BLESSINGS AND CURSES IN THE MIDST OF THE LAND

I’ve stated this before I think it bares repeating here. During the time of the Jim Crow Laws, blacks and whites in the South were forced into separation. Separate school, separate neighborhoods separate public eating placing. Whites had school buses. Negro kids in the 1950’s didn’t have school buses in Mississippi. Our books was left over used books that the white school didn’t want anymore.

Beatrice children would rush home from school with the smell of a pot of pinto beans and ham hocks cooking or maybe cabbage and corn bread waiting for their hungry stomach maybe some homemade tea cakes or fried apple pies and tell her about the insults they encounter from the white children as the bus load of white kids past them while they were walking from school, “Hey you stupid nigger”! The Nigger kids has to walk” Sometimes some of the white kids while leaning with head sticking through the bus window with sneering, contemptuous facial express would spit on us. And as the big yellow school bus past us with the Mississippi red dust from the gravel road covering us we could hear laughter from the white children. Ha! Hah!! Ha, ha!

How do you think Beatrice felt listening to her kids telling her about the insults they’ve encounter – how can she fight against a system that was design to bully her children. How can she prevent them from turning bitter? For earlier that day, Momma had gone to her vegetable garden and picked fresh vegetable for her family and during midsummer there was an abundant supply. This time of the year Momma’s garden was overflowing with ripe fruits and vegetables. Our mother and her older daughters assisted her in canning part of the surplus vegetable for future use. Poppa and his older boys, likewise, would slaughter a hog and momma would, after making sausages, preserve some of these in glass jars also. Beatrice looked at her children. Momma, looked at her children as they were eating. They looked the same no frowns on their faces except, maybe, they wasn’t smiling as much. You know how children are they always seem to shake everything off so easily. As she watch them eating she said a silently prayer for her children that that incident of extreme verbal hatred thrown at her children almost on a daily bases as they walked to school wouldn’t destroy their spirit; for everyone had heard about that Till boy – Emmett Till was his name. Why they killed that boy. The K.K.K. did it, alright. I heard somewhere that that poor fourteen – year – old boy before his mother put him on the bus leaving Chicago to see him off to spend two week vacation with his relatives in Mississippi Delta. His mother did the same thing me and Sam always do down here in Mississippi. We tell our children how to act and talk around them white folks. There are rules down here we color folks has to live by because if you don’t you’ll die.

Mommas and Poppas all through the south teach their kids on a daily bases what they must 1. Always say “Yes sir and No Sir” 2. Never look them in the eyes because they'll think you are an uppity nigger. White folks don’t like uppity niggers. They have been known to be lynched. We also tell our children especially our boys if they tell you to “kneel down” do it. Because child, whites has no law or rules that they have to obey regarding Negros. But we have to obey them as they make or change their minds about Negros.

You know that Till boy made head line news when they lynched that boy for looking at that white girl. But no one is talking about brother Franklin son, that deacon in our church. The dogs found his boy near the river. They found him dead with his face down in the mud.

“Lord have mercy”, was our Momma daily prayer. In Sunday school we teach our children to love one another. Lord, Momma thinking to herself how can I Lord teach my kids to love these evil white folk. Lord, Jesus I know it's some good whites. But down here in Mississippi they are so mean. Lord, only you Jesus know the reason they are the way they are.

This was the prayers of the faithful, who had never ceased, both day and night, to cry out for deliverance. Momma and Poppa read in their bible that they would be delivered out of this horrible fear of raising their kids here. How long before one of her five boys react in respond to their hostile environment.

That’s the way Momma felt a few years later when her youngest son James went to Vietnam. She heard about the hand grenades, mind fields. All that shooting, danger all around. Why her baby boy was in the midst of it all. It was awful. We could hear Momma praying. Why some times as we walked past her and Poppa cracked bedroom door we could get a glimpse of Momma on her knees kneeled in prayer. Momma felt that way, not quite as bad, but sort of that way when one of her boys left the house. Praying they would follow the rules set for the Negros.

Why she could see the times were changing. Negros in the South was stirring up lots of trouble listening to Dr. King, Malcolm X, the Black Panther. Momma said “these men are going to get my boys killed.”

Once Beatrice family were safely in her home, none of her boys were out in the night where the threat of impending danger or harm was a real menace; there was laughter. Momma children would keep her laughing. We use to love to touch her on her sides. With a light touch our mother would jump. We knew she was so “ticklish”.

Even not sparing the rod “our home was filled with laughter. When Momma whipped us with a belt or a switch which she sometime would tell us to go and get a switch from that elm tree out back… Now that was hard to do – to pick out a long twig from this tree Momma would choose between the switch from this tree and a belt.

This may sound strange but as soon as the pain from the whipping had stopped in a little while we were playful again. Momma children knew that the bible said to “spare the rod ruin the child.

“What am I going to cook today” Momma said I’m so tired of cooking. Three times a day Momma cooked. Breakfast, dinner and supper. Momma never took a vacation. Disciplining, nursing, teaching etc.

But, she saw her life changing. Her children had started feeling maybe these white folks were right about them – ugly nappy headed nigger kids. Black and ugly. Dumb, stupid nigger kids. Why, now Beatrice heard her children call themselves those horrible names. One of her children would say to the other “you got nigger hair and you are black and ugly”. For she and Sam couldn’t protect them from their surroundings. The negative influence was devastating on her family. Momma would say “my children ain’t ugly”.

Then, it seem out of nowhere – through the radio” I am black and I am proud. Black is beautiful. Her children started singing a new song. She and their father had told their children not to listen to worldly music. Evil music. But this music was difference. It seem like it was coming not from the world but these songs were God sent. This worldly man James Brown was sing I’m black and am proud. Lord have mercy. Momma felt Joy. Now her children started to believe her that maybe just maybe they’re not ugly after all.