My mother, Margaret Louise Lucinda Johnson, was born one hundred and eight years ago on December 13, 1910. Shown here on the right in this 1925 family picture, she was the fourth of five children born to prominent New Yorkers, Solomon H and Emma (Boyce) Johnson. Known to family and friends as Margie (pronounced with a hard g) she came into the world at a time when life choices and options for women were extremely limited, even for those born into relative privilege. For many years, her father, a well-known Harlem Republican (in the days when the GOP was a lot more friendly to people of color) ran the immigration department at Ellis Island. It was almost unheard of for an African American (we were known as negroes back then) to hold a position of such prestige. Solomon’s father, Solomon James Johnson, was a Union soldier who had somehow made the acquaintance of Abraham Lincoln and had been invited by the president to work as a clerk in the Federal Government, an even more unheard of situation for a black man at the time.*
Unfortunately, other than in material ways, little of Margie’s family power was enjoyed by its female members. Although she and her sisters attended the best schools, like New York’s School of Ethical Culture where she rubbed elbows with the sons and daughters of local movers and shakers, the women were all groomed to become spouses of the powerful, not to be wielders of power themselves.
My mother passed at the age of forty-four. I was only seventeen when she left this world and had no idea of what unfulfilled dreams she left behind. She was born before women had the right to vote, and generations before the concept of women’s liberation was even dreamed of. Although our family always owned a car, she never learned to drive.
Despite the times, her older sister Katherine was somewhat the hell-raiser and went against existing norms with her choice of career, men and lifestyle. Her younger sister, Billie, perhaps because family expectations had somewhat relaxed by the time she came along, seemed not quite as repressed.
But Margie, the dutiful middle daughter lived up to all the expectations of a well-bred Harlem woman of the times. Everyone who knew her liked and admired her and thought she had a good life. Beautiful, gentle and cultured, she married my father, a scrappy Trinidadian immigrant who had earned his citizenship on the battlefields of World War One France and had gone on to Howard University’s dental school, and to practice out of our Harlem apartment. Although she was extremely loving and gentle with me and my younger brother and sister, and a dutiful wife, I often had the feeling my mother was more stoic than happy. She smiled sparingly, and in my memory, never broke loose with a real knee-slapping laugh. With no medical proof to support my claim, I believe that her early cancer may have been depression and stress-induced.
I wish my mother had been able to enjoy the freedom and power of her grandchildren, three of them my daughters. The eldest, Yolande, splits her time between raising her own two children and a law career, the middle one, Lana, survives amazingly in the New York advertising world, and the youngest, Brienne, is a mother and gifted artist who views the world as her oyster. My three granddaughters, her great-granddaughters, are also reaching for the stars. Brittany is a nurse who earned her master’s degree with a perfect 4.0 GPA, Chloe is a mechanical engineer who was the speaker of her 2018 graduating class, and Belle-Janvier is a baby, barely out of diapers, who reads, writes, counts and is multi-lingual.
In a way, Margie lives on through them, and with some magical gene passed on to them, has made them the powerful women they are. I’m sure that is one of the legacies she likes to be remembered for.
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*The amazing life of Solomon James Johnson will be the subject of my next book.