Memory Monday-- Books, the Gift of Life

As you all know, I am a voracious reader. Always have been; it’s in the blood. As far back as I can remember, books and reading have been a vital part of my life. There was always a book case in my house and I was allowed to read anything that I was able to. Two memories stand out. Walking to the library with my mother and siblings every Saturday and the day I learned to read in one day.

In my kindergarten class at Garfield Elementary school, we were each given a book and told to take it home and have our parents help us learn to read. I think back then, they did not actually teach reading until the first grade. So, I happily presented my schoolteacher mother with the book and we sat down and I learned to read. The next day, the teacher, I have forgotten her name, called each student to sit down beside her desk and read what they had learned. I vaguely remember kids reading slowly or one or two words they recognized. They were encouraged and praised. It was finally my turn and I confidently walked up to the teacher’s desk and sat down. I opened the book and proceeded to read the entire book. I remember the teacher looking at me with her mouth open. She left the room and came back with another teacher, or maybe it was the principal, and they set up a tape recorder and asked me to read some more. That is all I can remember.

When I have told this story, I have always presented it as my learning to read in one day. But, in retrospect, I have long realized that this was not an overnight achievement and I was not some wonder child--- not really.  The foundation of learning to read had been laid for quite some time. I realize that I was slowly learning sounds and recognizing familiar words from all the books I had been “reading” and had read to me by both my mother and father. Every Saturday we walked to the library from our 24th Avenue home. I cannot remember the name of the branch; it is no longer there but it was not far from Garfield School, a couple blocks over from 23rd Avenue. I obtained a library card at three or four years old, when I was able to write my name. I checked out the maximum five books back then and “read” them or had them read to me. The gift of books and reading to your child is the best gift you can give them. It is economically feasible. A library is still free as far as I know, and reading is something that cannot be trampled on, destroyed or lost. It is a gift for life.

I was able to find a picture of a picture from the 50s of the Lakeside branch in Oakland. It is pretty standard from what I remember of the libraries back then.

Why a Black Graduation?

Saturday I attended the first Black Graduation for students of African descent in the Peralta Community College District which consists of four campuses, College of Alameda, Berkeley City College, Laney College and Merritt Colleges (my employer) in Oakland. Immediately when it was announced that there would be such an event, there were naysayers throughout the District. You heard things like “Why a Black graduation?” “Why are we segregating ourselves?” And this was coming from black folk.

Now, I have to admit, my reaction was one of hmmm, isn’t Merritt College and our graduations already predominately black? I mean, we were able to obtain a federal grant to improve black male retention based on our more than 50% black population. We have long heard complaints that our guest speakers at past graduations are almost always black—this year we are having the honorable Congresswomen Barbara Lee-- as well as the entertainment. And we have consistently had a black president for the past twelve years. But, I decided to brush the chatter aside and support those who initiated the idea and especially our students. Dr. Van Hook, an African American studies instructor at Merritt and Laney and his wife, Patricia Van Hook, took this on and my hats are off to them. They pulled it off and did a fabulous job. The well-planned and organized graduation was held at the North Oakland Missionary Baptist Church where Dr. Van Hook holds services.

Why a Black Graduation? It was clear to me the moment I walked through the church vestibule. First, the fact that it was being held at a church was telling in itself. As a public college district, Peralta adheres to the separation of church and state mandate. But the house of worship is a vital part of the African American community, no matter what religion is practiced. Celebrating our successes and accomplishments goes hand in hand with giving honor and praise to a higher power. To God be the glory. There was a prayer by Rev. Rutledge, the church pastor after opening greetings. The tune, There’s a Sweet Spirit in this Place today kept going through my head. This is why.

Why a Black graduation? A former, highly esteemed Black studies instructor, Dr. Cecelia Arrington, was honored as well as the first Black chancellor of the Peralta College District, Dr. Donald Godbold, and the first Black Trustee, Dr. Booker Jackson Jr. Jason Hodge, a former Oakland school board member, and his son called on the ancestors with their drums and libation ceremony. This is why. The graduating students ranging from ages early 20s to 60s who so desired, felt free in expressing their gratitude for their blessings. And they did so as they introduced themselves, draped in their beautiful Kente cloth. They announced their degrees received and thanked those who encouraged them on their journey. That is why.

Why? Because we had a keynote speaker, Davey D, radio commentator, journalist and community activist who felt free to speak truth to power where the audience could relate and receive. Because as a people, we have an oral tradition; we felt free in agreeing with the various speakers in a call and response format that dates back to Africa. Because every ethnicity has their traditions and celebrations and this is our way or as the kids say, this is how we roll. Because the sense of pride and joy on the faces of the family of the graduates were evident at hearing Dr. Siri Brown juxtapose the scholars of ancient Africa and the scholars of African descent today. That is why there is a Black Graduation.

Peace

Memory Mondays-- Coming of Age in 1963

I saw a couple of blogs that are titled Memory Mondays or Monday Memories as a theme and I like the idea of going down memory lane. I had been blogging fine the last few months almost four times a month and then I got backed up this month. So by my joining the Memory Mondays blogging bandwagon, it will guarantee a blog at least once a week. This serves as a two-edged deal as I am compiling a book of childhood stories that I hope to publish. Southern Roots/Cali Girl: My Coming of Age Story centers on my growing up in Oakland and the influence of my Southern born roots. I want to present excerpts and thoughts on these stories to give readers a taste of what is to come. As the family genealogist, this is a way of documenting my own history as well.

We have been experiencing a hot spell in the Bay Area in the last few days. This time of year brings back memories of summer vacations going back south to Arkansas. It was 1963, the last day of school and all over Oakland, Gary U.S. Bond’s song; School is Out—“School is out at last and I’m so glad I passed….” was blasting from cars. I was excited to be going down to see Grandmother, Uncle John, Aunt Esther and Gladys Marie, Barbara Ann and all the rest of my cousins down in the country. I knew that later on we would go to the big city of Little Rock and hang up with Uncle Raymond’s kids, eat bar-b-que and watermelon and watch the 4th of July fireworks.

Little did I know as we left in the wee hours of the morning in our new Buick in mid-June that this trip and this year would change me and that way I saw the world going forward. I express this momentous experience with a story that was published by the Museum of the African Diaspora (MOAD) anthology, I’ve Know Rivers.

Coming of Age in 1963
http://www.iveknownrivers.org/read-2.0.php?id=188

Tuesday's Just as Bad

It is the May 5, Cinco de Mayo and it has been raining since Friday, the first. It is dark and gloomy outside and I want to be home. I feel kind of blah. I feel like I am coming down with something, a cold, I hope nothing worse. No, I am not panicking that it could be Swine Flu or the official name, H1N1. Part of what has me feeling the blues is the news and the hourly reports on the H1N1. Schools closing, vacations canceled, people avoiding crowds. I understand the side of caution, but it seems things are being blown out of portion.

I need to be at home with a good book. I have been reading Mixed Blood by Roger Smith, a suspense set in Cape Town, South Africa. I’m learning a lot about the culture there, the interactions among the races in the new South African post Nelson Mandela.
The characters include Jack Burn, an American, running away from a crime he committed in Virginia, a corrupt racist Afrikaner cop, Barnard, a “half-breed” ex-con trying to go straight, Benny Mongrel, and a police investigator, Disaster, that’s right, Disaster Zondi, and a proud Zulu who is out to see that justice is met.

This was part of the Amazon Vine book program- https://www.amazon.com/gp/vine/
which is nice because you get a first chance at books that might be of interest but may not be aware of? So far, so good. It’s kind of exciting but I wish I were home in my cozy bed reading it. They may call stormy Monday, but Tuesday’s just as bad.

Mixed Blood: A Thriller

http://www.amazon.com/Mixed-Blood-Thriller-Roger-Smith/dp/080508875X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241551488&sr=1-1

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Black On The Block

My local book club’s selection for April is Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City by Mary Pattillo. On April 22, at our meeting, Dr. Pattillo, a professor at Northwestern University, called in to the Marcus Book Store and we discussed the book via telephone. In her book, Dr. Pattillo, a sociologist, looks at gentrification in the North Kenwood-Oakland neighborhood in Chicago, Illinois from a different angle. Most of us know gentrification to be when more affluent people, usually white, move into a lower-income neighborhood, usually occupied by blacks or Latinos. This community is being redeveloped under the guise of beautification and improving living conditions. In this case, the new folks moving into NKO were the same color as the old residents—black. The enemies were not some whitey trying to change their way of life but middle and upper-class African Americans who were critical of their way of being.

As an ethnographer, as the kind of sociologist she is, Dr. Pattillo was aware of the changing neighborhood when she moved there. According to her, sociologists, if they are able, move into the neighborhoods of the people they are studying; they are participant observers and they write books on the topics. Dr. Pattillo had two neighbors on either side of her; two women. One was a banker, new to the neighborhood, the other, a part-time bus driver and long-time residents, with three generations living in her home. The two neighbors could not stand each other. The bus driver felt the banker snubbed and avoided her neighbors while the banker resented the frequent activity she observed going on in her neighbor’s front yard. Dr. Pattillo maintains that issues of class differences are not addressed in America. There are laws against racial and gender discriminations; there are none against class discrimination. Additionally class is the elephant in the middle of the room among African Americans, yet it is there stark and plain, and truth be told it always has been.

I brought up the point that before integrations, because of segregation, in some urban cities, black people of all walks of life lived together; there would be the doctor on the corner and across the street there was the factory worker. Did they not all get along? Dr. Pattillo had some thoughts on that assertion. Black professionals made their living from black people; doctors, businesses, ministers and teachers had a symbiotic relationship with people they served and they sometimes attended the same churches. But Dr. Pattillo cited the book, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City written in 1945and other accounts that revealed there was indeed some dissent. Better educated and more affluent blacks spoke disparaging about their poorer sisters and brothers. They felt they were embarrassing by the clothes they wore (head rags in public) or talking loud on the train. Northern Negros especially looked down at the newly arrived southern migrants, having disdain for their illiteracy and country acting mannerisms.

So, why would affluent blacks move into a lower-income neighborhood that has high crime rates and try to impose their wills on folks who do not want to be bothered with their uppity ways? Many blacks cite that they want to be a part of a black community, and they have a genuine desire to improve the neighborhood and improve the quality of life. So why no kumbuya? No gatherings around the bar-b-que grill? To further dig the knife in, these newer affluent residents began charter schools and privatization of other services. And guess what, Bay Bay’s kids could not get into their schools. The applications were akin to getting into an Ivy League school.

After living in the community for two years, Dr. Pattillo joined a board, one that tried to bridge the gaps. It has been a slow process but hopefully progress is being made. Our group enjoyed discussing this book, looking at gentrification in a new light, at how the dynamics surrounding this sensitive topic is not as simple as black and white.

Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Black-Block-Politics-Race-Class/dp/0226649326/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241421117&sr=1-1

The Help.....Mississippi Goddam

The astounding singer, Nina Simone wrote the song, “Mississippi Goddam” in 1964 in response to the merciless 1963 killing of civil rights leader, Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi. The state of Mississippi, along with Alabama, were among the most egregious, hard-core, racist, states of the Union back in the day. It was as if the people of those two states never got the memo that slavery had ended; I have long been aware of this fact. It was with this awareness, that I read a new release, The Help by Kathryn Stockett, herself a native Mississippian. In this work of fiction set in 1963 and 1964, Stockett explores the complex relationship of black help, maids, or domestic servants and their white employers in Jackson. Skeeter, a young woman, just out of college and a budding journalist, comes home and discovers her beloved maid, Constantine, is gone and nobody can explain to her satisfaction what happened to her. In her search for Constantine, Skeeter looks hard at the inbalance in the lives of southern whites and the black people who serve them, some who live in extreme poverty. In a challenge from a New York editor to find something to write about that excites her, Skeeter decides to write a book, interviewing the black maids of her peers.

In The Help, the black maid/Miss Ann relationship is a convoluted union. It is also a symbiotic relationship; each needs the other. The white employers need someone to fix their meals, clean their house, wash their clothes and raise their children and the black domestic workers need employment to pay rent, buy food and other necessities of life. But I, who was born in the south and California raised, ask why would anyone need maid service eight to twelve hours a day, six days a week? If a woman is not working outside the home, why would she need full-time domestic help almost everyday of the week. Why do you need someone to fix you a sandwich in the middle of the day? Why can’t you teach your own children manners and change a diaper every once in awhile? To follow behind someone, cleaning up after them, fix all their meals, and oversee entertainment, including holidays, when these women would rather be with their own families? I asked my southern born and raised mother these questions and more; trying to grasp the understanding, to get into the heads of these spoiled, over-indulged white women, who I know not only existed in fiction, but in reality in 1960s Mississippi.

Mom explained that this was tradition, historical, no doubt a holdover from slavery, where as slaves, blacks waited on whites hand and foot, no matter their status. Mom went on to explain that white woman who were little better off than some of the blacks around them, hired black women to wash their clothes. That was the case in rural 1930s Arkansas where my mother was raised. Yes, there was racism and mistreatment of blacks in her rural Arkansas town, but the difference she saw in the women in her family, was that her family owned their land. They had as much or near as much and in many cases more than the many whites around them. They, and other black families such as them, were not subject to the harshness and cruelty that those who were sharecroppers and depended on whites for their every need.

The need for power, to order someone around old enough to be your mother or grandmother—or your daughter, to feel superior was something ingrained in the white women in The Help. Some of them were so hateful and mean-spirited, who would have their help jailed for the smallest infraction; the help was at the mercy of these white employers who would not hesitate to lie, if crossed. Oh, Mississippi Goddam.

It is my love of southern literature that I was able to read this book that is getting many rave reviews by critics. I, a child of the south, writer, family historian, and keeper of southern stories, appreciates a well-written, good story and Stockett is a good storyteller. When one of my sister reviewers became immediately offended by the book content and the dialect of the mostly uneducated black women, I was eager to read and see for myself. There were many uncomfortable moments, as I expected there would be, but all in all, the cumulative value of the book is an admirable contribution to the tomes of the “new southern literature.” If anything, this book opens up the dialogue, which has already began-- if the discussions online and on blogs are any indication, between black women; southern born and northern born, and with white women, especially those southern raised, and presents an opportunity to talk about this elephant in the middle of the room in this Obama era. Maybe black women and white women, and all women can come together in sisterhood now that the stigma of segregation no longer exists--- oh black women will still be working in white homes, and there is still an unequal balance of privilege and poverty; but maybe those who are privileged will look to those who are not, as human beings with the same desires and sensitivities as they. Mississippi goddam no more.

At Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Help-Kathryn-Stockett/dp/0399155341/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241420803&sr=1-1

Dera Williams
April 17, 2009

Finally...My Favorite Books in 2008

Well, here it is April. Spring is here and flowers are blooming and I am just getting around to presenting my list of favorite reads of 2008. I don’t know why it took me so long but it’s done. My favorite was Song Yet Sung by James McBride. Brilliant writer, beautifully told story of slavery on the Eastern Shore.

Here is the link to my list on Amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/My-Favorite-Reads-of-2008/lm/R1MV809Z8XG2JS/ref=cm_lm_byauthor_full

For a view of my other listmania lists:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/richpub/listmania/byauthor/A1NEYE93FWXT36/ref=cm_lm_pthnk_athr?page=0


Enjoy