I suspect that people thought I was crazy when I called out for Mama in the delivery room. “Rashad,” I later whispered to my newborn son, “you’re such a lucky little boy.” Since that day, I’ve had two more wonderful children, Brandon and Eze. They, too, have grown to know and love the remarkable person who brought me into the world and taught me how to be the best African American woman I can be.
I’m happy to say that I’m still as close to my mom as ever. In some ways, she’s my best friend. I still talk with her endlessly about raising my kids, maintaining a happy marriage, coping with stressors at work, dealing with
Dad’s worsening health. She listens patiently to every boring detail about my household chores and incessant errands. I seek her advice about my smallest fears and biggest dreams.
“Mama,” I gently confronted her one day, “I sure wish you had told all of us sooner that your cancer had metastasized. Did you think that we couldn’t handle it? Were you trying to protect us? Don’t you know that you taught us to be strong, to focus on the positive, to be grateful for all things, to trust in God’s divine plan?”
I close my eyes and wait for a response, but get none.
She is sleeping, Anesia, I tell myself, then say aloud, so she’ll hear me, “I’ve gotta get home to cook dinner now—and I’m making your special pound cake recipe for dessert. I’ll be back soon, Mama, and bring the kids, okay? Brandon wants to tell you all about school, and Eze is painting you the cutest picture.”
Before I stand to leave, I adjust the pretty silk flowers in the vase I bought for her last birthday. I glance over toward my brother, Kenny, and then turn my attention back to my mother. “Can you believe that Rashad is almost fourteen now? And he thinks he’s ‘too old’ to have a party! Well, he is growing up really fast, but isn’t that funny?” I pause and then softly add, “You know, Mama, if only you could have hung on for two more weeks, you could have met Rashad in person. God knows what’s best, though. If he had taken Kenny before you, I’m sure you would have died from a broken heart instead of cancer.”
I kiss my fingertips and gently touch the headstone on my mama’s grave and then the adjacent one where my big brother lies. “Bye-bye for now. I love you both.”
Feeling immensely blessed and turning to walk away, I look briefly over my shoulder one last time, then up at the heavens. “Thank you, God,” I say aloud with a peaceful smile and a lighter soul. I find myself walking a little faster to my car. I can’t wait to make Mama’s pound cake for my family.
Anesia Okezie
As told to Karen Waldman
Dancing in the Kitchen
I was born in 1946, when Mama was in her early forties and her two other daughters were already adults—what folks called a “change-of-life baby.” On my own growing up on Chicago’s South Side, I spent a lot of time alone with Mama in the kitchen. I loved to watch and help her prepare great food for the soul like mixed greens and cornbread, sweet potato pies, skillet fried corn, salmon croquettes, biscuits, potato salad, black-eyed peas, red beans and rice, buffalo fish, chitlins, catfish, macaroni, spaghetti, chicken and dumplings, homemade rolls, bread pudding, lemon meringue pie, the best fried chicken in the universe, and my favorite of all, those divine fried pies.
I especially enjoyed holidays and the family feasts Mama created, with turkey and dressing as the centerpiece. We would always get up around four o’clock in the morning.My first duty was to toast slices of bread on trays placed under the broiler, then cut up the slices into cubes for the dressing using scissors. My next duty was to chop up the green peppers, onions, garlic and celery. In the meantime, Mama would start boiling the giblets for stock, fixing the cornbread, melting the butter and beating the eggs. Once the dressing was mixed and seasoned perfectly
(with me as official taster) and the bird was stuffed and in the oven (lavishly basted with butter), Mama would put a seventy-eight on the record player or turn up the radio, and we would dance around the kitchen.
“Work a little while and dance a little while, that’s what I always say,” Mama would announce, starting to sway to the music of Ray Charles, Ruth Brown or Ivory Joe Hunter. This was her philosophy about all household responsibilities. In the midst of cleaning or washing or ironing, Mama would launch into a demonstration of the camel walk or the hucklebuck, with me as her partner. Years later she proudly handed me an article about housework she had clipped from some authoritative magazine like Woman’s Day . It recommended that you take regular breaks from your chores to dance. “Just like I always said,” Mama crowed—and rightly so.
When I took on responsibility for the family Thanksgiving Day dinners in the 1980s, Mama would always come to my house the night before to help. I vividly recall how this tradition started. I was at work late at the local Urban League on the day before Thanksgiving and worrying about how I was going to get everything done in preparation for my first major family dinner. I was tired and particularly distressed about the prospect of having to pick and clean the ton of greens in my refrigerator once I got home from work.
Then the phone on my desk rang, and it was Mama. “I think I’ll spend the night with you,” she said. “Will you come and get me?”
Hallelujah! In answer to my unspoken prayer, there was Mama in my kitchen that evening, cleaning all those greens and assisting me in every way needed to make our dinner a five-star success. This included helping me master her special technique for tucking the turkey’s wings in back so they wouldn’t brown too much before the bird was fully cooked.
While we worked together in the kitchen that Thanksgiving and each one after that, I played Mama’s favorite music on the stereo in the adjacent dining room. We listened to folks she loved, like B.B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Jerry Butler, Dinah Washington and Sam Cooke as we cooked. Every now and then, true to Mama’s tradition, we would take a break and dance around the kitchen for a while.
When Mama passed on three days after her birthday in May 1990, I wondered and worried most about how I would get through Thanksgiving that year without her. I arrived home one evening in October to find a letter from my niece Leah, who had moved to Georgia. “I am inviting you to come to Atlanta for Thanksgiving,” she wrote.
“Your daughters are welcome to come, too,” Leah added.
I immediately accepted her invitation—another unspoken answered prayer.
At the time, both of my daughterswere away in college— Jacqueline in California and her younger sister, Nikki, in Massachusetts. We decided that, as usual due to the distance and cost, Jacqueline would spend Thanksgiving with friends on the West Coast and come home for Christmas.
Nikki, however, was away from home for the first time, and we decided she would meet me in Atlanta to celebrate the holiday with Leah and her family.
Nikki and I arrived on Thanksgiving eve to find that Leah had already done much of the preliminary work— including picking and cleaning the greens. The next morning we got up early, as customary, and started cooking.
Leah turned on a radio station that played the dusties— rhythm and blues classics that I had enjoyed all my life.
We were having a wonderful holiday party—cooking, talking, laughing, and yes, taking dance breaks from time to time. I was doing just fine until we came to the part where I needed to show Leah and Nikki how to tuck the turkey’s wings in back, just like Mama showed me. Suddenly, a tidal wave of sadness engulfed me, and I felt for a moment like Ray Charles, about to drown in my own tears.
Because I did not want to upset the others, I turned my back and walked over to the open kitchen door leading to Leah’s large backyard. I looked at the bright sunlight filtering mystically through the tall Georgia pines and, in a flash, realized that death is not the end.
With that, I returned to our celebration of cooking and music. On the radio, “Mashed Potato Time” by Dee Dee Sharp was playing, and we launched into the dance associated with that early 1960s hit. Then the idea came. We would write a dance-and-co
ok book, including a song for every recipe. We would call it Dancing in the Kitchen . When Jacqueline called from California later in the day, we shared this idea with her. She was equally enthusiastic and started coming up with additional dishes, songs and dances to include.
Over the years since then, we have come back to this project time and again. For our family recipe for black-eyed peas, the song is “Pass the Peas” by James Brown. For our special party punch, it’s “You Beat Me to the Punch” by Mary Wells. Fried chicken, “Do the Funky Chicken” by Rufus Thomas, of course. And to start off the dessert section, what else but “How Sweet It Is” by Marvin Gaye?
Whenever we take the time from our busy schedules to complete Dancing in the Kitchen , one thing is for sure. It will be a tribute to our mother and grandmother, and the opening selection will be by the Shirelles—“Dedicated to the One I Love.”
Barbara Holt
History Through Herstory
There is black history untold in the memories of the hundreds of grandmothers, grandfathers, great-aunts.
Alex Haley
Thirty years ago on a hot summer afternoon my mother and I left home early one Saturday morning to spend the day going to tag sales, the New England equivalent of garage sales. My father looked at us with a pained expression on his face and said for the umpteenth time, “Do not bring any more junk in this house.” We promptly ignored him and walked out the door. Mom taught me to leave things in the trunk of the car and to bring tag sale purchases in the house little by little.
That bright, sunny day we drifted down winding country lanes stopping at every tag sale we spotted. We stopped at a lovely old country mansion. The woman in charge had lost her mother and was trying to sell a lifetime of her mother’s treasures, a yard full of beautiful antiques that I am sure her mother had cherished. A large antique sideboard caught my mother’s eye, but we knew we could not get it in the car or slide it past Dad. We went from room to room filled with the flotsam and jetsam of bygone days. It brought tears to my eyes to see those well-loved items scattered about looking a bit lonely and unloved. Just as we were ready to leave empty handed, the owner said, “Did you look upstairs? You might find something you like up there.” We ducked our heads and took a cramped staircase up to a stuffy room under the eaves; the room was filled with all kinds of dolls. I stood there simply enchanted.
On a dusty shelf in one corner of the room I spotted two old black composition dolls. It was love at first sight. The girl doll was dressed in a handmade red velvet dress with a beautiful matching bonnet. Alas, the boy doll was naked as a jaybird. I gently picked them up and cuddled them in my arms. Tossed on a table in the corner I spotted an elegant island doll with the name “Cindie Jamaica B.W.I.” on her apron. I spotted a tiny hand-carved doll tucked in a basket on the floor and added her to my arms. I quickly paid for all of my treasures. If I had known then what I know now, I would have bought every doll in that room. A lifelong hobby as a black-doll collector was born on that day; I was hooked in a mighty big way.
Somehow, holding these dolls in my hands now, dolls that had dark skin and black hair, dolls that looked like my friends and my family, dolls that were beautiful—beautiful and black —filled a void in my heart from my childhood when my mother could not find any black dolls for me to play with. I remember my two Toni dolls, one with blond hair and one a brunette. They did not have a black Toni doll. I did not have any dolls that looked like me.
The next thirty years took me on an endless quest to countless yard sales, flea markets, antique shops and antique malls looking for black dolls. I learned to wheel and deal with the best of them. My mantra was, “Is that your best price? I must have that doll for my grandbaby.”
I had another bargain and another black doll. I had dreams of one day having a black doll museum.
Over the years I have amassed more than four hundred black dolls, and I love each and every one of them. Many times people ask me if I sell any of my dolls, and I tell them they are all my children; would you sell your children? I loved each doll I brought home as if I had given birth to it myself.
My favorite dolls are old black rag dolls. The first rag doll I purchased was a topsy-turvy doll made with a white doll on one end, and when you pull her skirt over her head, the doll on the other side is black, and each doll’s clothing is different. The owner said it was made in the late 1800s by a little white child who lived on a farm in upstate New York.
I began to read and research and network with other doll collectors and discovered that the dolls could retell history. Rag dolls, especially, have a story to tell. Their faces are unique and expressive. They speak to me, and their clothing tells a story, just by the workmanship and also the patterns and colors in the fabric. You can tell how old a doll is by close examination of the fabric. Knowing old patterns and colors is the key.
I determine where each doll belongs chronologically in the history of the United States—at times a dark history.
As a collector and an African American woman, I had to get past the negativity of the Jim Crow images of large lips, side-glancing eyes, pickaninny braids, and just plain mean characterizations. As I encounter these dolls, I remember that they represent an important time in our history, and I am so grateful that I can give them a home where they can tell their story, be heard and be loved— perhaps for the very first time.
To slaves and poor African Americans, dolls were a luxury item; therefore I looked for dolls made out of things such as nuts (nut head dolls), cornhusks, rags, fabric scraps and bottles. I even found a tiny, old doll made out of a baby bottle nipple and two graceful dolls made out of tobacco leaves carrying pocketbooks made from chestnuts.
More recent character dolls portray positive images to black children of our culture’s many successful people. My collection includes dolls of Diana Ross, Louis Armstrong, Muhammad Ali, Dr. George Washington Carver, Colin Powell, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Michael Jackson and my favorites—the Tuskegee Airmen. I also collected many African American sports figures and dolls made by African American doll artists.
Before I knew it I was doing doll displays and lectures at libraries, schools and corporations. I used my dolls to profile the black experience in America from slavery to the present. I liked to encourage young collectors. I tell them to remember the two Rs, “reading and research,” and determine where you can place a doll in the history of the United States. I continue to share my collection and my stories about my dolls with young and old alike as I continue on this historic journey. Who would have ever thought that a simple visit to a tag sale would so completely change the course of my life?
As I sit in my grandmother’s rocking chair holding my favorite one-hundred-year-old rag doll, I hear a voice that says, “Daughter, thank you for telling our story.”
Emma Ransom Hayward
Ninety-Pound Powerhouse
Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
As a young African American female growing up in the 1920s, I knew my grandmother had experienced many difficulties being a minority. I never realized the impact those experiences had on her life, until the summer of 2001 when she shared with me the woman she truly was. For years her health had been on the decline, but at times when the family feared she had neared the end, her determination would abound all obstacles in her path. It was amazing to watch this happen time and time again.
During one of my visits to the nursing home in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, which she now called “home,” I had an opportunity to sit with her and talk about her life.
I had been born in a small town in Arkansas myself, but had been raised mostly in the city. Therefore, I was a city girl at heart. However, I found visiting the country relaxing, and the hospitality people showed was amazing.
Arkadelphia was sixteen miles north of my birth town, Gurdon. Driving down the interstate each day, toward the nursing home, I glanced around me looking
at the homes and miles of greenery I passed along the way. The continual flow of hand waves reminded me I had departed the city.
Later that afternoon as I relaxed on the bed beside my grandmother, I asked her to tell me about life during her young years. I knew very little. She had dropped out of school at a young age to work in the cotton fields, so her brothers and sisters would have an opportunity to pursue their education. I admired this, and because of that, the years passed so quickly she never returned to school. Unable to read and write and being elderly now didn’t hamper her lifestyle or spirit at all. She claims it has helped keep her stress level down throughout the years. I could only imagine what illiteracy was like considering the fierce competition in the city and the educational credentials required to reach particular advancement levels within corporate America. I listened to and learned amazing details of her journey.
At an age when most women prepared to raise families, she found her marriage crumbling. She and her husband soon parted ways. Granny was left alone with six children, uneducated, and determined to find a way to support them. Cotton fields became her savior. At home there was often a shortage of material items but never love. When the children needed clean undergarments they were hand washed the night before and remained damp in the morning. The children would slip into their damp garments the next morning and proceed toward the school grounds. Granny Martha never received a diploma, but she strove to ensure her children received their opportunities. The older children helped her with the younger ones.
There were times when work was available in the next town; the next towns in either direction were sixteen miles. Granny Martha had no car to help her reach her destination, but that didn’t stop her.
“I had the best car around,” she told me as she patted her two feet. I glanced at her, shocked. It was unbelievable that she had walked to the towns of Prescott and Arkadelphia many times. She continued describing how people she knew driving to the same towns drove past her without once stopping to offer her a ride—quite a contrast to the friendly appearance I experienced driving that same route now. Her walks to town would start before the sun rose and end as it settled in its bed.