So, Mommy Cain (my grandmother) was telling me some great stories on the phone tonight. We were talking about Whitney, for a moment, and she was saying how she felt like Whitney was her child. Similarly, I feel like I’ve lost an older cousin, or sister.
I found out that she had passed in the worst way. I as watching CNN (something I NEVER do), but there happened to be a program on called ‘Black in America: Silicon Valley’, with Soledad O’Brown, that caught my attention. It was really interesting, but 5 minutes in, the program was interrupted by an orange “BREAKING NEWS” banner flashing across the screen. The reporter had me hanging onto his every word, wondering what the hell had happened. He finally said, “Whitney Houston has died”. I ran to the bathroom and knocked on the door, to break the news to my sister. Then I broke down.
She’s a part of me. When I first saw “How Will I Know,” I wanted to be just like her. She reminded me of the mermaid on the movie Splash. I’ve heard several people refer to her music as “the soundtrack to my youth”, and I would have to say the same. From that very first album, to the Bodyguard, to Waiting to Exhale… Her music was always present.
She will never die, because her voice runs through my spiritual veins like life-blood. Mine and millions of others. Love you, Whitney.
My conversation with Mommy Cain moved on to MJ, and she told me how the church had opposed to her preaching about him. She said she was telling people that they needed to stop gossiping and talking trash about him, and instead try to understand where he was coming from. (What problems the church would have with MJ, I do not know. But it might have been his crotch-grabbing and Thriller video… In those days they were way less accepting of those things.) Anyway, she said the Bishop told the church that she was right in what she was saying, and that they needed to take heed.
Somehow she came to the story of her encounter with God at age 5, in Oklahoma. She was walking along with some family members, kind of trailing behind, when a voice called her name from a man hole. “Cassie Mae,” the man’s voice called. She looked around, and followed the voice to the man hole. This voice told her she was called to do God’s work, as was her father (A “drunkard,” abuser, and totally against religion. He was done with the church when he found out at age 10-11 that his father was leading a double life and had another family in a different county).
She, at 5 went home, and told her father what had happened. She said he lost consciousness, and in a trance-like state, repeatedly called on the name of Jesus. Neither she, her siblings, nor mother had ever seen anything like this. When he came to, she said he just cried, and asked her mother for forgiveness, for all he had done to hurt her. He had been delivered, instantly, and had turned over a new leaf.
The family had been planning to relocate to Bakersfield, California, the next day, in fact. My grandmother’s father was a cotton-picker, and although he had been invited to Detroit, MI, to live with his mother and the rest of his family, he declined because he wanted to win the cotton-picking belt in California. Before the manhole incident even occurred, they had been packing up, selling their furniture, and preparing to leave on New Year’s.
She said that on the way to Bakersfield, from Oklahoma, her dad would preach, wherever they stopped. At service stations, rest stops, wherever. And people would gather to listen. They stopped in Phoenix, AZ, for two weeks, where he was ordained by a Bishop from the Church of the Living God Pillar Ground and Truth, who had come to hear him speak.
When they arrived in Bakersfield, they came to a place called Greenfield, which was owned by the Kern County Farmers Connection. They provided people who had just arrived with free housing, until they got on their feet. My grandmother said her father just walked through the camp talking to people, and she would follow along, until she had to go to school. He built his first church when she was seven, and she bought the ledger at Crescents, on her own. That was when she first started preaching… She signed her name in that ledger.
The rest is history. She couldn’t go on cuz she had to get off the phone and eat dinner. But I have to write down more of these stories, that’s for sure. I’m reading James Brown’s autobiography now, and he has some of the same kind of magical stories to tell. What happened to our generation? I don’t want to live in the internet-age. I want to live where spirits are alive.
