Delta Jewels

by Alysia Burton Steele

  I remember that day, I remember the night that my aunt came to our house and told my mother. It was a rainy night, I remember that. I can tell you the house we were living in, how the furniture was arranged. I remember when my dad used to come home, I used to get angry because first thing he picked up was my sister. I wanted to be first. If I could tell my dad anything right now, I’d tell him now how much I love him, how much I miss him. You know how girls are about their dads? I look at my husband and his girls. I’d tell my dad, hey, I kept the faith. I never doubted God and I know through it all, He brought us through. You know, my aunt raised us, I know that she loved us, but it was something different without having that mother and father there. I used to wonder, God, why did You let us live? But later in life, I realized what it actually was—that He had a purpose for us. For me, especially, because I been a caretaker to a lot of people and I think that was His purpose for me being here. I just thank God for that purpose.

  My baby brother was, like, 8 months old. It was so ironic, years later a film director who was doing a movie on Emmett Till showed us a video recording of my mom. And for the first time my baby brother got a chance to hear her voice. When he looked at it, he asked me, “Lois, whatcha’ doin’ in that black-and-white picture?” I say, “That’s not me, that’s your mom.” He say, “Is that the reason why I love you so?” He thought Mom was me.

  MS. JOYCE DIXON MYERS, 66

  RULEVILLE

  BORN JUNE 1948

  MARRIED 10 YEARS; DIVORCED

  2 CHILDREN

  3 GRANDCHILDREN

  The same day I met Mrs. Gresham and relived the racist, still unpunished murder of her parents, I was uplifted by this retired teacher, who currently works part-time at Parks Elementary in Cleveland, Mississippi. She teaches the English language to foreign students every day and loves it.

  Ms. Myers sees me pull up. She has just returned from a trip to Atlanta and is across the street collecting mail from a neighbor. She is wearing a colorful silky robe and has on lounge clothes underneath. Youthful, with a mocha complexion, she has very few, if any, wrinkles. Her relaxed, shoulder-length dark brown hair is in curls that bounce when she walks.

  A neighbor is with her. He is about the age of my father. He immediately starts flirting with me as I pull my photography gear out of the car. “Good morning,” he says, giving me that once-over look.

  “Good morning. How you doin’?” I ask.

  “Fine now that I’ve met you. Are you married?”

  “Yes, I’m married.” I flash my ring.

  “Oh. I’m looking for a good wife.”

  I’ve heard this line recently from Rev. Matthews, but what worked for the good reverend 62 years ago is tired. “I’m sorry. I don’t think my husband would approve.”

  “Good day,” he says, and walks to his car. He looks back at me and shakes his head.

  Ms. Myers just looks at him, then says to me, “I wasn’t sure what you were by listening to you on the phone. You sounded white. I almost said no. I don’t want some white lady to come in and do a book about us and take advantage of us. But I was curious to hear what you had to say. Come on in.”

  Her neatly decorated home has teal blue vases and bowls decorating the dining and living rooms. We sit in the open living room area amid a flat-screened TV, a coffee table, and pictures, pictures, pictures. A wicker room divider displays 8-by-10 portraits framed in it. She sits next to me on the sofa and within 15 minutes she shares, “My daughter has been gone a long time, but you never get over that grief from losing a child. I have some stories to tell you. Stories about what it was like growing up in Ruleville.” Her voice starts to quiver, and the tears flow. I am choking back tears; my throat hurts because I want to release the cry, and when I can’t control it anymore, we are both crying. “I’m sorry for crying,” she says. “We just met and I’m getting emotional. I have stories to tell about my mother and what it was like growing up here. I moved to California when I was grown, but when my mother was sick, I moved back to take care of her.”

  “Ms. Myers, I really want to put you in the book, but you’re too young. I’m asking for women over 70. I’m sorry.” I’m having this conversation with myself: “If I lower the age of 70, people may not connect with the stories as experiences from elders. Most of the time I have to pull stories from the Jewels. Their children and grandchildren have to coax them to share anecdotes with me, but here is a younger woman eager to share life experiences.”

  She is visibly hurt but says, “I understand. I want to be in the book, but I understand. I think what you’re doing is a good thing.” On the spot, she asks, “Do you have time to go for a drive with me?” She takes me to a community center in town. We drive five minutes through Ruleville and she points out the homes of relatives of Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer. She tells me who lives where, she tells me the history of the churches we pass. “Mrs. Hamer’s family still live here in town. They don’t like to talk to outsiders. I think they’re hesitant to share because they don’t want to be taken advantage of. I think there were some issues from outsiders before.”

  “Wow, I wish I could talk to some of the family. I’d love some history of Ms. Fannie Lou. So much history.” I am sad to think that they won’t talk.

  At the community center, she says, “Leave your stuff in the car. Let me introduce you. We have to ease into this.” We go inside, and I get a tour of the Fannie Lou Hamer Museum. I am in awe of her accomplishments and determination to stand up for rights. I meet Mrs. Hooper-White, who knew Ms. Hamer because she helped deliver food to Ms. Hamer when she was making her rounds in Mississippi for Civil Rights. She used to listen to her at meetings. I can see from her big and round and beautiful eyes that she is very interested in the project. As I explain it, she seems as if she’s figuring out what she’s going to wear for the photo portrait.

  Excited, I chuckle and ask her, “You’re already thinking about what you want to wear, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” she says, “I am. How should I wear my hair?”

  While walking back to my car with Ms. Myers, she laughs and says, “I knew she would agree to do it.”

  I think about ways to add Ms. Myers to the book. She has such a giving spirit. A few months later I call her: “Ms. Myers, this is Lisa. I’ve been thinking about you.”

  “I’ve been thinking about you, too. How is the book coming along?”

  “If you want to share, I want to include you in the book. I shouldn’t say no to someone who has something valuable to add and who wants to talk.”

  We schedule a time. I go back to her house, where she greets me with a warm smile and hug. “I’m so glad you called me and invited me to do this. This is important work you’re doing.” Inside I smile because I know I’m doing the right thing by including her.

  I used to share lots of stories with my kids. I played Eyes on the Prize, about the Civil Rights Movement. It showed where they put the dogs on the people and they were spraying them with water. The kids watching bust out laughing. I broke down and cried like a baby. I mean I just cried, and they thought I was crazy. I turned it off and I told them, “I lived through this. Don’t do that. These are your ancestors, you laughin’ at. This is our blood and the same thing that they did then, they would do now, but the law won’t let them. That’s the only reason you’re not being treated that way. A lot of people died for you to have the rights that you have.” A lot of the kids didn’t know about Fannie Lou Hamer. I told them, “They beat her because she wanted to vote, because she tried to get people to vote. The school that you’re in right now, we couldn’t even walk down that street in that area. We couldn’t walk down the streets in the white folks’ area. It was a certain way [route] that we had to go. Black folks couldn’t walk over there, and if you walked over there, you were stopped: “What you doin’ over here, nigger? You don’t have no business over here. Get back on your side of town.”

  My great-grandmother Mrs. Marie Aiken, whom I called “Gram Ree,” holding me i
n 1970.

  Black people couldn’t come into town after 12 o’clock without permission. If you didn’t get permission from the police department, if you were coming through, driving through, they would put you in jail. If you had your lights on after 12 o’clock, they’d knock on your door and ask you what you was doin’, scared you were having some sort of meeting. This was during the Civil Rights. We had a lot of Civil Rights workers here and they were havin’ secret meetings and what have you. It was just like being in a prison, living in Ruleville at that time.

  Like so many Blacks in the South who moved north and west in waves of migration, Ms. Myers had moved away. Gram Ree, my great-grandmother, moved from South Carolina to Pennsylvania in search of a better life. She wanted to be able to provide for my grandmother, who remained in Spartanburg and would ride the train north during the summer months to visit Gram Ree. It ached me that I never asked Gram how she felt about her mother migrating for better opportunities. As Ms. Myers shared her initial reluctance to move back to Mississippi from California to care for her mother, I ached with regret that I had never mined Gram and Gram Ree for their memories of my family’s move north to Pennsylvania from South Carolina.

  It wasn’t until I came back home to take care of my mother, that I got to know her. My mother grew up around a bunch of boys. They would joke her and she would fight them. At first they would whoop her, but then she learned how to fight and she would beat them up. I found her to be a compassionate person, but it was hard for her to be soft because she always had to be hard. She did what she thought was best for her children. She had to be hard because my daddy was a softie. We had the soft, loving kind and then that strict person. I grew to respect my mother and love my mother so much.

  I didn’t realize I had taken this photo of Gram Ree in 2001. So actually, to my delight, this is my first Jewel photo. My cousin Robin Williams found this photo. Gram Ree was about 85 years old when I took this in her home in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. She passed away in 2008.

  When I first came back, on the plane I asked myself, “Why am I going to Mississippi?” After I got home, I found out why God had sent me back here. It was so we could build that bond together. And you know, it was wonderful. I took care of her until she died. We became best friends. She didn’t want nobody to do nothing for her but me.

  We lived up in the compress quarters [at the cotton gin]. The train ran through and hobos would be on the train. Now today, nobody would fool with hobos ’cause they’re scared of ’em, but my mom would feed them. They would come to the back door and she would have their food in one of those brown bags. She would hand it out to them. She was just a wonderful person. When you’re growing up you don’t see all that, ’cause she was so military-style with her discipline, but as you get older, you start really reflecting on who your mom was. I would say, “This woman is crazy,” but once I got older, I started really to reflect on the things she did and who she was. And you know, she was a real, real woman ’cause a lot of people wouldn’t have fed those hobos. They would have been afraid of them. But she would just hand them a bag out the back door. They knew where they could get some food. Evidently the other guys had told the other guys. Every time the train came through, she had those bags sittin’ on the table. She would hand them out to them, to people she didn’t even know. So, she was a jewel of a woman.

  MRS. RUBY HOOPER-WHITE, 75

  RULEVILLE

  BORN DECEMBER 1939

  MARRIED FOR 13 YEARS WHEN WIDOWED

  4 CHILDREN

  5 GRANDCHILDREN

  6 GREAT-GRANDS

  1 GREAT-GREAT-GRAND

  Mrs. Hooper-White is still working full-time. After serving as a social worker at Head Start for 37 years, she is now the site manager at the Senior Companion and Aging Program in Ruleville. She stays busy. And she’s outspoken. That hasn’t changed since she was a child.

  The black children went to school when it was convenient, when we didn’t have to go to the field. That bothered me greatly. The school bus would pass and the white children would be on the bus. I couldn’t understand why we, as little black children, couldn’t go to school when the white children went to school.

  I had finished picking cotton [for the season] and we didn’t have any shoes. I stopped the plantation owner, or the person that was supervising, and asked, “Could you give my daddy some money so he could buy us some shoes ’cause we want to go to school?” He told my daddy, “I told you to talk to that little girl. Now she askin’ for money. She wants shoes to go to school.” That did something to me; I felt like he was belittling my daddy, you know, not looking at him as a man who was the head of his family. He was down-talking to my daddy. My daddy spoke up and said, “Well, yessir, they do need some shoes. They not doin’ anything and they could be goin’ to school now if I could get the money.”

  Ms. Hamer and all of the Freedom Riders, they were coming from a march at Ole Miss, they were coming to Jackson. We were to meet them in Belzoni with some food. We took the back road to meet the people who were to get the food. Some of Ku Klux Klansmen got on our trail and I thought, “Lord, if you was ever gonna bless me, bless me tonight.” Somehow, somebody, who knew what was going on, informed the Ku Klux Klansmen and they got on our trail. I thought, “Lord, these white folk can’t win now, they can’t. Please don’t let ’em.” They had some kind of light and they were trying to find out where we were. We had to go down in a ditch, to hide, to make sure the car couldn’t be seen. We got out in case they located the vehicle, we could hide our bodies. So they [the Klan] got lost from us. We didn’t know where they were, where to go, or what to do. We stayed there, I guess, about three hours. We finally heard a noise. They had dogs, and the dogs let us know that they were leaving. We got out of that situation. I had kept thinking, “These white folks can’t be winnin’ tonight, they just can’t, they just can’t, they can’t.”

  Later on, when I was talking to Ms. Hamer, she would say [to me], “I like you, girl. I like you. I like yo’ style. You keep it up. Don’t let your education make no fool out of you. I like you.”

  And I would say, “I like you.”

  I like Mrs. Hooper-White. She is warm and welcoming. She has the most beautiful big eyes, and I make a note to take a photo close to her face so I can focus on those eyes.

  “I love what you’re doing,” she says. “We mothers need to help you tell our stories. There’s something about the warmth of your personality. It’s just easy talking to you. I feel like a grandmother to you.” I feel close to her. I like the fact that I could read her face when I asked to interview her. She’s asks me what it’s like being a professor.

  “I love what I do,” I say. “I didn’t know I would have the patience for it. I grew up with a grandmother who would tell me to sound out a word and figure out how to spell it. Kids today want you to hold their hand through everything.”

  She nods her head. She reminds me of a memory I haven’t thought about in years.

  It was in 1979. I was trying to write a letter to Michael Jackson’s fan club when I was almost 10 years old. It was right after his hit “Rock with You.” I was in love with Michael. My letter started, “I think you’re so cute.” I couldn’t figure out how to spell “cute.” I kept looking for words that started with the letters “qu.” Gram told me that wasn’t how it was spelled. “How do you spell it?” I asked. “Look it up,” she said. “It starts with the letter ‘C.’ Go look it up in the dictionary.” Gram didn’t hold my hand. She wanted me to be self-sufficient. Mrs. Hooper-White reminds me of Gram. She likes people to stand on their own two feet and tells me about a program for teenage girls she ran at Head Start years ago.

  I had a class for teenage girls called Self-Sufficient at the Head Start program. I always had to explain for 30 minutes what self-sufficient meant, but a few of them caught on. You’re trying to get them to get the gold, and they don’t see the journey. Every once in a while I would meet someone who had gone through that training and would say,
“I know you proud of me,” and I would say, “Yeah.” I met a young lady three years ago and she said, “Mrs. Hooper-White, I just want to thank you. I came to your office one day. I was pregnant and had had one child. You said some words to me that hurt me, oh they hurt me, and I went to my car and I cried and I cried and I cried. I told myself that I’m going to school and I’m gonna get me a desk job and I hope that old woman comes by my desk,” she said. “I had that baby and got my GED and I enrolled in a junior college. Then I enrolled in a senior college. I got my degree in early childhood development, but I was not satisfied. I went back to school and next summer I will graduate with my master’s degree. I’m a nurse! And I just wanna thank ya.”

  A field near Merigold.

  I remember what I said to her that hurt her. “Darling, let me ask you one thing—don’t you know how to do something other than just open your legs and have babies?” I said, “I love you.” She sat there, said, “That’s okay,” and she left. I don’t know what made me say that to her in those terms, I really don’t. She said when I asked her that question, I had tears in my eyes.

  I remember telling Gram that I couldn’t wait to leave so I could live by my own. I remember getting mad at her rules. It’s painful now to reflect on how little I appreciated her. She wanted me to slow down. I think she wanted me to know and understand my worth before becoming involved with a boy. I didn’t have a clue what she was trying to show me. But now I do.

  MRS. JEAN C. WOODLEY, 86

  DUNDEE

  BORN FEBRUARY 1929

  MARRIED 55 YEARS WHEN WIDOWED

  5 CHILDREN