By Norman Cain, January 23, 2020 — When I was born my forbearers presented me with the key to the avenue of the straight and narrow, where opportunity laid waiting. I cast it to the wind. It landed on Bacchanals Wide, Wild Boulevard. I cared less. For to me, the key was nonessential to my chosen Destiny at that time: tenure in the dens of inequity, where I reveled hardily and drank abundantly — starting At Sun-up to well after sun-down-from the vessels of Wantonness, which caused me to taste the bitterness of defeat, feel the painful clutches of despair squeeze lifelessness out of my ethereal core, leaving me in the vise of self-destruction.
One night, I in the clutches of drunken slumber, encountered, through vision vivid [I saw], three ancestors, silently walking in a single file across the long dusty road. On each side of the road, there were tobacco, cotton, and corn fields. At the head of the procession was my great uncle Charlie, the oldest of the Cusack clan. He was dark, short, and keen featured. He was a farmer and a recluse. He was followed by my paternal grandparents: his brother Lexington, ebony hued, short stature, a Congolese-featured man who was a farmer, educator fraternal leader, businessman, and his wife, Virginia, an olive-skinned, keen featured housewife.
When I told my mother, who had taken me, because of my transgressions, from the head of the dinner table when my father died, of the dream, she without hesitation proclaimed: “They came to tell you that you can make it.” This vision caused me to remember the time when I traversed the same dusty road that appeared in my dream during the scorching South Carolina summers (in the days of my youth) when I, a northern boy, was sent south to my grandparents’ farm after school was closed for the summer.
Then I would be barefoot, shirtless, wearing a straw hat and trudging to and from my grandparents’ tobacco field. The dream conjured memories of the house that Uncle Charlie, the first in the procession that appeared in the dream occupied. It was the house that was fronted by the humongous, fully leafed cloaked tree, stretching towards the heavens and whose strong roots would not allow it to be moved, in spite of elimination four of the eight rooms that housed the family of my paternal great [grandparents] and their children.
Each day, me, my sister and, Delores, my older cousin, who was raised by my grandparents in their house down the road, would visit Uncle Charlie, who briefly lived at 40th and Market Street during the 1920s. There was a family portrait Upon the south wall of the living room. It included my maternal great grandfather George Wainwright Cusack who was seated and dressed in a black suit. Standing to his right and dressed in white was his wife, Nancy.
In the background stood the 11 children of the family: Charlie, Emma Georgia Lexington, Spencer Beatrice, Amelia, Lorenzo, Suzan Ellen, and Maggie. The house was like a family museum. Upon the floor lay the instruments that the Cusak Band played specifically during Juneteenth. Among the instruments were a snare drum, bass drum, tuba bugle, and piano. Uncle Charlie would play the instruments and tell us folklore and ancestral stores.
The dream induced me to recalled how my grandmother, who when I contracted chickenpox and measles on consecutive summers, physically healed me by applying the suave of roots to my infected body. The dream further induced me to, shortly after having it, visit my grandmother at the homestead in a futile attempt, to elude the sinful temptations of Philadelphia. During that visit, she bestowed healing, wisdom encouragement, and family history upon my shattered soul.
The dream allowed me to recall how my maternal grandfather, who taught me how to shoot a rifle and handle mules, ordered me to kill a snake. He periodically told me about the time he and my paternal grandfather, Dan Cain, rowed a man, who was sought by the Klan, across the Pee Dee River and into North Carolina. The man resided safely in North Carolina. He returned once to South Carolina. Then he attended his wife’s funeral. He avoided detention because he was dressed as a woman.
After the recollections, that vision vivid dream had me experience a common sense epiphany, which led me to seek/retrieve the key that my forbearers had given me. I unlocked the door to the straight and narrow avenue. And I, consistently with opportunity in tow, transverse it to my genealogical tree, where I beseech. And greet my ancestor’s legacy, rendering sincere “That Yous” and bowing before it in humble reverence.