This blog and the others in the series are parts of a speech I gave at the University of Kentucky Annual Black Women's Conference as the Anna Julia Cooper Lecturer last March. The speech was titled, "Ready for Journey: Some Thoughts on Leading an Activist Life." In the wake of all the debate on The Help, authentic voice and what constitutes activism, I decided to share my thoughts about what it means to be active and activist in your life and the world around you.
On the eve of her 62nd birthday, my mother announced to my four sisters and I that she was going to Africa. I am not sure why this was surprising to us. My mother is a woman who makes proclamations. On my sister Sharon’s 41st birthday, she called each of her 5 daughters to announce she was no longer making birthday cakes. She said that 44 years of making birthday cakes—a number that coincided with the age of my oldest sister on her last birthday—was E-NOUGH for any one woman. When she decided to retire the second time on January 1st of the calendar year she would turn 65 making her eligible for social security, she announced that she was not going to think for one year. Because it had been proclaimed she would reply to any question she felt took too much brainpower, “Sorry. That seems like it will require more thought than I am willing to give this year.” At 60, she walked into the kitchen and said to all those gathered—her daughters, a son-in-law, a few stray grandchildren—she was no longer interested in cooking. Not only was she not making dinner that night, she would not be making anymore dinners outside of holidays and those “rare evenings where she was feeling generous”. With that she entered the pantry, then the freezer and invited us all to a hand full of peanuts and two sugar free popsicles, which is what she was going to have. Turned her back, went to her room and continued watching the endless news programming that dominates the viewing lineup at my mother’s house.
This is who she is. My mother. She makes her intentions known and then follows through. So when she said she was going to Africa, we were a little surprised but all got on board with the planning because my mother had said it in a particular tone of her voice that we all understood meant she would make her words true. She shared, with us for the first time, that as a young girl she had dreamed of being a missionary in Africa, but life and life choices set her on a path of marriage, child rearing and a nursing career that seemed to move her away from that dream until…one day in the church bulletin there was a notice for members interested in participating in a medical mission to Ghana. That was it.
The more I thought about it, the more my mother’s actions made sense and my surprise did not. My mother was ready for the journey. My mother grew up in small town in Southeast Texas during the southern apartheid—Jim Crow. She picked cotton in the same fields as her father, her grandmother, and all her foreparents who had been enslaved on a plantation nearby. She went to a segregated school that produced more field-hands-turned-factory-workers when they moved from the land to the city than they did missionaries. But she had a vision of a life and world different from the one in which she lived.
My mother found this vision, this place—Africa—this work—medical missions—she found this vision of a place she would not see with her own two eyes or touch with tender hands and feet for decades, She found this vision…in books. Warned by her grandmother that her weakness in the sun soaked cotton fields rendered her useless in the work that paid black people in that town and a white woman’s kitchen was no place to be, education was her only way. “Girl, get your education,” her grandmother said. And she did. She did it through formal education, but also she set on a life long path of self-schooling. I have never in my life known my mother to be without a book or two and thanks to the power of amazon.com and upwardly mobile children she will never know it.
While still in a town where a white man you passed every day could call a small girl nigger if he thought she had dawdled too long in his market [A true story], she read Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country, a novel set in South Africa about two men—one black, one white—trying to build family and find redemption in the early days of apartheid. This book, she will tell you now in her more mature language of struggle and survival, helped her to contextualize her own racial oppression in a global effort of black people trying to get someone else’s boot off their neck.
A book she made me read. A book she mentioned one Sunday morning, as my mother who at that time had never left the continent where she was born and who still loves Jesus more than any person I know, put down her Bible, her purse and her keys to watch Nelson Mandela walk out of prison. That was one book of many that would become useful at a time she could not have imagined. Her world was larger than the cotton and rice fields that surrounded her small town because she expanded it with the written word until she could make the physical trip.
THOUGHT # 1 on leading an activist life: You have to read. You have to read far and wide.
You have to read newspapers, books, magazines, pamphlets, streets signs, subtitles of foreign films, people, tea leaves, the stars. You have to educate yourself for the world you can see and the world you cannot.
By the time she landed in Accra, My Mother was ready. She is returning to Ghana for the fifth time this April and has since been to Kenya, Mexico, and will make her first trip to Costa Rica in August two months shy of her 68th birthday.
Anyone who knows me knows that I talk about my mother a lot. I love my mother. I LOVE my mother. I always say that my son is a love song to my mother and her care. My grandmother died when my mother was six, but she had been ill and unable to care for her for years before that. Being the daughter of a motherless child means that you and she are operating without a playbook. Her care and self-expression are largely her own handiwork. My mother is an original. Yet, I think she is in many ways the blueprint of what it means to live an activist life despite my now 15 years of teaching at the university level and extensive post-graduate education.
Everything I needed to know about community engagement and community work, about being active I learned watching my mother by the time I was twelve. Her propensity for reading gave her one of the highest levels of literacy in our community. My mother worked for 45 years as an oncology nurse while raising 5 children on her own, but at night after children were fed or while she was making dinner she helped people do their taxes, fill out forms, read letters from the bank, decipher their retirement benefits, apply for WIC or food stamps as well as make lists of questions to ask their doctor at the next appointment. She still is one of the last persons on earth who answers their phone because it rings, it’s her house and maybe the person on the other end needs something from her. She took her homespun obligation to be useful, helpful in her indigenous community to rural provinces in Africa where she treated burns from open fires, machete and machinery accidents, helped young mothers with sick babies release milk from engorged breast. But these people she helped were also a part of her community from the first time she found them in books. She knew them to be her people like the ones next door and up the block. She was READY.
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