Delta Jewels

by Alysia Burton Steele

  Gram always knew education was important. She used to say it all the time. I heard her. I knew the words, but I didn’t fully comprehend them until I started interviewing the Jewels. They didn’t resonate with me until I heard their stories. I knew that Blacks weren’t allowed to get an education, that school was not held for black children during cotton season and was almost nonexistent and woefully substandard even between seasons. I’d heard the stories, but hearing these words, the personal stories from the mouths of these victims of racist oppression, touched me. Hearing the horror stories from the Jewels makes me appreciate the upbringing and lifestyle Gram and Pop-Pop gave me.

  I was always absolutely terrible in math. Didn’t matter what math—algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus. I was awful at all of them. In the tenth grade, I was studying geometry. I wasn’t getting it. I don’t remember my teacher’s name. He was a white man with a mustache, strict, he scared me. I thought he looked like Hitler, because the same semester, I was learning about the Holocaust in history. I couldn’t do geometry, but I was not going to him for help, no way.

  My aunt Marie tried to tutor me at the dining room table. We had a formal dining room with French doors. I remember her sitting at the head of the table. “Why aren’t you getting this?” she used to ask while frowning at me.

  “I don’t know. I’m terrible at math.”

  “You can be good at anything you put your mind to,” Marie would sternly point out.

  I rolled my eyes.

  Gram took me to after-school tutors and church tutors. It wasn’t sinking in. Gram was convinced I was fooling around in class, not paying attention. I assured her that I wasn’t disruptive in class. To this day I don’t recall if I was. I remember strolling into class one day, books in my arm, wearing my cute eighties puffy sweater, laughing with my girlfriends. I walk inside the classroom door entrance and freeze in my tracks—just like a movie. Gram is sitting in the back of the room. She’s staring at me. She doesn’t say a word. She wanted to observe me in class. If I was doing anything I wasn’t supposed to be doing, did she think I would do it with her in the room? I could feel her eyes burning a hole in me. I was so mad at her. I turned and glared at her. She didn’t say a word to me and I didn’t say a word to her. But my friends knew who she was. Everyone knew who she was.

  I earned a C in that geometry class. I was quite proud. I actually passed! But oh no, Mrs. B—which is what Dad called Gram and how I referred to her when I was upset—wasn’t convinced I learned anything. She sent me to summer school. My summer school teacher was shocked I was there. Do I really need to tell you the kind of students who typically attend summer school? I was afraid I was going to get my butt kicked daily. I was scared. Surely, I didn’t belong there. I came home the first day so angry: “You do realize where you’ve sent me? I have a target to get my butt kicked and it will be all your fault. Why did you send me there?”

  “I wasn’t convinced you learned anything.” She had a way of shutting you down with a very calm voice, a few certain choice words, and never curse words.

  “What?! I got a C in geometry.”

  “I think you can do better.”

  I went to summer school. I don’t even remember what grade I got, but I was mad at Gram all summer. I can’t help but laugh now. I have a poster on my office door that reads, GOOD AIN’T GOOD ENOUGH.

  I knew that Blacks weren’t allowed to get an education, that school was not held for black children during cotton season and was almost nonexistent and woefully substandard even between seasons.

  MRS. MARGIE T. JOHNSON, 79

  HOLLANDALE

  BORN JANUARY 1936

  MARRIED 29 YEARS WHEN WIDOWED IN 1966

  14 CHILDREN

  7 GRANDCHILDREN

  6 GREAT-GRANDS

  I am asked to talk to high school students who are visiting Ole Miss. My colleague, R.J., who runs the Mississippi high school program, thinks the visiting students will enjoy hearing the Jewel stories. I am not sure about that, but I agree. R.J. assigns me a small lecture room, where, at most, 20 students can sit. Perfect, I think, not expecting as many as 20 kids.

  High schoolers start to pile into the room. There are way more than 20. Some start to sit on the floor, others line the walls. The room is full and students are sitting in the hallway outside the door. I’m shocked that so many kids want to hear stories about black grandmothers.

  I start with a slideshow of selected Jewels. At Mrs. Dillard, the eldest mother in the book, I talk about how she was thrown off a plantation because she refused to have her little girls pick cotton.

  “I know her,” says a girl’s voice in the back of the room. She is sitting on the floor, so I can’t see her.

  “Who said that?” I ask.

  A tiny brown-skinned girl with her hair in a natural Afro puff raises her hand. Small world, I think, and say, “Wow, you know her? That’s awesome. She’s a wonderful lady.”

  “Are you done with the book?” the girl asks, which surprises me.

  “No, I need about ten more but I’m having a hard time getting women to agree,” I say in a private conversation in the middle of this presentation.

  “I want my great-grandma in the book,” she says. “How do you decide on how to put them in the book?”

  I tell her that the women must be over 70, agree to give me details about their life stories, live in the Delta, and let me photograph them.

  “I want my great-grandma in the book.”

  “Talk to me after the presentation.”

  I continue the hour-long presentation. The kids laugh, ask questions. I am shocked they are so engaged. “You, too, can tell these stories. Go interview your grandmothers and grandfathers. Do it now while you have them. Don’t be like me, wishing I had taken time to learn something about my grandmother.”

  Students thank me as they leave, but three brown-skinned girls stay, eager to talk to me. “So which one of you was talking to me about your great-grandma?”

  Alicia shyly says, “It was me.”

  “Well, where does your great-grandma live?”

  “Hollandale.”

  I’ve never heard of it. She tells me it’s near Greenwood. “It’s in the Delta, right? Not just outside it?” She nods her head yes. “Well, I’ll tell you what: if your grandma agrees, I will interview her, but only if you’re there to listen.”

  “Can I call her now?”

  I nod and think, This child wants her great-grandma in this book. Let’s make it happen. She calls her great-grandma on the spot and she agrees to the interview. Alicia and her two girlfriends giggle. I am delighted to have this bond, and I exchange phone numbers with Alicia. An hour later, I receive a text: “Hi ma, you’re now my godmother.”

  When I call Margie Johnson, I can hear hesitation in her voice. “I agreed to do this for Alicia, but tell me about this book you’re doing?” she asks, with a tone that says, What did this child get me into? I explain and she agrees, but I can tell she doesn’t really want to do it. She’s only appeasing her great-granddaughter.

  The day I am to interview, there’s torrential rain. My phone service keeps cutting off and the GPS signal is lost. When I do have service, I call Bobby: “Babe, there are flood waters and I’m lost. I’m nervous. Can you get me directions to Hollandale? I am supposed to be at a mother’s house but I’m lost.”

  “Where are you?”

  I tell him and he stays on the phone with me and directs me. “There’s supposed to be a gas station on your right. You’re going to pass two streets and your turn is the next right.” It’s getting late and skies are darkening. I don’t like to drive in the Delta at night. I am almost three hours from home, and I have to teach the next morning. I don’t have the house number in Alicia’s text message, nor do I have a description of the house. I call Alicia and finally pull into the driveway, almost an hour late.

  Everyone has been waiting for me. Alicia greets me with a hug. I smile and thank Mrs. Johnson for her time. She doesn
’t smile, but says hello; she doesn’t really want to do this. She’s seated in a chair and with her are three adorable little boys, her great-grandsons, still dressed in their Sunday church clothes. As I explain the book and show Mrs. Johnson some of the stories, Alicia and her cousins listen.

  When I ask her, “Tell me a story that people ask you to repeat. Tell me about your childhood,” I can tell she has something to say. She looks upward, thinking. She decides to talk about the Depression, the only mother in the book to do so.

  Back in the day, I believe President Roosevelt was coming into office or something. They called it, I don’t know, the panic time. We had stamp books. I think I was 8 or 9 [years old]. Each person in the house had a stamp book. You had stamps for shoes, stamps for everything—gas, flour, stamps for meat, everything you bought, you had to have stamps. Everything was rationed back in the day. And when you go to the store to buy groceries, you couldn’t buy Coca-Colas. You could get—they called them soda waters back there then. They were the red, the yellows, and the root beers, but you couldn’t buy Coca-Colas, those were for the other color [Whites]. We couldn’t afford to buy them. The other pop was cheaper. I don’t even remember the Blacks buying Coca-Colas.

  Oh, I had a Cola-Cola, ’cause the little white girl that lived on the plantation, she made sure I had a Coca-Cola. She liked my aunt that raised me and she would come up to our house and she’d say, “I’ll get you a Coke, Margie.” Her name was Eugenia, and she would give me a Coke.

  Mrs. Johnson tells me that her aunt raised her. She doesn’t go into detail and I can tell she doesn’t want to tell me why. She is pleasant, but there’s still tension in the air, as if she still doesn’t want to be in the book, doesn’t trust me, so I tread lightly, wondering if perhaps this is her nature. Alicia is still listening to our exchange. I try to find something to warm up Mrs. Johnson. I ask about the women in her life. Now she smiles and tells me she was raised by her aunt. I love what she says.

  My aunt taught me morals. She taught me that whatever you tell somebody, make sure you do what you say. Let your word be your bond. I didn’t know what a bond was at that time, but now I understand that if you give somebody your word, you supposed to follow it up. And if you can’t, go back and let them know that you can’t do it right then and [say] I’ll be glad to do it when I can. She gave me that and then she taught me about God—the importance of knowing who He was for myself, not just because somebody else said it.

  She’s starting to warm up. She smiles more and she’s leaned in closer to me. Her eyes show me her spunk. Forty-five minutes into the interview and Mrs. Johnson is enjoying herself. “What else do you want me to know about you?” When she tells me she taught herself how to drive, my eyebrows go up, and Alicia smiles and perks up, too.

  I could never figure out why the car sat in the yard and everybody [my family] walked to church. They would walk to church for prayer meetings. They would walk to church for Sunday school. They walked to church for Sunday. But the car would sit on the yard. And the only time they would take the car out the yard was when they drove to town to make groceries.

  That gravel road would hurt your feet even with shoes on. Anyway, they’d be walking and leave me at home, so I was to do the chores, sweep and clean. Well, I would go out there, and I would use more gas in the yard than they used on Saturdays for groceries. ’Cause I would back it up and go forward. And then I would take and get the broom and sweep tracks out, sweep all the tracks out and then just wash the car. So then you never could tell I had it. I cooled it down. I learned all my techniques on driving in the yard. I have never had no driving lessons. So that’s my driving story. I was devilish, I was very devilish.

  MRS. MARY L. CHATMAN, 75

  CLEVELAND

  BORN SEPTEMBER 1939

  STILL MARRIED, 40 YEARS, TO JESSIE CHATMAN

  5 CHILDREN

  23 GRANDCHILDREN

  7 GREAT-GRANDS

  I’ve arranged to meet Mrs. Chatman on a Sunday after church. The night before, Bobby came home from a family visit in North Carolina but had stopped in South Carolina to buy me peaches, which I love. It is too many for me to eat and he doesn’t like their texture and won’t eat them. I decide to take some to Mrs. Chatman.

  When I meet her in the church sanctuary, she’s seated on a pew with her thick, silver bangle bracelets shining against her brown skin. Mr. Chatman and Rev. Tinson wait outside the sanctuary.

  I instantly like her when she says in a deep, raspy voice that she can tell a lot about a person just by “putting my eyes on ’em.” She looks at me intently and doesn’t take her eyes off me as I explain the project. It rattles me a little, but I keep talking. When I finish, she says: “I listen real good. In my lifetime, I had to listen to learn something.”

  “Mrs. Chatman, I have some peaches for you in my car. Please remind me after our interview.”

  I be tryin’ to tell them what’s right, what to do right. ’Cause when you teachin’ a person, you gotta tell ’em the right way. So if you don’t tell ’em the right way, they don’t know nothin’ no way when you get through talkin’.

  When my daughter was dating, her friend had to come meet me and then I had to see if he was all right. I had to look, see if he was all right and I didn’t have to do nothin’ but just look—put these eyes on ’em. You see, and then I knew. You just know.

  It’s like right about now, I don’t care who I’m talkin’ to and I don’t care what we talkin’ about, I’mma listen real good to you, and if I don’t get the Alzheimer’s, I come back wit’ you and tell you what you said, too. I’m a real good listener. That’s how I learnt a few things I know in life, a lot of ’em, really. I had to listen to learn ’cause I’m not educated, I mean tenth grade. I couldn’t get no further, because we had little ones, we had to help work and feed them. So we had to work and take care of them and then we had to chop cotton, we had to snap cotton.

  We go to school sometimes and then Momma said, “You can’t go, you can’t go to school today.” And you know that would hurt me, but that was my mother. I had to do what she said do and that’s how we missed out on our education. But my younger siblings educated. Well, you know, sometime, I feel a little disappointed, sometime. I feel like, you know, maybe if I could have went on, a little further, maybe I could have done some better things in my life. I always wanted something of my own anyway. Look like it took so long for me to get some things of my own. And I know it’s not my own, ’cause God gave it to me and he’s just lendin’ it to me for a while, and so when I leave, I want my children to maintain whatever we have. I don’t want them to give it to nobody out there, ’cause I worked too hard. I say, “I want you to keep what your momma and daddy left for you.” ’Cause like my momma, she didn’t have nothin’ to leave me and I know she didn’t and I know she did the very, very best she could for us.

  Mrs. Chatman says that her younger siblings received an education, and I can tell she’s proud of them, but she clearly has regrets about not getting more education. I hear sadness in Mrs. Chatman’s voice, as I have when other Jewels say they are not educated persons. It hurts me to hear them say this about themselves. A formal education doesn’t take away from their wisdom, their life experiences. I feel very honored to have my private history lesson from them, and this is what I told all of them. “I know education was denied to you, but that doesn’t take away your value. You have something important to add. You’re a smart woman. You have wisdom. I’m here because I want wisdom from you. I think there are a lot of people who can learn from you.”

  There is a quiet moment between us. I watch her fidget with her bracelets. I suspect we are both thinking about what the other has said.

  During the interview she fusses about her clothes. The pastor didn’t tell her I was going to take her photograph. She wishes she had known. She’s wearing a straw hat, a floral knee-length dress, and a half sweater to cover her arms. “I’m usually dressed up for church,” she said. “I haven’t been feelin
g good.”

  “Mrs. Chatman, I think you look lovely. My gram was strict about me dressing properly for church. No pants, always wear pantyhose and very little makeup.”

  Mrs. Chatman nods her head. Then she echoes others Jewels who have complained that younger women today don’t wear enough clothes to church. They are not happy with sleeveless shirts and short dresses.

  I know, some years back, I was getting older when I joined the mother board. As I sit there, Sunday and Sunday, whatever we’re havin’, I’m getting more wiser. I learn more stuff. It’s just some stuff I can learn on my own. I’m just glad I can think for myself, a little bit, you know? Although I’m not educated but I can still think for myself. I got a lot of wisdom now, I don’t let anybody take that from me either, naw. I just know things, and if you been in this world for 70-some years, you gotta know somethin’, don’t you think so? I changed my way of living, I changed my way of dressing. I changed because the stuff I wore, the things I was wearing in my thirties and forties, I don’t wear that no more. I just wear what we old ladies wear.

  The young women today, my advice, for number 1: Be educated. Get your education and you can be just about who you want to be in life. When you go out there to get a job, look presentable. Number 2: They need to learn how to put on some clothes. Them some awful clothes they wear. You don’t come to church naked. They be naked. And what I call naked: when you ain’t got no sleeves. I call that naked and I guess they think that’s right, but it’s not. Look presentable.

  I nod in agreement with her and feel older than my 43 years. When I see girls on campus wearing short shorts, tiny skirts, or tight, low-cut blouses, I shake my head. I know Gram wouldn’t have let me step foot outside my house dressed that way.