ILLIE

Illie. The name is pronounced “eye-lee”, with

emphasis on the first syllable; an uncommon name
for a child conceived under exceedingly common
circumstances; born on a day of no historical
consequence; into a family of no marked
achievements; situated in a place of no conspicuous
distinction.

Fate, providence, destiny and chance are a few of

the names given to the disparate forces beyond our
manipulation or control that consigns our conception,
our birth, our past or present location in time and
space.

Of this name, “Illie”, who, between then and now,

knew or knows what it was meant to convey; what
distinction it conferred or what connection it made to
persons past or present? Was this “different” name
an attempt, in all the scarcity of distinction
surrounding this newborn child, to endow her with
some measure of difference that would magically
provide her entrance into places, hearts and minds
unavailable to others? Not Mary, Margaret, Jane or
Elizabeth, but “Illie”. Of those who now wear it, what
could they tell us, of anything, about she who was
the first to be adorned or burdened by it?

In spite of her disregarded beginnings, Illie would

leave her personal mark upon this earth, if in no
other way, but by shear numbers. Between her
seventeenth and forty-third birthdates, fourteen
children would enter this world through her womb;
twenty-five years of bearing children. But even such

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a numerical feat, which today would seem unique,
was diminished in significance by being such an
ordinary thing during the time when, and in the place
where, Illie would spend her child bearing years—
along the alluvial plain of the lower Mississippi River.

The remaining seven years that Illie lived after the

birth of her last child at age forty-three (for she
would be dead at fifty) would be filled with the
anguish and anxiety that came with charting a
course for her and her brood, herding them without a
compass, from the hopeless existence on a
Mississippi cotton plantation toward a faux-rainbow
seen through the sooty and miasmic smog that
lingered perpetually over the Cuyahoga River Valley
in Cleveland, Ohio.

This brief account, however, is not about Illie’s life or her

children’s lives, but is only about the circumstances of her birth
and nothing beyond. Her life story, and what a story it is, will be
chronicled elsewhere.

She was born to an unwed mother, Mary Azaline Murff. Mary

Azaline, herself, had been born during reconstruction in 1877--the
daughter of Jordan and Mary Murff, two ex-slaves, living in the
State of Mississippi, both formerly the chattel property of a
Methodist minister, the Reverend Samuel Murff. Some twenty-
four years later, Azaline would give birth to her one and only child,
our Illie, on September 21, 1901. It was nine month after the
Christmas season of the first year (1900) of a new century.

The first “Mary” (the wife of Jordan Murff and the mother of the
second “Mary”, Mary Azaline Murff) died April 29th in the final
year, 1899, of the old century; leaving Jordan Murff in a household

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composed of his 22 year old daughter, Mary Azaline, and several
young kin-children of different relationships, perhaps some of
them his grandchildren. Jordan wasted little time in finding a
second wife. On the 12th of August in the same year of his wife’s
death (and just three and a half months after) Jordan would take a
second wife, a widow, Margaret Maxwell. Margaret, herself was a
mother of eight children, three of whom, as teenagers, still lived
with her. Jordan and Margaret’s combined household now was
now made up of Margaret’s three teenaged boys, Will, May and
Andrew, Jordan’s daughter Mary Azaline, and the several other
assorted orphaned children, some blood kin, others not.

After emancipation, the Maxwells (formers slaves in an adjoining

county, Oktibbeha) and the Murffs lived near each other in the
township of Weir in Choctaw County, Mississippi. Although there
is no record of when Margaret’s first husband, John Andrew
Maxwell, died, their five older children, Robert, Samuel, Marit
(called Rett), Charles and Laura were all out of her household as
the turn of the century approached. One of Margaret’s sons, Marit
“Rett” Maxwell, was already the father of three children with his
wife, Mattie Kennedy.

A devoted son, Rett often found himself visiting the home of his
mother, her new husband Jordan Murff—and his new stepsister,
“Mary” Azaline.

All the many transitions now occurring in the lives of the Murffs
and Maxwells (the deaths, the marriages and the shift in
relationships occasioned by those events) were occurring at a most
propitious time in the minds of men, the turn of the century! And
in spite of factual history revealing that nothing more sinister has
ever occurred on these momentous occasions that was anymore
more significant than what has occurred on the transition from the

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18th of June to the 19th of June of any year since mankind has
shifted from marking time by the universal measures of the moon’s
phasing, and the stars and planets moving across the heavens, to
measuring time by his own calendars which perpetually must be
adjusted for one reason or another.

Yet, once again, like at each hundred-year interval since the

calendar-adjusted birth of Christ, the transition from 1899 to 1900
had been filled with declarations of gloom and doom, “end-times”
pronouncements and other apocalyptic forewarnings. But nothing
out of the ordinary had happened.

But sometime during the Christmas season of the first year of the
new century, some 16 months after the Murffs and Maxwells had
become a combined family, something did happen; a very ordinary
thing. The relationship between the stepsiblings, “Rett” and Mary
Azaline, turned sexual. And, as a result, on, or very near, that first
Christmas of the new century, something wanted neither by this
young married man nor his stepsister would occur: conception.

A few hours before that moment, with an orgasmic release, tens of

millions of sperm from Rett’s body, began a tortuous race of
jostling and twisting through bends and turns, feverously
swimming their way up the acidic river composed of Mary’s uterus
and fallopian tubes. Each and every sperm, oblivious to the reality
that his race was in vain, struggled on in the hope that he, and only
he, would be the one of their flailing horde to find that one and
only ova, whose genetic substance combined with his own would
fashion the flesh and bone physical edifice that would house the
humanly indefinable “soul”, “life force”, “spirit” “essence” of Illie
Murff-Maxwell.

In spite of the knowledge that we humans now possess concerning

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the immutable and universal laws of physics and biology;
including the astounding realization that Illie’s conception and
impending growth in the womb and birth could only have been
possible through mingling the dimorphic material from the one
specific sperm from “Rett” with the dimorphic material from a
singular specific ova from “Azaline”; that no other combination of
the gazillion of sperm and ova seeking a mate, past, present or
future, could have provided the specific substance, the bits and
pieces of deoxyribonucleic acid, needed to produce this unique
living being, Illie--this once-in-all-of-eternity creation.

In spite of our awareness of the unbending consistency of such

universal laws and realities, our cultural realities (those feeble and
temporary social constructs fashioned out of our assumptions,
conjectures, beliefs, theories and suppositions, including much of
our religious attempts to guide our lives in a positive direction)
demand that we stand spitting into the constant and unrelenting
gale force winds of universal reality; casting dispersions upon
these immutable conceptive laws of physics and biology with
words like, “illegitimate”, “bastard”, “fatherless” and worse;
demanding that the forces and energies of the universe bend to
humanity’s will and shallow understanding.

Yet, in spite of our attempts to twist, shape, deny, repudiate and

reject this universal reality, counter to our malicious thoughts and
feelings, each soul will arrive through the same universally guided
chance encounter, with it own unique predilections, proclivities
and talents that can only be manifested through a body uniquely
designed and constructed with the material from a specific man
and woman—and no others. Only Rett and Azaline could have
been the biological father and mother of the person known to us as
Illie Murff-Maxwell.

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However sinful, debauched, debased, immoral, corrupt, wicked,
aberrant or evil we may consider the sexual encounter that
produced her, the inevitable results is that “Illie” was conceived,
was born, and in turn destined to produce fourteen children of
varying weights on our scales of “legitimacy”.

Like each human being before her, this fatherless, illegitimate,

bastard child, Illie, would perform the first task required of each of
us upon our arrival. On the 21st day of September in the year 1901,
she gasped for her first breath of life sustaining oxygen—a process
that would have to be repeated at least 50 times per minute for the
rest of her fifty years of life.

Just Sip
29 November 2009