LOVE, MEMORY & AL GREEN'S VOICE

Black history can be a moment of family, music and pork chops

“Love and happiness, yeah.”

My mother is struggling with dementia in her late ‘80s. It’s hard to understand her words and we’re not always sure she understands ours. But, whenever I visit, I play the music she loved when I was a child. It connects us to our shared history when language fails us.

“You be good to me/ And I’ll be good to you/ We’ll be together, yeah.”

My wife plays “Love and Happiness” on her phone as my mother reclines and we are no longer in a retirement facility in Virginia, but a humid kitchen in Brooklyn public housing in the early ‘70s. My sister and I sit at a round kitchen table, verbally sparing over placement of our clothes in out shared bed room. The scents of Southern food fill the room - collard greens, yams, corn bread, pork chops. The voice of Al Green - supple, smooth, casually sensual - , along with the Memphis groove of the Hi Records rhythm section and the twang of co-writer Teenie Hodges’ guitar, connects South and North.

“The power of love/ Wait a minute/ Let me tell you about the power.”

We drink cherry Kool Aid. I say “Grace” in a rush - an adolescent anxious to eat. At first the conversation at first is filled with talk of school as my mother is a teacher and we, of course, students. Soon the talk bounces around to blaxploitation movies, our Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm running for President, a neighbor’s purse snatched by a junkie at the elevated subway and, most important, our plans for moving out of the projects to a nicer section of Brooklyn.

Al Green singing in a retirement home is a gateway back to a turning point in our family’s history filled with the signifiers of a time long past still present. Perhaps I see it too warmly, filling with an unnecessary glow of nostalgia. But that moment is as real as Green’s falsetto. We were planning on moving on out, not to a deluxe apartment in the sky, but to a place without roaches and where mail boxes weren’t broken into. I think about that time as a kiss my mother’s cheek and a small smile spreads across her face. They say you can never go home again. I say I’ve never left that table. I’m still eating pork chops when Al Green sings of love.

“We’ll be together, yeah/ We’ll see each other/ Walk away with victory yeah.”