By Kate Sherry

“Working with what I got, I gotta keep on. Takin care of myself, I wanna live long. Aint never ashamed what life did to me, wasn’t afraid to change cuz it was good for me” Work That – Mary J. Blige

“I’m a Georgia peach,” laughs seventy-year-old Bay View resident Elizabeth Brown. The youngest of eight children, she was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1937 and settled in Milwaukee by way of Chicago.

 She’s the mother of seven children, the devoted partner for the last eleven years to Milwaukee lawyer Janet Mueller; creator of many works of art, and the survivor of several devastating blows. Through it all, she has coped by creating; mixing her spirituality and joy of life with colors and textures - leaving not only a piece of art behind, but the story that goes with it.

“I’m a survivor. I’ve been blessed,” says Elizabeth, who recently passed her one-year milestone in her battle against cancer. “When they said, ‘massive amount of cancer’ I asked Jesus that I be used to show that miracles can happen,” says Elizabeth. And they did. She was treated at Froedert Medical College, and is now cancer free.

“You know, my thing wasn’t the fear of dying,” says Elizabeth, “But the way you die. I don’t wanna be lingering. Don’t bring me back – if I conk out, don’t bring me back! Cuz I gotta go again!” She stands, beaming, radiating joy.

“I always had a guardian angel looking after me. Ever since I was born, I always had visions of some kind. You just know something’s gonna happen. I believe in Jesus, and the Goddesses, I believe in a greater power. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.” She points out one of her sculptures sitting on a turntable. Here comes a story.

“ Last year about this time,” she starts, “The x-ray technician showed me the x-ray of my cancer and asked what I saw.”  Elizabeth smiles that big white grin of hers and says, “I didn’t see the cancer inside, I saw a silhouette of a bald headed person laughing, and thought I’m going to sculpt it into a mask!’ And guess what,” she laughs, rubbing her hands over her hairless scalp, “Six months later, here it is!”

‘I’m really weird” she says slapping her hands together with a big chuckle. She points back to the sculpture of a laughing, bald female head she created while recouping. It rests on a turntable, so when spinning, it produces different expressions in every direction. She spins it around a few times, pleased with her work.

“My son laughed at me. Told me I look like a baldheaded old man. I said, “Better man than you!”  She laughs hard for a moment, then states rather serenely, “See, because you think you gonna shame me. You don’t shame me. And you can’t criticize what you came through”

In 1954, after spending a childhood she describes as being “highly abused, sexually,” seventeen-year-old Elizabeth gave birth to the first of her seven children. By the time she was twenty-one, she’d have another. She was a single mother, struggling to survive, and struggling to come to terms with her sexuality.

 “I knew from since I was an itty bitty girl that I was a lesbian. Had I said anything,” explains Elizabeth, “I’m sure I would have been ostracized. In the south they used to call lesbians, “Bulldaggers.” I don’t understand why, but that was the name for it. Or ‘them funny big women.’”

Elizabeth, however, was intrigued. These women were gracious, and had “the most beautiful smiles, and good hugs,” she says. “They weren’t like the other ladies who were church going and authoritative and stern. But I couldn’t ask anybody about any of that.”

Finding herself “drifting” and alone after the death of her mother in 1958, Elizabeth continued to struggle. She worked as a cook for the railroad, and for easier cash, sold half pints of whiskey out of her peacoat to the gamblers at the racetrack on Sundays – when it was illegal to sell liquor. “I was a business woman in my younger years” she says with a sly smile.

Elizabeth would visit the liquor store on Saturday, and purchase half pints of whiskey to sell at the races the next day for double or triple the cost.

In 1959, Elizabeth and her two children packed their belongings and left Atlanta for her sister’s Chicago home. She describes 1960’s Chicago as a lonely, overshadowed place with un-friendly people, and streets dirtier than those in Atlanta. Struggling to follow the old southern rules of her upbringing, Elizabeth found herself denying her true feelings when she wed a man to “do the right thing for society.”

While still married, a friendship Elizabeth shared with a young woman became romantic, and Elizabeth felt as if she had “committed the ultimate sin”. She made a decision. After a life spent living by others rules and regulations, she finally chose to come out as a Lesbian. “Once you become free, there’s a happiness can’t nobody steal.”

With a rocky marriage at best, Elizabeth and her husband separated, and remained so until his death in 1988. Now on her own, Elizabeth supported her family by working both as a dental technician, building sets of fake teeth, and as a Chicago City cabdriver. “I can make the best false teeth in the world,” laughs Elizabeth. However, it was driving the cab that paid off.

“It was the best job I ever had in my life. I made more money driving a cab!” She breaks into laughter when she recalls how she didn’t know there was a way to flag down a taxi, and used to think people were just being polite by waving at her cab as she drove by waving in return.

Tragedy befell the family, when one of Elizabeth’s older sons was killed in Chicago. He had, she says, spent this life mesmerized by Chicago’s criminal element. “As a parent, you can only be responsible for what happens in your household, while they’re in your household. And whatever went wrong, it didn’t happen on my shift. You want to keep teaching ‘em, but they reach a certain age, and you can’t anymore.”

Again, Elizabeth found herself desperate for clarity, and sought help by enrolling in the Moody Bible Institute. “I was trying to be religious,” says Elizabeth, “and I prayed when a bad thought come into my head, or I said curse word. It was driving a cab that made all those curse words I hadn’t used in 3-4 years come back! I had to leave Chicago. And when the spirit tells you to move, you move.”  

She searched for job opportunities, and made the move to Milwaukee in 1988 after accepting a position as dental technician. Elizabeth also worked for five years as a family advocate at the Milwaukee Women’s Center, and often answered the distraught calls on the center’s crisis line.  

“You listen to these calls, and it bares on your soul, so you just want to get rid of it. I’d sit before the clay before going to bed, and work it out.” Putting her hands on that earth was Elizabeth’s way of dealing with realities of life. “There’s something about putting your hands in the clay, something comes through the earth, something really good.”

It made sense for her to use clay as a cleansing of sorts. As a young child, she had been restricted to the house and the yard following her sexual abuse. She passed the time, playing in the mud, and making sculptures. “I learned how to do sculpture, before I knew what sculpture was,” says Elizabeth. She mentions that she never knew the word sculpture, because she had stopped learning to read in the fourth grade, when she already “knew enough to get by.” It wasn’t until spending a lifetime of dodging jobs that required a lot of reading that she discovered she is dyslexic.

She continues working with clay, creating sculptures of faces, and female figures. She’s discovered the many artistic possibilities of gourds, creates works out of glass, and eases the pain of others by creating artwork specifically for them. She sees art not just for its aesthetics, but for its soul.

Several years ago, Another tragedy led to another “healing” through creating. After exiting a gas station on W.Vliet St., her youngest son Cary was shot and killed.

“He was just so much,” she says, her eyes sparkling. “He was my teacher, he was my friend, he was my son.” While alone in Cary’s room after his death, Elizabeth sat down and began painting. Hanging on her wall, in a room consumed by various artworks, is a lone canvas. An explosion of black and red paint in the middle of a white canvas. It was her way of working out the pain.

 “We fight to keep from moving on sometimes as hard as we fight to get to where we’re going.” Says Elizabeth. “It is hard moving on, but I got tons of memories and jokes for rainy days. And I can just reach in and pull them out.”

For Elizabeth, art not only heals, it celebrates the joys in life. Her approach to creating a piece of art, be it one of her sculptures, paintings, cast jewelry, painted gourds, or her one-of-a-kind walking sticks, she always takes a natural, organic approach. “Whatever comes up, that’s it. Those are the blessings of playing around. You ain't doing wrong, cause that’s the only thing you’re doing,” she says, then adds with a laugh, “would I could, I’d do a three legged dance with my walking stick.”

Her basement in the home she shares with her partner Janet, is a maze of workstations, with gourds being her project du jour. “You can make anything out of gourds,” announces Elizabeth, as she shows us several that are painted, or decorated, or even open like boxes. Her first creation? A birdhouse for Janet.

Janet, she says, is the love of her life. “she’s a wonderful partner,” says Elizabeth. “she’s a little crazy, because she choose me. But, you know. hey, we’re together. I love her I really do. There’s no body else in my entire seventy years that has been what Janet has been in my life. There’s no replacing that. I wouldn’t want to.”

Although it’s been a while since she has worked with any of Milwaukee’s LGBT groups, she wouldn’t mind finding a group for inter-racial lesbians. Because Janet is white, Elizabeth hesitates to join groups geared only towards African Americans. “My blood line is mixed. My relationship is mixed. I can’t ignore that part of me, and I don’t want to leave her out.”

In the past, Elizabeth was involved with the Lesbian Alliance, SAGE, and also helped search for a building for the LGBT Center. “So many times, I had to bite my tongue,” she says. “This community should not be fighting each other the way they have been and not supporting each other. What we have to do is drop that ego shit about “me, me me” and come together.”

She laughs, perhaps nervous over what she is saying. But if you know anything about Elizabeth Brown, you know she says what she wants. “I’m just freeing up here. I’m letting it all go, because a couple of months ago I was on my way out the door, and something grabbed me and said, ‘come back in – you got to tell them before you leave – tell ‘em how you feel!”

And tell them, she does. “ I don’t have to ask anybody to be who I am. I paid my dues already. I’ve been through too much to let it disappoint me. I figure the truth is the best way to go. Truth and honesty. I ain’t hurting nobody.”

To see Elizabeth’s work, visit www.sagewomancreations.com