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

like anybody else and wouldn’t harm us. As long as we be truthful.— Mrs. O. R.
    In 1957 my sixth child was born and then I had two childrens to help me chop cotton. They was still paying $3.00 a day for chopping cotton. In 1960 my seven and eight was born, another set of twins, by that time I had three kids chopping cotton. In June, 1961 my husband died on the 5th day of June. That was the most awful day of my life. Robert was not sick, hadn’t ever been sick. He began having pains in his chest. The pains began to get so bad until I told my boy to go get my brother-in-law to go get the doctor, before the doctor got out there he was dead. And I was three months pregnant with my ninth child. My sister come out and move me to town.
    I went down and put in for Welfare. So I started working in private homes. I was working by the day. Sometimes I would work for three different white women in a day for $3.50. That what all three of them together would pay me. I was paying a woman $1.00 a day to keep my little children. Feb. 26, 1962 I had my baby. I started to working again in private homes. I just work for one lady. I work 4 1/2 days a week for $11.25 from 8 A.M. to 5 P.M. I work all of 1962 until May 1964. So I ask the lady could she pay me any more. So she gave me a $6.25 raise. I had to pay the baby sitter $5.00 a week out of that $18.00. So I got tired of working for nothing. I began to look for another job that could help me support my kids. In 1966 I began volunteer working for CDGM. * I work over at the center for about 6 weeks then CDGM died in Humphries county. Well, we work on. In 1967 we began to get paid $25.00 a week from Friends of the Children. I was making more then than I ever had in my life. On July 26, 1968 when I receive my $65.00 [a week] that was a happy day for me— Mrs. D. G.
    Before I had a chance to go very far with my workshops and fieldwork follow-up sessions I was fired. Unfortunately, the money for my salary, most of it, had come from OEO‡ which apparently frowns on black studies courses for Headstart teachers. Actually I suppose I am left with a project that will be a private one whose success will be largely immeasurable, but since I don’t believe success must be measurable I don’t mind at all.
    Slowly I am putting these stories together. Not for the public but for the women who wrote them. Will seeing each other’s lives make any of the past clearer to them? I don’t know. I hope so. I hope the contradictions will show but also the faith and grace of a people under continuous pressures. So much of the satisfying work of life begins as an experiment; having learned this, no experiment is ever quite a failure.
    * Child Development Group of Mississippi, the oldest Headstart program in the state.
    â€¡ Office of Economic Opportunity.
    1970

A TALK: CONVOCATION 1972
    W HEN C HARLES D E C ARLO * asked me to speak to you today I was quick to mention I had no idea what one said at such gatherings. I never had such a formal pregraduation ceremony, but was pushed out into the world from beside Mrs. Raushenbush’s fireplace with a few words of good cheer and a very small glass of champagne.
    â€œWhat shall I talk about?” I asked. To which Charles replied, “Oh, let me see: The War, Poverty, The Plight of Women, Your Own Writing, Your Life, or How Things Were When You Were at Sarah Lawrence.”
    There was a pause. Then he said, “It needn’t be anything fancy, or long. It won’t be published or anything, just speak from the heart.”
    So this talk is called “How to Speak about Practically Everything, Briefly, from the Heart.”
    The last time I spoke here I was already involved in a study of black women writers that has tremendously enriched the past couple of years. It began, this study, shortly after my husband and I moved to Mississippi to live. By the time we had overcome our anxiety that we might be beaten up, mobbed, or