Stand Up Straight and Sing! (4 page)

Still, being black and a woman and a mother had its limitations. It was not really an option for most women, no matter their skin color, to work full-time, willingly, and raise children, and this was true for her. So she relinquished teaching for the joy of raising and teaching her own family. Fortunately for her, my father was a determined provider. He was also a man who saw himself absolutely as the head of our household. His job as a manager at the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company’s branch office in Augusta, and his Saturday evenings spent with other deacons from our church looking after the grooming of the locals in our community barbershop, made it somewhat easier for my mother to be at home, pouring her love of books and words directly into my siblings and me.

She spent an incredible amount of time with us—nurturing, disciplining, teaching, encouraging, loving. By the time we were four years old or so, we all knew how to read, thanks to my mother, who employed rhythm and movement to help us learn how to spell and understand language. This was long before we were calling this kind of thing rap or hip-hop, mind you. To this day, I still spell
Mississippi
in the rhythmic way my mother taught me. With a nod to my mother’s efforts, I entered first grade only to find myself bored silly with my teacher and fellow students. I remember coming home from school one day, absolutely indignant after long hours dealing with youngsters who could not so much as recite their ABCs, let alone read a book. “Mother, do you know that those children don’t know how to read?” I asked, exasperated. In my very young mind, any child in first grade who did not know his ABCs and was not reading books had wasted five good years of learning. Little did I know that what I had at home—a mother who saw bigger things for me and who had, too, the ability to pour that foundation of knowledge into me with sure intensity—was something quite special.

It was during the summertime that other children got to experience the wonder that was Janie Norman, the teacher, in their own lives. She volunteered as an instructor at Vacation Bible School, with a special interest in what she used to call her “juniors”—what we know today as middle-schoolers, or students between the ages of eleven and fourteen. She was committed to the idea of grabbing hold of children in that particular age group, just when their hormones are going crazy and they stop being lap children and do not want to be cuddled so much in public. Yet they are not as grown-up as they like to think and still need that cuddle, though they hesitate to ask for help because they don’t want to seem like babies. Others might compare teaching this age group to running toward a wildfire. But Mother truly believed that if you could get juniors, particularly the girls, to develop a sense of themselves, their own worth and that of their bodies—specifically, that they have the right to all that the world has to offer—that they would have this understanding forever. She knew, too, that there was only a relatively small window of time in which to reach this age group, to fuss and advise and answer questions and really help them gain that sense of their complete selves, before they found themselves burdened with trying to fix those parts of themselves they could not accept or understand, for the rest of their lives. I thank my mother for that gift—for showing me the importance and beauty of self-worth.

PRACTICING ONE’S SENSE
of oneself outside the home, though, could prove challenging, since speaking one’s mind and railing against the expected path, if you were a girl, was not really acceptable, not really the thing to do. Indeed, on the other side of our front door, girls and women were supposed to accept the limitations placed on them by an inflexible society, and they were expected to make the best of it. This much was made clear by the time I was thirteen and not only old enough, smart enough, and bold enough to have an opinion, but foolish enough to actually express it out loud. It was my home economics teacher, Ms. Reynolds, who was the focus of my complaint. School schedules and rules notwithstanding, I simply did not understand why, when I finally made it to middle school, there was such a rigorous effort by the grownups in my life to guide my thoughts and actions, particularly where this teacher and the course that she taught were concerned. Our differing points of view were apparent almost as soon as my body connected with the little wooden desks in her home economics class—around the same moment she announced that we girls were going to learn how to prepare meals and sew the perfect stitch, so that later in life we could be useful, or some such. Well, I had sense enough to keep my opinions about these things to myself during class; after all, I was not a difficult child or a revolutionary or anything like that. But I did allow myself to have a word with my teacher after class, out of earshot of my classmates, to let her know that I was not in the least interested in learning how to sew and cook. “What I would prefer to do is take shop,” I said simply. “I would like to learn how to make a table. Could you arrange that, please?”

There was method to my madness. I didn’t just want to get out of home economics; learning how to make a table seemed like fun. My father fancied himself a weekend carpenter and I would watch him with his nails and his hammer and his insistence that he was going to build something and make it work. I was impressed by it all, even if my father seldom had time to complete the numerous projects he began. Often, it would end with his calling in another deacon from the church to help finish whatever it was that he had started. But really, there was a joy he had when he swung that hammer, no matter to whom the credit of completion was awarded. I wanted to experience that—much more so than I wanted to take time to study something that I imagined I would “pick up” in life somewhere along the way.

I thought my request was quite simple. But for dear Ms. Reynolds, a girl who wanted to bend the rules was quite complex—much too complex, surely, for her taste and sensibility. “Girls,” she responded, “do not take shop.”

For her, that was the end of the discussion. For me, it was the beginning of my own little one-girl war against home economics and the teacher who insisted I learn to prepare meals and sew. The battlefield was the classroom, where I made a point of showing up to class and reading while Ms. Reynolds taught my fellow students the art of “setting the perfect table” or some other important (to her) lesson. It did not take long for me to find myself in the principal’s office.

Now, the sight of a Norman child in the principal’s office did not usually signal trouble. Mr. Reese, the principal, was my father’s good friend and so all of us knew him well. He took great joy in seeing us, good students who had respect for our elders, who loved school and had the ability to participate in school activities and still get good grades. This, however, was not a friendly visit. As you can imagine, Mr. Reese was surprised to find out that I had been sent to his office by one of my teachers. Explaining why I was there and making my request to switch from home economics to shop class only made matters worse. “Oh, we can’t do that,” Mr. Reese said confidently. “There are only boys in the class.”

“Oh, I’ll be fine,” I said matter-of-factly, thinking he was just concerned that I would be uncomfortable in a classroom full of boys. “I have brothers. Uncles. Cousins. I’m surrounded by boys.”

Let’s just say Mr. Reese and I did not see eye to eye. My parents were summoned to the school to assist in my getting it through my head that table making was for male students and learning to sew was the province of girls and that I would remain in home economics because this was as it should be. And so I stayed. But I did my best to avoid any heavy lifting of sewing needles, fabric, spatulas, pots and pans, or anything else that had to do with housekeeping. And my mother was my willing accomplice. She even helped me complete one of my sewing assignments—the one in which I had to make my own apron. It was a project I started in class but had neither the interest nor the inclination to spend days on something that I knew my mother could complete in all of about fifteen minutes. So I took my half-sewn apron home with me one day. My mother sewed it all up in, quite literally, minutes, and I took it back to school and turned it in on time.

Ms. Reynolds was not fooled. “This stitch didn’t come from our sewing machines,” she said, holding the apron up to the light.

“No, it did not,” I said without hesitation. “My mother did it. It is finished.”

Of course, this spelled more trouble for me.

The absolute last straw for me was the day Ms. Reynolds announced that we were going to learn how to prepare breakfast and set a breakfast table and then let the boys come into the home economics class and enjoy the fruits of our labor. Now, to understand how insulting this was to my young being, you must first digest how I felt about boys at this time in my young life: I thought they should have their own planet. I did not see why they needed to be here, spoiling all the fun. My brothers and male cousins and their friends had a habit of “borrowing” my things and then not knowing where they were when I asked to have them back. I may have envied them their games and their freedoms and, yes, their shop class, but boys themselves, not very much. It would take only a very short time for my feelings toward them to change, however. But I interpreted Ms. Reynolds’s lesson plan as making the girls subservient to the boys in our class and I did not want any part of that.

I did not say this out loud, though. Instead, I asked to arrange the flowers for the breakfast tables. I have always loved flowers—big, bountiful blooms like the ones that grew on the fruit trees in our backyard and the rosebushes so beloved by my mother and our next-door neighbor, Miss Daisy, and in the fields on my grandparents’ farm. Flower arrangements were fun for me and I was happy to do this, but my refusal to participate in the cooking part of the breakfast event did not endear myself to the home economics teacher.

This landed me back in the principal’s office. And once again, my parents were summoned as well.

“Little Norman,” Mr. Reese scolded, “this kind of behavior is going to bring your grade average down. You don’t want to do that.”

“I do not want to do that,” I agreed.

The lecture was never ending, and my parents were none too pleased with it all. Yet when that meeting with Mr. Reese was over and my parents were leaving, my mother took my hand into hers, squeezed it, and said, ever so quietly, “Good for you.”

JANIE NORMAN DID
not raise me to take a back seat to anyone. However, as a girl child there were restrictions that drew clear distinctions between the freedoms my brothers and their friends enjoyed that were not extended to me. There was no staying out playing in the street after dark. No leaving the house without letting someone know where I was going. Girls needed protecting. My mother understood instinctively that, even in what we considered a safe community, no good came from letting a young girl roam about without her parents knowing exactly where she was, who she was with, and when her feet would cross the threshold of the front door and usher her into the warmth, comfort, and safety of her parents’ home. At age twelve or thirteen, one cannot see the fairness in the fact of a younger brother having more freedom than his big sister, but then, at such an age, one can also be completely unaware of the danger that lurks, or that gender has anything to do with it.

Still, despite the physical restrictions, my mother had the wherewithal to encourage me to be independent—to square my shoulders and know, really know, that I could do anything well if I put my mind to it. My siblings sometimes laugh about the “propaganda” we heard in the house at the time (we had learned that word and thought we were being clever in applying it to our parents’ disciplinary habits behind their backs). Their concern, of course, was firmly rooted in a specific place and time in the history of our nation, in the Deep South, where our people marched, bled, and soldiered their way through the civil rights movement. Every image of African Americans being run down with water hoses and chased by dogs brought long lectures from them about how each of us was born a child of the Creator and that we were just as good as anyone who breathes on this planet. I can still hear their voices, clear as a Sunday-morning church bell: “You may have to work twice as hard to show that you are as good. That is a fact of life,” they would say. “But you can do it. And you must. And you must always do your best. You must always show your best side.”

These lectures carried over into absolutely everything we did. “You must practice your piano lesson so that next time you can play better than you played the last time you were there.” “You must practice reciting that poem every day instead of waiting until the very last minute to learn it by heart.” Such things were said all the time. I thought otherwise because in my young mind, having to work twice as hard was simply unfair. The very idea of having to work harder than someone else in order to receive the same reward did not seem right to me. But I understood what my parents were saying on a practical level, and I knew that if this was what I had to do, then this was what I would do. It was a pleasure to make our parents happy; they rejoiced in good grades at school and in compliments from other adults who thought well of something that one of us managed to accomplish.

The civil rights of my people did not become linked to those of women, for me, until much later. There were just so many marvelous women in my own family, my community, the schools, my church, and our social clubs, seemingly unhampered from moving mountains and lifting their voices, that the connection between racism and sexism was not immediate. I admired, for example, the social studies teacher who had been a member of the Women’s Army Corps during the Korean War, and who was instrumental in making sure that we girls understood our womanhood and that it was something to be cherished and respected by our boyfriends. I did not consciously consider the importance of her presence in my life as a youngster, or that of all my amazing aunts. Understanding the groundbreaking work of the likes of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem would not come until later.