When she was at her best, Veronica Cook was outwardly serious and reserved. But those who knew her say she was a joker at heart with a wry sense of humor who fought like hell for those she loved.

 

“Lord, take me now,” she was known to grumble with a sly smile when her children said something she didn’t like.

 

She battled systemic racism as a Black single mother raising two children in New York’s grittier days. When Sean and VaNessa grew up, she was a cool mom who socialized with them and their partners, dining and dancing into the night. When grandchildren arrived, Veronica became a doting grandma who showered them with gifts. When the grandchildren outgrew their clothing, she donated the items to children in need through her favorite nonprofit, “Little Essentials.”

 

Other times, when Veronica buckled under the weight of intergenerational trauma and decades of oppression, she wielded her intensity against those who loved her and refused to seek the kind of help her children thought she needed.

 

“She was a complicated person, especially toward the end of her life,” recalls her daughter, VaNessa Cook-Williams. “The most positive memories I have are of her being my greatest supporter.” 

 

A lifelong New Yorker, Veronica’s story is the story of the city, one of millions comprising the glittering mosaic she called home. And what a view of it she had from her 15th floor apartment at the top of Inwood, overlooking Inwood Hill Park in one direction and subway yards in the other. On Nagle Avenue, Veronica raised two children into thriving adults. And in that home, she drew her last breaths in the final week of 2020 at 75 years old.

 

She appreciated “the small things”

 

Veronica Cook was born on March 20, 1945, in Bronxville, New York. She came of age in an era of great social and political change, but life didn’t come easy.

 

She was the first of 15 children born to Mildred Watts, and Watts’ only child with Robert Small. Watts fell on hard times as a young single mother supporting herself as a seamstress, Veronica’s aunt, Lillian C. Brannan, said.

 

Another relative, a great aunt who babysat Veronica, became her guardian, and subjected her to physical and emotional abuse, Brannan said. “It was a harsh household, but once she got out of the bubble, she became a different person.”

 

Brannan observed the transformation in Veronica – or Vera, as she called her -- when she visited Brannan’s family in Virginia in the summers of her youth.

 

“She would love to go out in the forest and grass. She would take blades of grass and make skirts and dresses. She was so talented with things with that,” Brannan said.

 

When Vera joined her cousins in the hot muddy yard to play, Brannan recalls there would be hell to pay if she scuffed her patent leather shoes or dirtied her dresses. Or whenever she helped herself to an extra biscuit. The cousins tried to clean her off and hid extra biscuits in their pockets to pass onto her.

 

“She got such pleasure out of small things we did for her, the love shown for her,” Brannan said. 

 

Back in Yonkers, Veronica’s fighting instincts kicked in when she was a teenager. She reported her abusive aunt to authorities and landed in a group home, Brannan said.

 

She graduated from the High School of Commerce on the Upper West Side -- precursor to Brandeis High School -- a model in its time of a comprehensive curriculum serving a majority-Black and Latino student body.

 

After studying fashion design, she got an apprenticeship with Oleg Cassini, according to Brannan. She married her first husband, Ozzie Phillips, and gave birth to their son, Sean Phillips, in 1965. In 1970, Vera got a job at Otis Elevator, but her passion for fashion and the finer things in life persisted.

 

“She used to sew and fashion her own clothing, I remember her and me making all of our maternity clothes, she could cut and design from newspapers on the table,” Brannan said. “She was a very beautiful woman in looks and personality, she had a lot of grace and poise. She can be remembered for her beautiful smile and eyes.”

 

By then, Brannan had moved into an apartment across the hall from Veronica’s in Yonkers. The two women were close in age and raised their children together, surrounded by other relatives who lived in the building. “Those were happy times,” Brannan said.

 

After Veronica separated from Phillips, as the story goes, Kenneth Cook spotted Veronica reading by the window of her home one day and decided he would marry her. They wed in 1978 and had their only child, VaNessa, in 1981. They moved into the apartment on Nagle Avenue, where Kenneth Cook’s family lived.

 

“She listened to her children”

 

Veronica’s keen visual sense imbued her home and she passed it on to her children. African masks and abstract paintings adorned the walls of their home. Like many teens in 1980s New York, Sean Phillips was obsessed with graffiti and hip-hop, bombing subway cars, then becoming a street art collector as he settled into a career with the MTA.

 

Veronica took care to cultivate her daughter’s aesthetic sensibilities as both a hobby and an armor, just as she did for herself. She encouraged her passion for fashion, photography, and cosmetology, while enforcing a rigid personal care regimen of daily makeup and weekly salon visits for blow outs. Cook-Williams now understands that her mother saw it as a way to protect or even beautify against the indignities of white America, but at the time she saw it as criticism.

 

It’s easy to imagine how Veronica’s experiences of workplace sexism and racism may have hardened her. As an administrative assistant in Barnard College’s security department from the mid-1980s onward, she lamented that she did not feel seen as an equal to her white associates, Cook-Williams said. She was constantly fighting her supervisors – also white -- for time off and flexible hours. “That’s what happens when you work for the man” was a common refrain at the dinner table, her daughter said.  

 

Nevertheless, she pressed on. When Veronica retired in 2009, she joked to her daughter that she might leave raw chicken feet strewn about campus, the ultimate senior prank. Whether she followed through is a secret she took to the grave.

 

She applied the same relentlessness to pursuing opportunities for her children, cobbling together the money and means to get them into top-tier parochial schools. When a teacher at VaNessa’s Upper East Side private school said she was falling behind in math because she wasn’t trying hard enough, Veronica fought back. She worked out a deal with the same private tutor who instructed VaNessa’s classmates and advised her to seek a neuropsychological assessment, ultimately determining that she had a learning disability. 

 

“She listened to her children,” said Margit Mateo, who married Veronica’s son, Sean. “She stuck up for them.”

 

And she cared for their spouses. When Mateo spoke of needing a long winter coat, one showed up at her doorstep two days later. Where Veronica sometimes struggled to show love through words or direct actions, she compensated by gift-giving, her daughter recalls.

 

After she retired, Veronica’s health took a turn for the worse. A cancer diagnosis exacerbated longstanding medical conditions, including diabetes. She withdrew from society into the confines of Nagle Avenue, turning away her children at holidays and refusing their calls.

 

Her son-in-law Winslow Williams often accompanied her to doctor appointments and learned parts of her story. He said he worried about the toll chemotherapy took on her quality of life and her mental health. But Veronica was headstrong and would not be told what to do, he said. She insisted on living her life without the support of a home health attendant.

 

“I’ll remember her as a friend, somebody who had a great sense of humor,” he said. “I will miss her greatly”.

 

Veronica’s daughter found her mother’s body on the same day the family learned that her son Sean had died. As the family now sees it, at least Veronica was spared the heartbreaking news of her son’s death.

 

In addition to her daughter, son-in-law and daughter-in-law, Veronica leaves behind granddaughters Ophelia and Kailyn and great-grandson, Kal-El.

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-Emanuella Grinberg