I can't not tell this story anymore.
Thought I detest double negatives. And triple negatives just throw my disabled brain into a tizzy. Honest to G-d--if you really want to mess with me, run a stream of triple negatives at me and watch me get all verklempt.
Anyway.
My aunt Phyllis, my dad's older sister, was born April 1st, 1927. So she would have been 81 years old today. She died December 5th, 1995, at age 67. Far too young.
I can't begin to note the ways her being, her passion and her personality shaped who I am today. So I will simply share some highlights of her life and her death, the impact of each on me, and how she spoke to me after she died.
She was a teacher at Miami-Dade Community College North in South Florida, (known locally as "Dade North") of English and Black Studies. On the night she died, she kept getting up to go to class, and lying down again because she just couldn't muster the physical energy.
She died of kidney failure.
But she also died of racism. And sexism. And fat phobia. And sexual abuse. And a heart broken too often.
Before she died, she changed the world.
In Judaism, rather than heaven or metaphysical afterlife, we have an injunction to carry on the work of our ancestors. As a kid I would never have guessed I would want to carry on my aunt's, well, anything.
Growing up, there were times when I hated Phyllis. I perceived that she yelled at me all the time, and I felt intimidated by her. She was large and loud and said whatever she was thinking, often about something I was saying or doing. Salty, scrappy and in-your face. I was afraid of saying the wrong thing. Behind her back I called her Aunt Bitch. Later in life when I told her this, she confirmed, without batting an eyelash, "I *AM* a bitch!"
Her answering machine message, until the day she died, went something like this: You have reached 947-5308. If you're trying to sell me something, hang up now, please, otherwise, leave a message.
You didn't f**k with Aunt Phyllis.
She also had a heart as big as a city block. And zero tolerance for bigotry.
The big heart came out a lot around her love of animals, and house full of dogs. She also had a formidable stuffed animal collection, and I used to love to go up to her bedroom and play with all the cute little kittens and teddy bears and puppies rather than mill silently around the adults who gathered around her kitchen counter.
Once at around age eight or nine, I tried telling a "Polack" joke in her house. I didn't even know what a "Polack" was, or, that I myself was of Polish ancestry.
She boomed, "There will be no ethnic jokes in my house!"
"Okay, okay," I said, "How many morons does it take.."
"That's discrimination against morons!" she thundered.
"If you want to make someone the butt of a joke, make it yourself."
What fun was the joke after that?
Little did I know how she got to feel that way. In the months and weeks leading up to her death, she shared some stories and writings with me that helped round out the picture.
Phyllis was born and raised in upstate New York in a town called Gowanda, which means "beautiful valley nestled in the hills," south of Buffalo, across Lake Erie from Canada. She was the oldest, my dad, Bill, the middle kid, and my uncle Bob the baby. The Nagles were one of five Jewish families in the town, and everyone knew which families those were. I remember my dad telling me a story of playing football with some friends. One of his friends missed the ball. When he retrieved it, he slammed it to the ground, shouting "Goddamned Jews!" This probably would have been in the early 1940's, just before the war.
In 1946, at age nineteen, on her way back from checking out colleges in South Florida (she would attend the University of Miami), Phyllis boarded a bus heading north. She realized before too long that the back of the bus was extremely crowded, while in the front, people sprawled over two and three seats with their belongings and such. Phyllis motioned to one very crumpled woman to come forward and populate the front of the bus. The woman's eyes grew wide and she shook her head, pointing to a sign above their heads, "COLOREDS SEAT FROM THE REAR."
Looking forward and back, only at that moment did Phyllis realize that the entire bus was divided in half by skin color: black in the back and white in the front. Until that moment she simply had not seen skin color. This raised her ire. Why in the world would an entire group of people be given preferential treatment at the expense of another group?
"Excuse me," Phyllis approached one of the passengers in the front taking up three seats, "would you mind consolidating your things to free up some seats, there are people cramped in the back."
The passenger complied.
"Would you mind doing the same?" she asked the next person. And so on.
Pretty soon she had freed up enough space in the front to seat the entire back.
When she approached the back of the bus, no one would move. Their eyes were all wide with fear and disbelief. She took the first woman she spoke to gently by the hand and led her, with her bags, to an empty seat in the front. One by one, she brought each of the passengers in the back to a new seat in the front.
Satisfied, she sat down and began to read her book.
But not for long.
The bus driver pulled over and stopped the bus. He looked in the mirror, directly at Phyllis.
"You!"
She continued to read, oblivious to what was happening.
"You--nigger lover--get off the bus."
Still Phyllis had no idea what was happening. Someone nudged her. She looked into the mirror and saw a white face contorted with anger looking directly at her.
"Yeah, you--get off the bus."
Phyllis rooted into her seat.
In what I'm sure was an adolescent proto-version of the same voice she used to scare telemarketers off her answering machine, she replied, "I paid my fare, in full, and I am not about to leave this bus."
So the bus driver did--in a fury. At 3AM, on a lonely interstate in central Florida, he left a bus full of black and white people sitting next to each other.
Someone went to call for help.
In the meantime, people started talking to one another. Black and white. Sharing photos of their children. One person started a song and everyone joined in. Then another. And another.
Then the food came out, got shared and passed around like a big picnic. About an hour later another driver showed up and resumed the journey without a word. By the end of the trip people had exchanged phone numbers and addresses and promised to keep in touch.
Carl and Sarah, my grandparents, welcomed Phyllis back home. Carl Nagle had a clothing store called Nagle's, the profits of which went to fund not only his own, but also a number of cousins' college educations. He wanted one of his kids to to take over the store, but they all went on to become teachers.
Phyllis went off to college with a pilot's license, a love of learning and an education that had already begun on a segregated bus in 1946.
The summer she got her doctorate, she had read 125 novels by Black authors, and in her words, was "hooked." On fire with the love of Black literature, she singlehandedly started a Black Studies department at the local community college where she taught. For years, she alone was Black Studies at Miami Dade Community College North. No one else came forth with any interest in teaching the topic.
Until one day, in the middle of class, the head of the Black Student Union stood up and asked her what she thought she was doing.
"Excuse me?" Phyllis asked.
"You have an academic knowledge, but you have no idea what it's like to be Black, so how can you stand up there and teach the literature of my people?"
Phyllis thought for a moment.
"You know, you're right," she said, "Why don't you come up here and help me out with your own experience?" and invited him up to teach beside her.
For four years, the two of them team taught, with the young man covering the experiential side of things and Phyllis covering the academic side.
"After four years," she said, "I felt like I did have some idea of what it was like to be Black."
One day, Phyllis had an idea. She decided to go into the jails to teach. And who overwhelmingly populated the jail cells but...Black men, many incarcerated for crimes they did not commit. With her books and lessons, she came bearing the messages of literature most of these men would never have a chance to read, let alone put into context with a professor.
Only the jailers were having none of it. They wouldn't give her a room, so she taught in a broom closet. And Project People was born, later to be reincarnated as All People, incorporated. From the closet, Phyllis started teaching in a program that would help people earn degrees while in jail.
While teaching, she met a handsome and brilliant young man named Roscoe Washington, who would later become my uncle. He emerged as a leader in his community, and received much recognition including getting named to "Who's Who Among American Junior College Students." He inspired people's confidence, and charmed them with his intelligence, good looks and warm manner.
However, the program mandated that the students return "home" to jail at night, at which point the white guards would spit on him with racial epithets.
Studies have shown that most people can't tolerate more than a few months of this kind of "split world." Roscoe did it for nine months and then one day, simply didn't return to jail. He went out west, and Phyllis followed.
Six weeks before Phyllis died, my sister Nancy and I sat in our aunt's living room while she directed us to various photo albums and memorabilia, explaining their contents and telling us to take them...the rest of the sentence, "when I die, which I expect to do soon," never got uttered but we all knew her meaning, and somehow held its reality in abeyance while we sorted through her many belongings.
After she died I defacto became the family archivist--my sister and others kept handing me things I insisted not get thrown away. I found FBI files saying things like, she has a long braid, and wears White Shoulders perfume, a fact I remember from my childhood.
During the course of Phyllis's last days, through a number of conversations it became clear to me that she was sexually abused by not one, but both of her grandfathers. She didn't frame it as such--she simply described their actions in a matter of fact way, as if offering up yet another piece of her history, which in a sense she was. However this particular piece had implications she seemed not to have pieced together. I started to.
All her life she had a problem with overeating. A food addiction, you might say. She would get up at night and eat things she really didn't want to. So she was overweight and had a lot of health problems stemming from her poor eating habits: diabetes, kidney failure. I knew intuitively--and many stories and studies bear this out--that the food addiction was a way of coping with the invasion of her young girl's body by trusted family members.
Where I went to with this information, coupled with both of her brothers' complete lack of presence during her death and funeral, was to a level of unspeakable and unprecedented rage at men, in particular the Jewish men in Phyllis life who abused and abandoned her. It was almost too much to cope with. They killed her, I kept thinking. If my great-grandfathers hadn't abused her, she wouldn't have abused her body and she would be alive now. They killed her.
My rage wouldn't go away. And underneath was a deep, deep sadness...thoughts of those men escaping the Old Country, running from pogroms, the stress of adjusting to life in the United States, and the rampant life force of a beautiful young Jewish woman in the face of all that. Her fractured body held an extremely powerful spirit. But for too little time.
Back in San Francisco post-funeral, I sat with my rage. I knew I needed to do something. I decided to curate an evening of performances called Strong Jewish Women. Ali Woolwich signed on and wound up co-curating it with me, and doing a lion's share of the work. With the help of Miriam Kronberg, I worked up my own performance. We donated most of the proceeds to Shalom Bayit, an organization for Jewish battered women, founded my longtime friend from bi activism days, Naomi Tucker.
One night prior to the performance, I dreamt I was riding a bus, number 78. I looked out the window and saw piles and piles of pennies. In and among the pennies, were some wheat pennies, the kind made in the 1950's and before, with sheaves of wheat on the "tails" side. when I got up, I remembered the dream vividly and went over to the pile of Phyllis's scrapbooks I had had out. The second page I turned to was from 1978. Bus number 78, I thought.
It struck me that the bus was the beginning of her social justice career, and the pennies, our most disposable change, were society's throwaway population: Black men in jail. After perusing the articles and feeling the message of the dream so acutely, I went downstairs to the Hilltop market below where I lived, to get, I don't remember what. In my change was...a wheat penny. I still have it. In the midst of tripping out over the synchronicity (wheat pennies are fairly rare), I looked at the date: 1927, the year of Phyllis's birth. Now I was reeling! A penny from the 50's is rare. Even rarer is one from the 40's. I had never seen one from the 30's, and here was one from the 20's in my hand, minutes after processing my dream. Another 1927 wheat penny showed up in my change several weeks later. I still have them both.
After Phyllis's death, a friend of a friend named Sylvia volunteered to stay in Phyllis's house until my sister and I could get back and clear out the rest of her stuff. Sylvia was psychic, and claimed to be in contact with Phyllis. I asked if she would help me communicate with her and she agreed. For an hour, I listed to Sylvia tell me her impressions. Phyllis was distraught. She was having a hard time leaving the house. It was extremely difficult for her to watch things she had collected for 40 years be uprooted and rearranged. She also felt terrible that the way she had written her will (dividing the house into four shares) was causing so much difficulty in parceling things out. She said if she had had any idea it would be such a headache she would have done things very differently.
Sylvia ran through a number of other emotions she was picking up on, all of which fit perfectly with my image of Phyllis. Whether or not Sylvia was actually in contact with Phyllis's spirit, I will never know--I do know that that one hour helped me feel so much more connected to Phyllis. I asked Sylvia,
"Is it okay with her, the performance I'm doing?"
Sylvia said yes, and she also said something else I am not remembering. I do remember that on the first night of the performance, while telling the story of the pennies, I noticed a penny on the stage, and picked it up, weaving the coincidence into the performance.
In the early 90's, I connected with some of my older cousins in Santa Rosa (about an hour north of the Bay Area) one of whom had grown up with Phyllis. They hosted her when she and Roscoe had fled to California, and filled me in on some of what had gone down in those troubled times. Roscoe was eventually apprehended by state police and returned to jail, where an all-white jury sentenced him to another fifteen months of incarceration. He and Phyllis continued to work together, and eventually married. Roscoe died several years later, and Phyllis never remarried.
Phyllis used to give very Phyllis-like gifts: Teddy bears. Selections of cheeses and salami's. I still have a teddy bear named "Yllis," because one Jewish Christmas Phyllis gave my sister and I (who were in our 20's by that time) identical teddy bears. That night the conversation went like this:
Me: What are you going to name your teddy bear?
Nancy: Ffff.
Me: I said, What are you going to name your teddy bear?
Nancy: Ffff!
Me: You're going to name your teddy bear Ffff?
Nancy: Yes.
Me: How do you spell that, Ff?
Nancy: No, that's too common.
Pause.
Me: Yeah, you're right, everyone I know named "Ff" spells it "F-f."
Pause
Nancy: P-h.
Me: Oh, as in Phyllis.
Nancy: Yes.
Pause
Me: Well, if you're going to name your teddy bear "Ph," I guess I will name mine "Yllis."
So, separated by 3,000 miles, the two teddy bears comprising the whole of Phyllis's name live in my and my sister's room respectively, still kicking after two decades.
When we arrived at Phyllis's house to go through her things after she died, about fifty-odd boxes came in the mail over the course of several days, filling her kitchen. They contained teddy bears, salami and cheese. Box after box of these Phyllis gifts. Who knew they piled in her house by the dozens! We wound up serving the cheese and salami over the several days we held a sort of open house for friends and family.
I wanted a funeral for her that reflected who she was. We scattered her ashes in her garden and sang songs from Jewish and African and African-American traditions. I took a line from Ntozake Shange's play, "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf" and set it to music. The line was, "I found God in myself, and I loved her fiercely." A young man whose name I cannot recall sang the song with me. After we scattered the ashes I took a pinch of them and sealed them into the corner of a plastic bag as a keepsake, quickly tucking them away and forgetting about them.
Part of what I carry from her English teacher tradition is a small collection of writing books I took from her home. One day I was searching for a screenwriting book I was sure I had taken with me back to California, I finally found it, opened it, and inside found the little plastic bag of ashes I had sequestered away. This told me it was time to commit the story of Phyllis and Roscoe to a screenplay. So I began to outline it.
Now it sits among a few screenplay ideas I am passionate about. This one would require some trips: to the Carolina's, to Miami...another funny coincidence about this is that among the papers I discovered a letter from an elected Miami official, commending Roscoe's work and his character. I went to college with Ellie Hidalgo, his niece, also a writer, who I may see on my next visit to LA.
Phyllis was so many things: beautiful and intimidating and loving and bitchy and passionate. When I got into the sad task of going through her address book and letting people know she had died, a number of people, in their shock blurted out, "She was my best friend!" I would have had no idea how important she was to so many people. For myself, I hold her as a part of my tradition, my Strong Jewish Woman tradition, my passion-for-social-justice tradition, and my non-traditional tradition. I love you, Phyllis. I miss you. Thank you for what you have given me and I hope I honor your memory by carrying on some thread of your work in my own.
