Snapshots of #LumbeeHomecoming

Malinda Maynor Lowery

Lest you think that I am using pictures of my irrepressible five-year-old daughter to entice you to read this piece, let me clarify: she is irrepressibly “aggavatin’,” a “hot mess,” and her behavior goes so far beyond the pale of childhood acceptability that some family members simply pat me on the shoulder and say “bless your heart.” To many adults, she is almost shockingly social; imagine Bill Clinton in the body of a five-year-old girl who thinks herself a princess. She’s never understood the meaning of “inside voice.”

One afternoon my cousins rented a blow-up waterslide for the little kids. I watched Lydia carefully, since she was one of the smallest and not an especially strong swimmer. I knew she was fine after she careened down the slide, leaped up like LeBron James in the Eastern Conference finals, and then ran over to me screaming, “I LOVE LUMBEE HOMECOMING!”

Lydia’s irrepressibility is precisely in tune with the symphonic cacophony that is Lumbee Homecoming. Once a year, during the week of the July 4th holiday, more than forty thousand Lumbee Indians gather in Pembroke, North Carolina, to enjoy a little fellowship. We have beauty pageants, a car show, a parade, live music, a powwow, and much more, complete with vendors selling everything from pine needle baskets to collard sandwiches. The Twitter account @LumbeeVocab was on fire, offering nuggets such as, “‘Who Daddy? What?’ = White people’s version of ‘Score’ or ‘For the Win’, could also be a response to ‘Congratulations’ or ‘Nice Work.'”

Plenty of outsiders visit, whether they’re married in or not, because it’s simply one of the most entertaining events of the year in southeastern North Carolina. “It’s like a festival,” a guest said to me once, but it’s really more of a big family reunion, marked by small reunions in the midst of it. These gatherings are sometimes attended by 75 people and sometimes by 250. They are flush with chicken fried at “Walmart’s,” greens, beans, corn, tomatoes, cucumbers fresh from your aunt’s garden, and pork barbecue (either whole hog or shoulders, depending on the family) made by a cousin. Somebody you know grew or cooked this bounty, because they love you, and that makes it heaven.

Lydia’s homecoming is full of cousins, by blood or otherwise. After she meets anyone, she asks me “Mommy, was that a “cuz-in?” Usually my response is yes, because she has, literally, hundreds of cousins, but even when the person is not a blood relative, I’ll say, “Yes, sweetie, she loves you,” which everyone does, because she’s so charming, like her daddy. My late husband, Willie French Lowery, was a legend of Lumbee culture for his rock, folk, and gospel music, but also for his irrepressible smile. He told stories with his melodies. Everyone points out how much Lydia “favors” him, by which they mean her looks and her manner. Her sister displayed a painting of him at her cousin’s vendor booth, and when Lydia saw it, she spontaneously moved toward it, placed her hands on his face, and kissed him, just like she did when he was living.

She’s beginning to see her daddy as an “ancestor”; we went to visit his grave during Lumbee Homecoming, and she sang one of his most famous songs, “Proud to be a Lumbee,” at the gravesite. In the car on the way there, I pointed out features of the landscape—broad fields, the line of trees on the horizon that marks a swamp, abandoned tobacco barns—and I said, “This is where your ancestors lived, Lydia.” She replied, “Mommy, what were their names?” Her curiosity about their names is particularly precocious for this rambunctious girl, who doesn’t seem to pay attention to anything for very long. But she has listened to her elders and heard them reciting the names of ancestors in a ritualistic way, prompted by photographs, usually of those long dead.

This practice seems to stand in opposition to the sharp, quick inflections of the hip-hop-influenced Lumbees between eighteen and thirty-five years old whose tweets I follow. Their expressions of culture are strictly limited to 140 characters, but are nevertheless poetic in their own way: “You don’t choose the pa sack life, the pa sack life chooses you.” A “pa sack” has different meanings to different Lumbees. Some see a “pa sack” as a particularly sad male figure, someone who’s past his prime but hasn’t realized it yet. For others, a “pa” or “pa sack” is a descriptive term for a Lumbee “gangsta,” a hustler whose works show evidence of remarkable faith in God’s ability to make everything turn out ok, despite the mistakes one makes with sex, drugs, liquor, money, or whatever illicit material one chooses. These men are not a new phenomenon. Those ancestors that had twenty-one children with God knows how many baby mamas? Pa Sacks. Here’s a tweet from a pa sack: “Last night confirmed why I have a love/hate relationship with Lumbee women haha yaw are beautiful but *&/!%! crazy lol.”

Over the course of this year’s Lumbee Homecoming week, I tweeted and retweeted as much as I could find about the festivities. Some of my favorites: “Tonight’s late night snack . . . fried chicken and chicken n pastry . . . lawd have mercy.” Or, “picking tomatoes and peas is tiring.” “Get a contact high on Union Chapel Rd. Only at #LumbeeHomecoming.” Those kids know their people. But I was unable to sum up the events in 140 characters, so I ultimately resorted to only a few, accompanied by the hashtag #LumbeeHomecoming. For example, “KINSHIP.”  “It’s coota hot.” “He’s a big lil’ fella.” As one Lumbee Homecoming tribute to the indigenous among us, Lydia and I finally ventured with friends into the taqueria in the nearby town of Lumberton.  At that moment it struck me to tweet, “Los Molcajetes, Lumberton NC: understanding global indigeneity, one taco at a time.” The tacos el pastor? I will be learning more about global indigeneity.

Lydia relished el pastor, along with her garden-fresh veggies, cornbread, and thirteen-layer chocolate cake. And her cousins. I don’t know what she will say when she’s twenty-two, but I’m trying to raise her as an irrepressibly traditional Lumbee girl.