A good woman, gone

Eddy Yankie Marshman, sometimes Marshwomon, has left the planet. This is a digital photo of a photo I made on film, of Eddy in her kitchen one night on Wirth Place, in New Orleans, in 1980. Despite the poor technical quality of the photograph, it catches her calm, her presence. In her kitchen she was surrounded by bags of potatoes, onions, and garlic, and she is sitting next to a potted plant, and that is fitting. She was a nurturing woman. She hung scarves over lamps, she burned sage and candles, she wore Patchouli oil into the 90s. She baked bread and cookies (and sometimes marijuana brownies). She nurtured her daughter Robin, Robin’s good friend Jamey, and all who were close to her. She fed us, she wrote poems about us, she shook her fist at injustice with us. She fought consistently against racism all her adult life. She was a proud working class woman, a strong feminist. It grieves me that I cannot find any of her writing. Eddy was a writer, a poet, a journal-keeper. She and I attended, with three of our best friends, a workshop in 1980, in Austin, with Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Meridel LeSueur. Eddy wrote, rewrote, polished, honed, and refined her writing. She submitted it to journals. Some of it was published. It mattered to her. It was, she once told me, the core of her, her writing.

Because much of her writing was created between 1977 and 1990, before the internet, I can’t find a scrap of it. There was a little chapbook of poetry by New Orleans lesbian feminists, published in 1979. I can’t remember what we called it, and I can’t find a copy.

Here is what I remember: Eddy loved the land. She loved to sit on a porch. She lived in houses with porches or balconies, and for a while she lived in a little shack in French Settlement, about an hour and a half deep into the bayous from New Orleans, where a succession of us lived, one at a time, seeking solitude and time for writing. Maryann Simpson found the place; I lived there for a year and a half and dubbed it “Little Gidding.” Eddy moved in when I left, to watch Spanish moss blow in bayou winds, to listen to birdsong and the lowing of cattle, to write. 

Eddy loved silence. She loved children--all our children. She loved Jazz Festival and Tipitina’s. She loved to feed people. I met her in 1973, at the Marengo Street Commune. In 1979 I found at attic apartment in a house on Wirth Place, near Fortier High, and Eddy rented the basement apartment in the same house and stayed for three years. In the late 80s, when I was teaching at Smith, I returned to New Orleans and “did” Jazz Festival with Eddy. We stayed friends, writing many letters to each other, until Katrina wiped out her home in New Orleans. We lost touch after that because she didn’t do computers and internet. I loved her and respected her, and I am grieving her loss, grieving that I didn’t do more to try to find her and hook up again after we both retired. 

She worked to wipe out racism and classism. When she was a personal care giver with Volunteers of America, she was advocate, friend, and carer for people the world had forgotten: people with disabilities, with mental illness; people who had been houseless, people in the margins, people on the edge. She respected everyone she worked with, and she fought for their rights. She was authentic and truthful, and she loved others who were. 

When I came back from Africa with two African daughters, Eddy came to us every Monday night for six months, at our little duplex on Banks Street in Mid-city, across from Marjorie and David Billings. She came to us to help my girls with homework, to bear witness with us, to love us, and to sit out on the front porch with me after I put the girls to bed, watching the sky through the limbs of live oak trees and talking about our mistakes and our hopes. It was a low point in my life. The girls were in culture shock, I was unemployed and working as a temp secretary, hiding my PhD which made me overqualified for the $15 an hour I was earning. When I got a severe case of poison oak and had sores over half my body, it was Eddy who showed me how to slather my arms in Calamine Lotion and wrap them in saran wrap. That’s what finally healed it. 

Eddy was a life-lover, a life-saver, a healer, a listener, a poet, and a friend for life. She was one of the best people I’ve ever known. May her heart be at peace, the same kind of peace she brought to those she knew. May we who knew and loved her carry her energy forward in how we love the world.