Bobby, you're a bastard,,,,

Bobby, you're a bastard....

This sums up a series of revelations that were tossed my way in my twelfth year...the year that I ceased living one lie and began living another, the year I was robbed of my identity, the year I ceased to belong.

During my sixth grade school year, I had dinner with my Aunt Roberta and my two cousins, Mibby and Junie.

The Bowers family were big people, and they ate big. At no time in my life have I ever had someone allow six pork chops for each person..... That's a lot of pig!

After the dishes were piled in the sink, Roberta felt the need to share things with me that I was not ready to hear... things that did not help those half dozen chops sit very well on my stomach.

Aunt Bert had a way of dropping information the hearer would never choose to know if they were given the choice...the type of information that had huge, sometimes a devastating impact, information that carried for long distances. The type of information that could rock the very foundations of truth as it was understood by the hearer and create fallout that blistered people in a wide radius.

Roberta loved her work...mercilessly dishing out whole platters of bones that still had meat to be picked.....

Your meat, my meat... It was all good.

"Bobby, Wakeley is not your real last name." (She said this with a smile, like there was joy in me knowing this!)

Both Mibby and Junie smiled knowingly as I tried to wrap my head around that tidbit... It was like this was old news to them, and because they lived with Roberta, it probably was.

For twelve years of life, all through six terms of school, Robert Wakeley. I still have the report cards with comments from my teachers....

"Robert does not work well with others."

"Robert does not make good use of his time and materials."

"Robert daydreams a lot."

"Robert is not working up to his potential."

"Robert complains about not seeing the board. Where are his glasses?"

All of these report cards were signed by my mother Martha Wakeley or father Eugene Wakeley, when he was around.

"Your real last name is Baldwin."

"Robert Barton Baldwin is the name on your birth certificate." (It hit me, I had never seen this document.)

I do remember that every now and then, my school would request a copy of my birth certificate, and my mother would say she didn't have it.....and go get something from a notary that satisfied them for a while.

It could be that when having me in a classroom was more disruption or trouble than my teachers wanted, the birth certificate issue surfaced. Like, if my mother couldn't prove I was born, they could get rid of me....

"Your mother ran off and married a man named Alvin Baldwin when she was about 18, and she became Martha Baldwin." (Looking back, maybe Mom was bored and restless, and she married Alvin mainly to have some sense of change and movement in her life?)

Impulsive, that describes my mother, and just as impulsively, my grandfather, Joseph, talked her into leaving New Orleans and going to Philadelphia with him. From what I understand, this was after the newlyweds had spent only one night together in Alvin's cramped home, where he shared a bedroom with his mother.

Now, my father, Eugene Wakeley, was a real piece of work, believe me, but he had been around pretty much ever since I could remember. We had history, some good, some nightmarish.

What was all this about them not being married? (Roberta then moved quickly with surgical precision....)

"While in Philadelphia, your grandfather and your mother stayed with family, and that's where she met Eugene, her first cousin." (The follow-through was that my mother became pregnant for me with Eugene! This meant that Eugene was not only my father, but my cousin.... And the family connectedness that all this implied made me dizzy.)

"So, Bobby, after your delivery, the people at Philadelphia General asked your mother who to put on the birth certificate as your father. She used Alvin Baldwin's name."

I wasn't anybody's!

"And you have at least one half brother fathered by Eugene with another woman....."

My mother, my mom, was not married to my father? (At the time, I wasn't even aware that people did that!)

The street car ride home was not fun.

I went home that night heavy....heavy with a load I didn't want, a load that I could not lay down, a load that I was too confused and embarrassed to let anyone see I struggled with...especially my mother!

I felt dirty, guilty, ashamed.... a lot like I did when one afternoon Uncle Eddie took me on the levee in his '52 Plymouth and tried to touch me and get me to touch him. Alone and helpless.

After that, our little apartment on Iberville Street became an uneasy place where I felt cut off from my mom. In many ways, she felt like a stranger because I couldn't connect her with all Roberta had told me. I couldn't look her in the eye, but I studied her, wondering how this could all be true...wondering how the same person that drilled into me the importance of truth could have lived out this lie for so many years.

I learned that under pressure people do all sorts of things.

When asked what was true, some writer (maybe Steinbeck or Hemingway?) once said, "It's all true." ....and it was.

After several weeks, my mother confronted me with the whole thing. It seems that my Aunt Bert told my Aunt Selma about the "night of the pork chops", and then Selma told my mom.

Eugene was out of the picture at this point, and within the year he would die in one of the flop houses off of Camp Street, and that left Mom holding the bag. Mom worked hard for the little that we had, a two bedroom apartment in the Iberville Housing Project and furniture from Goodwill....or somebody's will.

Mom would come home from work exhausted, throw together supper and then take a long hot bath. There would be nights when she fell asleep over her plate of food and never make it to the bath. Sometimes, to spend as much time with me as possible, she would have me sit outside in the hall with the bathroom door open and tell her about my day...trusting me not to sneak a peek at her in the tub....and I didn't.

Well one night she called to me to come sit by the bathroom door...."Bobby, I hear Aunt Bert told you some things when you were at her house for supper...." (It was all true, just as Roberta had said.)

I did not handle this well and began to deconstruct......

I was on the street more...the Quarter, the Central Business District... watching people, especially families, parents with their kids shopping, eating, laughing.

I'd go all over the Irish Channel and the Garden District on my bike and scope out homes, yards...particularly homes that looked warm, fantasizing the lovely things that were going on in the rooms of houses.

I wanted in!

I wanted to belong and feel solid and whole.... I wanted a history, something that was good and true and right....tied in with a whole mess of family that had always been and always would be....solid.

When people get married, they share a lot of things...including a name....parents share a name with their children.... I had nothing to share that was really mine, and I never would....

Who was I?

My grades fell off, I began getting into fights with my very best friends.... I felt mean and angry,full of shame and anxiety. How could I ever begin to explain this to anyone when I didn't have a good grip on it myself?

Being able to talk about all of it would have been a gift, but there was a hard and fast rule in our family against doing this. (I suppose this rule was made by people who feared discovery.)

As I scraped through the rest of the school year, my mother and aunts fabricated a plan that would tear me away from my city and my name... My mother's brother, Clifford, agreed to take me up to Arkansas where he pastored a small independent Baptist church in DeQueen.

He coasted in one day in the early summer ready to assume the perceived need in my life for male influence, remove me from the damaging contagion New Orleans housing projects might bring my way, and move me into an environment where I could launch out with a new name, no questions asked. (Nobody really asked my feeling about being separated from my mother, the streets of my city, and my name. These were all I had....)

Clifford moved fast....so fast that it sometimes would take your breath away. If change was to happen, he saw no reason to dilly-dally around with it all. The best time for change was now...right now. As a young man, Uncle Cliff escaped the whole dysfunctional mess of our Irish Channel family and moved up North. He was a damaged person who turned to Jesus, got married and prepared to become a pastor at a small Bible college somewhere in New York State.

Things, and sometimes people, may get left behind, broken, or bruised, but he operated with the speed of a battle field surgeon... Maybe that's how he survived it all...?

And he was ruthlessly blunt.

He arrived at our place on Iberville Street, and within 24 hours, he had decided what I need to take with me....and what I didn't need, too....including what sheet music I carried in my cornet case. The only jazz that went with me to Arkansas was carried in my head. To whatever degree Cliff could control it, I was to leave worldly things behind...like anything with a back beat or a groove.

Ethnic cleansing combined with identity theft.

As we rode up to DeQueen, my uncle informed me I was too fat and would be put on a diet, requested that I calll him and his wife Mom and Dad because it would be easier on their children.... And as we cruised along somewhere between Shreveport and Texarkana, he approached the topic of the name change.

As i watched the movie of grass and trees out of my window, Cliff opened with, "Bobby, you're a bastard."

There went any legitimacy I ever had....gone.