My daughter Jill’s mother and I
divorced when she was four years old. Jill lived with me and her brother Joe in
Eugene, Oregon in 1966.
I was a graduate student and
teacher at the University of Oregon, then suddenly a single father.
Later, I fell in love with the
young mother who had the neighborhood Kool-Aid House across the street from
ours. Sonja is African American, had three children, and those days
neighborhoods were open-doors, yards and sidewalks filled with kids playing
outside if not in school or asleep.
Sonja and I were married early
1968, our blended family living happily on a hill at the end of a cul-de-sac in
Eugene. Jill began learning about other people’s lives, of racism, and class
struggle. I learned about race politics and class struggle alongside my young
children.
The children, all of them, listened
to impromptu lectures wherein Sonja would lay things out, real plain sometimes.
She could explain what I didn’t understand when white people glared at our
family. At 68, I can agree with some of my friends later who would try to
explain that I was an educated idiot.
The transition made in most of my
thinking that time in my life made just about everything I’d learned in the UO
Sociology Department useless — or so it would seem on April 4th, 1968 when we
had to tell our children that Martin Luther King was dead, and how he died. We
grieved, ranted, cried. There was no way to shield our children from the raw
emotions that ran through the University campus, our progressive community of
colleagues and our friends. A few
months later, we’d have to explain to the children that Robert Kennedy had been
shot dead.
That summer of 1969, through
contact with black students on campus, Sonja and I heard about a Panther
conference in Oakland. Our expanding political knowledge had been limited to
cultural nationalists on campus, and direct experience as a mixed-race couple.
Class-struggle ideology appealed to both of us. We were curious, committed.
Elsewhere in the Bay area it was the Summer of Love, our campus in Oregon had
been dubbed the “Berkeley of the North,” and so the 1957 VW bus was packed yet
again, this time, bound for California. We took our youngest, newborn son,
Chon, to Oakland.
Before the year was over, Jill was
walking to the Methodist Church a few blocks from our house with her
African-American brother and sisters to have breakfast and attend Liberation
School. The programs and school were organized by the Eugene Chapter of the
Black Panther Party. As many as sixty children were fed and schooled according
to the 10-Point Program.
This is the background summary to
my first daughter, second child, Jill Maureen Armsbury.
The background music of her
childhood, in a literal sense, was like the times, innovative, changing and
full of social messages. Jill loved it — every kind of music from the Jackson
Five and the 5th Dimension to every sound that poured out of a window, or
played on anyone’s radio. Our home was full of students from all over the
world, and they brought their favorite records, political discourse and dance.
Jill had an eclectic audience for her earliest performances.
By the time Jill took part in the
protest on the courthouse steps urging the judge to release me from the jail in
1970, she had known a world of struggle, the kind that threatens to beat you
down and the kind of struggle that can make something better.
I was in, then out, then back in
prison. A friend, Arupo, took Jill into her home and family in 1976.
These became stable years for Jill, and Arupo’s daughter Debbie and Jill were
best friends. She kept ties with her brothers and sisters living in Portland,
too.
The 1970’s ended, and I’d spent
much of the decade in prison, where the struggle continued. When I got out in
1978, I returned to Spokane and became a plumber who’d get a job teaching
sociology now and then.
Jill stayed in Portland with her
foster family, performed with Portland’s Jefferson High School Dancers, was
awarded a scholarship from Martha Graham School of Dance in New York City. She
moved there in 1980, then cleaned houses and walked dogs to pay for voice
lessons, always believing in the notion of struggling against impossible odds.
She did indeed become a professional singer and entertainer the hard way.
During more than 25 years as a
performing artist based in NYC, Jill’s stage name was Jillian. She learned
Spanish, singing in two languages to her salsa fans, accompanied by
international Latin jazz musicians. I wasn’t surprised as much as relieved that
she was living her dreams.
Jillian’s El Telephono was a
number one song in Cuba in the mid-1990s. Before that she performed at the Apollo
Theater and Carnegie Hall with renowned players, including bandleader/husband
Johnny Almendra, close friend Tito Puente, and many others. With her big
voice, Jillian and Johnny’s Los Jovenes del Barrio wowed jazz
festivals across the country, and grew a loyal following of salsa dancers at
crowded NYC clubs. In 1998 she and Johnny brought the 13-piece orquesta
to Spokane, igniting a local love for salsa music that’s flourished to this
day.
I traveled to New York occasionally
to watch her perform. Afterward, we’d always recall her childhood years,
sometimes laughing about her big hair, big personality, the occasional
strangeness of being white in an African-American family––sometimes crying
about the long and hard years of separation.
Children are abandoned in chaotic
times, my children falling into the battle lines we drew back then.
As a young woman, she would
maneuver her now country-living, middle-aged father though the maze of city
streets, if by car or public transportation, mostly with the same wild energy
she put into everything. In our travels throughout NYC what always stood out
was how she would be on the lookout for a child in trouble. Or was it easy for
her to see the look of composed panic in the eyes of a child on a busy subway platform
- a child who’d lost a parent? It was as if she had some magic, she could spy
the child who was far enough from parents to be considered dangerously
separated. Taking a hand, Jill would return the boy or girl to parents who
usually hadn’t realized their child had wandered away.
Jill was at home with all people,
of all ages. I remember her presentation to a Bronx audience of black and brown
youth. She shared her life’s story, emphasized hard work, overcoming
difficulties and reminding them they should commit to constant study. She ended
the presentation by breaking into an opera song in Italian, finishing off with
her Cuban hit in Spanish. The kids loved her. She sang her heart out for
them.
Memories are cut short, Jill died
in January 2009. Exposed somewhere to asbestos, she died of Mesothelioma. She
struggled hard to live, and did for five years beyond her terminal diagnosis.
Jill didn’t install asbestos on
steam pipes, or handle vermiculite in house insulation. No certain source of
contact, just early death for a singer at age 46. I am left to wonder if her
asbestos exposure was fireproof stage curtains, or was it the burnt-out
factories in the poor neighborhoods of Portland. I wandered through them,
sometimes curious, sometimes furious — we’d warn the children to, “stay away
from there.” Or was it a whoosh of sudden and terrible exposure when the
destroyed World Trade Center came down? I’ll always wonder.
I’ll always marvel at her drive,
but I do understand it. Short months before the end of her life, Jill drove to
a Florida prison to visit Kent and Sandra Ford’s son, Patrice Lumumba, a
childhood friend serving a 20 year federal sentence, charged under the Patriot
Act. She sang to Lumumba through the phone,
plexiglass shielding any personal, real contact, but even so, was glad she went
to Florida to see her friend.
She lost a lung, but continued to
perform. Days before her passing at home, she
was living and working on a new album with her husband, Leon Pendarvis.
Jill’s hair, red and wild, became
part of her personality, her persona. It was never hard for her to get
attention, and lucky that she loved to entertain. She had talent and an
electrifying stage presence.
Through a childhood of
abandonments, neglect and at times having to resort to basic instincts, she
would often remind me that her passion for music, and wanting to share it, kept
her focused on survival. And that remained through her final days. Something always
hard for me to acknowledge, but I do because this is part of the legacy of
struggle, and the struggle’s children.
Chuck Armsbury currently lives and
works in Colville, Washington. He is the editor of The Razor Wire, a newspaper
of the November Coalition, a national nonprofit group founded in 1997 to oppose
the mass incarceration of drug law violators. In 1969-70 Chuck was defense
captain for the Eugene branch of the Patriot Party.
To listen to
Jillian online,“El Telefono” and other performances visit YouTube: