Vivian K. Richardson
Vivian Richardson, Aka Mrs. Richardson, Ms. Vivian, Vivian, Queen Mother
February 15, 1927-April 18, 2006
I was getting my robes in the Pastor’s Study on the evening of my installation, January 13, 1981 when I noticed a tall dark silhouette pass by the open door, and I heard a distinctive voice down the hall, “Who’s that young whipper-snapper in the pastor’s office?” she tolled, not to me, but presumably to someone else in the hallway, though clearly loudly enough for me to overhear. I was 30 years old. This was my first encounter with Vivian Richardson, a tall, proud, angry, forthright, abrasive, organic, deeply hurt, scrappy, connected, Lutheran, African/African-American/Black, Courageous Outrageous Woman, who often smelled of garlic and moth balls. It was to be one of a thousand experiences and meetings over the next twenty-five years as we found ourselves in an awkward dance of shadows and reality: race, gender, age, class and humanity. A dance that through its back-and-forths wound down the uncertain steps of relationship through treacherous terrain to a place of deep love and respect not without more awkwardness, hurts absorbed and processed, understandings come to.
As a new pastor, still reeking of seminary truths and untested in congregational protocols, I was negotiating a literal mine field of public/private all the time. I preferred to be called “Pastor Terry” to show I was one of the people and to break down the barrier of pastor and people—or so I thought. Later I would reclaim my Baptismal name and differentiate myself at least a little asking folks to call me “Pastor Moe.” Into the midst of this personal/professional morass was how to address parishioners. “Mr.” or “Mrs.” sounded way too formal to establish a friendly pastoral relationship. Should I show respect by calling the elders by their titles, and those nearer my own age by their first names? If I did, where was the line? And then there was Vivian K. Richardson who preferred to be called “Mrs. Richardson,” and I had more than an inkling why. Yet, I wanted to be consistent, fair, neutral, treating everyone with the same respect or openness. Hmm… Mrs. Richardson’s first gesture of grace was to let me call her Vivian, the name nearly everybody else in the congregation called her except the younger black adults who continued to call her Mrs. Richardson.
When we adopted our second child, just a year and a half after moving to NE Portland, a mixed race boy from a white birth-mother and a black birth-father, she took us under her somewhat prickly wings. “You have to put some oil in that boy’s hair. Don’t let if frizz like that. Go to the drug store and get some Afro-Sheen and put it in his hair every day.” Yep. There it was, on the second shelf from the bottom in the hair care section of the corner pharmacy. Afro-Sheen. With full instructions. Gradually her story and our story came together. I learned. She forgave. She accepted me as her pastor. Eventually she loved me, and I loved her. Vivian. Ms. Vivian. Mrs. Richardson. Queen Mother.
Natures Organic Food Store
I’d see her in Natures, the first organic store in Portland before organic was popular. She’d be buying vegetables, especially greens—beet tops, collard and mustard greens, organic grains and vitamin and herbal supplements of all kinds—and, of course, garlic. Though her sources were from a 1920’s Almanac of some kind, not the Farmer’s Almanac, but something more witchy and alternative, she was ahead of her time in some strange way. Garlic was one of her favorite foods with properties she cherished in multiple forms. I think she chewed it like gum. When I would visit her apartment, it had the a peculiar odor: mothballs, old books, garlic, something still left on the stove, fresh flowers, three days old. She’d bring herbal cures to church trying to get people to buy various tonics and pills. Her scariest potion was a garlic enema that she touted as “an excellent colonic for use every six months.” I don’t think she got any takers, but she was unabashed. As the pastor I didn’t want to encourage money changing in the temple, so to speak; as a person I was bashful (and fearful) about any proposal of enemas of any kind.
Black is Beautiful
Vivian knew everybody. Especially in the Black Community. She knew Janice Scroggins, a prominent Jazz musician. She knew Ron Herndon, Community leader, founder of the Albina Head Start Program and co-chair of the Black United Front pushing for school desegregation and economic equity in Portland. Ron, who once danced on the tables at a school board meeting, while his partner in the BUF, Rev. John Jackson negotiated in another room. She knew all the Black pastors, and many of their mothers. She knew the Black legislators, barbers, merchants, newspaper editors, photographers, morticians—she knew just about everybody in the Black community. When prominent Black leaders visited Portland, she was at the head of the line to see them: Desmond Tutu, Jesse Jackson, Maya Angelou, Cornell West, to name a few.
No one messed with Vivian. She carried herself, tall, black and strong. Though I was intimidated at first. I began to see her anger in light of her experience. I started to see her prickliness as strength forged in her experiences of suffering. As she shared her story, I began to reframe how I saw her. I knew she was by herself, divorced, as I would later learn. I had met her son, and knew her grandchildren who were also members of the church. She never remarried, but remained alone in her apartment. But in another way she was married to the community, the black community, and the Redeemer community that she had embraced from the early 70s forward. I could see some of the origins of her anger. I could begin to see that it was her friend, and it served her well in most instances. One time during Sunday service she called me out after the worship service because I didn’t pass the peace with her. While I made an effort to participate in that part of the ritual, and tried to go different ways on different Sundays so as not to just be in one part of the sanctuary, I did not have a goal of greeting everyone every Sunday. Vivian saw this through her experience, and was not happy.
But for the most part she wore her anger not on her sleeve, but where it belonged as the breastplate that protected her dignity and sought justice for herself and others. Through our own organizing and the many other groups she belonged to she met chiefs of police, mayors, bishops of all stripes, realtors who served or exploited the neighborhood, landlords who often avoided her, and cops on the beat. She couldn’t restrain herself, however, from slapping a child’s wrist if they took too many cookies during coffee hour regardless of where the parents were or what their particular cookie policy was.
Queen Mother
A highlight of her life was a trip to Africa organized by a local Lutheran pastor. The plan was to go to Malawi to plant coffee trees and assist in the development of a coffee plantation for the benefit of local farmers there, an early part of the Fair Trade movement. She and another African American matriarch, a mirror opposite of Vivian, who was tall, stately and outspoken, her travelling companion was short, shy and quite retiring. Together they made a beautifully contrasting pair, and deepened their long relationship by this spiritual pilgrimage to Africa, that Vivian called, “The Motherland.” “When I got off the plane in Africa, I knelt down and kissed the Motherland,” she told me. And I believe she did, celebrating more than a trip abroad: it was a pilgrimage of redemption. In kneeling and kissing the Motherland, she redeemed some of her own experience of the violent forced kneeling, abuse and oppression of slave America. She was not only African American. She was African. Her Motherland brought her to her knees at the source of her identity and struggle. She came back somehow renewed, softened, sharpened and truer to herself than before. She came back with a few tokens, mostly carvings and batik art work (additions for the Multicultural Art Shows), including an ebony carved fish that she gave to me for my desk. It was after this trip that I began to call her “Queen Mother,” at first in private and when I could tell she not only allowed it, but liked it, I would call her out more publicly. She was a Queen Mother. An African Queen.
Leadership
While Vivian knew everybody in the Black community, they also knew her. She was friends with the most prominent African American jazz pianist and a high flying African American singer in the Portland Opera. She had both over to her apartment for hors d oeuvres on New Year’s Day, a ritual she repeated with various trophy leaders from the Black community. She knew the pastors, though was wary of some, while having alienated others with her independence and womanist ideas. She was a womanist from the ground up, not from reading books or trying to emulate some role model. She was the real deal. Tall. Sassy. Opinionated. Critical. Forthright to a fault. And well connected. Yet, in her own way, lost in the world, and outlier in her own family and in the church she chose, mostly white, mostly traditional.
Still she served on the Redeemer council, at the table with the past and future of the congregation—and she was mostly with the future. She went to Synod Assemblies where delegates from Lutheran congregations across Oregon came together to worship and pray, conduct annual business and cast a vision for the church in the Northwest. She knew the bishop on a first name basis, and vice versa. She was a fearless leader, a strong African warrioress, who fought for justice in South Africa. Her eyes blazed like Desmond Tutu’s.
She didn’t talk much of her past, though I found out later that her husband had left her for a white woman—a double shot with multiple reactions in her life, a wound to her womanhood and to her blackness, a source of pain that she buried from her public life, and that somehow drove her into the church and the world at the same time.
315 N. Alberta
She lived in the same subsidized apartment for the whole time I knew her. When the twenty-year deal with the federal government was up, and the landlord threatened to upscale, raise rents and move on, she organized with the Tenants Union and won reprieve. Not long after that her memory began to fail. She took to taking more medicines than she could keep track of, and needed help. A member of the church called her every day to ask, “Did you take your pills, Ms Vivian?” If she replied, as she often did, “No, but I will real soon.” The response was always the same, “I’ll wait.” Vivian loved to tell that story. It was a sign of deep recognition, and while she acted peeved at first, deep down she was both recognizing her need for another’s reminder, and receiving a gift of someone else’s recognition of her as a whole person, forgetfulness and all.
Vivian died peacefully in 2006. I miss her still. I still have my favorite picture of her. It shows her standing by a lake with a fishing pole in one hand and a line of nice looking lake trout proudly displayed in the other. I think of her with all the other fisher/disciples, shaking her finger at them, and standing for justice. I see her in the multitude from all nations and ethnic groups waving her palm branch at the feast of the Lamb. I feel her with me still.