Читать книгу Passionate for Justice - Catherine Meeks - Страница 10
ОглавлениеNearly twenty years ago, leading a class on Ida B. Wells at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, Catherine’s students surprised her by noting that Wells reminded them of her. This chapter is a comparative reflection from Catherine.
I begin by acknowledging that there was little in my early life designed to help me believe that I could tell the truth either freely or otherwise. My early life, as a little African American girl in rural Arkansas, taught me to be quiet. The primary lessons came from living with my illiterate sharecropping father, who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, and my mother, who graduated from college the year that I turned eighteen. My father’s condition was caused by the premature death of my twelve-yearold brother who died because he was black and poor and could not get medical care from the local hospital.
Though my brother had died before I was born, I heard my father talk about him almost every day. He told us many times how the local hospital had informed him that he should take my brother, Garland, to the charity hospital in Shreveport, Louisiana, which was seventy-five miles from our home since my parents did not have money and the hospital did not treat African Americans anyway. By the time my father managed to obtain transportation for them, Garland was far too sick to be saved. He died in the hospital at age twelve.
There was more stress and distress in our household than was good for any of us. I did not understand what caused it until years later when I began to realize how my father’s experience as a disempowered illiterate black man in America framed his life. During my early years I thought that he was simply difficult to live with and I had to find a way to escape.
So at the early age of eight I began to practice ways to cope. One of the ways was to rise early before almost everyone in my family and go out to sit on the backdoor steps and watch the world wake up as the sun rose. There were times when I was puzzled about what motivated me to do this, but I am aware now that my effort to find ways to cope with a household that made me feel that escape was necessary helped me to form that habit. In addition to that, I believe that there was a deep inquiring mind and spirit in my eight-year-old body that was being nurtured onto a lifetime path of inquiring about the way to liberation. As an adult, I wonder what gave me this trait and my best analysis tells me that it was simply grace that prodded me and helped me to learn to cope in a world that would be difficult for many years to come.
Perhaps it is my inquiring mind and willingness to be different that put me on the path that would cross the one that Ida B. Wells was traveling. Though I did not meet her until I was in my early forties and she was born eighty-four years earlier than I was, there is so much that we share, and as I continue to live, the common threads become even more apparent to me. My soul resonates with her and the ways in which she chose to stand in the world.
Unlike Wells, I did not lose both of my parents, though I lost my father when I was sixteen. My mother was present and was gainfully employed, but still I assumed a great amount of responsibility in our household and felt that I had to help my mother as much as possible. This sense of responsibility led me to seek employment as a youngster, but the jobs never paid more than $3.00 per day. My jobs were cleaning houses for white women, babysitting, and working in a hotel as a short order cook in the hotel kitchen.
Though I was not compelled as Wells had been at sixteen to lie about my age so I could get a job in order to take care of younger siblings, the small amounts of money that I made did help my mother to make ends meet as she worked to take care of the four of us on a meager Arkansas teacher’s salary. My mother’s resourcefulness helped me to learn the meaning of “making a way out of no way.”
Clearly, just like Wells, I learned a great deal from my parents, although it would be years before I would come to see that fact and to appreciate it. Just as Wells had learned to be independent from her father and to have a deep and abiding faith from her devout mother, I learned from mine. My mother taught me that education was one of the most valuable possessions I could ever gain. Daddy taught me to love the land. Though he was a sharecropper, he loved the land and would rise even before me and go out to walk all around the field to see what had happened to the crops during the night. His love for the land was instructive to me, helping me to understand the need to be grounded as I traveled through the landmine of segregation and other forces of oppression that were not poised in my favor.
I share with Wells an inner motivation that propels me forward to this day. Wells recalled that she does not know when she began to read; the process must have begun very early in her life. She left school at sixteen to go to work, yet she maintained her curious mind and the courage to follow it throughout her life as she fought against lynching, racism, women’s oppression, and poverty. The archetypal spirit of resistor grew in both of us as we walked along the paths presented to us. Of course, the walk was different because she was traveling in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and I in the twentieth and twenty-first, but the beauty of the human journey is that we can share so much even though separated by a set of major differences.
When Wells was thrown from the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad ladies car because she was not white, though she had the proper ticket for that car, she had the courage to sue the railroad. She won the lawsuit initially but lost on appeal. This reminds me of my mother and several other teachers in her small school in Wheatley, Arkansas, who were fired after the school integrated, because the white people did not want to have the black teachers in the school. My mother and that courageous group of middle-age African American colleagues, having finally found their voices, sued the district. They won the lawsuit. They were surprised. Their example of resistance resonated with me as did Wells’s as I encountered opportunities to resist.
My earliest act of resistance came when I was a teenager and would be taken to the local doctor who had a separate waiting room for us in a dimly lit hallway while his white customers had a well-lit comfortable waiting room. I would refuse to sit in the space assigned to us. There was something in my soul that made me choose standing to sitting. It was a quiet protest, but I knew what I was doing, and it was intentional. My mother would have worried if she had known that I was resisting injustice. She simply thought I did not want to sit down. We did not talk about race and we certainly did not talk about resisting racism.
While race was a major factor in our daily lives, we did not talk about it beyond the survival instructions that were given to us about how to behave around white people. We were clear that there was a place assigned for us and that we had to be careful to stay in it. As I think back on it now, I understood that white people were dangerous. We lived on the property of a white man and we worked in his fields; we bought food from his store and I understood that he had a certain type of power in our lives. I did not really understand what it was except it was clear to me that we were not able to do whatever we wished. My parents did not talk about this limitation, but it was clearly present. White people were not a part of my life in a positive manner; it would not have crossed my mind to imagine being a friend to a white person.
The boundaries were clearly drawn, and we always knew to stay within them. In addition to the limits that I sensed, there was a clear sense of the white people holding the keys to our wellbeing. They owned everything that we needed to have: food, clothing, shoes, and any other necessity. Our challenge was to determine how to attain those goods when there was little or no money—often it was not easy to obtain basics. There were many times when we did not have shoes for the beginning of the school year because there was no money to pay for them and they were not sold in the store belonging to our landowner. The landowner happily sold us food and whatever else he had available on credit and those things were to be paid for when the crops were harvested.
It was this practice that made sharecropping nothing more than glorified slavery. By the time a sharecropper shopped from one harvest season to the next, there was always a huge bill to be paid. In my dad’s case, the bill usually took just about all the proceeds earned from the year’s cotton crop and he had to begin the next year with credit again. This cycle allows the landowner to keep the sharecropper in his debt with little chance to move to any type of economic stability. I watched my father go through this cycle year after year until he finally died of a stroke, which I believe was caused by years of oppression and the weight of the grief from losing my brother.
It was not until I went to college that I encountered four white people who took me into their hearts in a way that made it possible for me to see them as people that I could care about. They helped me to realize that loving a white person was possible. They loved me and related to me as a human being who deserved to be cared about. They stood up for me and other students of African descent when there was a crisis created on our campus by a grave act of injustice.
The act was the killing of a fifteen-year-old boy from our neighborhood by the campus security guard. It was murder and the person who did it was not held accountable. Our campus was filled with great turmoil around the injustice of the matter and the way in which the college worked to return to a sense of normalcy as quickly as possible. It was amid this turmoil that I caught a glimpse of their authentic and deep desire to do what was right for us as students of African descent, which I had never seen expressed by a white person at any time before. It was their honesty and willingness to risk their place in the white world for what they believed to be right for us that opened my eyes to the possibility of a relationship with a white person.
The door of my heart opened and allowed them to enter. It was the first time that I took the chance on letting a white person into the sacred space of my heart and it had been made possible because of their open hearts. Those relationships have lasted for over fifty years and helped me to be able to move along the path that my life needed to take me in my work of resistance to oppression and the pursuit of liberation.
Although I did not discover Wells until much later in my life, I think that my soul was always searching for her kindred spirit as a sister of resistance. When I left Brinkley, Arkansas, I was eighteen years old and had only been to Memphis, Tennessee, to visit the zoo and to Louisiana because one of my older sisters lived there. My older brothers lived in California and I began daydreaming about going to college there in my teenage years. At eighteen, I boarded a Greyhound bus and headed to Compton, California. I made the declaration that I was leaving the South with no plans to ever return in this lifetime.
Unlike Wells, I had the opportunity to leave the South because I chose to do so; she left because of threats to her life. Through her writing she made whites so angry that they burned down her newspaper office in Memphis and placed a bounty on her head. Yet despite this, she would come back to the South because she was more concerned about being true to herself than choosing the safe path. The realization of a similar spirit in myself was quite surprising.
This spirit had accompanied me along my path for longer than I knew, but the circumstances of my life allowed it to be mostly dormant. It was not until I went to college that I was given the opportunity to take a stand for justice in situations that would be challenging on many levels. My learned habit of keeping silent was challenged by the struggles for liberation that I had to navigate as a young African American woman in college.
As I was being asked to fight for the liberty of myself and for others, some of those challenges came too early in my life because I was not sure about my identity as a person. It was a terrifying experience. I wish that I had known Ida B. Wells before I had to navigate my way through some of those times.
Wells models what it means to have an authentic self. I have always longed to be an authentic person. Though I did not begin to articulate the “Who am I?” query until I was in college, the question was being asked at some level in my heart many years before. In the early years of her life, Wells seemed to ponder that question quite vigorously as she worked her way through the challenges of relationships with men and other women. She struggled with money in those early years as well. While it is tempting when reading her to simply resist her lament about all her struggles, especially those around money and buying things, my sense of honesty leads me to look at my own struggles and to take her seriously. She is described as “sometimes sick or cold, paying bills, mounting debts, fighting slander and fighting internal demons—a quick temper and sharp tongue—that bring on occasional bouts of loneliness and feelings of alienation from others.” She describes herself at those times as “just drifting along.”1 She is wounded by some of the things that are said about her by a few young men who accuse her of high-handedness in her courtships, and she says of them, “[They] have formed themselves in a league against a defenseless girl.” She goes on to speak about her financial hardship again, “[M]y system is not in good order and I cannot consult a physician till I get some money. If I once get out of debt I hope that this lesson will be remembered and profited by: to think I am in debt more than one month’s salary and if anything should happen I have not enough money coming to me to cancel my expenses.”2 This struggle with finances and the attitudes of some men resonates with my experience as well.
I believe that there is great value in being able to learn from the struggles of a giant warrior woman such as Wells and to spend time reflecting upon the ways in which one’s life can intersect with such a person. This type of reflection can be helpful in terms of providing encouragement for staying faithful to the call to resist oppression and to help relieve the projection of perfection that often blinds us to the reality of the heroine’s humanity.
Thus, reading Wells’s Memphis Diary and hearing of some of the conflicts that she had with men who did not seem to understand the type of person that she was and who did not seem to be worthy of her true affection is affirming. I share this life experience with her.
Boys did not like me because I was usually excelling in school, running for an office that no girl had stood for before or staying to myself so that I did not have to talk to them. While this was true in high school, it did not change much in college. There were a handful of men that I found attractive at a distance, but scrutiny always left me wondering what I saw in them in the first place. In addition to that, most of them were never interested in the things that I found to be crucial.
Wells’s shopping habits were not exactly like mine, though I never had enough money, I tended simply to do without things because there was no way to obtain them and I did not have any sources of credit. Survival was always uppermost in my mind, though that same kind of energy that pushed me to resist the segregated waiting room and to rise before sunrise pushed me forward.
When I think about that era in my life and read about a similar time for Wells, I am reminded of this comment from Nobel Prize–winning author Toni Morrison. She said, “[The black woman] had nothing to fall back on; not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality, she may very well have invented herself.”3 In the circle of psychology, this process of self-invention would mostly likely be described as individuation. It is the process of separating oneself from others and becoming who you are going to be in the world. Wells did this by forging a path that was different than most other young women in her age group. She was independent, working, taking care of siblings, moving into activism, speaking up about things such as lynching and women’s rights when others were choosing silence.
My effort at self-invention began as I boarded a Greyhound bus for California at age eighteen to go to college. I had a solid internal core that was pointed toward self-invention and liberation even though I did not know it. I was not sure what I was going to do and how I was going to become the person that I was put on the earth to become. But it is only in rare cases where anyone sees the bigger picture of their life. Generally, it is in the process of reflection that the path begins to become clarified. So, in Wells’s case, she simply kept putting one foot in front of the other. She kept standing up for what was right. She kept speaking out and she kept writing. She was honest about her longings for stability and an easier life, but she stayed faithful to her life as it unfolded.
It was her faithfulness that made her someone that history cannot erase. Of course, she had no clues about what her legacy would be in those early years when she was in the process of becoming the authentic person that she was put on the earth to become. She simply kept moving forward. This path is so familiar to me because I did not know that I would answer justice’s call and stand up to oppressors as I moved through my life as a student and later as a more mature adult. I had no idea that each time I resisted that I would be called to resist again and that I would do it. I did not know that getting deeper into my faith journey would be a call to more resistance. No one told me what I was getting into and I did not really have any markers to show me the way that the path would unfold.
Clearly the resisting was not as dangerous for me as it was for Wells when our lives are reflected upon, but when one is living out their call, there is no way to make such comparisons and they are not always helpful. This is true simply because when the unchartered path is being followed, it does not seem safe and it is never clear what the outcome might be. While Wells knew that the white folks who put a bounty on her head would be happy to see her dead, she had no way to know whether she would be kept safe.
I remember when that child was killed on our campus, an army of police were called out to handle us, the student protestors. We knew that they could kill us, but we had no way to know whether they would. For some reason we were not killed, just as Wells was not killed. All of us had some reason to be left on this earth and we had no clue what it was on the days that our lives were spared. But it did not matter because we had said yes at the deep core of ourselves and there was no turning back.
Wells did not return to Memphis after learning that her office had been burned. I left Los Angeles after being confronted by police in the last place I had ever expected to see a police officer: on my college campus while marching for justice for a fifteenyear-old boy who was murdered. I moved to Georgia of all places. It surprised me that I wanted to go back to the South, the place that I had left eight years earlier vowing never to return.
It is easy to understand that Wells needed to move away from the South after having her newspaper office burned down and having large bounties placed on her head. It is harder to understand why she would ever come back, and as I reflect upon that question, I must think about why I came back myself.
