Mar 25

Mar 25 Blog Post: My Mother was a Bailey

There are sounds that you memorialize, and this one I have well-memorialized. Despite not knowing my grandmother well, there are beautiful iterations that I can hear through her semi-southern cadence. These iterations are lyrical, balanced and soft. They were usually followed with a truncated laugh. She was the queen of comedy in an unflinching, unobtrusive way. She made her comments. They were generally short one-liners spoken through her semi-southern cadence followed with a pause and truncated laugh that seemed to come in threes.

These memories of her and her one-liners have informed the base of my research. Prior to this journey, the lack of information I had about my mother’s maternal family was what I had.

“Simply, I did not know what I did not know. ”

A wide-gaping black hole. Growing up in Bowie, Maryland , I knew nothing about Fauquier County. Growing up with my mother’s paternal family as my closest family connection, they were what I predominately understood as family. I saw my grandmother occasionally.

“My memories of her were neat, simple and beautiful but distant. ”

For as long as I could remember, my grandmother, Lillian Marshall Smoot sent me a card every birthday. And although the frequency is less clear in my memory on this one, occasionally, my mother, my grandmother and I would go to eat at the Hot Shoppes at Landover Mall in the early 90s or my mother would treat her mother to new dress or outfit at Woodies. At other times, my mother and I would drop by to visit her time to time at her apartment on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, DC. I remember in one of the earlier apartments, she was the caretaker to her eldest sister, Mary Smoot, the namesake of her grandmother. These were brief encounters with the richness I did not know. I not only had a child’s eyes, there was a gaping familial paradigm in which to place the people and the bits of information that I was receiving.

But, it was in these childhood memories even unfamiliarity had a mysticism about it. It was in my grandmother’s Connecticut Avenue apartment that I was first introduced to the concept of the daybed. Grandma Lillian had one and I was fascinated. I had never seen one prior and henceforth the image of a daybed would bring her to mind. I was likewise fascinated by the upper Northwest DC Connecticut Avenue address. Even then as a child, I could sense the prestige to living off Connecticut Avenue albeit my grandmother lived in a senior community, I remember feeling proud of this.

It was in one of her Connecticut Avenue apartments where she resided that I first glanced that fateful photo of her parents Joseph and Rachel Smoot of Warrenton, Virginia. At the time, I made no real connection to the photo, but more than a decade later that photo would become sacred.

As I got older, specifically around my college years, I remember asking my grandmother specifically,

“where are you from?” I remember her answer as my great-aunts used to say as ”clear as day.” “Africa.”

I remember it so succinctly not because I had not developed a consciousness around what it meant to be of African descent, but because the mouth in which it left effortlessly was framed by a beautiful 70+ year old face, that was so light in color that freckles lovingly made homes across it cheeks.

The differential struck me. But there were other one-liners, and these one-liners became my clues, my clues to put me on this journey.

At a time when I knew so little about my grandmother and her family, she said it liltingly and memorialized the sound unknowingly, “I’m from Warrenton.” When my own mother would bring up the last name Smoot and speculate local connections with Big names around the DC, Maryland and Virginia area, I would get curious, and it was another one-liner that left my grandmother’s soft way of speaking that gave me further direction,