05.13.10
One of a Kind
She’s a snazzy lady. Her perfectly manicured red fingernails, with a white, decorative flourish tell you that.
They match her blue dress and long, blue jacket. Adorned with a pearl necklace and bracelets, her outfit is topped off with glasses that have a wide, white frame trimmed in sequins.
“You haven’t seen any glasses like these, have you?” she asks in all seriousness with a slight smile on her face.
She doesn’t mean to brag or boast. She just tells it like it is.
At the tender age of 93, Thelma Taylor of Newark, New Jersey, still has her wits about her and holds her head up high.
“There’s a difference between a woman and a lady,” she explains. She personifies the latter.
As we stand in her living room on a sunny afternoon, she immediately treats me as a longtime friend even though we’ve just met.
“I love people,” she explains as she puts her right arm around my waist and holds my left hand in hers.
I had gone to her house with the intention of talking to her about Joseph Randolph, the first black president of Claflin College. He retired to Newark in the 1940’s after leaving South Carolina with his wife, my great-grandmother’s sister, Gertie. Indeed, Mrs. Taylor remembers him. She said “Uncle Joe,” as my Dad used to refer to him, was a highly esteemed man who “gave you the benefit of his wisdom.”
“He had all that education and experience,” she told me.
She recalled sitting at the feet of the man whom she says she greatly admired but was quick to point out that my aunt never had to “worry” about her spending time with him in the least. She simply looked up to them both.
“They were lovely people,” Mrs. Taylor said. “I loved them, loved to be in the presence of them.”
While I had every intention of spending the afternoon talking about my relatives, we somehow seemed to spend most of our time talking about other things. One of Mrs. Taylor’s favorite topics: her late husband, Edward.
“We were married 52 years, 11 months, and one day,” she tells me repeatedly. “Did we always agree? No. Did we ever argue? No, ma’am!”
She says it with the same emphasis each time, ending with a huge grin on her face showing off her pearly whites. She shows me pictures of him. They were in the same class at then Tennessee A & I, now known as Tennessee State University, from which they graduated in 1941 (ironically, my mother attended the same school).
Another irony: Mrs. Taylor and I hail from the same home state of Tennessee, something I’m sure Dr. Lloyd Preston Terrell could not have known when he first introduced me to Mrs. Taylor, one of his parishioners at Franklin-St. John’s United Methodist Church. Mrs. Taylor is from a small town near Jackson, about 130 miles from my hometown of Nashville. She remembers her school days fondly even though her parents couldn’t afford to pay for her to live in one of the dorms. But she says she didn’t fault them for it.
“I love them just as much,” she says emphatically. “Yes, I do.”
She majored in English - another thing she and I have in common - and wrote a play as part of her senior thesis. It sits perfectly bound today on a coffee table in her living room. The play was even performed on campus, and she had the forethought to cast Edward as her character’s husband. Wise woman.
She takes me to her library, giving me a tour of her house along the way. As we sit on the couch, my eyes wander across her vast collection of books ranging from Christian anthologies to black history. Ironically, one of the first books I pick up, Along This Way, the Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson, has an interesting inscription inside.
“From the library of Pres. and Mrs. Randolph of (Claflin) College to Edward and Thelma Taylor, Newark, New Jersey,” it reads.
A gift from my Aunt Gertie and her husband. Mrs. Taylor decides she wants to give me a book from her library but not that one. Her only hesitancy? Its condition. She would prefer to give me a newer book, one that is not so battered and worn. After I assure her it doesn’t matter and that I would treasure it, she insists on writing a new inscription in it: “… as a gift to lovely (her words, not mine) Miss Karen Jordan, May 7, 2010, with love.”
She underlines the last word twice. I couldn’t help but fall in love with Mrs. Taylor that day myself.
As we bid adieu after talking for more than an hour, she blows me kisses as I walk away. I will never forget her or her kindness. And as her 94th birthday approaches later this month, I pray that she lives to see many, many more happy ones.
