To Mommy Sweet Potato

Saturday, was the anniversary of my mother, Sallie Canada's passing, a few days after Mother's Day. i didn't have time to post anything then. So, here is a pic and a poem to my mother, whom I
affectionately call "Mommy Sweet Potato."

(Sallie Canada May 22th, 1936-May 18th, 2016)

Sallie

My earliest memories of you was of a pocket book swing as I waited with baited breath for your beautiful silhouette to show upon the horizon of a dirty Bronx street there’s my pretty mother come to rescue me from the confusion of kids playing hopscotch on the hot summers city concrete

Leather purse holding the wages of food for we hungry children hungry for spaghetti and rice and pinto beans corn flakes along with the remnant of left over milk saved like succor from the breast of a woman who put in more than 14 hours of work to feed the mouths of her little darlings

Nights fill with terror and the screams of daddy who felt it made better sense to beat the hell out of a princes to make up for a hard day’s mafia work

Mommy taught me how to read the bible so I was way ahead of my colleagues who wanted to know how Dick chased Jane mommy got a bachelor’s degree after raising a family while parlaying as a nurse in the ghettos of the South Bronx to become a school teacher she taught bible classed quoted scripture better than the Archbishop of Canterbury we buried her not… she said The flames are my end so burn me like the mustache man burn me like the flames of love that simmered in all your hearts-you feel me?

Sallie I still see you crocheting blankets in the night organ and piano you used to play spiritual cords that wafted into the wee hours like nocturnal serenades now I too play piano but there’s no forgotten memories of the southern roots burrowed deep in the red South Carolinian soil I wasn’t born there like you but I can still remember grandpa walking like a one of the prophets of old through the tall stalks of corn and his thirst for sweet potatoes the lonely waving fields of amber wheat you wanted to come back to that resting place even after your last stage of heart failure your spirit travelled across the parch and arid lands it finally made it there to roost and to repose amongst the house you had built as a monument to the…

Wilson clan a testament to the Samuels DNA which still whispers like antebellum phantoms in my vein I really miss you Sallie Canada you were light shining in dark places you were so stoic and Cherokee you Indian woman you fought off the last spasms of death until alas you gave up your final breath

To fly away toward meridional skies like a winged Corsica o’er Kelly Camden fields of green there you are with your ancestors singing We have overcome for you were strong in life now you are strong in spirit

And there remains the legacy of your love and of your fried chicken like Aunt Sugar Lump and Aunt Mamie’s collard greens and dumpling they endure in me I have pictures of you now smiles frozen in sequential time-but they are not you for you were like the sun that broke through the long night in the early hours of dawn during the stillness of twilight-I still hear you whispering holy words purloined from the scriptures like a cantor before the Torah shields

Alas it’s at this moment I know what the name Sallie truly stood for: it meant Soulful Attributes of Loving Light & Internal Endearment-you see mommy it is at this moment 

I finally recognized what you represented and I apologize ‘cause it took me this long

Post Script: Now I wear your unfinished green blanket as a scarf and I carry your radiant smile with that ole peculiar South Carolinian pride.