Speaking Truth to Power (5 page)

In Lone Tree during the 1950s and 1960s many of the families farmed small farms for a living, and others used their own farming to supplement jobs they held in town or hired their labor out to larger farmers. Unfortunately, even then the depression that was to hit the farm industry was being forecast, anticipated, and, in some cases, experienced. The family farm was slowly disappearing. The level of security and comfort a farm offered seemed each year to diminish. Even as late as 1960, 11 percent of the farm operators in this country were black, equal to blacks’ representation in the general population, but black farm ownership had declined even from 1920 figures. Though farm declines for whites seemed to plateau in the early 1980s, the trend in decline for black farm ownership continued. Farm displacement rates for blacks during that period were two and a half times that for whites. The dual hardships of unfavorable economic forces and racial bias in lending eventually took their toll. In
1990, 62,000 (or 1.5 percent) of the 4.5 million farmers in this country were black. By the year 2000 the U.S. Civil Rights Commission predicts that black farm ownership will be altogether extinct. Our family farm was a part of this trend. We were a typical midwestern/southern farm family with one added dimension—we were a black farm family. Even today my parents, having lived through both the heyday and the demise of the black-owned, working family farm, are still farmers at heart.

My family’s home was the center of my world. As a child, once I stepped off the orange bus that brought me home each day and headed west for the half-mile walk to the house with tar paper siding, there was little else of consequence. The only thing one could see from the house was the yard, the field, the abandoned cars, the tractor, combine, and other equipment, and the occasional cow that crossed too near the house to graze on my mother’s roses. There were no neighbors to visit with over the backyard fence; no cars to pass along the street in front of our house. There was no street, only an unpaved, rocky dirt road. And it wasn’t until 1972 that the telephone intruded on our isolation.

At home, I came into the world surrounded by family—people of all ages—and as only a child can conceive, they all belonged to me, and I to them. And this marvelously rich world of human interaction more than made up for what we lacked in cultural experience. We did not travel, we did not take vacations or go to the movies. We were farm people. Our family outings consisted of going to church and prayer meeting, visiting nearby relatives, the yearly all-black rodeo, and the segregated, until I was six, county fair.

My parents’ adult lives have been so consumed by family that it still takes effort to see them as independent personalities. Erma Hill, my mother, is a mixture of stern restraint and lavish generosity. Years into my adulthood I began to understand her. Underneath the crop of fine hair that has been gray or graying as long as I have known her lies a complex mind. She is never unnerved or flustered. She can appear almost haughty, and one glance can freeze its target. But upon closer examination, I have come to recognize that much of her moderation and even her severity can be attributed to shyness and modesty. Despite the fact that she is a
farmworker and the mother of thirteen children, she is never less than dignified. Her erect posture suggests the propriety of an Edwardian lady. Those were the days in which she and her friends came of age. Those are the ways her behavior reflects. And she taught her children to carry themselves in that same way despite the differences in the times of our upbringing.

My mother was at her best during our Sunday morning routine preparing for church. “Finish eating your breakfast and wash the dishes, so that we can get to Sunday school on time.” A few minutes later she would call again to her children from her bedroom, “Are you all ready for church?”

“Yes,” we’d groan in response, anticipating the next command.

“Well, sit on the couch and don’t move until I tell you,” the command always came back. “And don’t get your socks dirty.”

My mother often expected from us what we considered to be the impossible, especially on Sunday mornings. But we dutifully complied. Even in the summer, when we walked the three miles along the dusty road between our home and the church, we arrived with our white anklet socks spotless and only a hint of dust on our patent-leather shoes. My mother’s church friend often served as her reinforcement. A woman nearly six feet tall and over 190 pounds in her prime, Mattie Hutton was her closest friend. We called her Miss Mattie. One Sunday morning when I was about twelve years old, she presented me with a purse. “Never let me see you at church without one again,” she warned to remind me that I had come of age. As my Sunday school teacher, Miss Mattie watched my progress in this respect. She hovered over us like her own. From the time she and my mother taught us the children’s “Jesus Loves Me” until we learned the more complex spiritual “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” (a song mourning a mother’s death), they reminded us that we were first the children of God and only after that theirs.

Miss Mattie no doubt reasoned that if I were carrying a purse, I wouldn’t be able to play tag with the boys between Sunday school and church as I liked to. Well, I carried the purse, but I certainly continued to play chase. Years later, in deciding on a gift for me, she would choose
a handmade apron. I treasure the gift but I do not wear it, preferring to wear the evidence of my cooking on my clothes.

Another of my mother’s friends, Bertha “Red” Reagor, Miss Red, tried to make a similar impression on my role identification. Miss Red gave me a sewing basket for my birthday one year, and a miniature butter churn the year after. “I just thought this was the cutest thing for Faye” (everyone referred to me by my middle name). She laughed nearly each word, as was her customary way of talking. When I went away to college, my mother confiscated the sewing basket rather than let it go to waste. The butter churn I keep as a memento, knowing that butter will never be formed in it. Most of the gifts my mother’s friends gave to help ground me in what they considered my proper role and carriage, I still have. They serve as tangible reminders of the intangible gifts—the poise, the self-respect, the discipline—that were of far greater value.

But if she was the person who kept us in line, my mother was also an unselfish nurturer. My most distinct early memory of her is of her feet as they moved up and down with the treadle of the sewing machine that she had inherited from her mother. My mother sewed all of her daughters’ clothes until one by one they learned to sew for themselves. I would have my turn sewing soon enough, but then I was no more than four or five years old and too young for most household duties. During her sewing we would play a game for as long as her patience lasted. Having been taught the alphabet by my older sister Joyce, I would make up letter combinations, most of them nonsensical.

“What does ‘d-g-t’ spell?” I would ask. Though I had learned the letters, I had not learned the difference in vowels and consonants and the significance of vowels in correct spelling. “Nothing,” my mother would respond. “Nothing,” I would repeat incredulously. I had somehow gotten the impression that every letter combination spelled a word. Occasionally, I would hit upon a combination of letters that actually did spell a word. This only spurred me on. I am sure I would have played the game for hours if allowed. Though I never tired of it, eventually my mother did. “That’s enough spelling for now,” she would announce when her ability to endure my admittedly poor efforts waned.

Usually those words were enough. But certain signals alerted me that it was a bad idea to press any point. We all took my mother seriously. I knew that the appropriate response was to stop, at least for the moment. She often guided me to the next activity: “Let’s go outside and get the eggs.” Or the always welcomed “Are you ready for some lunch?” She would indulge me enough to try to distract me with food—a baked sweet potato or sardines and crackers. Though I remember enjoying these foods with my mother, I don’t think I ever really enjoyed the taste of them. We enjoyed mostly the communion of that time, so much so that I would never complain about the flavors.

I enjoyed a luxury shared by none of my other siblings. That was time alone with my mother. For the four years between the time when my youngest sibling, JoAnn, started school and the time I entered the first grade, my mother and I were nearly constant companions. Similarly, when JoAnn went away to college and I was in high school, my mother and I spent the summers together. And outside of her farm responsibility, I had her constant attention. By that time Mama had been raising children for thirty years, and knowing that I was the last child she would raise to adulthood, she seemed to take extra care with me. I never believed that she favored me, though my siblings might disagree. Certainly, she may have hung on to me a little longer. But she never excused me from discipline or the work that had to be done on the farm.

My favorite meals were the ones that my mother cooked for the family when I was a child. Food and physical warmth were two things that Mama lavished upon her family. She always assumed that her children were as hungry or as easily chilled as she. A sudden unexpected drop in the temperature (common in Oklahoma) during a spring day never caught us off guard. We were prepared with sweaters just in case. Each winter morning she rose before the rest of us to build a blazing fire in our wood-burning stove. And my mother did nearly all of the cooking. Meals of biscuits or corn bread, rice or fried potatoes, stew, pork chops or fried chicken, and greens were her specialties.

Summer and winter, my mother was invariably the first to rise in the household. In summer with no fire to attend to, she began the day by
starting the preparation for breakfast. The sound of rattling pots was our alarm clock, followed shortly by the sound of my father sharpening the hoes for the day’s work in the fields. “You all get up, now. It’s almost seven,” she cried out at 6:35. Following breakfast my mother gathered us and we trekked to whatever field we were working, often on foot. (My father worked with the tractor and looked after the cattle.) Midday, we broke. My mother prepared the noon meal. We returned to often oppressive heat of the cotton or peanut patch for an afternoon of work. We ate a light meal at about sunset, washed up, and shortly thereafter fell into bed exhausted. My mother and her children kept this routine every summer until only I and my mother were left to do the “chopping.”

My mother regularly coordinated meals, field work, and home chores. In any given year, the household included as many as eight of the thirteen children. When my parents learned that an elderly man once married to my father’s aunt had again been widowed, they brought him into the household. At the age of four, I could not understand how Charley Arvier, who spoke a kind of Cajun French and broken English with a Louisiana accent, was related to me. Yet we called him Uncle Charley, and he lived with us as part of the family until he died eight years later. She did this without any fanfare or self-consciousness. This was simply a part of her routine. As an adult I marvel at it.

My father’s personality is just as strong as my mother’s. Despite their differences in interests and background, as a young man my father, with his broad smile, smooth brown skin, and curly black hair, must have been quite appealing to her. He was handsome (though “Handsome” was the nickname that went to his older brother, Ralph), energetic, and athletic. And he probably served as an antidote to the sobriety of the Elliott family. Where my mother was shy and reserved, my father was always outgoing and charming. Still, they were never an odd couple so much as a matched set.

My father loved to tease, to make us laugh, and to laugh at his own jokes even when others did not. I recall once having incurred my father’s wrath. Late at night, when my mother was away, I was whining about having to share my bed with two visiting nieces and nephews, having
been used to sleeping only with my sister. My father took objection to being kept up past his bedtime to listen to my protest. I learned then that my father had his limits too. His one demand of us as small children was that we be quiet. “You all cut out that noise,” he would bellow in the evenings. Daddy still has great charm about him and the ability to relax and feel at home in almost anyone’s company. Yet he can also be detached and reserved. Like my mother, he is a product of his time—a time when fathers were not necessarily expected to be emotionally available twenty-four hours a day.

My earliest clear memory of him is watching him getting ready to go to the Sunday night musicals where he would sing tenor with his quartet, the Oklahoma Spirituals. Though as a farmer he was in the home much of the day, he did not work alongside us in the fields. He drove the tractors and tended the cows. On Sunday, however, we were all together. He would shave his face of all but his thick mustache and slick back his hair with Murray’s pomade. The orange tin of hairdressing was for his exclusive use. In the background, Negro spirituals played on the radio broadcast from a station in Muskogee. “Be quiet so I can hear the announcements,” my father commanded. The “memory lane” segment was a “must hear” for him. The announcer told who had died that week and which of the black mortuaries “has the body.” All the children were dressed, heeding our mother’s admonition to sit quietly. My mother, having concluded her responsibility to us, was also finished with her routine. But my father was a different story. He regularly finished his routine as the rest of the family waited, fully dressed. No one dared urge him to quicken his pace. We’d just wait patiently for him to enter the living room and ask of those gathered, “Are you all waiting for me?” My mother never learned to drive a car. Had she mastered this skill, I suspect that we would have waited at church for my father’s arrival.

My father’s most memorable church activity was his singing. I often anticipated hearing him sing “Pass Me Not O Gentle Savior” in his untrained falsetto voice. This voice was inviting and pleasant yet so unlike his speaking voice, it seemed completely unreal. As a child, I could not understand how my father’s gravelly speaking voice could turn to a
high-pitched singing voice. By the same token, my achievements at school were a source of pride and delight for my father. Though he expected me to do well in school, he never understood my attachment to learning. And I am certain that he never saw the significance of it for my future. I was, after all, always his “baby girl.”