Section by Kendra Palmer
A Eulogy for Tumi McCallum
Before I met Tumi, my siblings used to tease me. They’d tell me I didn’t know what the meaning of a best friend was. They thought I suffered from some edacious sort of social discontent, because just about every month, I’d find myself a new best friend. It’s interesting how my meeting Tumi has transformed my understanding of friendship.
I first met her at a summer program for pre-high school, ironically enough, it was
on July 25th, the day of her 14th birthday. As cheesy as this is, I knew instantly that this girl
would become my greatest friend, I remember coming home telling my sister how excited I
was that I just made this new friend. I can even still remember what she wore that day:
zebra print leggings and a plain white T-shirt, that was much, much too big for her. Later
Tumi confided that she made a practice out of stealing from her brother, Lebo’s wardrobe
(both for the lose-fitting comfort of his larger clothes as well as an older sisters’ duty; to
embarrass and aggravate one’s brother).
July 25th, though this date is first and foremost Tumi’s birthday, has also since 2001 come to be recognized as our anniversary—the day that our friendship began I remember that every other birthday, she celebrated her birth in her homeland, South Africa. And even there where it would be so expensive to call, nevertheless she would call me every year, on her birthday, to wish me our happy anniversary.
Not once in the six years I’ve known her did we ever share a moment of awkward silence. I
could have never survived high school without her. Underneath her quiet veneer, Tumi was quite the little talker, and together we could almost never shut up. We also shared some pretty wonderful traditions.
Like every Halloween, we’d have a sleepover and stay up so late gossiping nonsense that it
wasn’t until 5 am that at last we began the next day’s homework. God knows when we finally passed out. Somehow and miraculously, the alarm clock never seemed to work, on the day after Halloween. Each time I’d wake up with a start, and in my excitement, slap Tumi’s arm to wake her up. She would get so mad—not upset over how late we’d be to school (which after four years, we accepted as strange phenomena) but upset over the unpleasant way, which I always used to wake her.
She got me back of course, on several occasions, with a most efficient waking up
method, which she innovated. Usually she was the first to wake. She would sit on top of me, place her hands strategically over my eyes, and say loudly, “I am going to count to three. And if you don’t wake up by three—” she would pry my eye-lids open with her fingers.
Needless to say, her method of waking me up was quite fool-proof.
Tumi truly is the most wonderful person I have ever met, she laughed easily, and she loved easily, and she had the most genuine love for life of anyone I ever knew. She would never let people see her cry, if she could help it, because she hated the idea of bestowing her burden unto others. She cared so much more for other people. She was the kind of girl who, coming home from school, thought to prepare boxes of food and activities to hand out to the homeless. I remember one time, a friend and I were watching her as she was preparing a box, and how the friend wanted to eat the apple that Tumi was giving away. I remember Tumi got so annoyed, that he had even asked, when this food would be going to such a hungry and deserving tummy. Never have I met anyone so considerate, so generous, and so very present.
Tumi understood her own value. She was one of few people who recognized her voice as powerful. Even though she was a woman, even though she was a child, even though by many, she was considered a coloured—she spoke defiantly, with no doubts to be had because she was convinced of her value, simply as a human being, who could never be marginalized, by another, mere human being. Tumi’s self-confidence allowed me to have confidence in myself. She reprimanded me for my insecurities and reminded me that we are only ever as good as what our conditioning allows us to be, something which no one has control over, and something which should never be the foundation of shame or judgment. It is what I admired most about Tumi, she had great clarity of self, and she never submitted to shame.
Sometimes I like to say that Tumi was my heart. And she was. It sounds like such a stupid thing to say, and normally I wouldn’t, but normally she’d be alive so shit, I don’t think this would make sense to anyone unless they knew us. But I believe that we were of the same essence and that she was my heart and I was her body. She used me for my eccentric nature; I used her for her reason, support and company. My sister said that Tumi was attracted to my energy and spirit and I was attracted to her love. She taught me how to love in a way that only sisters can, only sisters like Tumi who knew how to give completely. Tumi was so giving that at times when I wanted a different lunch, Tumi would eat mine (she used to love dad’s sandwiches) and buy me whatever I wanted. One time we went window-shopping, and I saw this lovely dress that I couldn’t afford. That dress would later become my prom dress, because Tumi bought it for me.
Tumi was the first best friend I ever had that lasted for more than two months. She taught me that a true friend could never love too much. She challenged my shallow conception of what friendship was, and became a sister to me. She accepted me wholeheartedly. Tumi was willing to go all the way for me from the moment we became chemistry partners in class, that first day we met. When we graduated high school, she wrote me a letter telling me why she chose me that first day, she said simply, “I chose you because I thought you were pretty”, I think she meant that she knew we’d be friends forever. She always saw the best in everybody, even when they didn’t see that in themselves.
Tumi you will always be my best friend.
Section by Soraya Palmer:
Although I wasn’t there, I remember the day Kendra and Tumi’s friendship began. Kendra came home from the first day of the Beacon Summer school program and announced that she had just met a girl named Tumi who thought that everything was hilarious. According to Kendra, they had just decided to become friends on that day, which was Tumi’s birthday—or the anniversary, as they would soon refer to it. Nobody knew it could happen so fast.
Days before Tumi came over for the first time, Kendra used to warn me about Tumi’s peculiar sense of humor—she’d say, “Tumi will just sit there cracking herself up, even when I make the corniest jokes. I don’t know why, I don’t think I’m very funny. Maybe it’s the South African in her.”
The first time I really hung out with Tumi, we were in what used to be our parent’s room watching Television when this Wal-Mart commercial came on with a yellow smiley face that suddenly started singing. The singing smile became so big that it eventually covered its entire face and almost the entire screen. Kendra and I thought it was pretty trite—but Tumi just sat there cracking herself up—just like Kendra said, and she wouldn’t stop. And even though I didn’t think the jokes were actually funny, I was always a little jealous that I couldn’t see the humor in the everyday events the way that she could. And after knowing her for little while longer, I soon realized, that maybe it wasn’t so peculiar after all. It wasn’t that Tumi didn’t have a good sense of humor, but that she would take the most ordinary things that most people take for granted and make them into special events. Because suddenly, every time I saw that commercial I thought it was funny too—not because it really was, but because it made me think of how happy Tumi was. Tumi had what could be called an innocent love for life—the kind that was never hardened or made bitter by the racism she faced in South Africa, being separated from her family in America or the dramatic separation of her parents. Even towards the end, Tumi’s strength still amazed me. She would never let anything get to her and she could always see the positive in everything.
She always took everything as a learning experience (I can remember so clearly now sitting on the subway talking about land reform issues in South Africa or prisoner’s rights in Oakland, CA, Kendra sitting beside us looking extremely bored J).
Thinking about it, it is difficult to think of Tumi as just my sister’s best friend—because she was my sister as well. In fact she was more a part of our family and my life than most of my relatives, than friends I had had my whole life, even some of my closest friends from college—always because I knew they would eventually leave my life, as college and high school friends do. But Tumi was my sister—a spirit that stayed with me regardless of how often we spoke during the school year—and we didn’t necessarily speak that often—but she was always a significant presence in my life.
I remember walking around the halls of Beacon and people would come up and ask us if we were sisters. I remember being jealous of the kind of friendship she could have with my sister—it was as if they had their own language, their own world. I was distraught to say the least when Tumi started to become less of a presence in our house as her attention became unhappily diverted. Even then, however, Tumi would say things like, “Although we no longer talk everyday, Kendra is my one true friend” and I knew that Tumi was still there, still strong and their friendship was still and will always continue to be in my heart, the most beautiful, miraculous, and complete friendship I think I may ever see. Because they loved each other so completely and so profusely, it felt like a blessing to be around them, it felt just like magic.
Tumi’s strength of self and full capacity to love was in a way what killed her body—but it never killed her soul. She was still until the very end, the strongest woman I ever knew. I don’t know how she managed to have the strength to be happy, to be free in the way that she did, after what she had been through the summer before she died—but she did. One of the last memories I have of Tumi, was when I went to stay with her and Kendra in Baltimore at the beginning of the summer. She had recently split open her leg, attempting to climb through the window to the roof, her entire leg had turned purple, and I honestly wondered if she’d need stitches…but I had never seen her so incredibly happy as I did that week…she was happy because she was now allowed to be free, and it was me, her, and Kendra, the three sisters…the way it should have been.
A few days after I learned the news of her death, I went onto Tumi’s webpage and found a quote written by Audre Lorde that brought tears to my eyes. It was about the strength of women who have been beaten down by the violence of society, by the tyranny of racism and patriarchy and about the need to break the silences we hold in our hearts. One of the greatest lessons Tumi taught me was to try to love completely in the way that Tumi did with one exception—to realize the only person you can ever save is yourself—and never to settle for any injustice however benign it may at first seem, a lesson learned too late for her but not for her spirit, not for me. Not all of the following was included on Tumi’s webpage wall, but I think that today, all of it needs to be said. The quote reads:
“I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood…I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear into a perspective gave me great strength. I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.
What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am myself—a black woman warrior poet doing my work—[I have] come to ask you, are you doing yours?
"For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call America, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson - that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.
We can sit in our corners mute forever while our people and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid."
For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us…For it is not difference which immobilizes us but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.
--Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”
When I showed my mother what I had written for Tumi, for myself, for my sister, she asked me, ‘so what was that sisterhood like?”
And to tell the truth it’s difficult to say.
Because our sisterhood was like the ability to love so freely that I never needed to call her up and ask her, so what was our sisterhood like? I never needed to test or try my feelings for her. I don’t think she ever felt that need either. I didn’t run up to all my friends and tell them about our sisterhood, I didn’t tell my roommates each and every day, “You should really meet my friend Tumi, She’s one heck of a woman. Now I wish that I had. I guess our sisterhood was like that innocence sisters have, like children…you never think that they’d ever leave…but she did.
I had wanted to end with something written in, tswana, the language of her mother and country, but Tumi only ever taught me how to say one thing: I love you, which is Ke a go rata.
Tumi will be an inspiration to me in so many ways for the rest of my life, she already is. Tumi has taught me to never stay silent…and perhaps the most important thing of all… no matter how angry or sad we are, to never forget to smile…
Ke a go rata, Tumi, Ngyathanda udadewethu
