By OSWALD T. BROWN
WASHINGTON, D.C., May 14, 2023 — My saintly mother, Violet Corinne Elliott Brown, died in March of 1991 and I still miss her tremendously. To paraphrase an excerpt from Lanston Hughes’ powerful “Mother to Son” poem, marriage life for my mother was “no crystal stair.”
My father, Samuel Brown, was well-known carpenter and boat-builder and when I as a young boy, my mother left me in the care of my grandparents – Benjamin and Mabel Elliott of Stanyard Creek, Andros — as she followed him wherever he found work. My father was a philanderer, and mother eventually left him and moved to Nassau, where she worked as a maid. In fact, she was the maid for Clement and Zoe Maynard when Mr. Maynard was the chief pharmacist at the Princess Margaret Hospital, a fact that I am sure Allyson Maynard-Gibson and her living siblings, who were all children at the time, can recall.
Eventually, mother relocated to Miami, Florida, where her younger sister, Amanda Elliott-Fox, and her husband Lawrence Fox –a native of Long Island – had established a comfortable life for themselves working as the butler and maid for wealthy Miami Beach residents.
Given her strong work ethic, mother had no difficulty finding a job as a live-in maid with a very wealthy family on Miami Beach.
She naturally spent her days off with Aunt Amanda and Uncle Lawrence, who indeed had done very well and were among the affluent Blacks to build a home in the Miami suburban subdivision Liberty City.
According to Wikipedia, “Once part of the sparsely populated outskirts of northern Miami, what became Liberty City developed during the Great Depression of the 1930s when President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the construction of the Liberty Square housing project in 1933, the first of its kind in the Southern United States. Built as a response to the deteriorating housing conditions in densely populated and covenant-restricted slums of Overtown, construction on the initial housing project began in 1934 and it opened in 1937.
“Into the 1940s and 1950s, the growing Liberty City and adjacent Brownsville thrived as a middle-income black American community, hosting several churches, hospitals, and community centers. The area served as home to prominent figures such as Kelsey Pharr, M. Athalie Range (the first black American elected to serve on the Miami city commission) and boxer Muhammad Ali. Although segregation laws prohibited black Americans from resting and residing in popular Miami Beach, service establishment and resorts such as the Hampton House Motel and Villas catered to and entertained the likes of notables such as Martin Luther King Jr., Althea Gibson, and even whites such as Mickey Mantle.”
Aunt Amanda and Uncle Lawence built a three-bedroom home at 1510 N.W., 69th Terrace in Liberty City that was home-away-from home for me from I started travelling to Miami as a teenager in the mid-1950s when one could buy a round-trip ticket for less than $20.
My mother eventually moved in with Aunt Amanda and Uncle Lawrence after she got another job as a maid that did not require her to “live in.” This was around the time when I started my journalistic career as a trainee reporter with The Tribune and travelled to Miami more frequently; hence, I got to spend more “home time” with my mother.
When my late sister, Elthreada Brown McPhee, “dropped out” of Government High School, she moved to Miami to live with Aunt Amanda and eventually graduated from Miami Northwestern Senior High School. She subsequently graduated from Prairie View A&M University in Prairie View, Texas, thanks in no small measure to my mother, Aunt Amanda, and Uncle Lawrence.
So in wishing all the mothers around the world HAPPY MOTHERS’ DAY, my thoughts are very much on my late saintly mother Violet Corinne Elliott Brown. May she continue to Rest In Peace.
