In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (3 page)

“What did you and Daddy do for flour that winter?” I asked my mother.

“Well,” she said, “Aunt Mandy Aikens lived down the road from us and she got plenty of flour. We had a good stand of corn so we had plenty of meal. Aunt Mandy would swap me a bucket of flour for a bucket of meal. We got by all right.”

Then she added thoughtfully, “And that old woman that turned me off so short got down so bad in the end that she was walking on
two
sticks.” And I knew she was thinking, though she never said it: Here I am today, my eight children healthy and grown and three of them in college and me with hardly a sick day for years. Ain't Jesus wonderful?

In this small story is revealed the condition and strength of a people. Outcasts to be used and humiliated by the larger society, the Southern black sharecropper and poor farmer clung to his own kind and to a religion that had been given to pacify him as a slave but which he soon transformed into an antidote against bitterness. Depending on one another, because they had nothing and no one else, the sharecroppers often managed to come through “all right.” And when I listen to my mother tell and retell this story I find that the white woman's vindictiveness is less important than Aunt Mandy's resourceful generosity or my mother's ready stand of corn. For their lives were not about that pitiful example of Southern womanhood, but about themselves.

What the black Southern writer inherits as a natural right is a sense
of
community
. Something simple but surprisingly hard, “especially these days, to come by. My mother, who is a walking history of our community, tells me that when each of her children was born the midwife accepted as payment such home-grown or homemade items as a pig, a quilt, jars of canned fruits and vegetables. But there was never any question that the midwife would come when she was needed, whatever the eventual payment for her services. I consider this each time I hear of a hospital that refuses to admit a woman in labor unless she can hand over a substantial sum of money, cash.

Nor am I nostalgic, as a French philosopher once wrote, for lost poverty. I am nostalgic for the solidarity and sharing a modest existence can sometimes bring. We knew, I suppose, that we were poor. Somebody knew; perhaps the landowner who grudgingly paid my father three hundred dollars a year for twelve months' labor. But we never considered ourselves to be poor, unless, of course, we were deliberately humiliated. And because we never believed we were poor, and therefore worthless, we could depend on one another without shame. And always there were the Burial Societies, the Sick-and-Shut-in Societies, that sprang up out of spontaneous need. And no one seemed terribly upset that black sharecroppers were ignored by white insurance companies. It went without saying, in my mother's day, that birth and death required assistance from the community, and that the magnitude of these events was lost on outsiders.

As a college student I came to reject the Christianity of my parents, and it took me years to realize that though they had been force-fed a white man's palliative, in the form of religion, they had made it into something at once simple and noble. True, even today, they can never successfully picture a God who is not white, and that is a major cruelty, but their lives testify to a greater comprehension of the teachings of Jesus than the lives of people who sincerely believe a God
must
have a color and that there can be such a phenomenon as a “white” church.

The richness of the black writer's experience in the South can be remarkable, though some people might not think so. Once, while in college, I told a white middle-aged Northerner that I hoped to be a poet. In the nicest possible language, which still made me as mad as I've ever been, he suggested that a “farmer's daughter” might not be the stuff of which poets are made. On one level, of course, he had a point. A shack with only a dozen or so books is an unlikely place to discover a young Keats. But it is narrow thinking, indeed, to believe that a Keats is the only kind of poet one would want to grow up to be. One wants to write poetry that is understood by one's people, not by the Queen of England. Of course, should she be able to profit by it too, so much the better, but since that is not likely, catering to her tastes would be a waste of time.

For the black Southern writer, coming straight out of the country, as Wright did—Natchez and Jackson are still not as citified as they like to think they are—there is the world of comparisons; between town and country, between the ugly crowding and griminess of the cities and the spacious cleanliness (which actually seems impossible to dirty) of the country. A country person finds the city confining, like a too tight dress. And always, in one's memory, there remain all the rituals of one's growing up: the warmth and vividness of Sunday worship (never mind that you never quite believed) in a little church hidden from the road, and houses set so far back into the woods that at night it is impossible for strangers to find them. The daily dramas that evolve in such a private world are pure gold. But this view of a strictly private and hidden existence, with its triumphs, failures, grotesqueries, is not nearly as valuable to the socially conscious black Southern writer as his double vision is. For not only is he in a position to see his own world, and its close community (“Homecomings” on First Sundays, barbecues to raise money to send to Africa—one of the smaller ironies—the simplicity and eerie calm of a black funeral, where the beloved one is buried way in the middle of a wood with nothing to mark the spot but perhaps a wooden cross already coming apart), but also he is capable of knowing, with remarkably silent accuracy, the people who make up the larger world that surrounds and suppresses his own.

It is a credit to a writer like Ernest J. Gaines, a black writer who writes mainly about the people he grew up with in rural Louisiana, that he can write about whites and blacks exactly as he sees them and
knows
them, instead of writing of one group as a vast malignant lump and of the other as a conglomerate of perfect virtues.

In large measure, black Southern writers owe their clarity of vision to parents who refused to diminish themselves as human beings by succumbing to racism. Our parents seemed to know that an extreme negative emotion held against other human beings for reasons they do not control can be blinding. Blindness about other human beings, especially for a writer, is equivalent to death. Because of this blindness, which is, above all, racial, the works of many Southern writers have died. Much that we read today is fast expiring.

My own slight attachment to William Faulkner was rudely broken by realizing, after reading statements he made in
Faulkner in the University,
that he believed whites superior morally to blacks; that whites had a duty (which at their convenience they would assume) to “bring blacks along” politically, since blacks, in Faulkner's opinion, were “not ready” yet to function properly in a democratic society. He also thought that a black man's intelligence is directly related to the amount of white blood he has.

For the black person coming of age in the sixties, where Martin Luther King stands against the murderers of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, there appears no basis for such assumptions. Nor was there any in Garvey's day, or in Du Bois's or in Douglass's or in Nat Turner's. Nor at any other period in our history, from the very founding of the country; for it was hardly incumbent upon slaves to be slaves and saints too. Unlike Tolstoy, Faulkner was not prepared to struggle to change the structure of the society he was born in. One might concede that in his fiction he did seek to examine the reasons for its decay, but unfortunately, as I have learned while trying to teach Faulkner to black students, it is not possible, from so short a range, to separate the man from his works.

One reads Faulkner knowing that his “colored” people had to come through “Mr. William's” back door, and one feels uneasy, and finally enraged that Faulkner did not burn the whole house down. When the provincial mind starts out
and continues
on a narrow and unprotesting course, “genius” itself must run on a track.

Flannery O'Connor at least had the conviction that “reality” is at best superficial and that the puzzle of humanity is less easy to solve than that of race. But Miss O'Connor was not so much of Georgia, as in it. The majority of Southern writers have been too confined by prevailing social customs to probe deeply into mysteries that the Citizens Councils insist must never be revealed.

Perhaps my Northern brothers will not believe me when I say there is a great deal of positive material I can draw from my “underprivileged” background. But they have never lived, as I have, at the end of a long road in a house that was faced by the edge of the world on one side and nobody for miles on the other. They have never experienced the magnificent quiet of a summer day when the heat is intense and one is so very thirsty, as one moves across the dusty cotton fields, that one learns forever that water is the essence of all life. In the cities it cannot be so clear to one that he is a creature of the earth, feeling the soil between the toes, smelling the dust thrown up by the rain, loving the earth so much that one longs to taste it and sometimes does.

Nor do I intend to romanticize the Southern black country life. I can recall that I hated it, generally. The hard work in the fields, the shabby houses, the evil greedy men who worked my father to death and almost broke the courage of that strong woman, my mother. No, I am simply saying that Southern black writers, like most writers, have a heritage of love and hate, but that they also have enormous richness and beauty to draw from. And, having been placed, as Camus says, “halfway between misery and the sun,” they, too, know that “though all is not well under the sun, history is not everything.”

No one could wish for a more advantageous heritage than that bequeathed to the black writer in the South: a compassion for the earth, a trust in humanity beyond our knowledge of evil, and an abiding love of justice. We inherit a great responsibility as well, for we must give voice to centuries not only of silent bitterness and hate but also of neighborly kindness and sustaining love.

1970

Dear kind friend:

I am writing on this occasion because they tell me you teach the teachers at the new Headstart Friends of the Children of Mississippi and want to know all about us, or as much as we can think to tell. I myself think FCM is a good thing for the Negro children. I have three grandchildren attending myself.

Well, you know all over the state of Mississippi we have had a hard time and it doesn't seem to be getting any better, but, if you all say so, through the Lord, we may conquer later. I am praying to the Lord that it will be better in the future because it seem just like we haven't done any good yet.

I have to say that we are in a mean world down here in Amite County. It makes me say like Jose, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh, so blesseth be the Lord.

I am B.E.F. When I was seventeen, the white folks was wanted to take me away from my mother because I was a good worker, but she didn't agree to it because my father was dead, and no one there but my mother and I. They wanted me to run off from home and work for them. Because I didn't they arrested me claiming that I stole a cow. But no alterdavis was made out against me. They arrested me May 20, 1910 and kept me in jail until October. They sentenced me October 26, to the prison for five years and then I was back home in 1914 when I got married. I have seen some bad things done in Amite, such as a man whose name was Issac Simond who had gone to Jackson and redeemed his land of taxes and got title for him and his father and the white folks wanted to buy his timber and he wouldn't seel it to them. They went to his home one Sunday morning, six of them. They stuck a knife in his jaw and led him to the car, and put him and his son in the car and they drove down the road toward the church and got out the car to get a switch to whip him but he got out of the car and ran and they shot him down with buckshots. Mr. Wiley S……. was the sheriff, he came out and had an inquest. One of the Negroes asked Mr. Wiley “what are we going to do now.” He said, “there he is take him and do anything you want with him.” All of them had guns of all kind and we didn't have no protection at all, when we picked him up the blood ran out of him like water through screens.

Another man by the name of Herbert Lee, was shot down at the cotton gin by one of the Representatives of Amite County and he laid there about four hours before any one paid any attention to him. But yet and still the cotton gin kept on working. There were four in the gin, they made three of the Negroes who witness forget what they saw but when they made Louis Allen say he didn't see anything he wouldn't. Later he was killed because he was going to testify against the sheriff. He was shot with buckshots at his gate three times. His brain was piled up under the truck.

So this is most of the histry that I can recall, if you sure you want it, and I hope it will help the little children who are enroll in Headstart.

Yours truly,

B. E. F., Amite County, Miss.

T
HE LETTER FROM “B. E. F.”
was passed on to me by a friend. I never met the writer. Mrs. Winson Hudson, on the other hand, I've come to know well. She is a large handsome woman with bright coppery skin and crisp dark hair. Her eyes are deeply brown and uncommonly alert. When she is speaking to you her eyes hold you; at the same time they seem to be scanning the landscape. Her eyes tell a great deal about Mrs. Hudson, for she is one of the “sleepless ones” found in embattled Mississippi towns whose fight has been not only against unjust laws and verbal harassment, but against guns and fire bombs as well.

The first time I met Mrs. Hudson, having heard much about her from my husband and others who have witnessed personally the Hudson stamina and courage, she handed me twenty pages of writing. We sat down under some trees at the Headstart center where she is director and read parts of her “story” together. She was writing about her life, she said, because, among other reasons, she did not know how long it was going to last. She wanted, she added, to leave some kind of record for her community, setting straight all that had happened, so that the children would know about it, and the role she played. It bothered her very much that often her “own people” seemed to misunderstand her and failed to see that the agitation she caused in the community—for desegregated, quality schooling, for jobs, for Headstart—was not for herself or for any one group, but for everybody in the county.