In Retrospect

The year,2012, is drawing to a close. It is now a matter of hours bdfore the countdown begins. Like all years, it has presented its challenges and bumps along the road and there have also been some interesting and surprising twists.

Out of the blue I was reconnected with a dear friend that I have probably not seen for thirty years. We formerly taught together in a northern Ohio city school Our Appalachian roots are similar except she grew up closer to the Virgina area of the Appalachia of my father's family. As a young woman, she lived not far from my paternal great-aunt and my maternal uncle and his family. Our friendship was formed because we were part of the community of Appalachian migrants. When you are far from home...and living in a society that is antagonistic to the intrinsic values of your "home" territory...the natural instinct is to find friendships with others who share those "home" values.

Sylvia and I shared adventures and friendship and for a time, a house. When my younger brother-in-law was shipped back from Vietnam to a west coast military hospital, he called one evening to report tht he was stateside and needed a care package....full of chocolate chip cookies. With our other housemate, we baked cookies and sent them....only to find out that when the other GI's in the ward smelled the package...they promptly opened the box, ate his cookies and left him the empty box and wrapping paper. I am sure the cussing from our end of the call probably shocked my brother-in-law but he was told that another package would be coming.

Off to the store we went. There would be a massive baking session that night after supper. We baked twice as many cookies as the first time. This time,we wrapped each batch in aluminum foil, packed the foil wrapped cookies in tissue paper`and plastic wrap, put the cookies in a huge paper grocery bag, put them in a box, sealed the box and next day, went down the street to the neighborhood post office. The package was delivered safely to the hospital ward...this time without being raided.

RANDOM RUNNING TOUGHTS

     A careful analysis of the world we live in is frightening, to say the least,  and maybe it always has been, I am not sure.   There was a time when I would feel perfectly safe getting up at three or four a.m., getting in my car and driving the three and a half miles to Walmart on my biweekly shopping trip to buy household supplies.  My unobtrusive 4 cylinder vehicle would be parked 20 to 25 feet from  the store’s only open door, my debit card was in my jeans pocket (I quit carrying any significant amount of cash years ago) and in I would go, grab a basket from the cart  corral, and begin amassing the needed purchases. You know…stuff like toothpaste, mouth wash, bath soap, Kleenex, laundry detergent, any extra school supplies my sons required and those extra large boxes of cereal….nothing extravagant.  I might take a few moments to look at the quick sale items for fancy tee shirts or sweat shirts in the fellows’  appropriate sizes (with 5 active growing sons, I always tried to keep a little ahead of the growth spurts and the “he wore my shirt to school argument” and the “I forgot to wash my clothes “ game).  Out of Walmart within less than an hour, I would duck through Walgreens or Krogers  for a weekly supply of milk and orange juice.  By 5:30, I would be home, unloading the car and making a bee line to the shower.  By 6:30 almost all of us had to be out of the house….me to work and my sons on their way to the school bus stop.  I needed to be off the hill before the bus runs started because of the 17 mile drive to work.

     I never thought about personal safety……after all we live in a somewhat sleepy small suburban town. Our house had a perfectly good alarm system one of whom just might be asleep in the passenger seat of my car…..a 12 year old lab mix…who loved riding in the car.   Her Belgian Shepherd mate and their offspring would be lying on the living room floor of the house peacefully sleeping…never waking fully unless a strange car (or human) came up our hill.  My traveling companion has now crossed the rainbow bridge and my sense of safety has literally vanished.  The fragility of black men’s existence confronts me every day…..on the internet…..on television….in casual daily life.    As the mother of sons…the grandmother of a adolescent male….the racist atmosphere being created by a certain political candidate and his supporters daily supports the unthinkable rhetoric of hate that in the last year has become permissible in American society.'

      A friend, an immigrant of Middle Eastern  descent….fears sending her young adult son to her own church…..her feeling  (and reasoning) is that he is safer attending church with his Christian father!  I want to tell her she is wrong…but I can’t…..because my fear is that she is right.    My adult son….driving his car in the town he has called home for more than 30 years  comes to a stop at a traffic light behind a pickup truck proudly displaying Ku Klux Klan bumper stickers….in broad daylight!  My stomach is still churning and no…it is not gas.  Two months ago….two of my sons were driving in the through lane in front of a shopping center 1.5 miles from the house and an angry male of another race became livid because they didn’t stop the car to let him merge into the through lane from a turn lane in moving traffic no less. This other driver was so irate that he followed them home (on a dead end street off  a dead end street)! A call to police brought two  squad cars. The officers were able to diffuse the situation but……my sons were followed HOME and this clown blocked our driveway!   Stopped at the neighborhood gas station one afternoon, one son pumping gas and the other decided to go in for some Gatorade.  A high school aged couple (mixed race) strolled down the side street to the main  drag  which goes downtown and just as my youngest son walks out of the gas station….a female voice screeches a racial epithet from a passing car at the young couple….several times.    My youngest jogs up to the couple to chat for a supportive moment as the passing car speeds off.

     Isolated incidents? Doubtful.    In isolation, each incident could be blown off and forgotten in time but when the time frame narrows to four months and each event occurs less than 2 miles away from a home we have lived in for 36 years….the events become more unsettling. A new pattern of “acceptable” behavior is emerging and this behavior is perturbing at best and frightening at worst.   As a nation, the face we display to the world is supposed to be better than this.  Sadly, I think we are fooling ourselves.

FIFTEEN YEARS AFTER 9/11

Will I ever forget 9/11/1?  No WAY.  As a country, as a people, we had always taken pride in the fact that we had NEVER been faced with an attack (of war) on our own soil.   (Pearl Harbor was technically not a part of the United States when it was attacked  during WW II. Hawaii  did not become a state until 1959 and you birthers can STFU since President Obama was born in August of 1961.)

My classroom  was occupied with students  reasonably on task that morning when I heard a key in my door. I looked up and in walked a student, “Ms. Jane…..turn on the TV…they flew a plane into the World Trade Center!”  He grabbed the remote off my desk and turned on the television set. I was so shocked that I never asked where he got the key to my classroom…..but he knew there was a large screen (31 inch)  television in my room purchased by my Spanish 3-4  classes.)

In silent shock, my students and I watched the unfolding horror.  They began to scoot their chairs closer to my desk until they surrounded my corner of the room. The stunned silence in the classroom was deafening as we watched the unfolding horror…..the second plane hitting the tower…the collapse of the building  and the utter devastation….of World Trade…the Pentagon.  The bell rang for class to end, most of the students DID NOT MOVE.  I flew down the hall to my friend’s classroom and yelled at her to call her daughter (who worked at the Pentagon).  She looked at me like I was crazy and all I could say was…”Call her NOW!”  Ran back to my room, pulled my AT&T calling card out of my portfolio and frantically dialed my brother’s number in suburban Washington.   To my surprise and shock, he answered the phone and all I could say was …”Are you okay?” (I remembered that after the riots when Martin Luther King was killed…the government had blocked phone communication in and out of  D.C. )  To this day, I don’t remember any other part of our discussion.  I remember my friend coming to my room to say she had finally talked to a friend of her daughter’s and her daughter was okay….hadn’t been in the Pentagon that day.

Numbness set in…as a side effect of the shock.  Students sort of wandered the building looking for a seat near a television they could watch…the building was eerily silent. Probably for the first time in their teen age lives, the young people were emotionally shaken….this catastrophe was bigger than whatever violence they saw/felt/experienced in their neighborhood…..especially as speculation  about the number of people who died began.

Fifteen years later…time and War has moved on. At least one student I know of was killed in battle in Iraq.  I went to his visitation….not his funeral…the school building has been torn down….my friends and I have long since retired.   Many students have gone to War….a kid from the neighborhood was killed in battle….the young man my children call their “youngest brother” has been deployed three times and come home safely. More people have died in War than 9/11 claimed and the empty spaces in the hearts of a nation still ache.

For some reason….the idiots who own cable news…think it’s time to rehash that horrible day.  I refuse to turn on the television….because I DO REMEMBER….to the end of my days….I will NOT forget. It is NOT a day to be celebrated or to be made into unthinking political fodder.   The extreme HATE which  created  a 911, which fomented two wars in the 21^st Century, which continually stirs up religious,  racial , social, political and yes even gender anathema in this world is  a direct representation of pure EVIL rampant in our society and it needs to be stamped out and erased from the human psyche. My prayer today is for the HATRED to end unequivocally.

WAKE UPAMERICA - MY REALITY

          Get it straight from the beginning and don’t let anyone else try to interpret what I am going to say.  If you have questions as to my meaning, my motivation . my purpose, ASK ME!  These are turbulent and dangerous times for a young black man.  In the past year these are the events that scare, in the vernacular, the living hell out of me.  A young father goes into Walmart talking on his phone. He wanders through the toy section (as I have often done) looking at different TOYS.  I can only guess at his thoughts….and compare them to mine.  I am sure he noted prices (as all parents do) because toys are not inexpensive…even at Walmart.   I am sure he was thinking  of his children and what   he might able to buy with the available money in his pocket.  Lying loose and unpackaged on a shelf…he sees a TOY  pellet (beebee….in my generation)  gun.  Perhaps he had a similar toy as a young man..who knows?  Idly… he picks up the gun…still strolling through the toy section…still talking on his phone.   Less than five seconds later…he is dead….shot dead by a cop…..all because of a toy gun!  One of my sons works less than a half mile from the site of John Crawford’s death!  The Grand Jury found his MURDER justifiable!

            As a black woman, as a mother of black sons, I am outraged.  It has been over a year and my anger has NOT dissipated, has not lessened.  This incident which occurred less than 25 miles from my home, my supposed safe place wakes me in the middle of the night…seething with rage and anger and the emotions  are coalescing into a fury I do NOT want to name. During this past year…so many other names and faces have been added to this list of senseless, unjustified deaths…the most recent of which also occurred less than 25 miles away from my supposed “safe place.”   Handling a toy in a variety story, handling a toy on a playground, changing lanes without signaling, selling loose cigarettes,  having a missing license plate (in a two plate state)….on and on and on with a litany of excuses which ultimately fade to one excuse…being BLACK in America…..because the dead are all black people and the perpetrators are  white cops!  I no longer hope for JUSTICE for any of these prematurely dead folk because I no longer believe in the corrupt social system that masquerades as JUSTICE in a “civilized “ society.

            I have walked this earth over 70 years and what I see is modern day lynching…a continuation of the “overseer” from slavery times.  I see elements of white society deliberately blinding themselves to reality, willing to hide behind excuses and obfuscations so extreme as to be unbelievable.  The excuse I hear is…” I know  (fill in the name blank).  He is good people…he wouldn’t do such a thing!”  REALLY? ARE YOU SURE?   I think of the wife who told her husband (of another race) that one of his friends/coworkers had made an extremely distasteful verbal pass at her and attempted to grab part of her anatomy.  I think of the teacher who had taught one of the cop perpetrators….who didn’t seem to know that this was the second  person killed by this “cop”.   I think of the government official  who was warned about the racist tendencies of his town’s police department and professed disbelief along with questioning the veracity of the person who reported the incident.    I think about the cop caught on video with his knees in the back of a young teenage woman in a bikini after he hurled her to the ground….the same person who pointed a loaded gun at  the young teenage men who objected to his treatment of their friend.  I could go on and on but I won’t.

WAKE UP AMERICA!  My greatest fear at this point in my life is for the safety of my family.  I have witnessed too much, I have heard the current lie “I was afraid for my life!”  way too often

CHURCH AND STATE?

Yes, Kim Davis has caused a huge “hullabaloo!”  I am fairly sure that is exactly what she wanted in the first place.  Guess what, Kim Davis, you are a government employee and you became one as soon as you were elected and sworn into office.  As an individual, her religious beliefs are her own and I would and will defend her right to have those beliefs.   As a public employee, since this country is non-sectarian and has NO state religion, personal beliefs legally can not and should not enter the work place.

Do I have other issues with Kim Davis?  Yes!  She loudly proclaims her Christian beliefs which “prevent” her from issuing a legal sectarian document, i.e. a marriage license to individuals whose legal marriage she disapproves of.  It would have been better for her to do her job and not try to hide behind her “beliefs.”  Why? 

By the essential definition……Christian means a person who believes in/accepts Jesus Christ. Using that definition…anyone who belongs to  any Protestant, Roman Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox  church is a Christian.  (Are you listening, Kim?)  The significant difference  is that each  denomination has slightly different  opinions about one’s personal conduct!   The Ten Commandments  is basically a core belief…..but….there are variances in specific application of those beliefs and some denominations are stricter than others.  (Are you listening, Kim?)

My husband’s denomination would have kicked Kim out when her children (not her then husband’s offspring) were born!  They would have taken her back after she confessed before the elders (and maybe the whole congregation).   My denomination on the other hand would have considered the children her husband’s.  After confession and penance  the church would have  not have much more to say ….except….the divorce would have caused raised eyebrows.  The second marriage would have been the final straw and she would have been excluded from Communion.  Further divorce-remarriage-divorce-remarriage would have resulted in permanent suspension of membership (adultery without repentance).  

I cannot speak with any authority about the processes and procedures of other denominations except to say that Kim Davis would have been on  very shaky grounds with her marriage/divorce  record.  Am I condemning her?  NO!  Final judgment and/or condemnation/or forgiveness is in the venue of a Higher Power which  brings me to my main point.  All of us will face GOD’s judgment at the apropos time.

There is an old saying (secular version) that people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. We have NO state church and the rules of Kim Davis’s church do NOT rule any other church. My religious freedom gives me the right to associate with any church I choose and I have done so. Kim Davis has chosen her church and that is fine . However…Monday through Friday…when we are at work at our secular jobs…..at our government jobs…the LAW must be followed and other than mentioning in passing that I am a member of ???? church, I/we are not ALLOWED to be proactively churchy!

RANTING AND RAVING on a WEDNESDAY NIGHT

          After  many years spent in public school classrooms teaching communication (translate that word into reading and writing) in not one but 2 languages and much of the last decade decompressing and regaining a sense of myself. I am finally giving myself permission to speak and to speak candidly. I am pissed off!  That’s right, you read it correctly. no sugar coating, no polite speak, no editorial correcting the angry black woman’s language. I told you how I feel and now, I will tell you why I feel that way!

            Being born female in this country or in any other supposedly male dominated society is a negative factor. Being born black and female is a double whammy.  Strangely enough because my mother died shortly after my second birthday, the significant adults in my life were my grandmother, a four foot eleven, born red-headed, dynamo along with my father, my grandfather, and my mother’s four brothers. (Told you society, as well as my life, was male dominated!)  Since my family were always my family, I had no clue just how different and egalitarian they were until I reached early adulthood and was confronted with “the world.”

            As  a liberal arts major (languages not history) I have a tendency to acquire books .  Yes, I have a personal library of books on black literature and black history (which I described to the husband of a college friend ….”The day I leave this earth permanently….my children/grandchildren will be downstairs splitting up my library!”).   They might as well since I won’t need the books any more!  All kidding aside…the books I have acquired or reacquired after dealing with two devastating house fires….have value to me because no matter how “integrated” our schools have/have not become…the literary and social history of folk of African descent in the USA has been lost, strayed, stolen and purloined.  We as a people have been carefully edited out.  Of course years ago…..I understood and accepted the responsibility of educating my children about who we were and the validity of our history.

            Anyone who thinks ”edited” out history is accurate has a lesson to learn from a black academic, the holder of a Ph.D. from a major university and a man who teaches the history of black folk at a famous  university in the South. He made the mistake of telling me there were no black folks in Appalachia! I remember sarcastically asking him if I had turned “white.”   Then I realized he genuinely believed what he said. It was school time…for him.  The history of black folks in Appalachia is as diverse as we are, as diverse as are our origins. Immediately I thought about a poet also born in my birth state of Kentucky, Countee (Porter)  Cullen who was born in Louisville in 1903.  I thought about Whitney Young, an early voice in the Civil Rights Movement as president of the National Urban League, born in Lincoln Ridge, Ky. I remember thinking that this professor was a published academic and he had no clue about the origin of many significant black folk!  Henry Louis Gates, well known and published historian, a professor at Harvard University is a native West Virginian.  Carter G. Woodson, a fellow Berea College alumnus, and the “father of black history”  was a native Virginian. Booker T. Washington  was born in Hales Ford, Va., a small town near Roanoke. William C. Matney, my cousin and a national news correspondent for both NBC and later ABC was born in Bluefield, W.Va. Muhammad Ali was born, went to school and grew up in Kentucky. Without thinking, I rattled off names of significant people of Appalachian origin. Perhaps I made the mistake of looking for a depth of knowledge that was not required for history professorships? I knew that the people I have named had Appalachian origins and I have never had a black history class in my life! I thought about the poets – Nikki Giovanni, Bell Hooks, Frank X. Walker whose birth places were all in Appalachia….Knoxville, Tennessee. Hopkinsville, Ky., Danville, Ky. At that point….if  the professor wanted to know of any more black Appalachians…he would have to do his own research…I was through !  (Before anyone starts complaining about the number of Kentuckians named….don’t forget that I am a native born Kentuckian!)

            My list is not definitive, it was not meant to be. I have never  shied away from my Appalachian origins nor will  I.  However, the next person who complains about my identification as a “hillbilly” a.k.a.  an Appalachian very well may find themselves the recipient of either a snub or an old fashioned   dressing down. Let me shut up before I start with the profanity!

MS. MARGARET OF CASSVILLE

Family stories passed from one generation to another are sometimes the only way that one generation  of a family becomes real and tangible to succeeding generations.  In our family, the prime storyteller was my grandfather. He would always respond to the request, “Tell me a story.” To my child’s mind, he told great stories, stories I in turn , many years later, told my children. Sometimes they listened, mostly they filed the information  away  into some mental file called “momma’s  stories.” One day when my daughter was in sixth grade….”momma’s stories” became real. She came flying in from school with a question….

            “Did my grandmother really shoot up a Ku Klux Klan meeting?”

            “Where did you hear  that?”

            “From Liz (a kid on the next street whose family came from my home town in the Big Sandy Valley).”

            “No, my mother did NOT shoot up a Klan meeting..”

            “Liz’s mother said her mother told her…”

            “Her mother has the story a little mixed up but that’s probably not her fault….”

 

            The Old ones came out of Virginia after the end of the Civil War….probably around 1869.  My great-grandfather’s  father had taken him out for a walk one day to talk seriously  about the future. The older man was worried. He was growing older…in nhis middle sixties….and his creeping age concerned him greatly.

            “You and your family need to head west You have to keep my grandchildren safe. If I die tomorrow…you lose your home and everything you have worked for….the others will never let you keep the farm or anything else…because you are a black man…”

            William Henry (according to his son) was outfitted with a wagon (maybe two wagons), the basic tools he would need to work a farm, and more importantly enough funds to but property.  The family (the parents and and  children ranging in age from  15 to a few months)  packed their belongings and supplies in the wagons  and prepared  to head across the mountains.  The second eldest son chose to remain in Virginia. They would communicate by letter from time to time but would NOT see each other again.

            The farms that they purchased and settled on            was in a small town once called Cassville. The family managed to buy enough acreage to support everyone as long as everyone was willing to work. (Almost a century and a half later…part of that small farm is still family owned.)    Cassville was and is the setting for this story…..

            A time arrived when William Henry and his sons had to be away from the farm for two to three days.  Miss Margaret would be at home with the sons’ wives and the children of the family. The women could and would see to the farm chores with the help of the older children. Before he left, William Henry loaded the two ancient shotguns with bird shot and put them in a safe place not accessible to children. The men of the family then left to take care of their business. The mule team pulled  the wagon down the holler, through the town and on to the main road and away the men folk went.

            Certain men of the town watched the family’s men leave. It was obvious that they would not be returning before dark so the town men decided that after dark would be a good time to sneak up on the pasture field hill under three huge walnut trees…to build a bonfire and drink white lightning otherwise known as moonshine. To cover up their true planned activity,  the town men passed the word that there would be a Ku Klux Klan meeting that night at the head of “Nigger Holler.”

            The women of the town were not fools and there was no Klan in the town. By barefoot grapevine….someone’s children were sent from house to house with a message to be passed to Miss Margaret.  When the message got to the family farm…Miss Margaret hatched her own plan. The women would finish all the chores and give the appearance of closing up the house for the night. Miss Margaret and one of her daughters-in law would take advantage of a clear moonlit night and climb the pasture field hilln through the woods. They planned to hide under the hard shell hickory tree on the ridge slightly above the black walnut trees.

            Their vantage point gave them a clear view of the happenings below. The town men gathered, lit their fire and passed the whiskey jugs around.  Miss Margaret and her daughter-in- law waited until the moon made its appearance over the walnut trees and town  men were very drunk. She then propped the first gun against a tree branch and aimed for the center of the fire. KABOOM….she fired….the burning embers exploded out from the fire. The drunks were caught by surprise and ran around knocked cinders and embers off each other.  Miss Margaret took the second gun and aimed into the middle of the gathering. KABOOM! Then drunk men bolted down the hill toward town….screaming…..yelling….and cursing.

            The next day, Miss Margaret took her basket of eggs and butter to sell in town. As she walked through town…women came out of their houses to make purchases and someone whispered that the women were forming a Women’s Christian Temperance Union that very week and had she heard….some of the men had gotten drunk last night, shot each other up and were over at Dr. York’s house getting birdshot picked out of their skin? Would she have more butter and eggs to sell next week?

            The WCTU was formed the Methodist Church, the Klan never appeared in Cassville again and Miss Margaret sold a lot of butter  and eggs.