Delta Jewels

by Alysia Burton Steele

  “Are you okay?” asks Susan.

  “No, I’m having an asthma attack and I don’t have my inhaler,” I wheeze.

  “Okay, calm down. Take a few deep breaths. Are you going to be okay?”

  “Yes, I’ll be fine,” I whisper, determined not to miss this opportunity.

  We walk toward the conference room, where Mrs. Evers is waiting for me. My heart is beating a mile a minute. I cannot believe this is finally happening. I’ve photographed famous singers and unforgettable concerts in my day, but nothing compares to meeting Mrs. Myrlie Evers. I walk into the conference room and there she is, sitting at a long, oval-shaped conference table with her attorney and Reena. I’ve met her before, but as I look at Mrs. Evers now, I’m starstruck. She smiles to set me at ease, and I sit down next to her, surprised and flattered when her attorney takes cell phone photos of me with Mrs. Evers holding up the issues of Southern Living. I feel my emotions surface. Oh damn it! My throat tightens. My nose turns red. I’m going to cry.

  Mrs. Evers sees the tears forming, watches my throat quiver, and gently asks, “Child, why are you crying?”

  “I cannot believe I am sitting here next to you. I have been trying to meet you for almost nine months. I want you in my book. I would be honored to have you in my book. And I cannot believe I am sitting next to you. I have admired you all of my life and you’re right here.”

  She’s laughing warmly now. “I’m only human, too,” she says simply. “I’d love to be in your book.” Then she stands up.

  “For real?”

  “Yes.” And she walks out of the room.

  I haven’t had a chance to read any of the book to her and Mrs. Evers has walked out of the room. How will I ever get her scheduled? I am speechless. It happened so fast, I had less than five minutes. I bawled. I am so mad at myself.

  Reena is standing there watching me and, once I get a grip, says, “Okay, let’s schedule this.” She hands me her business card and tells me to call her later that day, when she will know Mrs. Evers’s schedule. “Her schedule is tight. It will have to be done in Jackson.”

  “I know. I know. I will cancel whatever is on my calendar to drive to Jackson,” I say, undismayed by the two-and-a-half-hour drive. I hug Reena and cry again, while she chuckles. “She’ll do it, right? She’ll do the interview?”

  “She is a woman of her word,” she said. “She said yes, didn’t she?”

  I hand Reena my freshly printed manuscript—the only copy I have. “Perhaps you or Mrs. Evers can read it on the way back home?”

  “I’ll only take it if you sign it for us. Write something.”

  “You want my autograph? Mine?”

  She laughs. “Yes, yours.” I don’t remember all I wrote on that last page, but I do remember writing, “To Reena, The next generation of Jewels.” Reena is executive director for the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute. When I asked her what that means to her, she replied: “I am the guardian of the legacy. I very proudly hold that position, to further the legacy of both of my parents for future generations.”

  A week or two later I drive to Jackson to interview Mrs. Evers. Bobby is with me. He will divorce me if I don’t take him to meet Mrs. Evers. The door opens. It’s Mrs. Evers, wearing a beautiful jewel-toned purple sweater. She shakes our hands. When we sit down to talk, she immediately starts talking. I don’t have my recorder on. I am nervous. She’s talking and I don’t want to interrupt her. I hadn’t asked for permission to record her, so I don’t want to just start recording.

  After a few minutes I ask, “May I start recording?”

  She says, “I thought you were. I only have an hour and I’m tired.”

  Bobby, Mrs. Evers, and I took a selfie after her interview for this book in May 2014. We were in her office in Jackson. It took me nine months to get this interview. She was delightful and shared with me many stories about her childhood

  I’ve screwed this up already, I think to myself as I start the recorder. She talks about Medgar. I listen intently to this, a private history lesson. But then I ask her about her grandmother. When she realizes I want to know about her childhood, her life experiences before Medgar, she becomes truly candid. She talks openly about her maternal grandmother and her aunt Myrlie, for whom she was named.

  My mother and father were married. She was very young, almost 17. My dad was about five years her senior. My maternal grandmother, Annie Beasley, felt that this gift, meaning me, the child, should have the best life that could possibly be given to her. She thought my mother was too young to really do the best job in rearing me. I was born in 1933, that was a time when the elder women in a family felt free to take the infants home with them and rear them if they felt that they would not get what was needed at home. So that’s what my grandmother, Annie Beasley, did. She walked across the street, to my mother and my father’s home, and I’m told that she said, “This baby needs me. Wrap her up, Mildred. I’m taking her home.” Home was just across the street from my mother. They lived on the same street, but on opposite sides. My mother was so young, and what my grandmother was about to do was something that was acceptable in our neighborhood. She knew she could see me and be with me. And you usually gave in to what the elders wished. So, I was packed up, taken across the street. My grandmother decided that she had to retire from her job—she was a schoolteacher—and devote her entire attention to this precious child that had been given to the family. That’s the beginning of my being Mrs. Beasley’s granddaughter, rather than Mildred’s daughter.

  Prayer was always important in life. I had to pray every night. She sat there next to me as I knelt at the bed. Sometimes she would do this hum [she hums it], “Baby. Come on. It’s time to say your prayers.” And I would think, “Oh my goodness, I don’t want to say my prayers. Do I have to say my prayers tonight?” But I wouldn’t dare say that to her. Obediently, I would turn and kneel down next to the bed and always say the Lord’s Prayer and always ask for blessings for those who had less than I. Then I would jump up, as a child would do. Okay, I’ve said my prayers. She’d always wait until I almost got out of the bedroom door. “Baby.” I knew what she was gonna say. “Come back. You didn’t finish your prayers.” “Yes, Mama. What didn’t I do?” “You know what you did not say. You get on your knees and you ask God to make you a blessing.” To this day, a day doesn’t pass that I don’t ask God to make me a blessing. I didn’t understand it then, but you live and you learn, and if I say nothing else in terms of prayer, I ask that: make me a blessing.

  It’s a miracle what grandmothers and older nurturers can do for you in training. She never ventured from telling me that I had special talents, and that she and God expected me to use them in the right way. How blessed I was. I’ve lived by those teachings over years and, honestly, I believe it has been the only way I have survived everything that I have been through. If that were to be taken away from me, I don’t know who I would be, I don’t know what I would do. I choose not to venture into that, but to just be thankful for her and all that she gave to me.

  (Speaking of her maternal grandmother, Annie Beasley, who later worked as a housekeeper:) Every Thursday, Grandmother would bring home the leftover food from this white family’s home. She was a superb cook. I was introduced to strawberry tarts, cookies with chocolate frosting, chicken prepared in a different way other than the boiled or the fried. And she would bring home clothes for me from the young girl in this white family. All of the women in my family were great seamstresses. I remember my [other] grandmother, Annie, and my aunt Myrlie taking those clothes, ripping them apart, and sizing them to fit me because they were too large. I had my first full-length mink coat by the time I was 13 years old. My take: “What is this? What is this fur? I don’t want this.” My aunt Myrlie said, “Baby sister”—which was my nickname—“don’t you know what this is?” “No, I don’t know what it is.” She went on to explain it to me about the mink coat, what it meant society-wise. It’s upper-echelon. [She said,] “You can wear this.” I have a
photograph of myself in that mink coat that Medgar took of me when I was pregnant with our first child.

  But I reached a point that I was weary of wearing that girl’s clothes. I said to my aunt, my mother, and my grandmother Annie, “I want my own clothes.” They said, “Well, baby, we don’t have the money to get you clothes like that.” “I don’t care. I want my own.” My grandmother took it upon herself to take a croker sack and make skirts out of it. We called them broomstick skirts. A broomstick skirt is one that has a band around the waist and you take the other cloth, the long part of the skirt, and you gather it on this band, pin it, and that’s it. The cloth came from the flour sacks. You’d go to the store and you would buy Rit Dye and you would dye those croker sacks different colors and cut it and make yourself skirts. I preferred that over the clothes that were given to me from the white house.

  Two hours after we’d begun, she is giggling and blushing when I ask, “I do have one question about you and Mr. Evers.”

  “Yes?” she asks.

  “What was your first kiss like with him?”

  She looks at me.

  I wonder if I’ve crossed the line.

  Then she bursts into a laugh, lays her head on the desk, and giggles. “I was just glad he wasn’t a sloppy kisser, like the younger boys I’d kissed.”

  Mrs. Evers, Bobby, and I laugh.

  “Mrs. Evers?”

  “Yes?” she asks.

  “What was your song? If you had one song with him, what was it?”

  She smiles again and says, “ ‘It Had to Be You.’ ”

  At the end of our conversation, she agrees to take a selfie with me and Bobby. For the first time in my career, I have a selfie with a celebrity. She is a living legend and I have something in common with her—I was raised by my gram, too.

  HAT. COAT. PURSE.

  My mother is white. My father is black. They met in 1968.

  Mom said, “I dated him to shock Mom, to push the limit.” Her mother, my grandmother Gram Duncan, was a recent widow, and Mom was full of anger because she missed her dad. Mom’s father, Joe Duncan, the grandfather I never knew, was an FBI agent who died of lung cancer when Mom was 14 years old. It was a terrible time for her and her siblings. “I was unhappy,” she said. “I had low self-esteem because I wasn’t popular in school. I didn’t have the blond hair and blue eyes that was popular; I had freckles and brown hair. I wondered what I could do to rock the boat. I know, date a black man.”

  My dad, Walter Burton, was a sweet talker. Short, about 5 foot 6, and slim, with an athletic build, he cocked his head to the side and wore Big Apple hats.

  Gram Burton wasn’t keen on Daddy dating a white girl. She didn’t like the idea at all. I never asked her or my grandfather why they objected, but it’s fair to guess that she worried about my dad’s safety. Men were killed because someone thought they were flirting with white women.

  My grandparents lived in an all-black neighborhood. There were parts in Harrisburg where blacks could not buy homes. They couldn’t just buy anywhere. Pop-Pop told me they lived in the projects while he was in the Army and afterward they struggled to save up enough money to buy a house.

  If my parents married, and my mom moved into the neighborhood, my grandparents wondered what the neighbors would say. I suppose they worried about Mom’s safety, too. It was 1969. It was a hostile time in Harrisburg.

  “The Black Panthers had a meeting spot in the neighborhood,” Mom says. “People didn’t like me there. They never said anything to me because your grandparents were very well respected and well liked. I think people left me alone because of the influence of your grandparents, but I worried, too. Things were hostile with race relations.”

  My mom said when I was 2 years old I used to say, “Hat. Coat. Purse.” when I was mad at her and wanted to go see my paternal grandmother. Here I am walking the three doors from my parents’ home to my grandparents’ home in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. We lived on Hoerner Street.

  My mom, Stella, laughing at me as I ran to my grandmother, Althenia Burton. This photo was taken around 1971. I would have been around 2 years old.

  Did Gram Burton, who would raise me and whom I honor with this book, have a memory about her childhood? Did she see a lynching? Did she witness black men being killed for false accusations? I’ll never know. She never talked about it, but after my private lesson with these women, I had so many questions.

  When Gram Burton called Gram Duncan to say, “Your daughter is dating my son and it needs to stop,” my white grandmother, Gram Larson, didn’t know how to respond. She thought the issue was race, but Gram Burton was concerned about my dad’s maturity level and ability to care for a wife and child. I know for a fact that Gram loved my mother. “Truth be told,” Gram Larson said, “I wasn’t keen on them dating either, but by then your mom was pregnant, in her senior year of high school, and she wanted to have you. Your parents were too young. Both me and your grandma Burton wanted her to put you up for adoption.” Mom fought to keep me. “I told your grandma [Larson] that I was 17 and a minor, yes, that was true, so I would have to do what she wanted me to do. But I looked her in the eye and told her that when I was 18, I was going to go back and get you,” Mom told me. “I suppose the way I looked at her, she knew I meant it. And I did.”

  My parents married when I was a bun in the oven in June 1969. There was nothing their parents could do. I was born that December. There were never any issues between grandparents. They genuinely liked one another. My grandmothers kept in touch after my parents divorced when I was 3 years old. The grandparents were more cordial to one another than my parents were to each other. My grandmothers visited and kept in touch with each other until Gram Burton died in 1994. Gram Larson came to the funeral and kissed me. Gram Larson still keeps in touch with my aunt Tiny—Gram Burton’s sister. I love that the families still talk.

  When my parents married, they bought a row house that was three doors down from my black grandparents William and Althenia Burton in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Gram Burton used to buy me the prettiest little outfits, matching hat and coat, always with patent leather shoes and a purse. I was a little lady, just like my Gram Burton. We were thick as thieves. I was attached to her even as a baby. Mom says when I was 2 or 3 years old and mad at her, I would say, with my little temper, “Hat. Coat. Purse.” That meant that I was walking to Gram’s house and I didn’t want Mom to accompany me. Mom would call Gram and say, “Here she comes. She’s mad at me. She’s walking up now.” I wouldn’t let Mom walk with me. She would stay on the sidewalk or porch and watch me walk the three doors to Gram. Gram waited for me on the porch, smiling, arms reaching out.

  Gram told me that after they got custody of me, I would wake up in the middle of the night, touch her face when she was asleep, and say, “Gram, I’m with you. I’m here?” And she would say, “Yes, baby, you’re with me.”

  My parents, Stella Duncan and Walter Burton, on their wedding day in June 1969. They were married at Capital Presbyterian Church in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. My paternal grandparents were church members.

  My parents had an ugly divorce. My mother moved to New Jersey and I cried for my grandmother for months. Mom also worried about raising a black child in a white rural neighborhood in New Jersey. So my mother called my black grandparents and asked them to take legal guardianship of me when I was 4.

  Although they didn’t have much materially, my fondest childhood memories are bubble baths and sitting on the swing on the front porch with my grandparents, Gram and Pop-Pop. It was Pop-Pop’s job to give me a bath. He did this until I was 7 or 8. I liked bubble baths but we couldn’t afford to buy bubble soap, so Pop-Pop took the label off a vegetable can and punched holes all around it, saved pieces of soap, and put them in the can. He would hang string from one side of the can to another and when he put it under the running water it made bubbles for me. As a child, I didn’t know we couldn’t afford bubble bath; I only knew I enjoyed bath time. After my evening bath, Pop-Pop and Gram wou
ld let me put on my two-piece halter-top pajamas [popular in the 1970s] and sit on the swing between them at dusk, when the streetlights were on. They would both sit close to me, Pop-Pop with his arms around both of us—calling me Peach, his name for me—and Gram holding my hands. They didn’t have much, but I know for sure that they loved me.

  The memory of my grandmother grows less dim, even makes me weepy from time to time, as I work on this project. Interviewing other people’s grandmothers and those like Mrs. Evers, who were also raised by their grandmothers, makes me feel closer to Gram. If I close my eyes, I think I can still hear her voice.

  MS. CURTISTENE SHORT DAVIS, 67

  LELAND

  BORN JULY 1947

  MARRIED 40 YEARS WHEN DIVORCED

  1 DAUGHTER

  2 GRANDCHILDREN

  Mrs. Curtistene Davis says she wants to help me with this book. “I love what you’re doing,” she says. “I’ll help you find more women. How many more do you need?”

  “I need three more.”

  “Can they all be from Leland?”

  She is the first from this town that I photograph. I tell her I don’t mind because I don’t have any other women from Leland.

  She shares local history on the plantation where she was born and lived—Heathman Deadening Plantation. “We lived in the southern end of the huge plantation. Deadening literally meant ‘dead end.’ ” The irony doesn’t escape her that hard living during slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation was dead end because she adds, “It was a hard life, but there was a lot of love, too. There was a lot of love individually, but also shared between families.” She says lots of families lived on the plantation, where they chopped and picked cotton. Her parents were sharecroppers. “Every family had to produce their own food. We had what we called ‘truck patches,’ which meant we grew our own food. We harvested and canned food—like beans, greens, peanuts, and watermelons.” She explained that each family had their own area and they would share with one another. “During the winter months we had what we called ‘hog-killing time.’ That meant we came together for hogs that were raised throughout the year and we butchered and cleaned the hogs and shared.”