Remembering Napoleon Bonaparte

A very dear friend of mine has left this world.

Napoleon Bonaparte passed away July 31st, 2009.

Now don’t think I’m crazy, that was indeed his real name. He was a man of color and a very colorful man.

I became acquainted with “Nappy” when I worked for Community Action. Even then he seemed old, as until his obituary is actually posted I can’t tell you for sure how old he was.

He was a veteran who served overseas. He had a huge collection of documents from his time in service, including pictures and newspaper clippings and you name it.

He had lived in Lincoln the majority of his life and knew a lot about the town and it’s history.

He told me once about a little restaurant downtown that when the civil rights movement was in full blown glory, and it became a law that the business had to serve blacks and whites equally, the owner would do so, but when a black person finished eating, the owner would smash the plate on the floor and throw it in the trash. The message being that once a black person had used the plate it was unfit for any white person to eat off of. Consequently the safest way to keep this from happening was to smash the plate.

Nappy said that there were a few who made a custom of going in, sitting down getting their glass of water, placing a toothpick from their mouth into the water then getting up and leaving. The end result, the glass got smashed on the floor, and the owner saw no revenue whatsoever from it.

Nappy liked to talk about how things have changed over the years. He enjoyed remembering when and where businesses were opened that are now long since gone. He liked telling stories about people he had known over his life.

He was also an ordained minister, but kind of an absent minded one.

I remember first had the day he was supposed to perform a marriage, and forgot to go to the wedding!!! I remember it because I was the one who went driving all over town trying to locate his huge Lincoln Continental so that I could drag him to the wedding.

I never found him, and he showed up about 30 minutes after the whole thing was over.

Someone made a phone call and found a minister who would perform the services sight unseen. It wasn’t the plan but I guess in the end it did all work out.

But the wedding was for Jane Poertner’s grandson, and needless to say, Nappy was in the doghouse with Jane for a while.

Nappy served on the building and grounds committee at Community Action. I being the CFO was also on that committee along with Paul Gleason and Docia Barrick.

Docia was another staff member, and Paul was a lot like Nappy in many ways. I loved to listen to Paul, Nappy and Docia tell stories about the town and how it had changed, but with other members on that committee and a purpose for our meetings, I often times had to work really hard to steer the three of them back to the here and now.

When Nappy’s mother passed away, I attended the funeral. It was unlike anything I had ever been to before.

The funeral was a true celebration of life, with laughter, story telling, old Negro gospel hymns, speeches, it lasted if I remember correctly almost two hours.

Nappy was the only son living in Lincoln, and he took care of his mother. She was a very independent woman, and didn’t really like being taken care of, but he did the best he could.

He used to come to Krogers, and he’d see Rich and tell him “mamma sent me to the store for an apple’. And he would buy one apple to take to his mother.

Generally by the time he got it home to her, she had changed her mind and wanted something different.

After she died, he came to my office one day, and we spent a long time just talking about her. He loved her and missed her. He told me about having to go through her things and how hard it was. He told me she had dresser drawers full of jewelry some of it really old, and how that he had tried to get kids and grandkids to take it, and they had taken some, but not near all of it.

He told me that someday he’d go through it and bring me a few pieces, but that never happened, and I wish now that it had.

Nappy lived just a few blocks from Rich and I, on the corner of Palmer and 19th maybe, I can’t right now remember for sure, but anyway, I drove by his house quite often.

I always got a kick out of the gold toned set of armour standing in his back yard. It made no sense for it to be there. It wasn’t in a decorative place or anything, it just seemed to be there, along with a lot of other stuff. Now don’t get me wrong, the place was not trashy, it was just full of Stuff!

When things were going downhill at Community Action, Nappy came to my office one day and he told me that it was out of control, and the reason was that the people who were running the show didn’t know what the agency had been through to get where it was, and they were not willing to listen and learn.

He said they had no concern for the past, they just wanted a different future. He wondered how anyone could mold the future without knowing the past.

When a lot of us bailed on CIEDC myself included, Nappy hung in there. He stayed on the board, and I know through conversations with Paul, that he did try to be heard, but he was an old man and the newbies dubbed him as being “set in the past, and not willing to change”, and therefore his voice didn’t matter much to any of them.

When I left CIEDC, I let on like it was a good thing, but those who were close to me know that I truly went through hell for quite some time after that.

I couldn’t move on, and it was horrible. But eventually I made it through, but in the end, I did so by separating myself from everyone I had ever known at the agency.

People who meant a lot to me while I was there became strangers, because I couldn’t think about them or be around them without the old hurt coming back.

Eventually I made it through that period of darkness, and figured out how to move on.

Recently I’ve re-connected with a few of them from the Agency, like Paul who is no longer on their board. He told me that Nappy was still hanging in there and that he talked to him on occasion about what was going on at the new CAPCIL.

I wish that I had found a way to spend just a little while with Nappy before he passed. But I didn’t. He would have made an interesting story for the LDN, it would have been good to renew that friendship, but I missed the chance.

I’m sorry dear friend if I let you down and I hope you are now enjoying a lovely reunion with your “mamma”.