In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens Read Online Free PDF

endurance, creativity, incredible loveliness of spirit? It should have been as simple as handing them each a mirror, but it was not. How do you show a connection between present and past when, as eloquent but morally befuddled Faulkner wrote, “the past is not even past”?
    Try to tell a sixty-year-old delta woman that black men invented anything, black women wrote sonnets, that black people long ago were every bit the human beings they are today. Try to tell her that kinky hair is delightful. Chances are she will begin to talk “Bible” to you, and you will discover to your dismay that the lady still believes in the curse of Ham.
    I thought about the problem, talked about it for hours with anybody who’d listen and offer advice. Since time was so short, the important thing, it seemed to me, was not so much teaching my “students” the facts of Africa, slavery and Jim Crow (though I did as much of that as I could), I wanted to give them in addition a knowledge of what history itself is. And in order that they see themselves and their parents and grandparents as part of a living, working, creating movement in Time and Place, I drew on my experience with Mrs. Hudson, and asked them to write their autobiographies; which they proceeded, some rather laboriously, to do.
    I had noticed during workshop sessions that the very word “black” did not come easily to some of the women. (This was especially true of the six or seven white teachers among the others. I never quite understood why they were even in my classes; they were plainly uncomfortable the whole time. None of them wrote autobiographies and all of them rejected the cruel facts of slavery, lynchings, et cetera, I showed on film. “I just naturally don’t believe the whites treated ’em that bad,” said one, pointing to the black women around her, who merely grunted, folded their arms, and smiled knowingly. Ironically, at this very time four Klansmen were being tried for the lynching, two years before, of Vernon Dehmer, head of his local NAACP, and the trial was in all the news media.) I asked the women to write especially about color prejudice within their own families. Many of them were annoyed by the question, for, they said indignantly, “How can we be prejudiced against our own selves; we are all of one race.” They did not say “we are all black.”
    The excerpts below represent part of the tiny scratch these women made on the surface of their memories, of their history.
I was one of three children, brought up by grandparents. There was a bright child and a black child which I am. I always feared adults and keep to myself. My grandmother love her bright child, seem to had only hate for me.— Mrs. D. M. T.
    They had very dark skin. My grandmother was low and fat, she had long hair and would have it braided all over her head. She wore her dresses very long and a apron as long as her dress. My grandfather was tall with long beards under his chin. His hair was very long. They lived on their own little farm and never had what I called a “hard time,” they raised corn, cotton and vegetables, cured their own meat and made syrup from cane. They had eight children, six boys and two girls. My father said they would whip them if they wouldn’t mind them, or any grown person.
    My grandparents thought white folks knew everything, and everything they did was right. They thought black people never knew what they was talking about, or what they was doing.
    My mother raised her family to work for what they wanted, and to be honest, proud of your color, to go to church, and school and do the right things. She taught us a white person wasn’t no better than a black person, a man was just a man, no matter what color he is.
    My mother said that the reason we are black is this: a curse from God.—Mrs. C. S.
    My parents taught us never to have fear of the white peoples because they were just people