.

So that we’re clear, Christine was not my nanny. She and I both worked the chicken farm for my dad as did a number of folks. Our families became close, but nobody as close as I did with Christine and her four kids whom I considered brothers and sisters. Always will.

I left home at 17 and was later reunited with Christine after I got out of the Army and returned to Florida for my first high school reunion. By then, she was suffering some of the debilitating effects of diabetes. I was able to help with the cost of the leg bandages which cost $25 apiece, a princely sum for a woman who lived on minimum wage. Her daughters, my sisters, and I spoke regularly and did what we could. Christine passed on a stormy, awful night of Hurricane Fran’s fury when I was living in North Carolina. The last call I got from her was the night she died in Winter Haven Hospital, where I was born, just before the wind snatched away all cell phone service that terrible night in September, 1996. She insisted on calling me, whom she called her “White daughter,” that night. She knew.

As I open the last of my moving boxes, I am finally able to absorb so many images from my youth. I have boxes of Christine’s correspondence, painstakingly hand written, spelled out phonetically. She was barely literate, but she put four kids through college making school lunches for elementary school children. She was loved and revered. Not the least by me, to this day.

Especially on this day.

The lessons I learned leaning into Christine’s ample hips while sorting eggs for my father, the songs she sang while making lard biscuits in our kitchen, the way she lived and the way the Black community of Auburndale, Florida gathered en masse around her when her husband died were extraordinary life teachings about a completely different kind of Black Excellence.

You don’t need a PhD or a Nobel Peace Prize to be excellent.

As I age, and I have a chance to unpack my memories while I unpack the very last of my moving boxes here in Oregon, this first Christmas morning in my new home I am moved for many reasons to offer thanks. This piece is dedicated to the woman who wove her love, her heart and her being into my own. She made room for me in her family. She is one of the many reasons I see, feel, listen and live the way I do, with diversity at the heart of my being. She helped set the cornerstone of how I see people, and embrace differences.

I don’t know whom you are thanking today, and for what. For my part, as the dark day begins to lighten in my part of the world, one of the lasting lights in my life remains a guiding one.

This is for my beautiful Black mom. Christine Brown.

I love you, Mama. Merry Christmas.