It is the 1960s and Kenny Guise is born into the world with two strikes against him: a racist mother who regrets giving birth to him, and an absentee father, Reverend Ivan Conrad Guise, a shady black minister with a checkered past. Fortunately, Kenny’s aunt treats him well and he grows up in New England alongside his cousin Dave eventually starting a music business in high school that becomes a hit on the party scene.
The story is rife with nostalgic Americana and humorous anecdotes. It’s a fun reminiscence of a time and way of life that many will recall fondly through memories of a world that's gone but not forgotten.
However, a violent storm was brewing. Events outside of the boys’ control were at work behind the scenes, changing their destiny in ways they never could have imagined. Dating all the way back to the American land grab of Native territories, to the battlefields of WWII Italy, history was coalescing in a dark and cruel manner. By the late 70s, organized crime, the disappearance of young Native girls and other underground activities, including police corruption had all coalesced to put unsuspecting Kenny right in the crosshairs of disaster.
.
It is the 1960s and Kenny Guise is born into the world with two strikes against him: a racist mother who regrets giving birth to him, and an absentee father, Reverend Ivan Conrad Guise, a shady black minister with a checkered past. Fortunately, Kenny’s aunt treats him well and he grows up in New England alongside his cousin Dave eventually starting a music business in high school that becomes a hit on the party scene.
The story is rife with nostalgic Americana and humorous anecdotes. It’s a fun reminiscence of a time and way of life that many will recall fondly through memories of a world that's gone but not forgotten.
However, a violent storm was brewing. Events outside of the boys’ control were at work behind the scenes, changing their destiny in ways they never could have imagined. Dating all the way back to the American land grab of Native territories, to the battlefields of WWII Italy, history was coalescing in a dark and cruel manner. By the late 70s, organized crime, the disappearance of young Native girls and other underground activities, including police corruption had all coalesced to put unsuspecting Kenny right in the crosshairs of disaster.
.
~ THE AGE OF GUISE ~
The first few days after Kenny’s suicide were the worst. After the initial shock, dark days of grief settled in among my small family and crew. What followed were the agonizing questions of why, and what happened?
Examining these questions was like sliding down the sharp edge of a razor blade, only to climb back up and slide down its salty dull side. No answers were found, the quest only bringing us agonizingly back to the grief. Within this piercing and searing loop is where I will yank off the warm covers and illuminate the cold facts.
My conjecture was that he never got over his mother abandoning him at such an early age. Maybe, maybe not; nevertheless, the fact remains that my nineteen year old cousin Ken Conrad Guise is dead and gone.
Kenny was the only son of my mother’s only brother, which made him my first cousin. I never met Kenny’s mother, relying only upon first hand testimony from my parents to try and understand what sort of person she was. Helen was a conservative white woman from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Over the years my mom described her in a few different ways; German-Irish, well educated, and plain looking. According to my father, she was plump, pale and the shape of her face reminded him of a six foot tall Sir Winston Churchill. He went on to say that she was a bit fast in the ass, or loose in the ass, I can’t remember his exact words. I also don’t know if this was true or not, but her grandmother did own a bordello, though they always tactfully referred to it as a motel.
My parents did agree that she was pale complected with shoulder length red hair with a neat part over her left temple. She was covered in tan freckles, too numerous to count on her cheeks, arms and oddly enough also on her wrists. Her most prominent facial features were her pointy nose and bushy eyebrows, both of which she kept covered with white powder.
At 26 years old Helen was exactly the same size that she was in college which was a solid size 16. Her daily wardrobe also hadn’t changed much, consisting of knee length madras and tartan plaid skirts which accentuated her curvy hips, and long sleeved collared blouses, in white and on occasion blue which accentuated her pendulous and full breasts. Footwear was always her scuffed up brown penny loafers unless she was in church, in which case she wore square heel black wedges size 15 extra wide.
Helen was overly fond of blue eye shadow, which appeared green from time to time, around her pale blue eyes. This led my father to question the health of her gall bladder which she insisted was working just fine. She was seldom seen without foundation smeared across her forehead and chin. My parents both privately referred to Helen as, “Lady Maybelline.”
Uncle Ivan, Kenny’s father, wasn’t her first choice in men, but she liked how he seemed to worship her which was something she didn’t find in white men, who tended to prefer smaller women. She had been taught by her family early on to stay away from black, brown and yellow men. Her father had informed her that any race other than the white race was substandard, and beneath her station.
She strictly adhered to this rule throughout her years at the University of Michigan. Once she graduated she discovered that the men she dated didn’t care about her education or how smart she was, they simply wanted sex from her. She discovered that giving men orgasms helped their health and even their memory, because afterwards they all seemed to remember they had an early morning meeting, class, or taxes to file and needed to immediately leave.
Helen’s parents split up the year that she graduated from college, which offered some evidence of her mindset back then. She and her mom were stunned when her father ran off with their cleaning lady, a brown beauty from the Dominican Republic, and left the family high and dry. He was never seen or heard from again.
This event was so overwhelming to Helen that instead of joining the work force after college, she volunteered to serve with the Baptist Women’s Aid Society. Due to her youthful exuberance they put Helen to work in the field as a missionary.
It was on one of her missionary assignments to a migrant workers camp in Columbiana, Ohio where she met my uncle, The Right Reverend Ivan Conrad Guise who at the time was brand new to the ministry.
After they met she stuck to her game plan, which was no sex for the first two dates, and after that only her skillful fellatio would be utilized, which essentially made her a virgin bride. What she found endearing was that my uncle appreciated her intelligence, unlike the other men she had tried to rope into a relationship. He seemed to be in possession of a good memory, too, because after the orgasm, my uncle had no other place to be except with her.
However, the twists and turbulences within their brief marriage began almost immediately. Uncle Ivan was known by all of us in the family to prefer men to women for as long as anyone could remember. I can only imagine how shocked everyone was, when he got married. In 1957, they were the first so-called inter-racial couple in our town.
They had no place to live in the months after their marriage, so my parents let them live in our house. There was a large spare room, with its own bathroom and shower, which they lived in for 18 months.
My father told me there was something very different about them, which caught his attention. He said my uncle did all the cooking for the family, and he enjoyed that, but not as much as my mom. The fact was that Helen couldn’t cook. If she did cook, some of her food combinations were culturally off putting to the family. She boiled hot dogs and served them with potato chips on folded white bread and called that a meal. When she eventually learned to make potato salad she put raisins in it, which made it look like writhing German roaches had infested it. This caused my father to have a flashback from his time during World War II in Europe, and he couldn’t eat at all that night.
Other abhorrent and repugnant concoctions included steamed rice with blueberries, scrambled eggs with raisins, macaroni and cheese with green peas, and the last straw was her mashed potatoes. After boiling twenty spuds, she mashed them with salt, butter and milk, then for some reason she added a banana! My stomach turns just recalling it. This made my father so sick that he missed two days of work. After this they tried their best to keep her out of the kitchen.
My uncle also couldn’t open jars, and after a while he stopped trying and opening jars became Helen’s job. She also took out the garbage, shoveled snow, mowed the lawn and helped my father with repairs. In other words, in the 1950s Aunt Helen did all the traditional male jobs and my uncle spent his time polishing his nails, cutting out recipes in magazines, and practicing his singing.
My father recalled that most mornings Helen wore men’s blue bedroom slippers to the kitchen table, and noted that she looked as if she were standing on a diving board, because her toes protruded beyond the edge of the slippers. Mom said she’d send Helen back to her room most mornings, because her breasts were spilling out of her robe while they were at the breakfast table, which distracted my father from reading the morning newspaper.
My parents at that time hosted cocktail parties once a month for their friends, many of whom were Buppies -Black Urban Professionals - accountants, business owners, doctors and a retired judge.
One party in particular stood out in my mother’s memory. Everyone was having a nice time, when Helen got tipsy and began explaining how she had never seen a black doctor before. She went on to say that he must be a veterinarian since he wouldn’t ever be allowed to treat human beings. When my uncle attempted to intervene she loudly accused him of “not screwing me in three months!”
One bright Sunday morning, my mother was up before the sun and went into her kitchen to make coffee. She screamed and became light headed when she discovered Helen washing a pair of her bloody cotton underwear in her kitchen sink. She went about trying to explain how this was no place to be washing her underwear, while she proceeded to bleach down the entire kitchen.
Not long after these events, Helen commenced to making sexual overtures toward my father. My mother began to find long red hairs in many unexplainable places, the refrigerator, and even in her shower. The proverbial last straw occurred only after she found strings of red hair in my father’s underwear.
Right after that, she found an apartment for her brother and new wife. Less than ten months later Kenny was born.
A year after Kenny was born, two significant things happened; I was born and Helen took Kenny to visit her mom in Michigan, and never returned.
If I can say one good thing about Helen and her mother, at least they shipped Kenny to my parents and his father every summer without fail.
As someone who has more than a passing interest in American culture and the sort of issues that David Badgett’s book tackles I was more than pleased to chance upon ‘The Age of Guise’. I surmise the book is taking a while to review and this is probably because it takes a nuanced approach to the sensitive issues it explores. Everyone one of the themes within is a potential hot potato but the writer’s handling of his subject matter is compassionate and level headed. It takes some skill to make characters such as these likeable but in some measure the author has succeeded and that is due to his humanist approach that he proclaims (via Eldridge Cleaver)! He has captured a milieu where his fictional world and its inhabitants natural will to survive are captured in broad yet sympathetic brush strokes; a reflection of a past that many would rather was brushed under the carpet. This is a coming of age story that is also well written and the complexity of these difficult and sometimes unsympathetic people is not downplayed or airbrushed. Badgett also handles suspense well, for example the narrator’s mother and her nephew and the dynamic in between them is one of the unresolved yet satisfying elements of the narrative which lends itself well to the complex tapestry of humanity ‘The Age of Guise’ portrays. The author is able to carry the reader with him through multiple threads which make a saga in the offing. It is credible that he depicts them in the (not too far removed) past as we in the present are able to draw parallels with situations that might otherwise make us feel uncomfortable and would otherwise maybe alienate the readership the author deserves. The ability to create a compelling and satisfying narrative is less common than is supposed therefore I look forward to the wider discovery and appreciation of this work!