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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)
Letter 5
January 30, 1978
Dear Son,
Just a few lines to let you hear from me. This leave
me up and about But not so well. Hope this letter may find you doing
fine. I receive your most kind welcomed letter also the card. You dont
know how glade I was to hear from you. Well Every Body is here doing OK
far as I know.
Hope your stomach is better. Doc you should go to the
Doctor. Dont keep putting it off. I love you and care a lot about you.
But Mother Cant do as I once have. I am willing But my health Just wont
allow me. Well I have no need to complain Because the Lord Been So good
to me. So all I can say thank to God it Could Be worse.
Bunk all was here to day. She OK. Mr Percy William is
dead.* Buried him 29 January. It is Some cold down here. We haven't had
no Snow as yet But Cold. Doc I am Sending you a little Piece of money. I
glade you got a raise. I wont you to get your self a pair shoes and
pants So you can look nice like other mens. And I look for answer Back
telling me What you Bought. So you Can look out for it. It Be around Feb
9 or 10 of the month. It want Be much But it'll help. Dont for get to
rite.
Take care of your self. I hope you finish School. And
Doc try to stop dranking wine and whiskey. I know you cant just stop
your self But ask the Lord to keep you and he will do just that.
So I close now. Close with love seal with kiss. God
Bless the one that open this.
From your Mother. Keep Smiling
Commentary
*Percy Williams
was a neighbor who lived on the Jerusalem Church road, just down
the road from Susie. While living, he worked at Johns Mansville
plant up in Jarratt. He was among the few men in the community
that had one of the better jobs to be had in Jarratt. But
everyone in one way or another either worked in the agricultural
or the timber industries. Two of Mr. Percy’s children, Diane
and Percy Junior, were about my age and we all attended Creath
Elementary, a two room school with seven grades about two miles
from the church, on the other side of the main Creath farmhouse.
Actually, the school was built on Creath family land, about a
mile before one came to Grandma Mary’s house or the Owens’
farm. Daddy and Mama sharecropped for the Creaths and worked on
the Owens farm during the Great Depression. They lived in a
house near Sansee Swamp, where the mosquitoes were as large as
eagles. It was during this period when my mother, then a
teenager, remembers working ten hours a day for seventy-five
cents. She has never forgotten the harshness of her childhood.
The house that they and their daughters lived in had fallen in
by the time I was walking to Creath Elementary. There was still
then evidence, however, that a house had been there. It was much
later than I learned that my family had lived there. It seem
that that family history they had all wanted to forget. It seems
it was my prying that brought it all back to consciousness, the
painful memories of subservience and poverty. But it was such
details I needed to make sense out of my life and theirs. Letter
4 < > Letter 6 * * * * *
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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
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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
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update
30 December 2011
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