In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens Read online

  At this point something goes wrong with my tape recorder and I lean forward to fix it, explaining with some vexation that I am the world’s worst manipulator of simple gadgetry. Coretta charitably admits she’s no genius with mechanical things either.

  While waiting for the tape to rewind I tell her that her husband often crops up in my work and is very often in my thoughts. I tell her that in my novel, a copy of which I just gave her, one of the characters mentions that although Dr. King was constantly harassed and oppressed by the white world he was always gentle with his wife and children. I tell her how important I feel this is: that black men not take out their anger and frustration on their wives and children. A temptation that is all too obvious.

  Coretta’s face is thoughtful as she says, “Maybe I shouldn’t say this, because I don’t know it, it’s just a feeling I have . . but few black men seem to feel secure enough as men that they can make women feel like women. It was such a good feeling that Martin gave me, since the first time I met him. He was such a strong man that I felt like a woman, I could be a woman, and let him be a man. Yet he too was affected by the system, as a black man; but in spite of everything he always came through as a man, a person of dignity. … I miss this now, very much. Since my husband’s death I've had to struggle on alone, and I can appreciate now, more than ever, how important it is to have somebody to share things with, to have someone who cares, someone who is concerned.”

  A rather ardent feminist myself I would like to spend a lot of time on the subjects of black woman and women’s liberation. But Coretta only states that she understands the black woman’s reluctance to be involved in liberating herself when all black people are still not free. Of course, she says, and laughs with humor and exasperation, “it is annoying to have men constantly saying things like ‘I know that must be a woman driver!’” She also believes that if women become irrevocably involved in social issues they will find themselves powerful as activists and as women. She thinks that women will liberate themselves to the extent of their involvement in the struggle for change and social justice. To me this sounds very logical, but I am stuck with the suspicion that, as with black people, there must be for women a new and self-given definition. I fear that many people, including many women, do not know, in fact, what Woman is.

  We do, however, share a vast appreciation for the black woman, liberated or not. I think we both realize that in the majority of black women in the South we have been seeing women whose souls have been liberated for generations. In fact, it is when Coretta mentions some words of gentle courage from some old woman she has met somewhere that her eyes fill with tears. “The black woman,” she says, “has a special role to play. Our heritage of suffering and our experience in having to struggle against all odds to raise our children gives us a greater capacity for understanding both suffering and the need and meaning of compassion. We have, I think, a kind of stamina, a determination, which makes us strong.” Then she says something that I feel is particularly true: “Women, in general, are not a part of the corruption of the past, so they can give a new kind of leadership, a new image for mankind. But if they are going to be bitter or vindictive they are not going to be able to do this. But they’re capable of tremendous compassion, love, and forgiveness, which, if they use it, can make this a better world. When you think of what some black women have gone through, and then look at how beautiful they still are! It is incredible that they still believe in the values of the race, that they have retained a love of justice, that they can still feel the deepest compassion, not only for themselves but for anybody who is oppressed; this is a kind of miracle, something we have that we must preserve and must pass on.”

  Coretta was born and raised in Marion, Alabama, a small town not far from the larger one of Selma, which her husband was later to make infamous. When she speaks of her upbringing in the “heart of Dixie” there is no bitterness in her voice. Like many blacks from the South she is able to dismiss or feel pity for white racists because she realizes they are sick. Instead, her voice warms with pride and respect for her father, who survived against fantastic odds. Not only did Obidiah Scott survive; he prevailed.

  The Scotts owned a farm in Marion, and Coretta’s father raised thousands of chickens. When his sawmill was mysteriously burned out only days after he purchased it he bought himself a truck and began a small pulpwood business. Recently, at seventy-one, Obie Scott ran for highway commissioner in his home town, something he wouldn’t have dreamed of doing as short a time as six or seven years ago. He lost in the election, and Coretta thinks losing “got to him,” but the important thing, she says, is that he still has the courage to try to change things in the South so that all people can live there in harmony and peace.

  “My father is a most industrious man,” says Coretta. “If he’d been white he’d be the mayor of Marion, Alabama.” From what she has told me about him I think she underestimates Obidiah Scott: if he had been white I doubt if he’d have stopped with the Alabama governorship.

  Although active in several political campaigns, Coretta appears to have enjoyed her swing through her home state, in support of local black candidates, including her father, most. She explains that she gave a number of “Freedom Concerts” which her children helped her sing, and that they enjoyed campaigning as much as she. What emerges about Coretta is that the fabric of her life is finely knit. Each part is woven firmly into another part. Her office, which is in the basement of her house, is where she directs the business of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Center. When her children come home from school they troop downstairs to see her. She will usually stop whatever she is doing to talk to them. Her music is a skill that she uses for a variety of good causes: her Freedom Concerts bring out the crowds at local elections for black candidates; her other concerts are given to raise money for the memorial to her husband that she insists he must have. Her singing is also her means of reaching other peoples who can understand the beauty of her voice if not the words she sings.

  The hour I was allotted for the interview has long since ended. But Coretta, much more relaxed now, is willing to discuss a few other topics that seemed to grow, organically, from answers she has given to my questions. About black people in power and the whites who work with them she says: “I don’t believe that black people are going to misuse power in the way it has been misused. I think they’ve learned from their experiences. And we’ve seen instances where black and white work together very effectively. This is true even in places where you have a black majority, in Hancock County, Georgia, for example, or Fayette, Mississippi, where Charles Evers is mayor.” About nonviolence she says, “It is very difficult to get people beyond the point of seeing nonviolence as something you do on marches and in demonstrations. It is harder to get people to the point of organizing to bring pressure to bear on changing society. People who think nonviolence is easy don’t realize that it’s a spiritual discipline that requires a great deal of strength, growth, and purging of the self so that one can overcome almost any obstacle for the good of all without being concerned about one’s own welfare.”

  I am glad, while we’re talking, to hear Coretta, the mother, talking to her oldest son, Marty, fourteen, who calls her on the phone. It seems he has been left at his school several miles away, it is pouring rain, and he wants somebody to come immediately to pick him up. Coretta is concerned but firm. She tells him that since he has missed the ride home that was arranged for him he will just have to wait until she can send someone for him. He protests. She restates her solution; he will have to wait. Period.

  We spend a few minutes discussing her role in life as she sees it. I am not surprised that what she would like to do is inspire other women to take a more active role in the peace movement, in the election of acceptable candidates, and in being involved in making the decisions that will affect their lives and the lives of their children. She says that she and Martin used to talk a lot about trying to organize women and she regrets that he never had time to get ar
ound to addressing women as women. “We have never used,” she says, “the womanpower that we had.”

  While I am gathering up my paraphernalia to leave, Coretta comes from behind her desk and we chat a few moments about the pictures of her family that line the walls of her office. There is one that is especially charming, of her and her husband and the children on an outing in the park. Coretta’s face in the photograph is radiant, although she ruefully comments that it was a hassle that day getting everybody dressed up so they could have the picture made. Outside her office she introduces me to Dr. King’s sister, Mrs. Farris, whom I had known slightly at Spelman. Mrs. Farris brings the presence of her brother strongly to mind; she has both his dignity and his calm. She is a woman of few words but they are pertinent ones. She assists Mrs. King with the bookkeeping.

  When I leave the red-brick house on Sunset Avenue, the rain that had been beating down heavily all day has let up. And, though there is no promise of sun, there is a feeling that spring has already come to the winter-colored slopes of Atlanta. “You Southern black people,” someone had said to me several weeks before, “are very protective of Martin King and Coretta.” I think about this as I leave the place where Martin King no longer lives except in the hearts of all the people who work there in his name.

  As my plane takes off, I think of all the ways Martin and Coretta King’s lives have touched mine. I think of that spring day so few, so many, years ago, and of Coretta’s willingness to encourage a group of young women who were about to become involved in an exciting but somewhat frightening experience. I think of the years when I and most black Georgians, including atheists and agnostics, went to bed praying for Martin King’s safety, and how we awoke each morning stronger because he was still with us. It was Martin, more than anyone, who exposed the hidden beauty of black people in the South, and caused us to look again at the land our fathers and mothers knew. The North is not for us. We will not be forced away from what is ours. Martin King, with Coretta at his side, gave the South to black people, and reduced the North to an option. And, though I realize the South belonged to me all the time, it has a newness in my eyes. I gaze down from the plane on the blood-red hills of Georgia and Alabama and finally, home, Mississippi, knowing that when I arrive the very ground may tremble and convulse but I will walk upright, forever.

  1971

  CHOOSING TO STAY AT HOME TEN YEARS AFTER THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON

  OUR BUS LEFT BOSTON before dawn on the day of the March. We were a jolly, boisterous crowd who managed to shout the words to “We Shall Overcome” without a trace of sadness or doubt. At least on the surface. Underneath our bravado there was anxiety: Would Washington be ready for us? Would there be violence? Would we be Overcome? Could we Overcome? At any rate, we felt confident enough to try.

  It was the summer of my sophomore year in college in Atlanta and I had come to Boston as I usually did to find a job that would allow me to support myself through another year of school. No one else among my Boston relatives went to the March, but all of them watched it eagerly on TV. When I returned that night they claimed to have seen someone exactly like me among those milling about just to the left of Martin Luther King, Jr. But of course I was not anywhere near him. The crowds would not allow it. I was, instead, perched on the limb of a tree far from the Lincoln Memorial, and although I managed to see very little of the speakers, I could hear everything.

  For a speech and drama term paper the previous year my teacher had sent his class to Atlanta University to hear Martin Luther King lecture. “I am not interested in his politics,” he warned, “only in his speech.” And so I had written a paper that contained these lines: “Martin Luther King, Jr. is a surprisingly effective orator, although terribly under the influence of the Baptist church so that his utterances sound overdramatic and too weighty to be taken seriously.” I also commented on his lack of humor, his expressionless “oriental” eyes, and the fascinating fact that his gray sharkskin suit was completely without wrinkles—causing me to wonder how he had gotten into it. It was a surprise, therefore, to find at the March on Washington that the same voice that had seemed ponderous and uninspired in a small lecture hall was now as electrifying in its tone as it was in its message.

  Martin King was a man who truly had his tongue wrapped around the roots of Southern black religious consciousness, and when his resounding voice swelled and broke over the heads of the thousands of people assembled at the Lincoln Memorial I felt what a Southern person brought up in the church always feels when those cadences—not the words themselves, necessarily, but the rhythmic spirals of passionate emotion, followed by even more passionate pauses—roll off the tongue of a really first-rate preacher. I felt my soul rising from the sheer force of Martin King’s eloquent goodness.

  There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating “For white only.” We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, we are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

  And when he spoke of “letting freedom ring” across “the green hills of Alabama and the red hills of Georgia” I saw again what he was always uniquely able to make me see: that I, in fact, had claim to the land of my birth. Those red hills of Georgia were mine, and nobody was going to force me away from them until I myself was good and ready to go.

  . . Some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality… Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back … to Georgia

  … knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed…. This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.

  Later I was to read that the March on Washington was a dupe of black people, that the leaders had sold out to the Kennedy administration, and that all of us should have felt silly for having participated. But whatever the Kennedy administration may have done had nothing to do with the closeness I felt that day to my own people, to King and John Lewis and thousands of others. And it is impossible to regret hearing that speech, because no black person I knew had ever encouraged anybody to “Go back to Mississippi …,” and I knew if this challenge were taken up by the millions of blacks who normally left the South for better fortunes in the North, a change couldn’t help but come.

  This may not seem like much to other Americans, who constantly move about the country with nothing but restlessness and greed to prod them, but to the Southern black person brought up expecting to be run away from home—because of lack of jobs, money, power, and respect—it was a notion that took root in willing soil. We would fight to stay where we were born and raised and destroy the forces that sought to disinherit us. We would proceed with the revolution from our own homes.

  I thought of my seven brothers and sisters who had already left the South and I wanted to know: Why did they have to leave home to find a better life?

  I was born and raised in Eatonton, Georgia, which is in the center of the state. It is also the birthplace of Joel Chandler Harris, and visitors are sometimes astonished to see a large iron rabbit on the courthouse lawn. It is a town of two streets, and according to my parents its social climate had changed hardly at all since they were chi
ldren. That being so, on hot Saturday afternoons of my childhood I gazed longingly through the window of the corner drugstore where white youngsters sat on stools in air-conditioned comfort and drank Cokes and nibbled icecream cones. Black people could come in and buy, but what they bought they couldn’t eat inside. When the first motel was built in Eatonton in the late fifties the general understanding of place was so clear the owners didn’t even bother to put up a “Whites Only” sign.

  I was an exile in my own town, and grew to despise its white citizens almost as much as I loved the Georgia countryside where I fished and swam and walked through fields of black-eyed Susans, or sat in contemplation beside the giant pine tree my father “owned,” because when he was a boy and walking five miles to school during the winter he and his schoolmates had built a fire each morning in the base of the tree, and the tree still lived—although there was a blackened triangular hole in it large enough for me to fit inside. This was my father’s tree, and from it I had a view of fields his people had worked (and briefly owned) for generations, and could walk—in an afternoon—to the house where my mother was born; a leaning, weather-beaten ruin, it was true, but as essential to her sense of existence as one assumes Nixon’s birthplace in California is to him. Probably more so, since my mother has always been careful to stay on good terms with the earth she occupies. But I would have to leave all this. Take my memories and run north. For I would not be a maid, and could not be a “girl,” or a frightened half-citizen, or any of the things my brothers and sisters had already refused to be.

  In those days few blacks spent much time discussing hatred of white people. It was understood that they were—generally—vicious and unfair, like floods, earthquakes, or other natural catastrophes. Your job, if you were black, was to live with that knowledge like people in San Francisco live with the San Andreas Fault. You had as good a time (and life) as you could, under the circumstances.