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Letters of an Abiding Faith:
Legacy of a Slave's GrandDaughter to
her Son
written by Ella Lewis to her Son
(Rudolph Lewis)
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Letter 19
April 22,1983*
Dear Son,
Just a Few lines to give answer to your letter I
received some time ago. Very glade to hear From you and Know you
was doing fine. I sorry it took me So long to rite.. I hope you
forgive me. No 1 I hate to rite No 2 I Been Sick and Some Worried.
So I feel Some Better So I try to drop you a Few line.
No Body is well. Susie is sick too. Also Aunt
Sal.** We had So much rain down here. Also last week we had an
inch Snow. I haven't started my garden as yet. It Been So Wet.
Gwen was down last week End.*** I ask her when had she seen you.
She say she haven't. But she Call you. My teeth giving me lot of
trouble. My glasses need changing too I guess that Why my Eyes
giving me a lot of trouble.***** So you take care of your self.
Rite when you can.
From Mother
I love you *
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Commentary
*That summer of 1983 I worked as
an English Skills Specialist for the University of Maryland
College Park. Under the encouragement of Dr. Donna Hamilton, my
former Shakespeare teacher, I interviewed that summer for
a teaching position at the University of Northeast Louisiana
University (NLU). The school paid for my flight to Monroe for
the interview. The evening after the interview before I caught
the plane, I was treated to a cat fish dinner by the dean. On my
return to Maryland, I talked to several professors in the
English Department before I made my decision to accept the
position. My mentor Dr. Wilson, fearing my safety knowing my
temperament, objected to my going into the deep South. But I
wanted to know New Orleans and Monroe was three hundred miles
from that romantic city. I had been there before while I was
married in the early 1970s. Then I gave my 59 Porche to a friend
named Steve Smoot. He never picked it up and it was eventually
towed away. I then sold all that I had and caught the Trailways
bus. I stayed in New Orleans two weeks in one-room hotels for
bums that cost four dollars a night. I had the blues. I spent
most of my time in the French Quarter. For awhile I shared a
room with a fellow I met in Biloxi. Feeling uncomfortable, I
later got my own room. But I soon ran out of money and had to
call my wife and a female friend for money to get back to
Baltimore.
**Aunt Sal," a variant of Sally, the name of Mama’s
sister. The word "aunt" is often pronounce with the
clipped "aint." By the date of this letter, Aunt Sal
had moved off of South Freemont, I believe, into one of the new
low-rise project houses with her daughter Laura..
***Gwen was David’s estranged wife. I lived with her and
her girl friend without charge in Fort Washington for several
months after I came back from Africa. I was hired before I left
Jarratt for an adjunct position with the University of the
District of Columbia. I later got a room in Washington.
****At the writing of this letter, Mama was seventy-two years
old. By this time, she had been in retirement about seven years.
From 1948 until about 1976, she worked six days a week at
Jarratt Motel as a cook for dirt pay. Her starting pay in the
late 40s was less than $18 a week for six days work. Before then she and Daddy had
worked as sharecroppers for Luther Creath from about 1926. Mama
also cooked, washed, cleaned his house, and helped to raise his
children. She, Daddy, and their daughters lived on his farm at
least ten years sharecropping.
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—WashingtonPost |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
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Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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