In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens Read Online Free PDF Page A

started outside. My husband was shooting, emptying every gun. My daughter was swinging to me thinking the Klan might kill me. She said she didn’t know where all the shooting and bombing was. I pulled aloose from my daughter and she fell on our concrete porch. When I came to myself I heard my daughter say “Mama, I am hurt.” In a day or so we had to rush her to Hinds General Hospital. The baby had to come. The baby was saved but had to stay in the hospital for a long time. But we were so glad to save the baby… .
    Just a month later we came home one Sunday evening and found my daughter crying. The deputy sheriff had brought her a telegram saying your husband has been injured in Vietnam. My daughter wrote him almost every day but he only got his mail by chances. He was on guard the night that plans were set up to destroy our home and his family here in the U.S.A. He was on guard in Vietnam guarding the Cambodian border.
    He came home in November from Vietnam. He was hit three times, once in his leg, once in his knee, and once in his chest. The bullet in his chest will have to stay there forever or as long as he lives. I asked my daughter not to write to tell him of this terrible incidence while he was in Vietnam. But he knows all about it now. And I’ll let anyone decide within themselves how he feels about this country that his son will have to grow up in.
    Last summer I was offered a job as consultant in black history for Friends of the Children of Mississippi. This is a Headstart program that interested me because for three years it existed without government help or intervention. Its director was a young man from SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. My job was to create black history materials for teachers of the children in the Headstart centers, since Friends of the Children realized how impossible it would be for teachers to teach “blackness” to small children if they had no grasp of what black history was themselves. I was to devote two week-long workshop sessions to teaching these teachers, who turned out to be ninety women from various parts of the state. Some of them had been schoolteachers in Mississippi public schools, most had been maids, many had been fieldworkers. Almost all of them had children of their own, though often these were grown-up and away from home. The average educational level was perhaps fifth grade, though all the women were intelligent, industrious, anxious to learn, and deeply concerned about the welfare of the children they were teaching. How did I know this? Because many of them, indeed most, had worked for from one to eighteen months at the Headstart centers for less than ten dollars a week. Many months they worked for nothing.
    I came to my job filled with enthusiasm. These were women I identified with, women who’d do anything for the good of black children. They were women Charles White might have drawn, heavy-set women with gold teeth and big fat arms; women who’d worked in the cotton fields for fifty cents a day. I felt, on my first day before my class, as if the room were full of my mothers. Of course, teaching them black history in two weeks of lecturing, films, pictures was something else again.
    It was hard. And I’ve no reason to believe I was a success.
    In the first place, “history,” to my students, was a total unknown. Many of them were extremely poor readers, and of course how were they to relate to history that was never written? Q. —“When was the period of slavery?” A. —“Around 1942?” And how could I underestimate the value of that answer, although it did not offer the class perspective, which we very much needed.
    How do you teach earnest but educationally crippled middle-aged and older women the significance of their past? How do you get them to understand the pathos and beauty of a heritage they have been taught to regard with shame? How do you make them appreciate their own