I was 19 when I first met Isaac McNatt. It was a Saturday night in the fall of 1974, my junior year at Yale, and I was the production manager for “The Amen Corner,” by James Baldwin. The play was directed by my buddy, Charles, and the assistant director was Bob McNatt, with whom I had fallen madly in love while we worked together. Bob told me his dad was coming to the opening night, and asked me to look for him since he would be backstage. I was terrified; how would I know him? Did he know about me? Would he hate me? Bob did what he’s always done—smiled at me, told me to relax, and said everything would be fine. I do remember that he blew me a kiss as he left.
About 20 minutes later, I saw a tall distinguished man walk through the door and my first thought was: “Oh, this is what Bob will look like when we’re older,” because he looked so much like Bob, and because when you’re 19, anything older than 30 seems very old indeed. So I walked up to him and introduced myself, and said that Bob had asked me to look out for him.
He took my hand, and smiled this warm, open smile that made you feel like the sun had come out and was shining all over you. “I’m Isaac McNatt; I’m so glad to meet you,” he said, and I knew he really was. I took him to his seat, and sat right next to him. In between acts we chatted, and I talked about wanting to be a writer, and how much fun it was to work on the play, and how talented I thought his son was.
That was the first of our many conversations over many years, as I learned to love “Mac,” as much as everyone else did. I came to care for him first as the antithesis of my own angry and violent father. He was elegant, and smart, and kind, and he and his wife, Gladys, adored each other. They talked and laughed and held hands whenever they were together; I had never seen anything like that before. I kept asking Bob if his parents were really like that—he kept telling me they’d always been that way. For a lot of Americans, Barack and Michelle Obama were a big surprise, but I’d been looking at their forerunners for decades—Isaac and Gladys McNatt, and their 62-year marriage, was the real deal.
Mac and I were kindred spirits around technology. We always loved gadgets, and could talk about them endlessly. Bob and his mom only rolled their eyes at us while we talked about computers and tried to write our own batch files (he was better at it than I was!) But he was also a keen political thinker, and what he knew of politics came from his long activist history. I’ll always remember his talking about being in the Seabees during the Second World War; they refused to admit him to Officer Candidate School because he was black. When the black Seabees were expected to eat after the white enlisted men, Mac helped to lead a protest on the base that led to his expulsion from the Navy, along with 17 of his brothers. This dishonorable discharge was especially hurtful to Mac’s future; he’d enlisted after taking a leave of absence from St. John’s Law School in NYC. Without an honorable discharge, he would never have been able to practice law. So he and several of his brother Seabees decided to fight, and they enlisted the help of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund: their lawyer was a young man named Thurgood Marshall. The future Supreme Court justice eventually won for them the honorable discharges that would allow Mac admission to the New York and New Jersey bar, and a distinguished career would follow.
In addition to his political and social activism, Mac was a serious churchman, and loved the Unitarian Universalist faith we eventually shared. I learned half of what I know about doing church from watching him and Gladys in their leadership roles at Community Church of NY, the church in which they were married, and in which I was ordained decades later.
The symptoms of Mac’s Alzheimer’s disease became clear to me while I was living with them in the summer of 1998, working on my ministerial requirement for clinical pastoral education. He would be fine for long stretches, and then he would forget things or misplace them in a way that was completely unlike him. By then, I had seen enough people at the hospital to figure out what was happening, and his eventual diagnosis sent us all into a long time of grieving, as we began to say good-bye to this man who had been the light of all our lives.
Mac died quietly last Monday at a hospice in North Carolina. Knowing it was time didn’t make it any easier to let him go, and we are heartbroken. But I so glad he lived, so grateful to see his face in the faces of my husband and sons, and to hear so many stories of his dedication to his country, to his liberal religious faith, and to his people. He was a treasure, and I loved him. Take care, Mac.
What a gift it must have been, to be a part of his family, and to have him for your children to look up to. Thank you for sharing a bit of his life with us.