When a lifelong friend passes, childhood memories come flooding back | Opinion

About a month ago, one of my oldest friends and his wife died only two days apart.

Floyd Dorsett, his older sister Nellie and their three brothers were members of the first family we met after moving to Miami in April 1944. I had turned 6 that February; his sixth birthday was two months earlier, in December.

Their mother Doris and my mother became like sisters. Our families’ friendship lasted more than eight decades — even with Floyd living in New York with his wife Florentine.

Last year, as we were getting ready to celebrate Nellie’s 90th birthday on May 1, we got the news that Floyd, whom we called Jake, had had a serious fall and was hospitalized. Up until this time, he and Florentine — we called her Tine — had been doing well.

Jake, a retired New York City police homicide detective, and his buddies from the force met weekly for breakfast. And the cancer Tine had battled for years was in remission.

Still, their plans to come to Miami for Nellie’s birthday celebration were not to be. The next thing we heard was that Jake and Tine were hospitalized – in the same hospital room.

We kept hoping for a good outcome. Jake and I talked at least once a week until earlier this year, when he called to let me know that Tine had to have one of her legs amputated. After that, the calls slowed and then stopped. Whenever I called and left messages, I never heard back.

Nellie, Jake’s sister, was having the same problem until Virginia, their youngest sibling, who also lived in New York, let us know that things didn’t look too good. Tine wasn’t recovering from the amputation very well and the shock of it all had taken a toll on Jake’s health.

He forgot how to answer his phone and whenever Virginia helped him when Nellie called, he was usually incoherent.

“I think we are losing Jake,” Nellie said to me after one such call. A few days later, we got word that Tine had died. Two days later, Nellie called to let me know that Jake had died.

She was 86. He was 87.

I sat for a long time that day after hanging up from Nellie, just thinking of our years together. Nellie’s grandmother, Mrs. Rogers, took to my mom like another daughter. I could still see her walking along the path that led from Overtown’s 10th Street, where she lived, to Ninth Street, where we lived, calling out Nellie’s name as she got closer.

I can still see us playing barefoot under the coconut trees in the summertime in the yard of the Watkins’ property, where we lived. I see myself sitting crossed-legged on the big back porch listening to Nellie tell of traveling to Nassau alone on a boat.

As she told her story, I conjured up a scene that had Nellie rowing a boat across that great big ocean. Nellie, who was four years older, was the “big girl” in our little tight-knit group and I wanted to be just like her.

Back then, those of us who were the youngest walked to school together. First, to Overtown’s Frederick Douglass Elementary (then Douglass Primary), and later to Phillis Wheatley Elementary.

When my family moved to Fort Worth in the summer of 1948, Nellie and I cried together, standing on the front porch of the Watkins house, promising to write to each other. Jake stood off to one side, just looking sad. We were 10, and we didn’t know if we would ever see each other again.

But as the Lord would have it, Momma did not like being so far away from her family and friends. Nor did she like the cold winter of 1949 — the sleet, the snow and ice-covered streets. Mom had to run to catch her bus for work, slipping and sliding.

The spring of that year offered Mom even less a reason to stay there. With spring came the flood and a tornado with no warning. That summer, Mom packed us up and we moved back to Miami. Back home, we reunited with the Dorsetts and hurricane warnings.

All too soon, Jake and I were seventh graders at Booker T. Washington Junior/Senior High School. Although we were growing up during segregation and the Jim Crow era, where there were signs all around us to help keep us in our “place,” our growing-up years were light-hearted and mostly a fun time. Somehow, in our Black neighborhoods, we youngsters were shielded us from much of the racist drama that swirled around us.

Jake and I got caught up in the high school scene — Jake in the marching band and I in the chorus and later, the majorettes. We looked out for each other, giving each other’s boyfriend or girlfriend the nod. We attended teenage dances, always saving at least one dance for each other.

The years passed swiftly. Graduation day came and all too soon school was over and real life had begun. Life as we knew it was never going to be the same.

Jake was the third oldest of 10 siblings. After graduation, he enlisted in the U.S. Army. Tine and her family had already moved to New York, a few days after graduation.

She and Jake would later reunite there and get married. Tine went to work for the Social Security Administration and Jake became an officer with the New York City Police Department, moving up the ranks to become a homicide detective.

And me? I didn’t take a scholarship to Knoxville College (now Knoxville University) and got married a year after graduating high school.

I don’t know how long I sat after Nellie’s call, going over the years of our friendship. Looking back, it seems the Dorsetts were always part of my family’s life.

We shared each other’s dreams. We saw each other through the good times, and the sad times. We comforted each other when our friends or classmates died. We cried with each other at the funerals of our family members, and danced at each other’s celebrations.

In a few weeks, God willing, Nellie and I will travel to New York to say goodbye to her brother and sister-in-law and my dear friends. Jake and Tine had no children. They were inseparable and would have been married 64 years on Sept. 4.

Fittingly, the family on both sides decided to have a double memorial service on their anniversary. It is the right thing to do.