by Alice Walker
I am B.E.F. When I was seventeen, the white folks was wanted to take me away from my mother because I was a good worker, but she didn’t agree to it because my father was dead, and no one there but my mother and I. They wanted me to run off from home and work for them. Because I didn’t they arrested me claiming that I stole a cow. But no alterdavis was made out against me. They arrested me May 20, 1910 and kept me in jail until October. They sentenced me October 26, to the prison for five years and then I was back home in 1914 when I got married. I have seen some bad things done in Amite, such as a man whose name was Issac Simond who had gone to Jackson and redeemed his land of taxes and got title for him and his father and the white folks wanted to buy his timber and he wouldn’t seel it to them. They went to his home one Sunday morning, six of them. They stuck a knife in his jaw and led him to the car, and put him and his son in the car and they drove down the road toward the church and got out the car to get a switch to whip him but he got out of the car and ran and they shot him down with buckshots. Mr. Wiley S……. was the sheriff, he came out and had an inquest. One of the Negroes asked Mr. Wiley “what are we going to do now.” He said, “there he is take him and do anything you want with him.” All of them had guns of all kind and we didn’t have no protection at all, when we picked him up the blood ran out of him like water through screens.
Another man by the name of Herbert Lee, was shot down at the cotton gin by one of the Representatives of Amite County and he laid there about four hours before any one paid any attention to him. But yet and still the cotton gin kept on working. There were four in the gin, they made three of the Negroes who witness forget what they saw but when they made Louis Allen say he didn’t see anything he wouldn’t. Later he was killed because he was going to testify against the sheriff. He was shot with buckshots at his gate three times. His brain was piled up under the truck.
So this is most of the histry that I can recall, if you sure you want it, and I hope it will help the little children who are enroll in Headstart.
Yours truly,
B. E. F., Amite County, Miss.
THE LETTER FROM “B. E. F.” was passed on to me by a friend. I never met the writer. Mrs. Winson Hudson, on the other hand, I’ve come to know well. She is a large handsome woman with bright coppery skin and crisp dark hair. Her eyes are deeply brown and uncommonly alert. When she is speaking to you her eyes hold you; at the same time they seem to be scanning the landscape. Her eyes tell a great deal about Mrs. Hudson, for she is one of the “sleepless ones” found in embattled Mississippi towns whose fight has been not only against unjust laws and verbal harassment, but against guns and fire bombs as well.
The first time I met Mrs. Hudson, having heard much about her from my husband and others who have witnessed personally the Hudson stamina and courage, she handed me twenty pages of writing. We sat down under some trees at the Headstart center where she is director and read parts of her “story” together. She was writing about her life, she said, because, among other reasons, she did not know how long it was going to last. She wanted, she added, to leave some kind of record for her community, setting straight all that had happened, so that the children would know about it, and the role she played. It bothered her very much that often her “own people” seemed to misunderstand her and failed to see that the agitation she caused in the community—for desegregated, quality schooling, for jobs, for Headstart—was not for herself or for any one group, but for everybody in the county.
We worked out a plan, Mrs. Hudson and I. She would mail newly written pages of her autobiography to me as she wrote them; I would be typist and editor, sending the typed pages back to her to be proofread. The interesting thing about Mrs. Hudson and her autobiography is that she wants only enough copies printed so that all the black people in her community will have a chance to read it. (At present we are in the middle of her story. She had to leave Mississippi recently for a long, much needed rest, and I am momentarily stumped as to where and how we will finally get her story out the way she wants it.) Working with Mrs. Hudson has been, for me, humbling, because she is such an eloquent part of a largely silent and unsung force. When people speak of the courage and “honor” of the South they do not mean people like Mrs. Hudson; they do not even know such people exist. They do exist, however, and for all the sons and daughters of the South, their existence is a reason to rejoice. Here is an excerpt from The Autobiography of Mrs. Winson Hudson, a Black Woman of Mississippi:
My sister’s house was bombed twice, because she used her daughter’s name in the integration lawsuit along with Medgar Evers’ son and Doctor Mason’s son at Biloxi, Mississippi. Our home was meant to be bombed in November 1967, but we heard the truck. I happened to be night watching until twelve on that night. Medgar always warned us to be careful at all times. He said, I must tell you the truth. You have no protection. I believed in Medgar Evers; about three weeks before he was killed we were with him in federal court in Jackson. He seemed so blue. Every now and then we could find something to laugh about. Medgar was a foreseer; many things he told us have come to pass. You will have heartaches, your people will deny you….
The night the Klan was backing into our house to throw off a bomb my only daughter was living with us while her husband was in Vietnam. She was expecting a baby. She was sick that night and she heard the truck also. I told her to get up and rush into the back room. My husband and I started getting out to start shooting. By this time the German shepherd dog had forced the Klan to move on. I ran to the phone to tell my sister to be ready. By this time a bomb went off at my sister’s house. I picked up the receiver and I heard my sister’s baby girl screaming “Oh, mama!” “Oh, mama!” I started outside. My husband was shooting, emptying every gun. My daughter was swinging to me thinking the Klan might kill me. She said she didn’t know where all the shooting and bombing was. I pulled aloose from my daughter and she fell on our concrete porch. When I came to myself I heard my daughter say “Mama, I am hurt.” In a day or so we had to rush her to Hinds General Hospital. The baby had to come. The baby was saved but had to stay in the hospital for a long time. But we were so glad to save the baby… .
Just a month later we came home one Sunday evening and found my daughter crying. The deputy sheriff had brought her a telegram saying your husband has been injured in Vietnam. My daughter wrote him almost every day but he only got his mail by chances. He was on guard the night that plans were set up to destroy our home and his family here in the U.S.A. He was on guard in Vietnam guarding the Cambodian border.
He came home in November from Vietnam. He was hit three times, once in his leg, once in his knee, and once in his chest. The bullet in his chest will have to stay there forever or as long as he lives. I asked my daughter not to write to tell him of this terrible incidence while he was in Vietnam. But he knows all about it now. And I’ll let anyone decide within themselves how he feels about this country that his son will have to grow up in.
Last summer I was offered a job as consultant in black history for Friends of the Children of Mississippi. This is a Headstart program that interested me because for three years it existed without government help or intervention. Its director was a young man from SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. My job was to create black history materials for teachers of the children in the Headstart centers, since Friends of the Children realized how impossible it would be for teachers to teach “blackness” to small children if they had no grasp of what black history was themselves. I was to devote two week-long workshop sessions to teaching these teachers, who turned out to be ninety women from various parts of the state. Some of them had been schoolteachers in Mississippi public schools, most had been maids, many had been fieldworkers. Almost all of them had children of their own, though often these were grown-up and away from home. The average educational level was perhaps fifth grade, though all the women were intelligent, industrious, anxious to learn, and deeply concerned about the welfare of the children they were teaching.
How did I know this? Because many of them, indeed most, had worked for from one to eighteen months at the Headstart centers for less than ten dollars a week. Many months they worked for nothing.
I came to my job filled with enthusiasm. These were women I identified with, women who’d do anything for the good of black children. They were women Charles White might have drawn, heavy-set women with gold teeth and big fat arms; women who’d worked in the cotton fields for fifty cents a day. I felt, on my first day before my class, as if the room were full of my mothers. Of course, teaching them black history in two weeks of lecturing, films, pictures was something else again.
It was hard. And I’ve no reason to believe I was a success.
In the first place, “history,” to my students, was a total unknown. Many of them were extremely poor readers, and of course how were they to relate to history that was never written? Q.—“When was the period of slavery?” A.—“Around 1942?” And how could I underestimate the value of that answer, although it did not offer the class perspective, which we very much needed.
How do you teach earnest but educationally crippled middle-aged and older women the significance of their past? How do you get them to understand the pathos and beauty of a heritage they have been taught to regard with shame? How do you make them appreciate their own endurance, creativity, incredible loveliness of spirit? It should have been as simple as handing them each a mirror, but it was not. How do you show a connection between present and past when, as eloquent but morally befuddled Faulkner wrote, “the past is not even past”?
Try to tell a sixty-year-old delta woman that black men invented anything, black women wrote sonnets, that black people long ago were every bit the human beings they are today. Try to tell her that kinky hair is delightful. Chances are she will begin to talk “Bible” to you, and you will discover to your dismay that the lady still believes in the curse of Ham.
I thought about the problem, talked about it for hours with anybody who’d listen and offer advice. Since time was so short, the important thing, it seemed to me, was not so much teaching my “students” the facts of Africa, slavery and Jim Crow (though I did as much of that as I could), I wanted to give them in addition a knowledge of what history itself is. And in order that they see themselves and their parents and grandparents as part of a living, working, creating movement in Time and Place, I drew on my experience with Mrs. Hudson, and asked them to write their autobiographies; which they proceeded, some rather laboriously, to do.
I had noticed during workshop sessions that the very word “black” did not come easily to some of the women. (This was especially true of the six or seven white teachers among the others. I never quite understood why they were even in my classes; they were plainly uncomfortable the whole time. None of them wrote autobiographies and all of them rejected the cruel facts of slavery, lynchings, et cetera, I showed on film. “I just naturally don’t believe the whites treated ’em that bad,” said one, pointing to the black women around her, who merely grunted, folded their arms, and smiled knowingly. Ironically, at this very time four Klansmen were being tried for the lynching, two years before, of Vernon Dehmer, head of his local NAACP, and the trial was in all the news media.) I asked the women to write especially about color prejudice within their own families. Many of them were annoyed by the question, for, they said indignantly, “How can we be prejudiced against our own selves; we are all of one race.” They did not say “we are all black.”
The excerpts below represent part of the tiny scratch these women made on the surface of their memories, of their history.
I was one of three children, brought up by grandparents. There was a bright child and a black child which I am. I always feared adults and keep to myself. My grandmother love her bright child, seem to had only hate for me.—Mrs. D. M. T.
They had very dark skin. My grandmother was low and fat, she had long hair and would have it braided all over her head. She wore her dresses very long and a apron as long as her dress. My grandfather was tall with long beards under his chin. His hair was very long. They lived on their own little farm and never had what I called a “hard time,” they raised corn, cotton and vegetables, cured their own meat and made syrup from cane. They had eight children, six boys and two girls. My father said they would whip them if they wouldn’t mind them, or any grown person.
My grandparents thought white folks knew everything, and everything they did was right. They thought black people never knew what they was talking about, or what they was doing.
My mother raised her family to work for what they wanted, and to be honest, proud of your color, to go to church, and school and do the right things. She taught us a white person wasn’t no better than a black person, a man was just a man, no matter what color he is.
My mother said that the reason we are black is this: a curse from God.—Mrs. C. S.
My parents taught us never to have fear of the white peoples because they were just people like anybody else and wouldn’t harm us. As long as we be truthful.—Mrs. O. R.
In 1957 my sixth child was born and then I had two childrens to help me chop cotton. They was still paying $3.00 a day for chopping cotton. In 1960 my seven and eight was born, another set of twins, by that time I had three kids chopping cotton. In June, 1961 my husband died on the 5th day of June. That was the most awful day of my life. Robert was not sick, hadn’t ever been sick. He began having pains in his chest. The pains began to get so bad until I told my boy to go get my brother-in-law to go get the doctor, before the doctor got out there he was dead. And I was three months pregnant with my ninth child. My sister come out and move me to town.
I went down and put in for Welfare. So I started working in private homes. I was working by the day. Sometimes I would work for three different white women in a day for $3.50. That what all three of them together would pay me. I was paying a woman $1.00 a day to keep my little children. Feb. 26, 1962 I had my baby. I started to working again in private homes. I just work for one lady. I work 4 1/2 days a week for $11.25 from 8 A.M. to 5 P.M. I work all of 1962 until May 1964. So I ask the lady could she pay me any more. So she gave me a $6.25 raise. I had to pay the baby sitter $5.00 a week out of that $18.00. So I got tired of working for nothing. I began to look for another job that could help me support my kids. In 1966 I began volunteer working for CDGM.* I work over at the center for about 6 weeks then CDGM died in Humphries county. Well, we work on. In 1967 we began to get paid $25.00 a week from Friends of the Children. I was making more then than I ever had in my life. On July 26, 1968 when I receive my $65.00 [a week] that was a happy day for me—Mrs. D. G.
Before I had a chance to go very far with my workshops and fieldwork follow-up sessions I was fired. Unfortunately, the money for my salary, most of it, had come from OEO‡ which apparently frowns on black studies courses for Headstart teachers. Actually I suppose I am left with a project that will be a private one whose success will be largely immeasurable, but since I don’t believe success must be measurable I don’t mind at all.
Slowly I am putting these stories together. Not for the public but for the women who wrote them. Will seeing each other’s lives make any of the past clearer to them? I don’t know. I hope so. I hope the contradictions will show but also the faith and grace of a people under continuous pressures. So much of the satisfying work of life begins as an experiment; having learned this, no experiment is ever quite a failure.
* Child Development Group of Mississippi, the oldest Headstart program in the state.
‡ Office of Economic Opportunity.
1970
A TALK: CONVOCATION 1972
WHEN CHARLES DECARLO* asked me to speak to you today I was quick to mention I had no idea what one said at such gatherings. I never had such a formal pregraduation ceremony, but was pushed out into the world from beside Mrs. Raushenbush’s fireplace with a few words of good cheer and a very small glass of champagne.
“What shall I talk about?” I asked. To which Charles rep
lied, “Oh, let me see: The War, Poverty, The Plight of Women, Your Own Writing, Your Life, or How Things Were When You Were at Sarah Lawrence.”
There was a pause. Then he said, “It needn’t be anything fancy, or long. It won’t be published or anything, just speak from the heart.”
So this talk is called “How to Speak about Practically Everything, Briefly, from the Heart.”
The last time I spoke here I was already involved in a study of black women writers that has tremendously enriched the past couple of years. It began, this study, shortly after my husband and I moved to Mississippi to live. By the time we had overcome our anxiety that we might be beaten up, mobbed, or bombed, I had worked up a strong interest in how to teach history to mature women; in this case, fifty- and sixty-year-olds who had an average of five years of grammar school. The approach I finally devised was to have them write their own autobiographies. Reading them, we were often able to piece their years together with political and social movements that they were then better able to understand.
Nor were all these women simply waiting around for me to show up and ask them to write about themselves. Mrs. Winson Hudson, whose house was bombed more than once by the KKK, was already writing her autobiography when I was introduced to her. A remarkable woman, living in Harmony, Mississippi, a half-day’s drive from anywhere of note, she is acutely aware of history, of change, and of her function as a revolutionary leader. Her defense against the Klan was a big German shepherd dog who barked loudly when he heard the bombers coming, and two shotguns which she and her husband never hesitated to use. She wanted other people to know what it meant to fight alone against intimidation and murder, so she began to write it all down.
From Mrs. Hudson I learned a new respect for women and began to search out the works of others. Women who were generally abused when they lived and wrote, or were laughed at and belittled, or were simply forgotten as soon as critics found it feasible I found that, indeed, the majority of black women who tried to express themselves by writing and who tried to make a living doing so, died in obscurity and poverty, usually before their time.