Mary Lee DeRamus
Sunrise: February 21, 1915 - Sunset: October 11, 2011
I was about 7 years old the day Aunt Mary came into our kitchen and said to me, "Do you want to take dance lessons?" As always with Aunt Mary, it was more a statement than a question. I immediately answered, "Yes, tap!" Then, she did what she was noted for - she laid down the conditions. If I want to take tap I had to also take ballet. What I didn't know then was that she wanted me to fulfill her lifelong dream of becoming a ballerina. Unfortunately, that dream ended for her when my legs were no longer thin and I didn't walk around on my tiptoes all the time, anymore. Besides not having children of her own, that might be the only other dream of hers that was never realized.
Aunt Mary was a "Mover and a Shaker." Despite not having more than a junior high school formal education, she became an extremely successful business woman and quite possibly the only female, African-American (closet) millionaire in the county.
My siblings and I are a generation from a culture and a family where almost everyone older than you had parental authority over you. Aunt Mary was one who exercised that authority each time she saw us. She had a plethora of rules and regulations but there are two pieces of sage wisdom I've never forgotten: 1) never be involved with a man who has less to lose than you do and 2) always tell the truth - a lie is too hard to remember.
Aunt Mary loved her animals - her dogs and her horses. She had outside dogs that wandered around and kind of guarded her 104 acres of farmland; and then there was always some pampered pooch that lived better than some people and rode in her car cradled in her arm. But it was her horses that fascinated us - Pretty Boy a golden palomino with blond mane and tail and King of Spades, a jet black stallion who danced a side step with his tail and long, powerful neck arched. They were her favorites in her stable of 21 horses and they were my favorite too. Being around them gave us one of several opportunities that other steelworker's kids from E. 22nd Street didn't have a chance to experience.
In the Word of God, Revelation Chapter 20:11 it says, "And I saw Heaven opened and behold a white horse: and He that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteous he doth judge and make war." The 14th verse says, "And the armies which were in Heaven followed Him upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean."
I want a white horse. I want to ride back with Him. Aunt Mary, I pray you ride again, too.
