Chicken Soup for the African American Woman's Soul (2 page)

I
am where I am because of the bridges that
I crossed. Sojourner Truth was a bridge.
Harriet Tubman was a bridge. Ida B. Wells
was a bridge. Madame C. J. Walker was a
bridge. Fannie Lou Hamer was a bridge. . . .

Oprah Winfrey

A Line in the Sand

O
n my underground railroad, I never ran my
n train off the track and I never lost a passenger.

Harriet Tubman

Blue. Once the paint was blue. Weathered, sun tarnished, the house slumped on the sand in the clearing. The door stood open, and though the few windows were without glass, it was dark inside. A roof of rusted tin shaded the front porch and steps, never painted. A shabby cane chair, a broken box of firewood, that's all there was.

She was as weathered as her home, dressed in gray, the blouse darker, but still gray. Gray hair was pulled severely back from her face. Her skirt stopped at bare ankles and cracked, worn feet as she stood on the hot sand and watched me trudge up the road.

The same sand pulled at my low-heeled white shoes making each step a commitment. The runs in my nylons and scratches on my legs were witness to an encounter with a raspberry bush. I'd read books about the sun searing the skin on the desert. Not here. The clouds formed a lid on the pot I'd simmered in since June. Sweat oozed persistently between my breasts, under my arms, down my thighs. Many hand washings had not released a moldy whisper from my cotton dress, which glued itself to my damp body. I yearned to be dry.

What was she thinking as she watched me? White folks drive up in cars; they don't walk up to the house. She went to church regularly, and perhaps she guessed who I was. When I reached her, her eyes were veiled, but not cold. She didn't trust me, but she wasn't locking me out.

“Evenin', Mrs. Crawford?” I asked.

“Evenin',” she answered, her voice almost a whisper as she looked at her feet. She wasn't going to help me.

“My name is Sherie Holbrook, and I am here registering voters for Martin Luther King.”

I had said the magic words,
Martin Luther King
, and she looked up at me quickly and then down.

“We're talking to people about going to the courthouse to register to vote. Have you registered yet?” I wished she would offer me a glass of water.

The soft voice answered, “Yes, ma'am.” I'm sure she was thinking that perhaps I would go away now.

I didn't believe her. I had been taught to say exuberantly, “Good for you. So few people have. Do you have your registration card?”

“Yes, ma'am.” She turned toward the house, limping slightly as she walked up groaning steps and disappeared into the darkness. Time went by. I thought she had decided not to return. Sometimes, that's what folks did. They just disappeared so they wouldn't have to explain they were terrified to vote.

This was the summer of 1965, and waves of change were crashing against shoals of tradition across the American South. The American Negro demanded freedom and the rights that freedom bestows, and they were determined to get that freedom now! For many, the price for that freedom was costly. Some of the people we met told us that Negro votes were not counted, so there was no reason to vote. They knew that some people who resisted the system lost their jobs, like Rosa and Raymond Parks when she refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white man. Some relied on surplus food to feed large families when the income from chopping cotton fell short.

With the mere flourish of a pen, this source of sustenance could disappear. There were beatings, lynchings, bombings and burnings. Just having us in the community could have lethal consequences, as it had in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where churches were burned and three civil rights workers disappeared for over a year before their tortured bodies were found buried in an earthen dam. In Birmingham, Alabama, a church was bombed, and four little girls in Sunday school were sacrificed. We represented change, but we also represented danger, and eventually we would leave, and the community would be left with the Ku Klux Klan, the White Citizens' Council and politicians who owed their success to stopping this change at any cost. Terrorism wasn't shipped from afar; it was homegrown and individually specific.

Now I brought that danger into her dooryard. Mrs.

Crawford had no job, and her husband could not be fired.

He had died long ago. She had no children who could be hurt. They had moved north for jobs in the cities. Her house was all she had, and she knew it could easily be burned to the ground. That's what happened to her church when the “Civil Right” people came and held their mass meetings there.

Her hands were empty except for calluses when she reappeared. She watched the ground as she came closer.

“Cain't find it,” she mumbled an apology.

“But you don't need it.” I didn't want her to get away.

“You can help us anyway because you have registered to vote.” She glanced up at me for a second.

“On next Monday, we are taking a bus of people down to Monck's Corner to register. If you come with us, you can help them understand how important voting is, and they will see that you have done it.”

“Yes, ma'am. I'll come,” she said softly.

“We are meeting at Redeemer Church at 10:00 A.M.,” I insisted.

“Yes, ma'am,” was all she said.

Mrs. Crawford was not there as the old, faded green bus crunched across the church parking lot and rested before the crowd of quiet people. The importance of the occasion was clear that sultry morning: Sunday dresses and suits, fancy hats with feathers and tulle, polished shoes, pocketbooks. They were too quiet, too afraid, but they were there. They deserved more. They deserved to celebrate their courage! Florence began to sing, “Oh, Freedom. Oh, Freedom. Oh, Freedom over me.” The crowd began to sing tentatively.

We stepped up the tempo of the singing with “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize.” Voices committed a bit more.With “Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round” everyone got on the bus, and it slowly whined out onto the road.

Inside the bus fans fluttered like butterflies to beat back the heat. Many had pictures of Martin Luther King on them, others the image of Jesus. Someone else saw her first, walking slowly toward the church, waving her handkerchief. The bus creaked to a stop, and Mrs. Crawford stepped up.

She came down the aisle to the empty seat next to me and smiled as she met my eyes.

“Everyone! We're so lucky. Mrs. Crawford has already registered to vote, and she has come to answer any questions about doing it.” Applause. We went on singing.

She sat quietly next to me in her broad-brimmed straw hat. Five miles went by, and then she whispered, “Chile, I ain't never registered.”

I whispered back, “But you will today.”

“But I cain't read or write.”

“I'll teach you. You just need to sign your name.”

“I cain't.”

“We have time. I'll show you.”

I took a pencil from my purse and turned to the back of the map of Berkeley County. I slowly wrote Rebecca Crawford. It was too much; I could tell as a furrow tightened between her eyes, and her gaze dropped to her lap.

“Wait. Let's start one letter at a time. Here, write over the top of this letter
R
.” I wrote the
R
and handed her the pencil and paper. Awkwardly, she traced the letter over and over. “Now, write the
R
fresh here below.” Her hand shook as she tried. I couldn't recognize the letter, and we started again.

Fifteen miles is not very far when you're trying to overcome 250 years of defeat. We registered 150 people that day, but Rebecca Crawford was not one of them. She asked me to come and teach her, so she could “regster” next time. I promised I would.

More than a month went by. As much as I remembered my promise, my other responsibilities kept me away. I begged our project director for some time to visit her.

The road was as long and as hot as before. Far ahead, I could see someone moving toward me. I recognized the straw hat first, then a basket on her arm and finally that beaming, delighted face.

“It's you!” She set down her basket in the middle of the road and raised her arms to heaven in thanks. I shook her hand and smiled back into her eyes. Before I could say anything, she said, “Chile, I been wonderin' where you was.

Sunday I prayed that you come and learnme howtowrite.”

I explained I had been busy trying to get other folks to register.

“When I gots up this mornin' I was feeling something extra good was gonna happen today. I cleaned my house real good. I felt so grand I come on down the road. I saw you, and I knew what that good was. Look what I cain do.”

She bent down and picked up a stick. With a steady hand she wrote Rebecca slowly and deliberately in the sand.

She was right, good things were coming, but they were much bigger than me.

Sherie Labedis

Legacy

A
nd so our mothers and grandmothers have,
more often than not anonymously, handed on
the creative spark, the seed of the flower they
themselves never hoped to see —or like a sealed
letter they could not plainly read.

Alice Walker

Somehow, it just didn't feel right. Maybe it was the way that I was brought up, but it was hard for me to say it. Although I felt blessed and honored to have the opportunity, I just had a hard time saying aloud that I was “a graduate student at Harvard University.” After all,
I
know good and well that I'm just a country girl from Sweet-water, Tennessee, who never saw herself as the Ivy League type, but what impression did that title give people who didn't know me?

I was not alone in this dilemma. Many of my black and Latino colleagues in the Graduate School of Education felt the same way. Several of us had to admit that when we told people we were going to graduate school and they asked where, we answered evasively, “Uh, Boston.” It wasn't that we were embarrassed about being smart or weren't proud to be there; it was just that the perception people have of “Hah-vahd,” conjured up images of privilege and snobbery. Many of us were first–generation college graduates from lower to middle-class families, and most of us were there because we wanted to give back something of educational value to the underserved students of color in America's schools. We actually discussed more than once whether going to Harvard was an asset or liability when our goal was to return to the neighborhoods we came from, “keep it real,” and be taken seriously by regular folks. Would we build a “barrier of bourgeoisie” by having a Harvard degree?

Very quickly it was June and graduation day arrived. An incredibly rich year of reading, writing and discussing educational issues had flown by, and I was standing outside in a processional line with my dorm mates and new friends-so-close-we-were-almost-family from the Black Student Union. I sat dazed in my cap and gown on the same lawn where I'd seen Nelson Mandela receive an honorary degree back in September. I sat in a row of brown faces on the lawn with its giant oak trees that had been there since 1636 and tried to comprehend what in the world I was doing there. While the platform dignitaries waxed eloquent, it felt surreal. I snapped back to reality when it was Hazel's turn to take the platform. Hazel Trice Edney, graduating from the Kennedy School of Government, was my friend from the dorm and one of the sharpest sisters I have ever met. She had won the speech contest and was believed to be the first African American woman ever to give the graduate student address at a Harvard graduation. Hazel from Louisa, Virginia, who had grown up in a home with no indoor plumbing and became a single welfare mother at age fifteen, had managed to earn her college degree and risen through journalism in the black press, covering politicians like Governor L. Douglas Wilder. She would soon start a Congressional fellowship in Washington, D.C., in the office of Senator Edward Kennedy. Her delivery of the speech was flawless, and we were all proud to know her.

Suddenly, listening to Hazel, proudly watching her represent all of us, it hit me. This wasn't about me. I was there as a representative. I looked up into the branches of the centuries-old trees and thought about what they would have looked like back in 1636. I thought about where my ancestors would have been in 1636 . . . 1736 . . . 1836 . . . even 1936, and how remote the possibility seemed that any of their daughters would ever be at Harvard. I thought about Grandma Mildred, valedictorian of her Cook High class with her career options so limited. No, this degree was not about me at all. This was about standing on the shoulders of my black grandmothers who scrubbed floors and cared for babies—both theirs and others'. Black women whose potential went untapped and whose intelligence was so long ignored. Women whose great minds could have been idle, except they rerouted genius, pouring it into rearing the next generation. This degree was for my grandma, who was a farmer's wife and a housekeeper, but never just that, like so many black women seen only as the shadow domestic by the outside world but who stood out as pillars of dignity in their own communities. This degree was dedicated to a woman who had to sacrifice many of her personal dreams as a young woman, but made sure all eight of her children had a respect for education and would ascend to the level of their own potential. It was dedicated to a woman who passed on heritage to her numerous grandchildren with old
Ebony
and
Jet
magazines, her gardens and recipes, family stories and photo albums. I was here because she could not be, but had the self-respect and insight to pass something significant on to her offspring.