Delta Jewels

by Alysia Burton Steele

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  This book honors the woman who raised me and loved me very deeply, Mrs. Althenia A. Burton, my paternal grandmother. She stood in the doorways, always watching her loved ones drive up or drive away. I know for sure that I am because she was.

  I am grateful to all of the giving, strong, independent, and loving Jewels in this book for sharing such personal stories so that others could learn. I feel like I have 54 wonderful new grandmothers.

  I dedicate this book to all the strong matriarchs on both sides of my family, but especially my loving and kind maternal grandmother, Mrs. Constance M. Larson (Duncan), who always supported my education and growth. Oh, many memories of museum visits and exposure to art. Thank you for all that you have done and continue to do for me. I love you, Gram.

  My mother, Ms. Stella Duncan, always believed in me, and when I was 15, she would let me roam downtown Philadelphia to take photographs. You dragged Angela (my little sister) behind me when I wanted to get street scenes. You always told me I had “the eye.” Thanks for believing in my dreams, Mom. Thanks for loving me enough to have that little brown baby when interracial marriages were frowned upon. You loved me before I was born and fought for me. I cannot even tell you how much I admire your strength. I love you.

  Aunt Tiny—Mrs. Marie Williams, Grandmother Burton’s sister and the matriarch of that side of the family—stay strong and know that I treasure you. My aunt, Ms. Marie F. Burton, my big sister, my rock, you’re the one who constantly pushed me. Oh, the fights we had, but I know it was because you wanted more for me. I greet your photograph every morning when I walk into my office. I talk to you almost daily. You are sorely missed. My aunties, Mrs. Jane Larson and Mrs. Vicki McCargar, I have always been close to and admire you both. You continue to inspire me in ways you didn’t even know. My cousin, Ms. Robin Williams, one of the most giving women I have ever known, you are not my cousin, but my auntie. To my aunt Patricia Wright, thank you for all that you do.

  I am blessed to have very fond memories of my great-grandmothers: Mrs. Marie Aiken, Mrs. Ione Kelly, and Mrs. Lillian Morris—all strong women.

  A Delta Jewels scholarship fund is being established to honor the women featured in this book. To learn more, please visit www.alysiaburton.com.

  THE INSPIRATION

  My paternal grandmother, Mrs. Althenia Aiken Burton, died in 1994. Although I’ve taken photos since I was 15 years old, I never thought about taking Gram’s photograph or recording her voice when she was alive. When we’re young, we think we’re going to live forever and just assume our family will, too.

  I missed her increasingly over the years. Time didn’t stop my brain from trying to remember, having regrets, wondering what I could have done to preserve every single thing about her, before her ways, her tone, the color of her nail polish, her mannerisms, her looks at me became a shadow of a memory.

  Gram was originally from Spartanburg, South Carolina, not too far from Aiken. My great-grandma Marie Aiken never talked about her upbringing, but their name, “Aiken,” and roots made me think they were enslaved. As a Northerner, when I ventured to Mississippi to accept a teaching position in 2012, I saw cotton for the first time and began to wonder about my black family.

  Gram Larson, my white grandmother, is amazing at family history. That side of my family knows our history from County Meath, Ireland. This photographic journey began because I wanted to connect with my black side, the black women of my grandmother’s generation. How many picked cotton, were treated poorly, and took beatings? That’s what I wondered when I saw the rows of cotton growing in the Mississippi Delta and took my first photo of it in 2013. I have severe asthma and allergies, which worsened in Mississippi because all this greenery doesn’t agree with me, but even with allergies, it’s beautiful. It feels just like the cotton balls that I buy in a plastic bag at a drugstore. When I drove past the cotton fields, darn it if I didn’t start thinking about my grandmother and how much I missed her. I wondered what she would think if she saw the cotton.

  I have carried this photo in my wallet since 1987, when my grandparents, William and Althenia Burton, gave it to me. This was their 25th wedding anniversary photo, which was taken in 1972.

  I had a successful career as a newspaper photojournalist and picture editor for 12 years. I was on the Dallas Morning News photo staff that won a Pulitzer Prize for its Hurricane Katrina photographic coverage. I was a picture editor on staff and called my supervisor before the storm touched down. “The storm sounds worse than expected,” I told him. “I think we should send more staff.” “You make a decision,” he told me, and so I started calling the staff to see who would start the trek to New Orleans. As I photographed vast fields of snowy flowers, I wondered if Gram would be proud of my accomplishments, what she’d think of me living in the South, if Gram would be proud of me teaching at a university. She never wanted me to be a photographer. She worried I would not find employment and make a decent living. “How many black girls from Harrisburg made a living in photography?” she’d ask me. I would do anything to hear her voice one more time. How I wish I’d captured her image and voice.

  “I could honor her memory by recording stories from other grandmothers of her generation,” I said to myself. I began to interview and photograph grandmothers in Mississippi, my new home state. These Delta grandmothers are matriarchs to their families, like my grandmother. They are ordinary women, like Gram, who have lived extraordinary lives under the harshest conditions of the Jim Crow era and were on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement. They are church women.

  I needed help finding the women who would help me find memories of my grandmother and honor her. “Would you help me find black pastors who might introduce me to their ‘mothers of the church’?” I asked Clarksdale mayor Bill Luckett, a white man. Bill e-mailed me five names and churches and told me that Rev. Juan Self pastors the first church where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke outside Atlanta. Going to the church where King spoke gave me chills. Rev. Self is also the architect who renovated the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. (The museum celebrated its reopening in April 2014.)

  Me and my grandparents when I lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This photo was taken in 1992, two years before my grandmother’s death.

  Rev. Self sounded young when we talked on the phone, and he asked, “What is this project you are doing? How can I help you?”

  His youthful voice surprised me and I asked myself if he might be too young to help me find elder women. “I’m doing a book to honor my grandmother, the woman who raised me. She passed away 20 years ago, but I want to honor her by interviewing other people’s grandmothers.”

  A close-up of cotton in a field on Route 278 East heading toward Clarksdale.

  Silence for a second. “I have a mother in mind. She’s our eldest. She’s 105 years old. I will call her family and talk to them and call you back. Why don’t you come to church, have dinner with my family, and talk to me more about this project?”

  I agreed and we scheduled the soonest time he could meet—a Sunday two weeks away. That July morning I drove more than an hour to First Baptist Church in Clarksdale. The plaque outside noted King spoke there and the church was used for Civil Rights mee
tings. I nervously entered. During the service, I make eye contact with Rev. Self and with my eyes say, “Please don’t make me stand up. Please don’t make me stand up.” I am a professor who commands attention when I speak, but still a true photojournalist. We do not like being the center of attention. But he asks me to talk. I start to tear up and my voice quivers as I stand and talk about why I am there.

  I hear someone say, “That’s okay. Speak. Go ’head, girl.”

  I tell them that I miss my grandmother and I’m doing a book to honor other people’s grandmothers because I will never hear her voice again. I can’t sit down fast enough and hide within myself, but when I’m done, I hear someone say, “Bless you.” And I cry.

  MRS. TENNIE (TENNESSEE) S. SELF, 89

  CLARKSDALE

  BORN MARCH 1926

  MARRIED 29 YEARS WHEN WIDOWED

  5 CHILDREN

  15 GRANDCHILDREN

  9 GREAT-GRANDS

  The first person to greet me when I tearily attend that Sunday service at First Baptist Church is Rev. Self’s mother, Mrs. Tennie Self.

  “Good morning,” she says, and hugs me, her nature welcoming, even with her raspy voice. I had no idea this friendly woman was his mother.

  Service is in the church basement because they are renovating the sanctuary upstairs. We sit on foldout chairs. There’s a good mix of elders and children. The choir is singing a slow hymn. I am getting weepy. The music warms my heart and takes me inside myself. After the congregation greets one another at the end of service, Rev. Self approaches me and we shake hands. “I’ll be leaving in a minute. You can follow me to my mom’s house.” Outside, he and his wife climb into their black SUV and I drive behind them just a few miles west of the church to a well-manicured gray brick ranch with a two-car garage and bars on the front door. It’s a nice neighborhood—all ranch-style homes, a better area of town where black folks live.

  I follow the family through the garage and enter the kitchen to a welcoming spread of baked chicken, potato salad and fruit salad, cornbread, and candied yams, which Mrs. Self prepared before she went to church. She’s known for her cooking. Everything is staying warm, wrapped in aluminum foil on the stove, ready to be served on her round kitchen table with ruffled cloth place mats. The house, full of people, smells like home. Rev. Self and his wife, his three sisters, and his niece with her family visiting from Portugal all sit at the table and Ms. Tennie joins us. I am getting shy; I didn’t expect so many people. Sitting next to me is Mrs. Self’s 11-year-old great-granddaughter Alyca, visiting Mississippi from her home in Portugal. Alyca is watching me. “You’re a good person. I can tell,” she says. The family gathered around the table then opens up with questions.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Where was your grandmother from?”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Where do you live now?”

  “What do you do at the University of Mississippi?”

  “What kinds of questions are you going to ask?”

  Everyone takes turns asking me questions and I answer them all, and then show Rev. Self my portfolio on my laptop. “You’re pretty good. I like your photography,” he says. “I will help you. This is a good project.”

  I know Ms. Tennie, as I affectionately call her, is going to be a handful the first time I photograph her. She ends up giving me less than five minutes. She is wearing a bright red dress with a long strand of pearls. Her short hair is curled at the ends. She reminds me of Gram with her hairstyle.

  “Where do you want me to take your photograph?”

  “It doesn’t matter to me, just make it quick.” Ms. Tennie moves fast and doesn’t like to be slowed down. I thought she was going to give me more time, but after I take 13 photos, she says, “Hurry up and take the photo; I have food on the stove.”

  “I’m trying to take a nice photo. Please be patient.” She looks at me. I don’t say another word.

  We are in her formal living room, where everything is in its place. I have her sit on the sofa because the big windows facing her cast light on her face. I don’t want to use a flash or lights for any of the women. Recording their voices and using a digital camera are intimidating enough; I don’t want to add another element. It’s about the connection.

  After our short photo session, she quickly walks back to the kitchen to check on the food. Nothing has burned, and she goes into her bedroom to change into more comfortable clothes. I just took my first photograph for the book.

  I was excited as Rev. Self’s mother began to talk with pride about her experiences when a car dealership refused to sell her a Cadillac and when she insisted on having “Mrs.” next to her name in the local telephone book.

  I went to a Clarksdale dealership to look at a car in 1949 or 1950, something like that. This Cadillac was sitting on the display, and I said, “Ooh, what a pretty car.” Black folks didn’t buy no Cadillac back then. This white man said, “C’mon over here and I wanna show you a car.” He didn’t want me to look at that Cadillac. I said, “But I like this.” And he acted funny. I said, “No, I like this.” I thought, I bet they’ll sell me one in Memphis. So I went to Bud Davis Cadillac in Memphis and bought me a Cadillac! I drove past the business where they didn’t want to sell it to me—“Toot, toot, hello!”—and showed them my Cadillac. It was a big one, a DeVille or whatever it was, and I would drive by there in the morning when I go to the post office so they’d see it.

  The telephone company wouldn’t put “Mrs.” by black folks’ names. Put your first name down there and that’s it in that book. So I went down there and told them, “Well now, you put the ‘Mrs.’ for the white folks’ names and I’m a Mrs., too, I’m married, too. They didn’t do nothing but change it. I don’t know if I was the first, but anyway, I had it done. When the next one [book] came out, it had my name like it was supposed to be written. If you can write those white folks’ names down as Mrs., you can write mine Mrs. After all, I’m married, too. What’s the difference? That’s what I wanted to know. I just—I’m just real vocal about things and I’ve never, never stood back.

  “I’ve never had a problem speaking up for myself. I just speak,” she says. “Especially during the Civil Rights Movement. I just speak, and if I have to die for what I believe in, then so be it.” Her tone has changed from almost playful to stern. I know she means it.

  One day, she says she parked the wrong way on the street while going into the post office. She saw Whites doing it, so she did it. After she left the post office, she drove down a street on the white side of town. A police officer followed, then stopped her, walked up to her car, and told her she was out of her area of town.

  “I felt like he was just bothering me, so I drove away. He was talking and I didn’t even listen to him. I was so mad I stormed into the police chief’s office, walked right up to him, and said, ‘I wasn’t doing anything wrong. Call your dogs off. Don’t start with me,’ and I walked out of his office. Someone told my husband and he came home and said, ‘Tennie, please watch yourself. One day you’re going to say something and I’m going to have to defend you and we may get killed.’ ” She laughs as she remembers this.

  MRS. ALBERTINE T. REID, DIED AT 105

  SHERARD

  MAY 1908–JULY 2013

  MARRIED, 40 YEARS, TO LEDELL REID

  8 CHILDREN

  17 GRANDCHILDREN

  30 GREAT-GRANDS

  20 GREAT-GREAT-GRANDS

  “I have a mother in mind,” Rev. Self had told me during our first phone call. “Mrs. Albertine T. Reid is our eldest. She’s 105 years old. I will call her family and talk to them and call you back.”

  I was elated as I waited to hear from him. When I finally spoke to Mrs. Reid’s granddaughter Juanita Reid Virdure to make an appointment for the interview, she said, “Mama has been waiting for you, but Mama has taken a turn for the worse and is tired. Mama says she’s ready to go home. We can schedule a tentative appointment. Call me the day before to see if Mama is up f
or your visit.”

  When I call back, Mrs. Reid is not up for the visit. “Thank you,” I say, “why don’t I call you another time? The last thing you need to worry about is me bugging you for an interview.” She thanks me. I plan to call in two more weeks. During that time Rev. Self tells me that Mrs. Reid has died.

  I don’t want to call, but I want to show my respect. Mrs. Virdure starts to cry as she tells me that her grandmother passed away. “I’m sorry. This is just hard. She lived a good life, but it’s hard,” Mrs. Virdure says.

  I start to cry, too. “I understand. It’s been 20 years and I still miss my grandmother. The good thing is that she had you.”

  Silence. I hear her sniffle. I’m jealous of Mrs. Virdure for a fleeting moment. News of her death reminds me how fragile and unpromised grandmother time is. I regrieve Gram. Right then I decide I will interview Mrs. Reid through her granddaughter’s memory, and nine months later, I call Mrs. Virdure again. “Mrs. Virdure, this is Lisa Steele. I called you about your grandmother for my book last summer. Do you remember me?”

  “Oh yes, I remember you. How are you?”

  Mrs. Reid in 1929, when she was voted Miss Alcorn.

  “I’m fine. I want you to know that I didn’t forget about you. I am almost done with the book. Would you like to be a part of it?”

  “Yes, thank you for calling. You would do that? I would like that very much. Mama had great stories. We know all of them. We have her history. You could use one of her photographs in the book.”

  Mrs. Reid lived on the family farm in Sherard, Mississippi, for 77 years—from 1930 to 2007—but the Virdures live north of Memphis in a well-manicured, upper-middle-class neighborhood of brick homes. Their home has an open design with tiled floors and big windows. There’s cheerful peach paint in one of the rooms and family photos everywhere. Mrs. Virdure immediately welcomes me with a hug. Her husband, Ledell, introduces himself and invites my husband, Bobby, to have a drink on the wood deck in the backyard. Bobby looks like he’s hanging out with an old friend, and I exhale as Mrs. Virdure sits down next to me and hands me a photo of her beautiful grandmother, Albertine Reid. Mrs. Reid was 105, her daughter is probably around 80, and this granddaughter must be about 60, although she seems younger. One granddaughter to another, we talk for almost two hours.