Dancing with the Bones of the Past by Noah Moore-Goad

Dancing with the Bones of The Past

 by Noah Moore-Goad

               History could be described as a dance. Each move, every step is made in time with the spirit and music of the times, both literally and figuratively. We as people try to understand our lives within the framework of both our personal histories within the greater context of the world around us by studying what has gone on before. By learning the steps of the people before us, we are better prepared to make our own best moves – moves that take us further down the road where the best and the worst of times are behind us, and the unknown lies before us.

“History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived; but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” – Maya Angelou

               My friend Hilda Creasy is well versed in dancing through life. She is a published author, a painter, a creative force in the lives of her family and friends. Hilda represents to me a great student of history. She has lived through some of the most important and pivotal times in American history in her own inimitable way. Born and raised In Hinton, West Virginia, Hilda is one of fifteen children… all single births. I interviewed her to get her perspective of history through her eyes. She has some good insights on what the past was like for her generation. ”Everything gets used on a pig except the oink!” her father would say when he would slaughter one of the hogs, with nothing to be wasted or left unused.

                This idea that nothing was wasted stemmed from that fact that her family and her neighbors were poor; replacing machinery or other goods wasn’t easy. To combat the poverty around them, they repaired or engineered the things they used. Clothes were handmade and almost all the food was grown or livestock was raised on family owned farmland. The rations of World War II were something that affected everyone, a shared sacrifice that was more annoyance than problem. She grew up in the poverty of Appalachia, so everything in her life was shared and passed down to her 15 siblings and repurposed and recycled. She told me that her mother always said “waste not and want not” and it was something she grew to understand and appreciate more as she became a mother herself.

               She moved to Chicago with her brothers as a young woman during the 1950’s, before the interstates were built between West Virginia and Illinois; her brothers went to find work in the factories; she to find work as a waitress to make money to go to Business College. During her time working there she went to business school, and eventually would get her realtor’s license. She met her husband in Chicago and on June 16, 1955 Hilda and Jay Creasy got married. They started out in an apartment to begin their life together. It would be three and a half years before the first of five children they would have together. She told me that moving away from home at seventeen with her brothers was difficult for her, but her parents knew that there was nothing for a bright girl with a future before her in West Virginia. The title of her memoirs is “Transplanted by Necessity”; she told me that most of her life meant moving to find better jobs, to further her education… and then still moving to find the best place to raise her family.

               They eventually settled down in Marengo, Illinois; they bought 6 acres of land and built the house she still lives in. Jay and Hilda were married for fifty-seven years until Jay’s death in 2012 due to colon cancer. She told me that her greatest achievements were being a mother to her children and to have met and loved Jay. She told me that history is just a big ball of yarn and that we only see one end of the string at the time. It is only when enough time has passed that we see the skein of history and start to understand how it all unravels. We talked the Affordable Care Act and the worries that people have about the economy today. She told me that so much of what is going on now happened in much the same way, the fights over Social Security and Medicare and the  conservatives’ fears of the USA becoming a Welfare state. She asked me if we as a society would ever learn the lessons of the past. The struggles that people she grew up with in Appalachia still go on to this day and she thought that if we could ever get past our political and social preconceptions to fully realize that the most important task at hand, in her opinion, was to care for those who cannot care for themselves and to fight for social justice and fairness.

                I met Hilda when I married my husband Michael four years ago; Michael and Hilda go back thirty-five years when they worked at a realty firm together. They have been fast friends ever since. I’ve read her books, and I have a signed watercolor of her porch swing and trellis outside her kitchen window that hangs near our front door.

               She has touched both of our lives; this woman from the hills of West Virginia… a woman that still has a minute trace of hillbilly accent but a heart as big as the mountains she still calls home. She wrote in her memoirs that when people from up north asked her where her accent came from, she always said, “I got it from drinking from the bottom of a Dixie cup.” She hadn’t drunk from that cup in many years, but small drops of that accent still linger on. 

               She was told just a few months after Jay passed that her doctors found her cancer she had thought beaten had now moved into her bones and she had been given a year, maybe two to go. I think that throughout her life, she has been travelling; moving from her parents’ home in the hills to Chicago, to all the places she’d been to find out that history is made of travelers. We are lucky to meet them on the road and should always entertain them, learn what we can, and when the time comes, we say good-bye and know that the journey doesn’t end; we just keep going. I am not ready to say good-bye to Hilda, but I know that someday I will have to; such is the stuff history is made of – a long string of saying our good-byes to what and who we love.

“I am what time, circumstance, history has made of me, certainly; but I am also much more than that. So are we all.”  – James A. Baldwin

               I was born in the autumn of 1969. The year saw the lunar landing and Armstrong taking his small step for man, the end of the Beatles, and riots in the streets of New York City as drag queens hurled bricks at the police during a raid of the Stonewall Inn. This act of defiance and civil disobedience began three days of rioting, and the beginning of the LGBT civil rights movement. Fast forward to what will be soon 2014, with sixteen states with marriage equality passed, and I realize that I am a product of that same struggle. I am one man in a long line of people who have struggled to accept my place in a world that wasn’t ready for change; a change towards fairness and equality.

                I, like millions of gay and lesbian Americans have a history that is rich but largely obscured in mainstream historical discourse. Bob Dylan once sang that “to live outside the law, you must be honest.” Honesty is paramount to realizing one’s place in history, I think. Knowing your place in history is an important part of not making the same mistakes over and over, just as Mya Angelou said – all it takes is courage.

               I’ve been called many nasty things in this life, all forty-four years of it; most of it was undeserved. I’ve had some of my hardest struggles and my biggest fears imposed upon me by the ignorance of those who don’t know the role that gays and lesbians have held throughout history. LGBT history is history, and it is important that this part of history be made more accessible to a larger audience, in my opinion.

                I’ve had to muster the courage that Mrs. Angelou was referring to in order to get past the naysayers and bigots I’ve had to overcome in my personal life. There were moments where I briefly considered ending it all, but I realized rightly that someday things would get better. Now we have sixteen states where my marriage to my husband Michael is legally recognized… a far cry from the religious pamphlets that were shoved down my throat as a teen proselytizing that gay people like me were pedophiles and monsters, people to be shunned and hated.  We all have to dance with the bones of the past; history demands we learn the choreography of our predecessors – thankfully, we have the dance step charts created by historians, poets and musicians to keep us moving in the right direction. In the end, however, I am reminded of La Cage aux Folles, and the song “We Are What We Are”:

“We face life though it's sometimes sweet and sometimes bitter,
Face life, with a little guts and lots of glitter.
Look under our frocks: Girdles and jocks,
Proving we are what we are!”

               We are all what we are, indeed… dancing to our own music, tracing our steps backwards and forwards through our lives; making our own little histories while the dust settles on the bones of the past.