Hear Voices in Water

This story begins on a cold winter night in 1943 in South Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at 2204 Kimball Street. It was an address that will forever be stamped on the retina of my mind because ...

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The snow was falling, and a fourteen-year-old girl staggered across the street from our house to the home of two sisters, at 2205, looking for help because of the pain that I was beginning to cause her. I heard her scream and beg for God's pardon as she entered the home of the two sisters. She fell on the floor, and the jolt seemed violent as the water sloshed across my little body.

I must have been struggling to get out of that dark, wet, rubberlike balloon, and the more I stretched, the more the girl screamed. There was so much movement and rolling about in the balloon. I couldn't see, but I could feel and I could hear. I don't remember most of her words, but I remember the excitement my little body felt when she kept calling one name. That name would follow me throughout my entire life. The young girl continued to call that name, intermingled with an uninterpreted language and a sudden jolt. Suddenly, I heard sounds, clearly, crisply, and with such clang. I saw flickers of light, and I cried as I faded away from the voice of the girl who had been screaming a name I had become accustomed to hearing.

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As unbelievable as the foregoing may seem, there is biblical evidence of another little boy who overheard a conversation between his mother, Elizabeth, and her cousin, Mary. This conversation was about the baby that Mary was also going to deliver. The little boy, later to be named John, was also in an enclosed water chamber, and his mother was six months in expectancy with him. John, the record tells us, was in Elizabeth's womb and heard that the Messiah was coming through this family member, and the Scriptures say, "The baby (John) was filled with the Holy Spirit in his mother's womb." If Mary was like any other girl that had just been visited with the news of a pregnancy and impending delivery and if Mary just happened to tell her cousin what the name of the baby was going to be, I can only imagine that the little boy in Elizabeth's womb acted as I did when I heard that same name, two thousand years later, from within my teenage mother's womb. The name that John and I heard was Jesus.

I can't scientifically argue for this next series of conclusions, but my faith tells me that my exposure to Mama's experience on that cold winter night must have predisposed me to her faith. Years later, I would be introduced to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, through the Nation of Islam, and although I will delve further into that part of my testimony in a subsequent chapter, I've concluded that fourteen years of Islamic teachings never took a hold of me because of that "Mighty Overshadowing of the Holy Ghost" on Mama on that cold night in December, at Philadelphia.

I learned later that the date was the 11th of December at one forty-five in the morning that I was born to a girl named Lucy Lottie-Mae (Harris) Ellis and a twenty-four-year-old man named Jesse Ellis. The place was known as Philadelphia General Hospital. The records of my birth were lost in a major fire some years later, so there was confusion about whether I was born in 1943 or 1944.

Let me explain the confusion. Lucy was a young genius, but she was also an epileptic who suffered, over the years, from her many falls and grand mal seizures that took their toll on her brain. One might say that a mother should know when she gave birth to her child, but Lucy's mental condition, medicines, electric shocks, and stints at the Philadelphia Mental Hospital (Byberry) could have scrambled some of her facts. I do know that the "lady across the street" and her sister repeatedly said that I was born in 1943. Mama always said I was born in 1944, so I had to adopt her date for military service records, but the Philadelphia public school system has me recorded as born in 1943. As a matter of fact, when I did go to school, I was moved from the first grade (1-A) to the latter half of the second grade (2-B) in 1948. Talk about confusion. You figure it out.

After I was born, I can't remember my father being in my very young life. There is some information that says that he was away in the United States Army for a stint. But in those baby years, I don't recall his presence. I do remember those ladies across the street, one of which was my father's mother and the other was his mother's sister. Both sisters were in their early forties and were preachers. Martha Ann Parker Ellis was a Disciples of Christ pastor. She was a minister at a little storefront church on the northeast corner of Nineteenth and Latona Street in South Philly, and Mama had been the young pianist for that church, known as Saint Paul Church of Christ. That's how she met Daddy, and that's how I got here. The other lady preacher was Lucy Parker Lucas. Aunt Lucy was a preacher and missionary in the United Holy Church of America. I saw Aunt Lucy in my formative years, but I was told that she travelled to the nation of Brazil to establish a mission and a school for a time. Recently I came across some old newspaper articles and pictures of the old United Holy Mission in a village of the nation of Brazil. Both women were pioneers in ministry for women who had a call of Christ to preach.

Something must be said about my mother's stepmother, back across the street, at 2204 Kimball Street. Her name was Geneva Harris. Grandma Geneva was a very scary lady. She was unkind to me and mean to Mama. The family stories say that she had been married to Mama's father, Professor James Benjamin Beverly Cary Harris. Grandpa was a professor of music who had been born in Richmond, Virginia. He taught music and piano in Richmond and became romantically involved with one of his young Caucasian students named Lottie. Lottie was Irish, and because of the race prohibitions in the nation, especially in the South, Grandpa's life was threatened when it was discovered that Lottie was on the family way. He was briskly encouraged to leave Richmond under one condition: that he take the little girl Lucy and leave the little Irish girl, Lottie, alone and never communicate with her again. So when Grandpa came to Philadelphia he met Miss Geneva and married her with the understanding that she would help him raise the little fair-skinned girl. Lottie returned to Richmond, never to be seen by little Lucy "Lottie" Mae Harris again. Grandma Geneva never bore children, and it is rumored that Grandpa never really loved Geneva, but he made a contract to stay with her if she would raise his little Lucy.

Mama said that Grandpa adored her and taught her everything he could about music. From a small child until she was ten years old, Grandpa taught Lucy to read music and play the piano. Epilepsy was not as understood in those days as it is now; and Lucy was always falling out in school, at church, or on the streets, and my grandfather would do everything possible to protect his baby girl. But suddenly, Grandpa died in his sleep, and little Lucy, age ten, was left alone with the unkind stepmother, Geneva. After the funeral, Lucy gravitated to the two sisters across the street, and it was during some of those times of absence from the house that Lucy would make herself available to Rev. Mrs. Martha Ellis's son, Jesse.

Mama said that Jesse was a real snazzy fellow in...