Violet Blake (known to the world as Lennox Lewis’s mum) died on Thursday 30 November at age 85. Lennox announced her death on social media, describing the loss as “an indescribable type of hurt that has me reeling, yet also has me comforted to know she is now in a better place with no more suffering”.
Violet Lewis (her maiden name) was born in Jamaica on 10 May 1938. Her father was a laborer. Her mother worked as a household domestic. Violet was one of twelve children. When she was young, she lived with her Aunt Gee. Then Gee married and Violet was sent to live with another aunt. “I can’t recall ever living at home with my brothers and sisters,” she told Lennox’s biographer, Ken Gorman, in 1992. “I hardly knew my mum and dad.”
In 1956, Violet moved to London, where Aunt Gee had relocated with her husband. She lived briefly with Gee and then in a rented room while working as a nurse’s aid. On 27 April 1962, her first child (Dennis Stephen) was born. The father was Rupert Daries; a Jamaican who was working as a swimming instructor in London. Soon after the birth, Violet returned to work on a night shift at the hospital.
“Rupert was good to us,” she later reminisced. “I liked him as a brother, but I didn’t love him. You think, if you don’t love him at first, if you live together, you may grow to love him. But it never happened like that.”
Then Carlton Brooks, another Jamaican living in London, entered her life. “We met at a party,” Violet told Gorman. “I was madly in love with him, though we never lived together. It turned out that he was married, but I didn’t know [Brooks had a wife and family in Jamaica]. He never told me he was married. He strung me along. Then, when I told him I was pregnant with Lennox, he said, ‘I’m sorry, Vi. I’m married and I can’t marry you.’ It was a great shock for me. He was the only man I really really cared for. It made me very sad.”
On 2 September 1965, Lennox Claudius Lewis, was born.
“I have fond memories of being young,” Lennox told me years ago. “I was generally a happy child. My earliest memory from childhood is of a rocking-horse that I used to sit on for hours at a time.”
But those pleasant hours grew fewer and further in between. When Lennox was four, Violet uprooted their home. She was still depressed over the loss of Carlton and decided to start her life over somewhere else. She sent Dennis to live with his father (who had since married), left Lennox with Aunt Gee, and moved to Chicago in the hope of setting up a home in the United States for Lennox and herself. But she didn’t have a proper visa, couldn’t get regular work, and returned to England a year later. Then she moved to Ontario with Lennox but, after six months, sent him back to England. She was still mired in depression; the school fees and rent were more than she could afford; and there was barely enough money to feed herself, let alone a growing boy.
A five-year separation between mother and son followed. Lennox stayed with Aunt Gee and then in two boarding schools run by the state for children who had difficult lives at home.
Meanwhile, Violet took a job on an assembly line in a factory in Ontario. “I cried every day for those five years,” she told me. “They used to call me ‘weeping willow.’” And Lennox recalled their separation with the thought, “There was anxiety. I felt like I was out there by myself and I missed my mother.”
Finally, in 1977 when Lennox was 12 years old, Violet sent for him. They hadn’t seen each other for five years. Later, she said of their reunion, “I knew it was him as soon as I saw him at the airport. He was big but he’d always been big. I’d watched him growing in the photographs he’d sent me. I kissed him and kissed him. You know what boys are like at 12. He didn’t want people to see me kissing him, but I hugged him and kissed him anyway.”
“When we reunited, there was such a noise,” Lennox remembered. “Loud happiness. ‘Oh! My baby! My baby!’ She gave me a kiss that went on for so long that I didn’t think it was ever going to stop. I was a bit embarrassed, but I was also very happy to see her and the feeling that came over me was indescribable. There’s something about being around your mother. A mother gives off a special kind of love.”
Later, Lennox would say, “My respect for my mum has continued to grow as I’ve matured and come to understand what she’s gone through. People ask me, ‘What place do you consider home?’ And I tell them, ‘My mother’s womb.’ If they ask where I’m from, I tell them, ‘I come from Violet.’”
In announcing his mum’s death, Lennox wrote, “I’ve spent the greater part of my life doing my best to honor her and repay her for all the things that she’s given me in life and to make her life as comfortable as possible. I’m grateful that God has allowed me to do this for her.”
That motivation was instilled in him during their years together in Canada.
“When I was young,” Lennox told me years ago, “if I said I was going out, my mum would ask, ‘Where are you going? Who are you going with? Be careful. How are you getting home?’ And she’d always wait up until I got home. It was always very important to me that I not disappoint my mother. I never had a police record. I never got a girl pregnant. Sometimes mum calls me her baby. When your mum says ‘my baby,’ it’s different from when your girl says it. When your mum says it, it’s a much deeper feeling. It has more meaning. And I guess I’ll always be her baby. It seems like, every year on my birthday, mum gives me underwear and socks. And it seems like, every year, I need them. And when mum’s birthday is coming, I ask her what she wants. She’ll never want for anything; I promise you that. But all she ever asks for is something like a winter coat.”
In 2004, after his first child (Landon) was born, Lennox added to that sentiment, saying, “I hope that someday when my son is a man, he feels as much love for me as I feel for my mum.”
Now Lennox has written, “Mum, you are gone and I’m praying you’re in a better place. Thank you for the foundation of love, discipline, and support that made all my dreams come true. None of it could have ever been without you, nor could any of it have meant anything without you. I love you eternally. Rest now.”
Thomas Hauser’s email address is thomashauserwriter@gmail.com. He has just finished writing a memoir about his own mother who died last year at age 96. MY MOTHER and me will be published in spring 2024 by Admission Press.