"SHE MADE A WAY' AND THE POWER OF CAPTIVITY

 “SHE MADE A WAY” AND THE POWER OF CAPTIVITY

I’ve begun to talk about my book “She Made A Way: Mother and Me in a Deep South World,” most recently at a salon at Ann Starks’ home.  I am grateful to Ann for inviting me and friends to share together, and I’ll be glad to come and share with you and your group at your home or other places.  As we talked yesterday, I was reminded again of how much I have been captured by the systems of the world, what the Bible calls “sin,” or what I like to call “captivity.” I grew up in a church that was deeply important to me. They emphasized that the primary elements of sin were individual issues – fornication, alcohol, cursing, lying, cheating, stealing, etc.  While all those are definitely relevant, as I came into young adulthood, I began to discern that the Biblical view of sin, of captivity, was much deeper and more radical.  Systemic powers like racism and sexism and homophobia and militarism and materialism – all these and more are at the root of the Biblical view of sin.  I tried to address some of that issue in this book, in “She Made A Way,” as my mother and I negotiated our way through that morass of captivity.  

I began my talk yesterday with a reading from the beginning of the book, and I want to share it now:

“It is one of my earliest memories.  I am trapped in our room in our home on Porter Street  in Helena, Arkansas.  I say that I was “trapped” because it felt like that to me at a young age of four.  It was in a hot, sticky room on a Sunday afternoon, with both doors  shut.  Summer in the Mississippi River delta in 1951 – hot and muggy, no air conditioning, only a small rotating fan whirring on the dresser, trying to draw me some cool air.  I had been ordered by my mother to take a nap, and failing that, ordered to lie there quietly until she opened the door to tell me that I could get up and play.  At least I had open windows on three sides of the room – to the east Fannie and Mack Thompson’s house, facing the Mississippi River a mile away.  To the south was our backyard, where I longed to go and play in the fifty yards or so of ground before the steep climb began to Crowley’s Ridge;  to the north was a window to the screen porch, where we would often go sit in the evenings to seek to cool off and get relief from the stifling heat.

    On this particular afternoon, though, these windows were not welcome entries into relief but rather reminders that I was trapped by my tyrannical mother, who refused to allow me to get up and play until she gave me permission.  I fumed and tossed and turned, waiting for the excruciating time to be ended.  In my fuming on that hot Sunday afternoon in 1951,  I had no idea of the depth of the story that underlay my confinement.  It would take me decades to learn the depths and nuances of that story, but for now I will say that my mother worked six days a week as a beautician in someone else’s shop.  The only time that she had to take a nap and rest during those grinding days was on Sunday afternoons, after attending church and Sunday school and eating Sunday dinner.  

    I grew up fatherless in a patriarchal world.  My father, for whom I was named, had abandoned me (and my mother) for another woman before I was a year old.  I was born in Memphis, and after my father left, we lived in Memphis for a time, living with an Irish woman, who she kept me while my mother worked as a beauty operator.  This Irish woman nicknamed me “Nibs,” using  an Irish word for the British aristocracy, who consider themselves to be the center of the world – “his Nibs” and “her Nibs.”  That appellation is even heard on occasion now to refer to the Queen of England in an affectionate way.  I have come to use “Nibs” as my primary name – one of the great ironies of that development is that I don’t know the name of the Irish woman who named me. My mother told me during my childhood, but I have simply forgotten it.

    I may be projecting onto to my mother a sense of shock and loss in my father’s departure – for reasons that will become clearer, we never talked much about him or his departure.  Undoubtedly, she felt loss, and undoubtedly, we were poor,  and she was looking for shelter.  She would find shelter with her grandmother’s sister, Bernice Brown Higgins, who had recently been widowed.  Because of this, Mrs. Higgins needed fiscal and physical companionship in her small home on Porter Street in Helena.  

    It is not surprising that these two women, my mother and Mrs. Higgins (whom I called “Gran”) pooled their resources in Helena to create a new household.  We moved from Memphis sometime in my second year to live with Gran on Porter Street in a green clapboard house facing the north.  That small home - two bedrooms, one small bath, a combined living and dining room, an average sized kitchen and a wonderful back porch and spacious side porch – would become my constant and stable home until I left for college in 1964.  It was in the east bedroom of that house where I would find myself confined on that hot, sticky afternoon in 1951, fidgeting while my mother sought some rest from the grind of her life, on the couch in the living/dining area.  I would come back often to this home until my mother’s death in 2004……..

    I will be telling the story of my mother and I negotiating our individual selves, our selves together, and our relationship in a world that changed.  The external world changed dramatically from our 1947 move to Helena to the early decades of the 1970’s, when I permanently left home.  Yet our internal world also changed as my mother and I discovered a deeper and larger world out there.  This larger world envisioned Black people as siblings rather than enemies, envisioned women as equal partners with men, celebrated people who loved others of the same gender, and began to see that money was not the key to life.  I grew up being immersed in racism and sexism and homophobia and militarism and materialism by my mother and by other people who loved me, people whom I loved and trusted.  Most of them taught these things to me not because they were mean, but rather because they too were caught up in their cultural environment by these repressive and oppressive powers.  This book will be about seeking liberation from those powers, while knowing that captivity to them came to me from people who loved me and whom I loved.

    My mother and I had a powerful connection because she dedicated herself to raising me as a “real” man, becoming both father and mother to me.  “Manless” herself, she nevertheless taught me what a real man is:  protective, loving, nurturing, challenging.  Trapped by and influenced by these very forces, she taught me to begin to think about liberation from them, a liberation that would take me out into a whole new world, while bringing her along also towards her own liberation.  These will be stories of that journey towards liberation, fashioned by a woman who was a captive herself but who gave me the foundation to work against those oppressive values.”

    Again, I’d be glad to come and talk with your group or do a session on Zoom.  I’ve had many readers already tell me that this book was an occasion for them to return to their own roots and to think about their journeys. So, get a copy and let’s talk!