Pansy Coleman Valdez
Pansies are among the most popular flowers. Once, they were
merely a weed, called heartsease. They
were the little beauties we call violets until an English noblewoman began to
cross-breed and cultivate them, with the help and supervision of her gardener.
This was in 1812. By 1833, once the dark “face” of the pansy we know today had
been developed by the diligent breeding of British and continental gardeners,
there were hundreds of varieties.
At about that time, farmers with small plantations had been
in the Bluegrass region of Kentucky for some twenty-five years, and they were
using slaves to clear the land and produce crops. In Springfield, fifty miles
southwest of Lexington, there had been a whipping post in the town square for
fifteen years. Soon, the sisters of St. Catharine, a Dominican order, would
arrive, bringing more slaves.
By the mid-1800s, the slave market had grown tight, and the
slave trade in Kentucky a lucrative business. In Lexington, at “Cheapside", slaves were auctioned and families permanently broken. Less than fifty miles
west, slaves were being funneled into the state through Louisville and
Cincinnati, and bred like prize animals at “stock farms” to be hastily sold at
auctions and sold “down the river” as far as New Orleans.
Pansy Coleman and her dozens of extended family members in
and near Springfield are the descendants of some of those slaves.
c. Steve Pavey
The seemingly endless variety and loveliness of the flower
known as “Pansy” is celebrated in poetry, drama, and fables worldwide. Most
commonly, the name means “thought” or “thoughtful…” after the French pensee or “thought” as in “pensive" and
in Hungary the word for pansy is translated “small orphan.”
I love to think about these meanings for Pansy’s name.
She is pensive; she’s thoughtful, of others, and also curious about the world
around her, and she struggles with anxiety, and depression, and there’s no better word
than pensive for that malaise. Being thoughtful is both an
asset and a curse, when thoughts can’t be stopped. And she became an orphan not
long after I got to know her. She was the daughter who, although she has
married twice, didn’t have her own biological children, so she took care of her
mother until her mother, whom everyone called “Mooch,” died, in 2013, two years
before we started the project.
Pansy told me that her mother had dementia during the last
several years of her life; at the same time she was caring for her (they lived
in her mother’s house), Pansy took on a foster child, a relative’s daughter,
even though the situation promised to be difficult: Keeland’s mom was
going to jail for drugs and there was no
guarantee that Keeland (a painfully shy
six-year-old who’d quickly glean the nickname “Pupcake”) would be able to stay
with Pansy and her husband.
Pansy has been married to Benjamin for about eleven years.
He’s Mexican, and has been working here in Washington
County for some time... now in his late fifties, he has older kids in Mexico
from a former marriage. His nickname is Big Daddy. I didn’t meet Big Daddy
until I’d known Pansy for some time, so I’ll come back to him.
Pansy knows almost everyone in Springfield, and almost
everything there is to know. She volunteers at the Community Action Center; she
sells Avon; she attends both the Black Baptist Church on High Street and the Iglesia Casa del Alfarero in Lebanon,
which is the well-attended Spanish-speaking Protestant church. Church is
probably the most consuming of her activities, although she used to go to the
gym in Springfield, a small storefront place called Fuel Fitness.
That’s where she met my oldest son, Casey, who had moved to
Kentucky in 2008 at age 26 after leaving college and trying several other
enterprises in New Jersey (where he grew up and his father still lives), including rehab, each of which failed and or crashed as badly as the vehicles
he walked away from, miraculously, as his drug and alcohol problems got worse.
He was supposed to be trying to make a new start when he
moved here, but it was not until three years ago that he finally hit bottom,
and made his way to what seems to be a lasting sobriety. Pansy played a role in
his final step to recovery, and moreover, she probably saved my son’s life.
They’d quickly become friends, and she took him into her
circle of broken souls who needed help. Being a typical addict, my son no doubt
took advantage of that, although he’s a decent guy—I am pretty sure he mostly
used her for rides, help getting work, and the occasional meal. And I know he helped her when he could. And I know he loved her, too.
She would make him go to church, and do her best to get him
moved into a place, set up with some work, and he’d do okay for a while here
and there. He did attend AA meetings, and he “tried.” But addiction is a strong
adversary, and it was gradually winning. My son was very sick. I did see him
during these years, but infrequently, because he knew that if he was drinking,
or high, he should not call me, or come over.
I met Pansy at the café attached to my B&B, which I
called The Little Red Hen, and kept open for lunches for about a year and
a half. About a year later, Casey went to jail for a year. He had violated
probation after being found guilty of possessing drugs.
That’s when the idea for the book was started.
c. Steve Pavey
Pansy doesn’t like to drive outside Washington County,
because of an accident she had, but she wanted to visit Casey, who was in
E-town (Elizabethtown, Hardin County—the nearest detention center), so I drove.
On the way home, we got talking about Springfield. I asked her whether she
thought the town was kind of… ? (I wanted to say “racist.)
“Oh, yes!” She replied.
I finished. “Racist?”
“Very much so.”
She went on to tell me about a number of incidents that had
happened to her personally. A few involved her struggle to maintain custody of
Pupcake. Another was about her marriage to Big Daddy. She went into the city’s
offices to request use of the Opera House for her reception, and was told it
was booked. When the woman who told her this stepped out, she looked at the
calendar, and it was open. She asked about a few other dates. They were
“unavailable” as well.
“You mean to tell me you didn’t see how those
white women looked at me when I came into your café?” she asked. I thought
about it. It was true. She, and a few relatives she’d brought along, were the
only Black people to come to the Little
Red Hen, a café next to our B&B we’d had open for a few years.
“This is happening in 2015?” I was simultaneously shocked
and not surprised.
“Oh yes. That and much worse.”
“We need to write a book, or something!”
“I wish you would.”
The next fall, after leaving the church I was serving in
Lexington, I accepted a position in New Jersey serving three weeks per month as
an interim minister at a small congregation.
The church was near Atlantic City, but I stayed at my
family home with my stepmother, who had dementia, and my younger half-sister,
in Burlington County, near Philadelphia.
In November, I was at home, in the room that had been my
brother’s bedroom throughout my childhood, when I got a call from Pansy. I
hadn’t heard from her for some time, so it startled me.
“I’m so worried about my buddy,” she said.
She told me not to tell Casey, because he’d kill her, but
she had to. He was so bad off, he thought that he was dying, and she just knew
that someone had to help him. I called his brother in Lexington. Friends from
AA took him to detox that very day.
And my son beat the odds. He’s alive. As I write, he’s been
sober for five years, and he is successful in business and life by any
account.
It’s one of those rich ironies that the flower we now know
as “pansy” started out as a weed. It makes me think about how something which
could be such an elegant and evocative plant that it was painted by Van Gogh
could have been a nuisance plant. And black pansies? They’re extremely dark
purple, but very, very rare. Why did Mooch name her baby daughter Pansy? Did
she like the flower, the sound of the name, or the symbolism? A very
dark-skinned Black woman, ebony as a Black Pansy, she is also rare. She’s rare
because she will not play the role assigned to her in Springfield. She refuses
to.
Pansy’s cousin told me that she and her mother were so
close, they were just like sisters. “She would do Pansy’s toenails, pack
Pansy’s purse; Pansy never left home, even when she got married, she took her
momma with her.”
If there is a theme that runs through Black history as told
to me by the people of Springfield, it is the theme of the mother: it is she
who has kept on, kept the faith, and kept, by sheer force of will, the people
alive.
