My mother’s maiden name was Claudette Winfield. Her twin brother was named Claude Winfield. She left home for college to attend Jackson State University and met a young man named Claude McInnis who was named after his uncle Claude Brown. That’s a whole lotta damn Claudes, which is why my Pops never intended for me to be a junior. My mother’s twin was her best friend until the day she died. As siblings, they argued and disagreed often. As siblings, no one else could say anything bad about the other one. So, when I learned Wednesday that my mother’s twin, my Uncle Claude, had passed, I realized that is the end of the Claudes. But, more importantly, that is the end of one of the most important people in my life.
The short version of Uncle Claude’s life is that he left Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1968 with twenty-four dollars in his pocket because for him—a poor, gay, black man—anywhere other than Clarksdale was better. I don’t say this to denigrate my hometown. Y’all know I’m Clarksdale, Mississippi, all day every day. My city is the home of the blues, and your city’s music sucks—‘nuff said; let’s continue with Uncle Claude’s story. Yet, Uncle Claude was “run out of” Clarksdale because he was a black man, and being gay didn’t cause some white folks to be any less vile to him. By the time my uncle was in high school, he was already a very good seamstress. Since he was a male, I’m tempted to call him a tailor. But, by the age of fifteen, Uncle Claude was doing more than tailoring. He was making clothes, often of his own design. He got so good at making clothes, particularly dresses, for the black girls and women that white girls began to pay for his services. Y’all know that black folks can’t have ish without white folks gettin’ in on the deal. From what I understand, he was able to earn enough money from making clothes that he didn’t have to go to the fields to chop cotton like his brothers and sisters. (As an aside, my mother was out there. But, she was such a spoiled brat that she was mostly in the way and messing up the white folks’ fields by chopping crooked lines. I think that the white folks may have even paid her not to return.) Also, from what I understand, Uncle Claude willingly gave most, if not all, of his earnings to his mother (my grandmother) because that’s what you did then to keep a household afloat. As the story goes, there was a report that some local Negro male was riding in cars with young white girls. This had to be stopped. Of course, there was a white police officer assigned to the Negro side of town whose duty was to investigate, locate, and bring that Negro male to justice for “overstepping” his bounds. Now, this is where the story gets interesting as sometimes other people’s prejudice can actually help you. The white officer knew of my uncle because it was his business to know all the Negroes. How can one keep the Negroes in place if one doesn’t know them? As such, he was well aware, as most of the black community was aware, that my uncle was “not straight.” In those days, especially in Clarksdale, Mississippi, a young black teen didn’t openly declare his alternative sexuality. But, it was no secret that my uncle wasn’t interested in girls. So, when the white officer first saw my uncle in the car with a few white girls, he didn’t think much of it. After weeks of searching for this disobedient Negro male riding in cars with white girls, the officer could only report to his chief that the only Negro male he saw in cars with white girls was “dat Winfield boy, and everyone knos dat dem girls ain’t in no danger from him.” To the officer’s surprise, he was told, in no uncertain terms, to inform Uncle Claude that, if he was caught in another car with a white girl, it would be the last ride of his life. The next time the officer saw Uncle Claude in a car with a white female, he stopped the car and said, “Look, boy, I know dat you don’t have any plans or designs on these white girls other than making dresses. But, you cannot be in a car with another white girl.” Then, the officer looked my uncle directly in the eyes and said, “This warning is not coming from the chief of police. It’s coming from even higher.” My uncle told me that he thanked the officer and offered to walk home. The officer was kind enough to allow the white female to drive him to the edge of his neighborhood where he could walk home from there. (In the South, we call that white kindness.) My uncle then said, “That’s when I decided that Clarksdale didn’t have anything for me and that I didn’t have anything for Clarksdale.” Less than a week later, he was gone to Chicago. A year or so after that, he relocated to New York.
Black men leaving the South for work or to escape Jim Crow was not unusual. Unfortunately, those same black men leaving home and staying gone for ten to twenty years at a time was also not unusual. I know that my uncle left Clarksdale in 1968 because that was a year before I was born. For the first twenty years of my life, the only recollection of and interaction I had with my mother’s twin were his regular Sunday morning phone calls and his picture on the wall of family photos. He would call every Sunday morning to talk with my grandmother before she left for church. When it was my turn to talk to him on the phone, I would stare at his picture on the wall that was smiling back at me. The joyful sound of his voice matched the smile on his photo so it was almost like he was there. Yet, no one in our family seemed to think that it was odd that they hadn’t seen him in damn near twenty years. I had other uncles—Uncle Joe who worked in New Orleans (one of my other favorite uncles) and Uncle Robert who worked in Peoria, Illinois—who visited home regularly. But, not Uncle Claude—I didn’t meet Uncle Claude in the flesh until I was twenty years old, having just completed two years of college and basic training. There was a literary conference in New York that I wanted to attend, and he purchased me a ticket to NYC. It was only then that I realized that my Uncle Claude had become a moderately successful model and had worked as an art designer for fashion magazines. (He is not to be confused with Claude L. Winfield who is a retired NYC teacher, administrator, and visual artist.) Attached are two pics of me visiting Uncle Claude in NYC in 1989. The first is of me on his balcony in Manhattan, and the second is of us getting ready to see the Broadway show Black and Blue. Yes, this is how I looked in college, and these pics are already on my website so it’s too late to be ashamed of them now. By the way, I still own that jacket that I’m wearing on the balcony. It just has more buttons on it now.
Uncle Claude’s first major ad as a model was a Coca-Cola print ad. Yet, by 1989, he had retired from modeling and was doing light consultant work with a few agencies and magazines. His primary work had become helping to write grants and manage centers that housed homeless citizens with HIV and AIDS. Those were some of the first places that he took me when I arrived in NYC. His work was clearly his passion. Whenever he arrived at one of the centers, the people were so happy to see him, and he was extremely happy to see them. I’d assumed he’d got involved in these projects because the fashion industry where he’d worked had been disproportionally hit by AIDS. But, later that day, he revealed to me that he, too, had HIV. This is two years before Earvin “Magic” Johnson informed the world that he has HIV. When Uncle Claude gave me the news, I thought that I was looking at a dead man, a very good-looking and stylishly dressed dead man, but a dead man nonetheless. I was twenty and didn’t have any fucking words. I had just met my uncle in person who was showing me the time of my life. And, now, he’s telling me that he’s going to die. At least, that’s what I heard. Noticing the look of horror on my face, he sat me on the couch, rolled a blunt (in record time I might add), lit it, hit it, exhaled, and said, “Nephew, life isn’t how long you live. It’s how well you live. I’m a poor-as-shit black child from Clarksdale, Mississippi, who’s traveled the world five times. I’m good with every decision that I’ve made. I’m good with life. I’m good with me.” With that, we enjoyed the remainder of my time in NYC, and Uncle Claude lived the next thirty-three years in good health doing exactly what he wanted to do. (As another aside, that was also the day that I learned that everybody on the planet smokes weed except me. But, I digress.)
Twelve years later, in 2011, a former excellent Jackson State University student, Ms. Terra Cousins, who had taken my world literature class was now working for Bridge Builders Inc. and was chair of their annual HIV/AIDS Awareness March and Celebration. She asked me if I would read a poem for the event. To that point, I’d never written anything about HIV and AIDS. So, I took the opportunity to call Uncle Claude and ask him what he wanted a poem about HIV/AIDS to address. It was another great talk, and it produced “For Uncle Claude.” He dropped so much information and wisdom in that conversation, but what I remember most is when he said, “In the Seventies, we didn’t know anything. Today, people step over information to hug ignorance.” That summarized everything that he had told me, and it became the poem’s epigraph. Of course, there’s so much more that I can tell y’all about Uncle Claude, but I’ll leave y’all with this. While he didn’t live lavishly, he enjoyed his money. He took me to a restaurant that didn’t have prices on the menu. I later learned that restaurants that have menus without prices signify that, if you must ask the price of the food, you can’t afford to be there. When I learned that the cheeseburger was twenty-five dollars, I asked the waiter if I could see one. The waiter responded, “Is that what you’ll be having?” To which, I replied, “Err…no sir, I just want to see what a twenty-five dollar cheeseburger looks like.” Uncle Claude was so embarrassed that all he could do was roll his eyes and say, “You are so fucking Clarksdale.” I asked, “Uncle, have you had one of these twenty-five dollar burgers?” He ended, “Hell no, I’m not paying twenty-five dollars for some meat, cheese, and bread. That’s a menu item for these scary white people who want to have a ‘regular’ experience without having to engage ‘regular’ people. I engage regular people all the time so I get to eat whatever I want whenever I want, and it’s not going to be a twenty-five dollar hamburger.” The next day, he took me to a joint to have burgers, and I was afraid to be there. In fact, I wanted to return to the place with the scary white people. Yet, Uncle Claude was just as comfortable in that greasy joint as he was in the upscale restaurant because he had long ago made peace with who he was and with what he was, which gave him the courage to leave Clarksdale, Mississippi, and see the world.