When I was a kid I used to see this picture of my sister when she was a little girl, with a woman I never met. Her name was Rosanne Emerson, but everyone called her Tutsie.
The only things I ever knew about her were that she was my mom’s aunt, she passed away before I was born, and she was really nice. Like most people who weren’t in my life as a kid, I didn’t give her much thought.
But as a I became older, curiosity got the better of me. Much like my mom’s dad (who also died before I was born) she was a name I continued to hear more and more about, and a face I saw in more and more pictures. With that, I started to feel almost left out.
Here was this really sweet woman, who would have been a big part of my life, and according to my family would have “loved me,” yet I never met her. Even my cousins on my dad’s side of the family had stories about her.
So, I wanted to learn about her too. I wanted to know about the woman that everyone loved, and make her a part of my life the only way I could.
She was born on July 5th, 1926, the elder of two girls. Her younger sister, my Nana Millie, was born almost exactly two years later. Though she was born Rosanne, and preferred to be called Ann, the nickname “Tutsie” was mysteriously given to her since childhood and stuck the rest of her life.
She grew up in an apartment on 157th Street, in Flushing, Queens, with her parents, sister, and maternal grandmother. In 1948, after her father’s death, my grandparents marriage, and her grandmothers death (both in 1950) she stayed to live with her mother, Anna.
They lived together, in that very same apartment, until her mom died in 1972. After that, she lived upstairs in a house next door to my mom’s family in Wantagh, NY, that my grandfather bought and renovated in the 70’s.
Unlike her sister, who became a housewife to raise her daughters, Tutsie worked. She was a secretary with the Shell Oil Company for many years, until the company moved to Texas. Instead of relocating with them, Tutsie found a new job in banking, in Queens. This meant, that for the first time in her life, she had to learn how to drive; an activity, I learned, she did not enjoy.
When my mom and her sisters were growing up, every Saturday their dad would drive the family to Flushing. While he went to work in his shop, the girls would spend the day with Tutsie and her mom. Tutsie would walk with them through Queens, and take them to the stores nearby. At night, she would rub their heads, and make up stories. The three she was most famous for were, The Little Pink Star, Jack & His Cow, and Jacqueline. She had a gentleness and kindness that always made my mom and her sisters feel safe.
While she never married, or had children, there is a rumor in my family that she was briefly in a relationship with a man named Michael, who was killed in a car crash in the 40’s. Nobody really knows anything else outside of that, and she remained single the rest of her life.
While she and my Nana were always close, after my grandfather’s death in 1981, the two sisters became best friends.
My Nana on the right & Tutsie on the left...
My Nana also got a job of her own as a secretary for the Levittown School District. But for the next twelve and a half years, the two would do everything together.
I can promise you (and believe me I’ve looked) there are very few, if any, photos of my Nana without Tutsie. Even in old VHS tapes, if one was there the other wasn’t far behind.
There’s one video in particular from Christmas 1992. They’re setting the table for dinner and my mom is filming around the house. She walks in, and says, “Hi girls.” They don’t bat an eye. Of course it’s possible they didn’t hear her, but it looks to me like they were synced in their own little world. My Nana had lost her husband, and Tutsie had lost their mother, but they became each other’s partners in life.
That next Christmas she caught a bad cold, which eventually led to pneumonia. My Nana rushed her to the hospital, but she became septic and died on January 11th, 1994. She was only 67 years old.
I was born a year and a half later.
Growing up, I was very close with my Nana, but she never mentioned Tutsie. According to my Aunt Sue, whenever the subject would come up, she would see the sadness in my Nana, who would simply say, “I miss her so much.”
My Nana passed away in 2009, buried with my grandfather, only a short distance from where Tutsie and their parents are also buried, in Mount St. Mary Cemetery in Flushing.
I once said about my grandfather, that it’s hard to talk about someone that you’ve never met because you would only truly know that person through others. I never met my Great-Aunt Tutsie, but as strange as it sounds, it almost makes her that much more special. She’s become this legend, and someone that I will always honor as an important and special member of our family.