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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 49
Dec 20, 1989
Dear Son,
I received your letter glade hear From you. This
leave me doing OK. Much better I hope you got the Check I sent
you. It was not much But it the Best I Could do right now.
Doc let me tell you Some Thing a Baby got to
Crawl Before he Walk. I say that to Say this. You have Come a long
ways. Just thank God For What you have Because you Cant hurry God.
You just got to wait and pray that the only hope I Know. So stop
complaining Just Count your Blessings See What God have done.
Doc dont take Every Body For your Friend. Your
Enemies Cant hurt you But your Close Friend can.* Sooner you learn
that the better you will Be. Peoples dont want to See you with
nothing. But you Keep praying and doing the right thing.
Lucinda gave me Microwave Oven on my Birthday.
So when Ever you go to work You Get me a Small radio. I rite you
again Soon I getting sleepy. I still praying For you So you Be
good have a nice Xmas and a happy New Year.
From Mother
love you *
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Commentary
*Henry Nicholas, the national
president of 1199, came to town to wage a campaign for the 1199
members of Baltimore to vote the National Union into the
American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Workers (AFSME),
rather than Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Most
of the old leadership of the Baltimore/Washington local was for
Nicholas and AFSME, rather than SEIU. Initially, the officers
were split, with the Executive Vice President Beatrice Moore,
wife of the local’s president (Bob Moore), leaning toward
Nicholas and AFSCME. In the end she sat on the fence. I tried to
do the same thing. I, however, handed to Nicholas a photo which
indicated that personnel of SEIU, pretending to be local
organizers, had gone through the records of the local before the
guidelines for the election were established.
Of course, all of that got back to Bob Moore. I was barred
from the office. My paycheck, however, was signed by Henry
Nicholas. Thus, in the campaign, siding with Nicholas, I was
going against a friend of twenty years, a friend whom I had a
great affection. I did not take the matter lightly. Though I had
fallen short of probity in my personal life, I have been
punctilious in my public life and career. It has cost me dearly
in stability, financial security, and friends. I wanted to
picture the matter like a scrimmage game, persons on the same
team preparing for the greater enemy. But people became deadly
serious. I was naïve.
AFSCME lost Baltimore. Beatrice Moore was forced into
retirement by SEIU. I decided I did not want to work further
with Nicholas; because on the whole, I didn’t trust him
personally anymore than Bob did. Yet I thought he could do more
for workers here in Baltimore than SEIU; moreover, the rank and
file leadership wanted him. But Bob was fighting for his life
and he had debts he had to pay. Much of this I did not
understand until after the campaign was over.
I had no interest in going to Philadelphia and Nicholas told
me he had no other position for me than organizer, which may
have required me going anywhere in the country. I was exhausted
by the intrigue. This gaming was above my head. I handed
Nicholas my resignation and he accepted it.
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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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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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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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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
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
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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