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Mollie Cooper's Life in
Mississippi
& Her Journey to Freedom By
Barbara Gray
My personal hero is my grandmother Mollie Cooper. I have
many memories of her. But there is a visit with my grandmother I will
remember as long as I live. On this occasion she told me a
story that outweighs all my other memories of her. This visit with
my grandmother occurred a year or so after my mother's passing. Maybe it
was something that I asked my grandmother that sparked her story.
My grandmother told me me that she was born in St. Louis and raised
by her father along with her older sister and younger brother. I'd
always thought she was born in Mississippi because that's where my
mother was born. My grandmother Mollie's mother died when she was young
and she did not remember her. Mollie was not yet thirteen when her older
sister married, left St. Louis, and moved to Chicago.
When Mollie was about thirteen, her father became very ill. He knew
his time to live was short and he wanted to be family when he died. He
also wanted to make plans for Mollie and her brother to be taken in by
family after his passing. His sister was in Mississippi, which is where
he was born.
I don't recall where in Mississippi my great grandfather took Mollie
and her brother. He, however, had warned her never to go to the deltas,
which were the worst place for colored people to live. In the deltas,
white people treated colored people real bad.
Mollie's father died leaving her and her brother with his sister.
Orphaned, Mollie didn't like living in Mississippi and she was very
unhappy there. Living was hard there. At the age of fifteen she met an
older man who wanted to marry her. With the condition that he take her
brother also into their household, Mollie agreed to marry him. The man
agreed and they married. My grandmother Mollie never mentioned loving
him--just marrying him. As a new teenage bride, she left her aunt's
house and was taken to the place her father told her never to go--the
deltas.
The deltas were worst than her father had described. Mollie and her
husband were sharecroppers. Sharecroppers??? As a child, I had no idea
what drudgery a sharecropper life was. My grandmother quickly made it
plain that there was nothing exciting about this part of her life. In
the white hot fields, she picked cotton.
Before she went into further details, she told me of the loss of her
younger brother, who died within a year of her marriage. "Back
then," she said, responding to my questions, "people got sick
and died. We didn't have names for illnesses. He had a fever and
died."
I found the idea fascinating that my grandmother Mollie as a young
woman picked cotton. With a smile on her face, "your mother used to
help me in the fields. She was a good little hand." Well, I thought
I had heard everything. My mother never told me she had picked cotton.
She was five when she left Mississippi. I knew she could not have
forgotten that.
My grandmother Mollie went on to tell me how horrible life was in the
deltas. The cotton fields were huge--"as far as the eye could see
was all fields." The sun was so hot and there wasn't a tree
anywhere for shade. As she spoke, I could sense that she was reliving
the pain and the anguish of her memories of those times. Though she
didn't elaborate, my grandmother Mollie said she had seen horrible
things done to black people in the deltas.
Mollie did tell me, however, about her husband, my biological
grandfather. He was abusive, an alcoholic, a gambler, and he ran around
with women. They were never able to get ahead because he always owed the
white man money. He stayed in debt. It had gotten so bad that the white
man started to take things that they needed to survive on. Often they
did not get paid for their work because of money her husband owed to the
white man.
The last straw for grandmother Mollie was when the white man came and
took away her chickens. That was all they had left and she begged the
man like she had done many times before. But he took the chickens
away. She knew then that she had to do something for herself and her
three children. That's when she began to plan her escape.
Mollie saved enough to take the train to Chicago. Her sister there
knew she was coming. A Sunday, she sent her children to a relative's
house. This was the day she was going to make her move. She knew her
husband would not be home because always spent Sundays with another
woman. She had one bag. She went and got her children and got on a train
to Chicago. She never looked back. She said she couldn't understand
women today saying they couldn't leave a man. "That's a lie,"
she said. For she left with one bag and three children and never looked
back.
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Mollie arrived in Chicago with three babies and was taken in, she and
her three children, by her older sister and her sister's husband. She
lied to get a job, telling the owner of a cleaners that she had
experience as a seamstress. She knew how to do a few things by hand, but
she had never worked as a seamstress.
She met a man named Albert Cooper, who loved her and her three
children. They married and had seven more children. The man she left
behind, her husband, she was told in a letter that another man killed
him over a woman. That had nothing to do with her remarrying. She was
not thinking about things like divorce. She knew she would never see him
again.
While my mother was pregnant with me, my grandmother
Mollie lost her sister. During my lifetime, up until the date of this
talk with her, my grandmother had lost my grandfather and three of her
children.
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It occurred to me then that my grandmother had
suffered a lot of loss. She had grieved the loss of loved ones over and
over again. She had practically been left alone in this world to
survive, which she did. And through all of this she was not a bitter
woman. She had a place in her heart for every single person in my
family, no matter what they did or what anybody else thought of them.I understood this now. I understood a lot now. I understood why no
one in my family was going to be without a place to stay as long as she
was alive. I now understood why sometimes it would seem as if she was
far away in a deep thought, something unpleasant. Before this day's
story, in my eyes, my grandmother's greatest accomplishment was that she
had had ten children. I knew now that this woman who I had just looked
at as a grandmother was more than just that.
She was history, more than just a woman. I knew then that what she
had in her, I had in me. If she could survive the things she survived, I
surely could survive the things I had to go through. Her blood flowed
through mine. If I could be half the woman my grandmother was, I would
make it in this life. Photo above: from left to right: (Top) Effie (mother), Barbara, Dorothy, Charles, Irene,
Alice, Frances; (Bottom) Claudette, Mollie Cooper (grandmother) Kenneth, Robert Cooper
(grandfather), Lawrence -- February 15, 1953
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Barbara Gray reside in Baltimore, Maryland. She is a
native of Chicago, Illinois. Ms. Gray is married and has a
twenty-one-year-old son. She has been employed as a correctional officer
for fourteen years and is a veteran of the U.S. Air Force.
After a
twenty-two year absence from the classroom, Barbara has returned to
school as a full-time student. She is currently working towards earning
a BA degree in criminal justice at Sojourner Douglass College. To
contact her hit bgray1g@yahoo.com |
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Greenback Planet: How the Dollar Conquered
the World and Threatened Civilization as We Know It
By H. W. Brands
In Greenback Planet, acclaimed historian H. W. Brands charts the dollar's astonishing rise to become the world's principal currency. Telling the story with the verve of a novelist, he recounts key episodes in U.S. monetary history, from the Civil War debate over fiat money (greenbacks) to the recent worldwide financial crisis. Brands explores the dollar's changing relations to gold and silver and to other currencies and cogently explains how America's economic might made the dollar the fundamental standard of value in world finance. He vividly describes the 1869 Black Friday attempt to corner the gold market, banker J. P. Morgan's bailout of the U.S. treasury, the creation of the Federal Reserve, and President Franklin Roosevelt's handling of the bank panic of 1933. Brands shows how lessons learned (and not learned) in the Great Depression have influenced subsequent U.S. monetary policy, and how the dollar's dominance helped transform economies in countries ranging from Germany and Japan after World War II to Russia and China today. He concludes with a sobering dissection of the 2008 world financial debacle, which exposed the power--and the enormous risks--of the dollar's worldwide reign. The Economy |
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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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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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If you like this page consider making a donation
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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
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 29 November 2011
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