Lanterns Read online

  Langston Hughes’ poetry and books with his wise character “Simple” and Booker T. Washington’s autobiography Up from Slavery were in Daddy’s home library. I never met Booker T. Washington, but Daddy greatly admired his teachings about self-reliance, individual initiative, community uplift, hard work, education, and service. Thanks to Daddy, I learned how Booker T. Washington and his Tuskegee colleague and scientific genius, George Washington Carver, overcame slavery, and molded Tuskegee Institute into a pathway of hope and opportunity for thousands of Black students.

  I learned to love to read because my Daddy loved to read and had a study full of books he spent time with every day. On our living room mantel was a complete miniature set of Shakespeare’s works. Buying books to improve our minds was an indisputably higher priority for him than buying a toy or nonessential clothing. The value of staying up to date on the latest thinking and developments in one’s field was impressed upon us as we watched Daddy and Mama subscribe to theological and church music publications and buy the latest books by leading theologians and thinkers. While cleaning out our house after Mama’s death, I was awed and humbled to find years of saved magazines and clippings on teen pregnancy, family values, and race relations. Among a pile of old issues of Christian Century on the freezer on our enclosed back porch was one opened to a page with a quotation by Dwight David Eisenhower underlined in red: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.” I had discovered this quotation independently in a Washington, D.C. library several years before, made it into a Children’s Defense Fund poster, and used it in many speeches. How reassuring yet eerie to feel Daddy’s guiding hand affirming my work for children and my struggle with still misguided national priorities so many years later. Eisenhower’s warning is more relevant today than ever.

  Daddy and Mama did not confine their self-improvement to reading. They went to Union Theological Seminary (Daddy admired Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, esteemed pastor of Riverside Church, very much), to a Black Mountain, North Carolina conference center where they met E. Stanley Jones, and to Oberlin College for summer courses and other enrichment. They went away every year for a week to the Minister’s Institute at Hampton Institute in Virginia, sometimes taking me along. I would wander along Hampton’s waterfront and through the chapel and library at the college Booker T. Washington attended and where he later taught while my parents listened to the latest developments in their fields. I’d join them in the evenings to listen to great sermons and choirs.

  My belief that I and others could do more than complain, wring hands, or give in to despair at the wrongs rife in the world stems from my parents’ examples. Daddy, a teacher-preacher who never raised his voice in the pulpit and who tried to educate our congregation’s mind as well as touch its heart, taught that faith required action and that action could be sustained only by faith in the face of daily discouragement and injustice in our segregated southern society. Because the public playgrounds and many public services were closed to Black children, Mama and Daddy made our church a hub for children. Boy and Girl Scout troops, boxing, skating, ball games, and other physical activities provided outlets for pent-up boys’ and girls’ energy. Choirs, children’s days, pageants, and vacation Bible school made church a welcoming haven rather than a boring chore. And the great preachers and role models invited to speak at Shiloh helped challenge our minds and widen our horizons and remind us of the sky above and of the rainbows in the clouds.

  My outrage about children who die needlessly from preventable diseases and curable sickness today is a result of my parents’ sadness over the senseless death of little Johnny Harrington, who lived three doors down from our church parsonage and did not get a tetanus shot after stepping on a nail. His good and hard-working grandmother didn’t have the money or the knowledge to take him to the emergency room and nobody acted until it was too late.

  My concern for safe places for children to play and swim comes from the lack of public playgrounds for Black children when I was growing up and our exclusion from the swimming pool near my home where I could see and hear White children splashing happily. A childhood friend died when he jumped off the bridge into the shallow hospital-sewage-infected waters of Crooked Creek near my home and broke his neck. And I almost drowned in a segregated public lake in Cheraw, South Carolina that lacked adequate lifeguard surveillance. Daddy and Mama built a playground behind our church with a skating rink and swings and sliding boards and lights so children could play at night and Mama opened a canteen with sodas and snacks so that young people could have someplace safe and fun to go.

  My advocacy for equitable health care for all and outrage that our rich nation denies it to millions comes from the horror Daddy and I felt when we witnessed a White ambulance driver arrive on the scene of a middle-of-the-night collision near our home only to drive away, leaving behind seriously injured Black migrant workers after he saw that the White truck driver with whom they had collided was unhurt.

  Daddy died on May 6, 1954—eleven days before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision that he had waited and watched for. My mother carried on our family’s rituals and responsibilities valiantly—doing what she had to do to continue preparing us for life.

  My concern for children without homes and parents unable to care for them comes from the foster children my mother took into our home after Daddy died. I am still ashamed of my resentment and jealousy when I was asked to share my room with a homeless child for a few days. As I grew older, nearly a dozen foster sisters and brothers were reared by my mother.

  An elderly White man asked me what I did for a living when I was home for my mother’s funeral in 1984.1 realized and told him I do, perhaps on a larger scale, exactly what my parents did: serve and advocate for children and the poor.

  2

  COMMUNITY ELDERS AS CO-PARENTS AND MENTORS

  Miz Tee, Miz Lucy, Miz Kate, and Miz Amie

  I LOVED IT when my parents left town to attend a convention, visit a relative, or pursue continuing education because I would get a chance to stay with Miz Tee Kelly or Miz Lucy McQueen which I loved. They were among my many kind Black community co-parents and elders who spent time with and paid attention to me. They had no children of their own but mothered many children as if we belonged to them.

  Miz Tee—Mrs. Theresa Kelly—lived in a four-room unpainted house with a big front porch and a small back porch on Amelia Street in Bennettsville. Every inch of it was sparkling clean. Every Sunday night my family enjoyed Miz Tee’s scrumptious dinners of fried or smothered chicken, macaroni and cheese, rice or mashed potatoes with gravy to die for, greens—collards, turnips, cabbage, or kale—and the thickest but lightest buttermilk biscuits, the recipe for which she took to heaven with her, that would melt in your mouth. Topped off by the best sweet potato pone I’ve ever tasted, and fresh churned ice cream, Miz Tee’s dinners were a treasured Wright family ritual each Sabbath evening.

  Miz Tee, when she kept me, would let me share her daily chores of ironing, cooking, washing, hanging out the clothes, and cleaning the house. She was not only a perfect housekeeper and cook, but she starched and ironed white dress shirts without a wrinkle for White folks with the heavy cast irons she hooked onto and heated around her coal-burning potbellied stove. In the room where I slept—which doubled as her living room—there was a big framed picture of Jesus walking on the water towards the boat of his terrified disciples who were afraid of capsizing in the tossing waves.

  I never met anyone else in her family; I felt my family was her family. She lived alone for as long as I remember. As far as I know, she had very little formal education, but she knew her Bible and attended Sunday school and church every Sunday faithfully. She was so proud and encouraging when my
sister Olive, my brothers, and I went off to college. She would send us shoeboxes filled with greasy dollar bills and fried chicken and biscuits that everyone on my dorm floor looked forward to with great anticipation. “When is Miz Tee going to send another box?” was a common question.

  Miz Tee believed that God controlled everything including the length of life. When fierce lightning and thunder storms would come during summer months, Mama didn’t seem so sure. She would gather all of us together, cut off the electric lights, and sit with us in the dark on the stairs in our new parsonage until the storm passed over. She was afraid of lightning strikes. One day when a big summer storm was whipping up, Miz Tee told me to go out on the back porch and bring in the clothes hanging there so they wouldn’t get drenched. As I went to obey, a clap of thunder boomed and I ran back and told Miz Tee I was scared of being struck by lightning. She calmly replied, as she returned with me to the back porch to gather in the clothes, “When it’s your time, it’s your time, when it’s not, it’s not. Lightning not going to hit you less God’s ready for you.”

  On some nights other than Sundays, my family and I visited with and ate at one or another parishioner’s house, all of whom vied to outdo the other in providing hospitality for our family. As the last, and for six years, only child at home, I often accompanied my mother to her circles, Mothers’ Club, and missionary society meetings. The church circles, groups of about thirty women who met regularly, were named after the great mother figures and backbones of the church—Mrs. Mary Jane Bradford, Mrs. Nanny Edwards, Mrs. Delia Harrington, and Mrs. Viola Reese. So I overheard the womenfolks’ talk and gossip all the time as we shared meals and engaged in various church and community chores and activities.

  Because there were no washing machines or dryers, Black women in Bennettsville washed their families’ clothes and White people’s clothes in big washtubs, with scrubboards, soaked them in Rinso, washed out heavy stains with lye, hung them on clotheslines to dry, and ironed them with irons heated on wood-and coal-burning stoves. Sometimes Black women of our community would gather to wash clothes together at one another’s houses. When they came to our yard, I helped out by hanging up the well-rinsed wet clothes on lines, taking them down after they dried, and folding them. Quiet guerrilla messages about race relations accompanied these clotheswashing exercises. Black women were ambivalent about having to wash White people’s clothes, cook their food, clean their houses, and tend their children—often while leaving their own children—to make ends meet. While they were grateful for the chance to work, they did not like it that the door of opportunity was closed to them on most non-domestic jobs except teaching which required more education than most of them had received in their segregated and unequal public schools.

  Unlike ours, many of the houses where Black people lived had no electricity. Miz Tee’s house did not so we ate and conversed there by the soft warm light of wick-lit oil lamps. I keep one on the third floor of my home today to remember how it felt.

  Every summer after the vegetable gardens and peach trees ripened, a group of women would come to our parsonage and we’d all spend days peeling peaches and apples and tomatoes, shelling peas and butterbeans, shucking corn, and cooking and canning them and making jelly for winter. And every year there was a hog-killing time. My Daddy raised chickens and hogs and kept our smokehouse filled with bacon and hams and pork chops that lasted all winter long. I don’t touch a chitterling to this day—indeed flee the room at the whiff of chitterling smell—after getting sick and gagging for hours after overindulging in a feast of them, perhaps not as thoroughly cleaned as needed. But the communal preparation of food, the washing of chitterlings in tubs and hanging them on the clotheslines or fences, the preparation of sausage and the cutting of pork chops, hams, and bacon, the salting of meats—and sharing a portion of it with those less fortunate—are childhood memories I’ll never erase.

  My parents did not have to raise me and my sister and brothers alone. The whole community helped them and me just as they helped other people raise their children. Every place I went, there were eyes watching me and people reporting on me when I strayed into places or company or engaged in behavior they knew or thought my parents would not approve. There was always a place other than Miz Tee’s if my parents were away. Miz Lucy McQueen, a beautiful, kindly, gray-haired church woman who taught Sunday school, would spoil me with lemonade and biscuits and good stew beef and did not make me eat vegetables I did not like when I stayed in her welcoming but decrepit old house. I don’t remember much of what it looked like inside, but I do remember what it felt like: warm and loving. And I can smell the big gardenia bushes that bloomed profusely alongside the rose bushes in her yard. Their fragrance, and the perfect white petals that browned at my touch, are among the sweet smells of childhood memory. I’ve not had luck keeping gardenias alive for long stints in my kitchen and yard but I’ll keep trying. (My mother’s hardy snake plants, though, have nearly taken over my sunny kitchen windows.)

  Miz Kate Winston is another precious elder from childhood. She came from Washington, D.C. with a White family in the summers and attended our church when she was in Bennettsville. I visited her once in her home on Rhode Island Avenue in the nation’s capital and waited eagerly for her trips home when she would bring me the prettiest dresses—different from any you could find in Bennettsville—and more extravagant than my parents could afford or would buy.

  Sometimes I stayed with Mrs. Nancy Reese, who was married to Mr. Pierce, a master bricklayer who helped build our church and some of the leading White homes in our town. Miz Nancy organized and led the gleaners who went behind the senior ushers who take up the church offerings, collecting small leftover donations in little tin containers for mission work which we counted with her after church. I loved being a gleaner and going up and down the church aisles every Sunday with Miz Nancy’s other child charges.

  Just as my parents did not have to raise me alone, my husband and I have been blessed with Mrs. Amie Byers to help raise our three sons. My mother sent Miz Amie to live with us and help care for our children when our oldest son Joshua was fifteen months old and our second son Jonah was an infant. She stayed for fourteen years until our third son Ezra was nine years old, treating our three sons as her own. She not only watched over them and their playmates but all the children on our Newton, Massachusetts and later Washington, D.C. neighborhood streets. A woman without a great deal of formal education, she is as smart as a whip, full of mother wit, able to fix anything, piece together any puzzle, and puzzle over any problem that arises until she solves it. Fearless with the hoe, she would chop in two the snakes I feared that plagued our country yard in upstate Chatham, New York. Full of quiet dignity, she transmitted an example of patience and calm—qualities that frayed dual-career parents often lack. My sons honor her now like a grandmother.

  She never missed a graduation as our sons—she called them “my boys”—went through elementary and high school, and she celebrated their academic honors and sports achievements as we did. Although her disabled hip kept her from traveling to Stanford when Josh got his Masters and to Oxford when Jonah got his Doctorate, she was with us in spirit and sat proudly at Josh’s, Jonah’s, and Ezra’s college commencements. I could not have made it without her. I hope my children carry deep in the recesses of their minds and spirits her constant humming of hymns and spontaneous prayers and stories of times past in Bennettsville. Her care for me and our family has carried into the present the legacy of mothering from the good women of Bennettsville for which I’m so profoundly grateful.

  My having been blessed with many positive adult community mentors does not mean I don’t remember, as all children do with great clarity, the times when the spoken and lived messages I received from adults diverged. A kind family friend who ran a play school for children once took me with her to visit her sister in another South Carolina town for a week. At the Greyhound Bus ticket counter, the clerk asked how old I was. Wanting to pay the cheaper child’s
fare, my adult friend told the ticket man I was younger than I was. I piped up and said, “No I’m not, I’m twelve.” She paid the adult fare, but not so happily. I remember sensing I had done wrong by telling the truth.

  We adults, myself included, often engage in small “stories” or “white lies” to cut seemingly small corners. But it is so important to try to tell the truth before children in small and big things. And when we misstate something, have a momentary lapse in judgment, or make a mistake, to admit it. Children pick up our signals and are confused when we say one thing and do another. This small incident nearly fifty years ago makes me insist on paying the right prices or fares, correct a clerk when he or she undercharges as well as overcharges me, and never return a garment I’ve worn but just don’t like. One of my proudest moments as a parent came when I received a letter in the mail from a man who lived two streets over from our house in Washington. Two of my sons had slid and hit his parked car during a snowstorm and left a small dent in it. They did not know whose car it was so they left a note behind the windshield wiper telling the owner what had happened and where a bill for any repair could be sent. The bill arrived with the owner’s note that said this was the first time an anonymous driver who had damaged his parked car had done what my sons had done. Never have I enjoyed paying a bill more, and I thought how proud my Daddy would be of his grandsons’ integrity. I kept the man’s letter on the refrigerator for many months.

  Although Miz Tee, Miz Lucy, and Miz Kate stand out most fondly in my store of childhood memories, there was a plentiful presence of adults who guided and helped us children in Sunday school, vacation Bible school, and other church activities, and in my Brownie and Girl Scout troops (my Scout leader, Miss Johnson, was also my seventh grade teacher). Mrs. Alice Thomas, the mother of my best friend, Ruth, welcomed me into her home as another family member. I would regularly visit Miss Flora Fields, whose nickname was “Scrappy” and who lovingly cared for her retarded brother, Henry, just to talk. In the summer, she and I would pick vegetables from her garden for me to take home to Mama. Black adults always waved and spoke to children. They stopped us on the streets to ask how we and our families were doing; they watched from and called me up to their porches for friendly chats; and I ran their errands. They provided buffers of love and encouragement that helped combat the negative influences of segregated small-town southern life. They helped keep the outside messages from Whites that I, a Black child, was inferior from being internalized.