A Life Constructed. Delon Hampton
day, especially when they’re roasted in the shell.
Above all my mother relied on her excellent skills as a cook to keep me healthy. Our home was always filled with the rich aromas of home cooking and hearty spices, and there was always something good on the stove or on the table. Almost always it was country cooking that harkened back to her roots: fried chicken and collard greens, cornbread and chili, beef and macaroni and cheese, and all sorts of rich cakes and pies. Every once in a while I would go to bed hungry—not because my mother had not provided for me, but because I was a finicky eater and she never forced me to eat anything I didn’t want to eat.
My favorite meal, without question, was Sunday breakfast. That’s because that’s when my Uncle Man (Burnette Lewis) and Aunt Alma, who lived a little further south in Chicago, would come over to have breakfast with us. Beaming above a plate of eggs, grits, and biscuits, Uncle Man would tell stories and jokes and talk to me in a way that neither Uless nor Dave Mixon nor any other man had talked to me in my life. Uncle Man was full of life and he was my favorite uncle. I always enjoyed his company.
My mother cooked not just for her family, but for others in our community, especially at her church. She was a devout Christian and a pillar in her congregation at the African Methodist Episcopal Church. If there were such a thing as a ministry of cooking and serving, Elizabeth Hampton Mixon was truly its finest minister. Without religion, my mother probably could not have survived all the hardships she experienced in her life. As a result she tried to give back however she could, whether it was with her cash or with her cooking.
My mother wanted me to come to know God, faith, and religion like she did. But I didn’t. My impression of organized religion came from her preacher, whom I saw living high on the hog thanks to the hard-earned donations from my mother and others. He would often come to our house to beg for money for his personal use, while my mother struggled to put food on the table and clothes on my back. When I was about twelve years old and my mother decided I was old enough to make my own decisions about religion, I walked away from it. I would return a few times. During a stint in the US Army, for instance, I read the Bible from cover to cover and studied other religious books with other soldiers who were into religion. In graduate school I joined the local Methodist church, joined its youth group, and I even taught Sunday school. My roommate at the time, a devout Christian aptly named Henry Moses, who would become an inseparable friend, did his best to keep me on a faithful track. One of the many impressive things about Henry was his ability to reconcile religion and science. He would go on to earn a doctorate in biochemistry from Purdue and become a professor at Meharry Medical College. To this day his faith is still strong.
Despite the efforts of people I loved and respected, like my mother and Henry Moses, and despite my trying, I could not reconcile what I still see as the hypocrisy of many leaders and practitioners of organized religion. How could any religious person condone war, discrimination, greed, the rape of children, or other horrible offenses? And if there is a God, how could He let them get away with such behavior? I also simply cannot accept the concepts of God and the devil, heaven and hell, life after death. But even assuming there are such places, to me heaven sounds boring, and hell seems like not such a bad place. One might even be able to have a lot of fun in hell. Just think of all the great entertainers, comics, and thinkers who will probably be there.
Though my mother could not instill faith and devotion to religion in me, she did instill in me many other redeemable qualities, such as knowing right from wrong, fiscal responsibility, the value of hard work, and courtesy and respect for my elders. Back when I was growing up, before everyone had a car and while Chicago’s “L” was still being built, the only reliable way to get to downtown Chicago was the streetcar. Whenever we went downtown, usually on shopping trips, which I grew to hate (I still detest shopping today), my mother made me give up my seat for any grown-up who was standing. Today when I ride public transit, I never see this happening. Instead, I notice that it is often the parent who gives up a seat to his or her child. To me that seems both unusual and unfortunate.
My mother also instilled in me a desire for a better life. She let me find the path to my future on my own, however. To the best of my recollection, we never had a conversation about my future. She was so busy trying to house and feed her family that she had neither time nor energy leftover to provide that sort of guidance to me. Likewise, she never helped me with my schoolwork either. Partly that’s because she could only help so much, even if she could find the time to do so. My mother, due to circumstances beyond her control, never completed the eighth grade.
What my mother lacked in education, she made up for in her love for me. I would relish the chance to see her again and tell her how much I love her and appreciate all she did for me. But if I believed in an afterlife, I am sure she would be up in heaven, and I would likely be down in hell. Knowing my mother, though, I am sure she would never stop trying to convince St. Peter to let me join her.
For a woman who loved me like a son and whom I loved like a mother, my mother was not actually my mother at all.
I wasn’t who I thought I was, either.
When I was growing up, Elizabeth Hampton spoke often of her place of birth, Jefferson, Texas, and of her relatives there. Some came to visit us in Chicago, and sometimes they stayed longer than a few days. My Uncle Valentine Lewis and his wife, Aunt Tot, for instance, moved in with us for a few years after work dried up in Texas. Uncle Valentine worked as a carpenter for a building contractor, while Aunt Tot worked as a clerk in a drugstore. From them and from my mother, I learned a little about the Lone Star State. To a boy from the streets of Chicago, Texas and everything about it seemed like a foreign land—a place where cotton and corn grew in endless fields, and cows and chickens roamed the prairies like the squirrels and pigeons in Grant Park. I envisioned cowboys and bands of roving Indians, and a sky that went on forever.
So when my mother decided one day when I was about ten years old that we needed to visit her home and meet the rest of my relatives, I naturally was ecstatic. It would be my first trip outside of Chicago. Riding on a real train was exciting enough; taking it to a place as mysterious and storied as Texas to meet members of my family for the first time only made it all the more titillating.
Little did I know just how revealing this trip would be for me.
It was around this same time that my mother told me something else: that my birth mother had died shortly after my birth in Jefferson, Texas, on August 23, 1933.
My birth mother, I was told, was named Alzadie Lewis Douglas. My father’s name was Charles Douglas III. And my name at birth, I was told, was not Delon Hampton. It actually was Charles Douglas Jr.
Before her death at age twenty-five, I discovered, Alzadie had requested that my father give me to her sister and her husband to raise as their son. That sister was Elizabeth Hampton, and her husband was Uless. Why my mother decided that I should be raised by her sister instead of my natural father and her family back in Jefferson, I do not know. I’m fairly sure, however, that my father didn’t put up much of a protest to keep the baby whose birth coincided with the death of his bride.
Discovering my true past, of course, also prompted new questions when I was old enough to comprehend these things. I found myself wondering whether my injection into Elizabeth and Uless’s family is what led to my all-but-nonexistent relationship with Uless, and if it led to their ultimate divorce. I wondered what my life would have been like if my mother had not made the decision to send me away from Texas. And I wondered if my birth father ever thought of me.
None of this entered my mind, however, as my mother and I walked into Chicago’s Union Station bound for my first-ever journey to Jefferson, Texas. For a ten-year-old boy on his first trip out of town in the 1940s, the station seemed bigger than life itself. The limestone and marble corridors leading to our train seemed as long as city blocks. The massive barrel-vaulted skylight that ran the length of the Great Hall seemed like a window into the heavens. Shortly after my inaugural trip from the train station, those same skylights would be blacked out to make the building less of a target for enemy aircraft during World War II.
Our trip from Chicago took us out of