In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens Read Free Page A

Joplin’s music lives! We care because we know this: the life we save is our own.
    *Reissued by the University of Illinois Press, 1979.
    1976

THE BLACK WRITER AND THE SOUTHERN EXPERIENCE
    M Y MOTHER TELLS of an incident that happened to her in the thirties during the Depression. She and my father lived in a small Georgia town and had half a dozen children. They were sharecroppers, and food, especially flour, was almost impossible to obtain. To get flour, which was distributed by the Red Cross, one had to submit vouchers signed by a local official. On the day my mother was to go into town for flour she received a large box of clothes from one of my aunts who was living in the North. The clothes were in good condition, though well worn, and my mother needed a dress, so she immediately put on one of those from the box and wore it into town. When she reached the distribution center and presented her voucher she was confronted by a white woman who looked her up and down with marked anger and envy.
    â€œWhat’d you come up here for?” the woman asked.
    â€œFor some flour,” said my mother, presenting her voucher.
    â€œHumph,” said the woman, looking at her more closely and with unconcealed fury. “Anybody dressed up as good as you don’t need to come here begging for food.”
    â€œI ain’t begging,” said my mother; “the government is giving away flour to those that need it, and I need it. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t. And these clothes I’m wearing was given to me.” But the woman had already turned to the next person in line, saying over her shoulder to the white man who was behind the counter with her, “The gall of niggers coming in here dressed better than me!” This thought seemed to make her angrier still, and my mother, pulling three of her small children behind her and crying from humiliation, walked sadly back into the street.
    â€œWhat did you and Daddy do for flour that winter?” I asked my mother.
    â€œWell,” 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