"She has been sexually active throughout her entire adult life, including what she calls an "affair" when she was 95. She does not smoke but occasionally will make a drink for herself. Even as a centenarian, she is dancing, electric sliding, bowling, biking, walking, and exercising more actively than many people in their forties or fifties."
Audre Lorde once wrote, "Even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded, because it is so easy not to battle at all, to just accept and call that acceptance inevitable." With that in mind, Ruth's survival, from the earliest moment, was an accomplishment. She was born a twin but her sister died shortly after birth. "This little light baby, she ain't gonna live," Ruth's grandmother predicted at the time. "But this little black baby [Ruth] she's the one who's gonna live."
Ruth became the first daughter to parents with three sons, and today reflects on her brothers lives by reminiscing on their musical ability and on their service in the military. The eldest, Charles, born in 1890, played the violin and became a Second Lieutenant in World War I. The next son, Harry, was born four years later on New Year's Eve of 1894. He went on to play the piano, clarinet, and guitar, and even joined the military band in the war. The last son, Wellington, born in 1896, played the drums, and was drafted into the service. Ruth rounded out the musical trio by adding her ability to play piano by ear and to play the mandolin and the guitar.
Perhaps as a survival tool learned in a culture of closetedness, Ruth seems to have always had a perceptive ability to identify other homosexuals, even going so far as to pick up on her own brother's sexuality. "Harry didn't care much about the girls," she told film director Yvonne Welbon in the documentary Living With Pride: Ruth Ellis @ 100. She said Harry "was more of a studious person. Music was his main thing." Harry went on to the University of Illinois Medical School and set up an office in Champaign, Illinois, becoming the first black doctor in the city.
Decades later, when Ruth was nearing 80 years of age, she signed up for a karate class in Detroit. Her instructor, a white woman named Jaye Spiro, looked like she might be a lesbian, Ruth recalled. Ruth invited her to get together some time and when they met outside of the class they "came out" to each other. In eighty years "in the life," Ruth had never before known a white lesbian.
In many ways, Ruth's life feels like an anomaly. She witnessed two of the nation's worst riots but managed to emerge from both unscathed. She lived in the midst of the Jim Crow era and yet attended a racially integrated school forty years before the Brown decision required all public schools to desegregate. At a time when homosexuality was still referred to as "the love that dare not speak its name," Ruth insists "I wasn't in what you call a closet. Never!" She never married and lived with her female lover for 35 years, but her family never questioned her. While her father seems to have known about his daughter's sexual orientation, the only complaint he ever raised was that Ruth and her girlfriend were too loud one night in the house. "The next time you girls make that much noise I'm gonna put you out," Ruth remembers her father saying. Ruth acknowledges that everything was "hush hush" in her youth, and yet she managed to find a girlfriend and life partner while living in Springfield, Illinois. She says she knew very little about lesbians, but she also remembers reading Radclyffe Hall's 1928 lesbian classic The Well of Loneliness. Somehow, in the midst of a racist, homophobic, and sexist culture, Ruth appears to have lived as a strong and empowered black homosexual woman.
In the course of her life, Ruth has played many different roles. She was an entrepreneur who started her own printing shop in a time when most black women were still working as domestics. She has been something of an activist who opened her Detroit home as a social spot for black gays and lesbians as far back as the 1940s, and even attended the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's "Creating Change" conference when it came to Detroit in the 1990s. She was a loyal spouse, who stayed with her partner Ceciline "Babe" Franklin for 35 years. She is a traveler, venturing to the Bahamas, Mexico City, Niagara Falls, and to women's musical festivals. And still she is largely self-taught, having learned photography, bowling, cooking, and piano mostly on her own. Even as the most senior of senior citizens, she leads an active lifestyle. In Welbon's documentary, Ruth, in her nineties, returns to her Springfield High School gymnasium and without prompting begins jogging around the gym floor in the same way that she must have run 85 years earlier. She has been sexually active throughout her entire adult life, including what she calls an "affair" when she was 95. She does not smoke but occasionally will make a drink for herself. Even as a centenarian, she is dancing, electric sliding, bowling, biking, walking, and exercising more actively than many people in their forties or fifties.
"Ruth represents power, strength, and dignity," says Kalimah Johnson, a young black woman and poet. Johnson has come to a senior citizens center on the third floor of a downtown Detroit church to join dozens of other people, young and old, to fete Ruth on her 100th birthday. Ruth is tastefully dressed in a taupe-colored short-sleeve frock with two strands of pearls draped to her waist and matching pearl ear rings. With her white hair combed and brushed into shape, she is a portrait of matronly elegance sitting at her round table even as she nibbles on a barbecue drumstick and sips on her fruit punch. Nothing seems to disrupt her poise -- not the woman sitting next to her in a loud leopard print blouse and matching hat nor the outside rumble and spark of thunder and lightning intruding on the melodious sounds of the live string quartet. She is not even unnerved by all the cameras, photographers, videocameras, and reporters jabbing microphones in people's faces. It has taken 100 years to get to this day and she seems determined to enjoy it.
The following day she is wearing a San Francisco T-shirt over a pair of faded jeans as she stands to greet me in the hallway when the elevator door opens on the thirteenth floor. She ushers me into her place and politely asks if I would like something to drink or care for any leftover cake. Everyone seems to know Ruth has just reached her 100th birthday. Her coffee table is covered with birthday cards. A neighbor stops by for a piece of birthday cake. Several signs in the building remind the residents of Ruth's birthday party the night before. When Ruth goes downstairs to check her mail, a young woman on the elevator addresses her like a celebrity. In many ways, she is. The pictures, plaques, and newspaper articles that fill the walls of her living room attest to her celebrity status.
As I settle into the couch in the living room, she relaxes comfortably in a reclining rocker that reminds me of my great grandfather's. In many ways her spirit connects me to both my great grandparents. The décor of her apartment, the sound and cadence of her voice, the happiness in her soul all seem familiar to me, and instantly I feel at ease. I find myself talking not only to Ruth Ellis, but soon I am speaking to my own great grandmother as well. I hear the words "colored" and "stout" in ways that only my great grandparents had used. But Ruth is different.
She confidently interrupts me before I can even finish the small talk leading up to the interview. "You want me to say when I was born, where I was born," she chimes in nonchalantly. I laugh. She is a seasoned pro, an expert at media interviews. She has been interviewed so many times she hasn't even seen all of them. In addition, she has all the trappings of stardom -- an agent, a website, a video, and an email address -- without any of the usual ego and the pretense.
If Ernest Hemingway is one of 20th century America's great heroes, then his unassuming home girl, Ruth Ellis, is one of ours -- an African American same-gender-loving woman who has much to teach all of us about survival. In recognizing her, we recognize ourselves, airing out the tattered stories of our lives from the musty closets of history.