Living by the Word Read online

  I believe that the worst part of being in an oppressed culture is that the oppressive culture—primarily because it controls the production and dispersal of images in the media—can so easily make us feel ashamed of ourselves, of our sayings, our doings, and our ways. And it doesn’t matter whether these sayings, doings, or ways are good or bad. What is bad about them and, therefore, worthy of shame, is that they belong to us.

  Even our folklore has been ridiculed and tampered with. And this is very serious, because folklore is at the heart of self-expression and therefore at the heart of self-acceptance. It is full of the possibilities of misinterpretation, full of subtleties and danger. And in accepting one’s own folklore, one risks learning almost too much about one’s self. For instance, if you read these tales, you will see throughout them various things about us that we have to accept because they are true reflections, but they’re painful. My view is that we needn’t pull away from them because of the pain. We need simply to try to change our own feelings and our own behavior so that we don’t have to burden future generations with these same afflictions. There’s a lot of self-criticism in the folklore, for instance, and things that are really, sometimes, unsettling.

  Joel Chandler Harris and I lived in the same town, although nearly one hundred years apart. As far as I’m concerned, he stole a good part of my heritage. How did he steal it? By making me feel ashamed of it. In creating Uncle Remus, he placed an effective barrier between me and the stories that meant so much to me, the stories that could have meant so much to all of our children, the stories that they would have heard from their own people and not from Walt Disney.

  1981

  * See my short story “Elethia” in You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down for the creative solution to this problem.

  LONGING TO DIE OF OLD AGE

  Mrs. Mary Poole, my “4-greats” grandmother, lived the entire nineteenth century, from around 1800 to 1921, and enjoyed exceptional health. The key to good health, she taught (this woman who as an enslaved person was forced to carry two young children, on foot, from Virginia to Georgia), was never to cover up the pulse at the throat. But, with the benefit of hindsight, one must believe that for her, as for generations of people after her, in our small farming community, diet played as large a role in her longevity and her health as loose clothing and fresh air.

  For what did the old ones eat?

  Well, first of all, almost nothing that came from a store. As late as my own childhood, in the fifties, at Christmas we had only raisins and perhaps bananas, oranges, and a peppermint stick, broken into many pieces, a sliver for each child; and during the year, perhaps, a half-dozen apples, nuts, and a bunch of grapes. All extravagantly expensive and considered rare. You ate all of the apple, sometimes, even, the seeds. Everyone had a vegetable garden; a garden as large as there was energy to work it. In these gardens people raised an abundance of food: corn, tomatoes, okra, peas and beans, squash, peppers, which they ate in summer and canned for winter. There was no chemical fertilizer. No one could have afforded it, had it existed, and there was no need for it. From the cows and pigs and goats, horses, mules, and fowl that people also raised, there was always ample organic manure.

  Until I was grown I never heard of anyone having cancer.

  In fact, at first cancer seemed to be coming from far off. For a long time if the subject of cancer came up, you could be sure cancer itself wasn’t coming any nearer than to some congested place in the North, then to Atlanta, seventy-odd miles away, then to Macon, forty miles away, then to Monticello, twenty miles away…The first inhabitants of our community to die of acknowledged cancer were almost celebrities, because of this “foreign” disease. But now, twenty-odd years later, cancer has ceased to be viewed as a visitor and is feared instead as a resident. Even the children die of cancer now, which, at least in the beginning, seemed a disease of the old.

  Most of the people I knew as farmers left the farms (they did not own the land and were unable to make a living working for the white people who did) to rent small apartments in the towns and cities. They ceased to have gardens, and when they did manage to grow a few things they used fertilizer from boxes and bottles, sometimes in improbable colors and consistencies, which they rightly suspected, but had no choice but to use. Gone were their chickens, cows, and pigs. Gone their organic manure.

  To their credit, they questioned all that happened to them. Why must we leave the land? Why must we live in boxes with hardly enough space to breathe? (Of course, indoor plumbing seduced many a one.) Why must we buy all our food from the store? Why is the price of food so high—and it so tasteless? The collard greens bought in the supermarket, they said, “tasted like water.”

  The United States should have closed down and examined its every intention, institution, and law on the very first day a black woman observed that the collard greens tasted like water. Or when the first person of any color observed that store-bought tomatoes tasted more like unripened avocados than tomatoes.

  The flavor of food is one of the clearest messages the Universe ever sends to human beings; and we have by now eaten poisoned warnings by the ton.

  When I was a child growing up in middle Georgia in the forties and fifties, people still died of old age. Old age was actually a common cause of death. My parents inevitably visited dying persons over the long or short period of their decline; sometimes I went with them. Some years ago, as an adult, I accompanied my mother to visit a very old neighbor who was dying a few doors down the street, and though she was no longer living in the country, the country style lingered. People like my mother were visiting her constantly, bringing food, picking up and returning laundry, or simply stopping by to inquire how she was feeling and to chat. Her house, her linen, her skin all glowed with cleanliness. She lay propped against pillows so that by merely turning her head she could watch the postman approaching, friends and relatives arriving, and, most of all, the small children playing beside the street, often in her yard, the sound of their play a lively music.

  Sitting in the dimly lit, spotless room, listening to the lengthy but warm-with-shared-memories silences between my mother and Mrs. Davis was extraordinarily pleasant. Her white hair gleamed against her kissable black skin, and her bed was covered with one of the most intricately patterned quilts I’d ever seen—a companion to the dozen or more she’d stored in a closet, which, when I expressed interest, she invited me to see.

  I thought her dying one of the most reassuring events I’d ever witnessed. She was calm, she seemed ready, her affairs were in order. She was respected and loved. In short, Mrs. Davis was having an excellent death. A week later, when she had actually died, I felt this all the more because she had left, in me, the indelible knowledge that such a death is possible. And that cancer and nuclear annihilation are truly obscene alternatives. And surely, teaching this very vividly is one of the things an excellent death is supposed to do.

  To die miserably of self-induced sickness is an aberration we take as normal; but it is crucial that we remember and teach our children that there are other ways.

  For myself, for all of us, I want a death like Mrs. Davis’s. One in which we will ripen and ripen further, as richly as fruit, and then fall slowly into the caring arms of our friends and other people we know. People who will remember the good days and the bad, the names of lovers and grandchildren, the time sorrow almost broke, the time loving friendship healed.

  It must become a right of every person to die of old age. And if we secure this right for ourselves, we can, coincidentally, assure it for the planet. And that, as they say, will be excellence, which is, perhaps, only another name for health.

  1985

  THE OLD ARTIST:

  NOTES ON MR. SWEET

  [For many years after writing “To Hell with Dying” I thought of how good it would be as a story for children, proving as it does that imperfection is no barrier to love, one of the great fears that children have. Alas, no appropriate illustrator could be found. And then one da
y one was found, and the book was published: To Hell with Dying, illustrations by Catherine Deeter. The editor asked how the story came about.]

  I like to use the case of Mr. Sweet, in “To Hell with Dying,” as an example of a story that is “autobiographical” (is this or that piece autobiographical? some puzzled reader is always asking), though little of it ever happened. The love happened, and that is the essence of the story.

  There was, in fact, in my rural, farming, middle-Georgia childhood, in the late forties and early fifties, an old guitar player called Mr. Sweet. If people had used his given name, he would have been called Mr. Little; obviously nobody agreed that this was accurate. Sweet was. The only distinct memory I have is of him playing his guitar while sitting in an ancient, homemade (by my grandfather) oak-bottomed chair in my grandmother’s cozy kitchen while she baked biscuits and a smothered chicken. He called the guitar his “box.” I must have been eight or nine at the time.

  He was an extremely soulful player and singer, and his position there by the warm stove in the good-smelling kitchen, “picking his box” and singing his own blues, while we sat around him silent and entranced, seemed inevitable and right. Although this is the only memory I have of him, and it is hazy, I know that Mr. Sweet was a fixture, a rare and honored presence in our family, and we were taught to respect him—no matter that he drank, loved to gamble and shoot off his gun, and went “crazy” several times a year. He was an artist. He went deep into his own pain and brought out words and music that made us happy, made us feel empathy for anyone in trouble, made us think. We were taught to be thankful that anyone would assume this risk. That he was offered the platter of chicken and biscuits first (as if he were the preacher and even if he was tipsy) seemed only just.

  Mr. Sweet died in the sixties, while I was a student at Sarah Lawrence College, in Westchester, New York, in an environment so different from the one in which he and my parents lived, and in which I had been brought up, that it might have existed on another planet. There were only three or four other black people there, and no poor people at all as far as the eye could see. For reasons not perhaps unrelated to this discrepancy, I was thinking of dying myself at the very time I got the news of his death. But something of my memory of Mr. Sweet stopped me: I remembered the magnitude of his problems—problems I was just beginning to truly understand—as a black man and as an artist, growing up poor, forced to endure the racist terrorism of the American South. He was unlucky in love, and no prince as a parent. Irregardless, as the old people said, and Mr. Sweet himself liked to say, not only had he lived to a ripe old age (I doubt that killing himself ever entered his head, however, since I think alcoholism was, in his case, a slow method of suicide), but he had continued to share all his troubles and his insights with anyone who would listen, taking special care to craft them for the necessary effect. He continued to sing.

  This was obviously my legacy, as someone who also wanted to be an artist and who was not only black and poor, but a woman besides, if only I had the guts to accept it.

  Turning my back on the razor blade, I went to a friend’s house for the Christmas holidays (I was too poor even to consider making the trip home, a distance of about a thousand miles), and on the day of Mr. Sweet’s burial I wrote “To Hell with Dying.” If in my poverty I had no other freedom—not even to say good-bye to him in death—I still had the freedom to love him and the means to express it, if only to myself. I wrote the story with tears pouring down my cheeks. I was grief-stricken, I was crazed, I was fighting for my own life. I was twenty-one.

  It was the first short story I ever published, though it was not the first one I wrote. The first one I wrote, before my memory of Mr. Sweet saved me (“To Hell with Dying” illustrates, I think, my wish that I could have returned the favor), was entitled “The Suicide of an American Girl.”

  The poet Muriel Rukeyser was my don (primary teacher) and friend at Sarah Lawrence. So was Jane Cooper, in whose writing course I wrote the story. Between them they warmly affirmed the life of Mr. Sweet and the vitality of my art, which, I was beginning to see, merged in unexpected ways, very healing and effective ways, with my life. I was still hanging by a thread, so their enthusiasm was important. Without my knowledge, Muriel sent the story to the greatest of the old black singer poets, Langston Hughes, who loved it immediately, and said so, and who was able to publish it two years after he read it.

  When I met Langston Hughes I was amazed. He was another Mr. Sweet! Aging and battered, full of pain, but writing poetry, and laughing, too, and always making other people feel better. It was as if my love for one great old man down in the poor and beautiful and simple South had magically, in the new world of college and literature and poets and publishing and New York, led me to another.

  1987

  MY BIG BROTHER BILL

  [At a powwow in honor of Bill Wahpepah shortly after his death, Carol Wahpepah, his widow, asked those of us who had memories of Bill to write a collection of them for his children. This was my response to her request.]

  In regard to the contact between the two races, by which such stories (i.e., the “Uncle Remus” tales) could be borrowed from one by the other, it is not commonly known that in all the southern colonies Indian slaves were bought and sold and kept in servitude and worked in the fields side by side with negroes up to the time of the Revolution. Not to go back to the Spanish period, when such things were the order of the day, we find the Cherokee as early as 1693 complaining that their people were being kidnapped by slave hunters. Hundreds of captured Tuscarora and nearly the whole tribe of the Appalachee were distributed as slaves among the Carolina colonists in the early part of the eighteenth century, while the Natchez and others shared a similar fate in Louisiana, and as late at least as 1776 Cherokee prisoners of war were still sold to the highest bidder for the same purpose. At one time it was charged against the governor of South Carolina that he was provoking a general Indian war by his encouragement of slave hunts. Furthermore, as the coast tribes dwindled they were compelled to associate and intermarry with the negroes until they finally lost their identity and were classed with that race, so that a considerable proportion of the blood of the southern negroes is unquestionably Indian. —James Mooney*

  I first met Bill Wahpepah in the fall of 1984, in Custer, South Dakota; I think perhaps our mutual friend Belvie Rooks introduced us. She and I were in Custer to attend the trial of Dennis Banks, and I was coming out of a long period of spiritual reassessment and political hibernation. On top of everything else—by which I mean the assassinations of the sixties and seventies, the repressions (on Indian reservations and in ghettos, in particular) of the seventies and eighties, and the rape and brutalization of the planet in general—the election of Ronald Reagan, with Nancy Reagan posited as a desirable model of twentieth-century womanhood, had hit me hard. During this period, which encompassed several years, Indians were very much in my consciousness. There was my mother’s mostly Cherokee grandmother to contend with in myself, for instance. There was my gravitation toward Indian art and artifacts, which had in fact started years earlier: the need to have arrowheads on my person (I never flew without one) and Indian pottery, jewelry, and rugs around. And there was my study of Cherokee folklore and folkways: I made the astonishing discovery that the animal tales, commonly known in North America as “Uncle Remus” stories, which, as told by my parents, I grew up listening to as a child, and which I had assumed were from Africa, could as easily be from the Cherokee, since the very same tales abound in their folk “literature.” I also discovered what appeared to me to be the origin, or one interesting possible origin, of the expression “the blues.” Among the Cherokee the color blue itself was “emblematic of failure, disappointment, unsatisfied desire.”** When one felt that way, one painted one’s body or part of one’s body blue. When one felt better, red was the color of choice. I began to recognize in the faces of the people among whom I grew up traces of the Cherokee Indian tribe that everyone around me, when I was a chil
d, had claimed was gone forever, last seen as its members left Georgia on the ominous Trail of Tears. And of course the myth the white people perpetuated to make black people feel even worse about having been enslaved was that the Indians, warriors to the last man, had never been.

  Prominent among the people I was now scrutinizing was Miss Bessie, long-haired and high-nosed, whom everyone in our community automatically called “The Indian.” She was very poor, like most of us, and a great believer in sharing, but to a greater extent than even my parents, who were very generous; she would give you anything she had. You had only to admire something sincerely, a spool of thread, a plant, or a kitchen object, and it was yours. In fact, to me, Miss Bessie, still alive and nearing a hundred, remains a primary symbol of human generosity.

  In my apartment I lived with Edward S. Curtis’s photographs of Indians on every wall; I began to feel that the faces he photographed spoke directly to me. I studied the people’s clothing, their adornments, their hair; I noticed particularly their sense of aesthetics, their sense of style. I could see that of all the clothing styles created in or imported into North America, theirs was still the most intrinsically elegant. Over a period of months I made a thorough investigation into the merits of the teepee and stopped only a little short of buying and living in one. No other structure seemed so sensible for the landscape and for the nomadic life style Indians enjoyed. I needed the reading of the folklore, I needed the photographs around me. Especially the photographs. Indians do not live in history books; every one encountered there is dead. But in the folklore Indians are still acting colored and telling jokes, and in the photographs they are still looking out at the world and at the white man with infinitely expressive faces and not managing to keep all that they are thinking to themselves. Of what devastation, to the environment and to other human beings, we are now witnessing did their incredulous expressions forewarn!