[“Telling Mabel Hampton’s history forces me to confront racism in my own relationship to her,” Joan writes, a role model for me in her own way. Her relationship with Mabel began with Mabel as the caretaker, the underpaid domestic, but somewhere along the way it became its own love story. In November 1960, Joan wrote Mabel a postcard from Basel, Switzerland. “I am going to buy a mountain here for us,” she said. “Would you like to live in the Alps?”
The story ended with Joan taking care of Mabel. As Mabel aged, losing her hearing and some of the feeling in her fingers, Joan brought her to live in her Upper West Side apartment, where she cared for her hero’s body, and also for her story, one she would tell in essays and speeches long after Mabel was gone. “The loss to me personally is too huge to even talk about even after all these years.”
Following Joan’s lead, I tend to Mabel’s story. I dig around for the moments tying her to those in the life in Harlem in the 1920s and ’30s, the cruelties they suffered at the hands of the state and the unbridled joys they found in each other’s arms. I also dig for the more intimate moments that make her my own personal hero, a lesbian who came out of hardship and rewrote the ways we can love one another, not just our Lillians but also our neighbors, strangers, transient lovers, everyone in the life. I speak Mabel’s name in the snow, those syllables a sweet something to whisper in my lover’s ear. I nod back to let Mabel know that I smile when I see her, laugh when I hear her. I want a monument on her block, funded by lesbians, but for now I will settle for this, the kiss of snowflakes and streetlamps, of lips that repeat her name back to me.
“You have lots of stories to tell, Mabel,” Joan says.
Another day, another interview session. Mabel changes her mind. Somebody should write about me and what I think.
What I wanted out of life was to be with a woman and stay with a woman. When you’re in this life you know everybody and everybody knows you.”]
amelia possanza, from lesbian love story: a memoir in archives, 2023