Joy in the Morning: Early Rays of Sunset

By Robert Scott Jones

Life for the main character, Daniel Howard, begins with his birth in New Orleans in 1902. His father is a prominent Methodist preacher from a successful and influential Creole family -the Howards. The family motto is, work, save, educate. His mother operates a no-name school for children who cannot attend regular school during the day. His paternal grandmother, Grandma Howard, chiefly commands the Howard family business interests. She is extremely color conscious, preferring the lighter hue and Creole heritage. In his pre-teen years, Daniel Howard is often in trouble for being sighted on Bourbon or Basin Streets tap dancing and yearning to play the piano in the blues clubs and juke joints. Through his lens the reader is introduced to his view of New Orleans to include, the lively scenes in the French Quarters; Mardi Gras; Voodoo; Congo Square; and, life in a vibrant port city among many other experiences.

His maternal grandmother, Nana, heads the maternal side of his family. Nana is a widow and illiterate and resides in a tin roofed former slave cabin outside of New Orleans. She is an extremely religious woman and ekes out a meager living as a maid. She is also the local midwife, and tends to the sick with herb potions. She still grieves that her son, Lester, was dragged from her cabin one dark night and lynched.

After graduating from college, he is recruited to teach in a small-impoverished town in the Mississippi Delta where despite his hopes and desire to make a difference, hardships and humiliations await him and his new bride, Miss Emma.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469171401

Book preview

1

I THINK TO MYSELF THAT PERHAPS death plays no role in dying. Life takes care of that! I’ll laugh when death comes creeping into my room. Yes, I’ll laugh and heartily so. There will be no solemn signal rattling in my throat, no stiff cupping of my hands. I’ll laugh and make death wait for me. I’ll laugh and make death linger until I get dressed.

Lately, I pose a thoughtful question to myself each day. I ask myself, How are you this fine August morning? Well, I assuredly say from myself to me, I slept through the night and opened my eyes at sunrise. Obviously, I did not pass away in the night as some anticipates. I think a better question this morning may be this: What will I do with myself today? Confined to this bed, which may well be my cooling board and this peaceful room filled with portraits and mementoes of remembrance, I think I may make this my thinking day. Yes, my thinking day. Organizing my experiences, triumphs, and tragedies in my head before I am dead. I really should at least be honest with myself considering the illusions I have allowed to swirl about me. Who am I? Who have I been? What has my life been worth? Life for me has been quite a roller-coaster ride. Like the old folks down home were accustomed to saying, I’se just been rising and falling, falling and rising. There were days when I prayed to pass away, preferring death to life. Yes, a thinking day. Not my invention, but I accept the invitation.

My neighbor Sinclair Early, Silks, brought a few sprigs of fresh honeysuckle over yesterday. He sat there on the bottom edge of my bed with that old saxophone pipe wedged tightly in the left corner of his mouth. Between the swirling puffs of sweet cherry tobacco, he relished to read to me some of his hand-penned poetry that he carried in his scrapbook, the frayed one with scenes of Cape Cod on the cover. His voice, gently mellowed by life and its seasons, was low and whispery as if to plant some lyrical seedlings in my head. I remember part of one of his poems about gold-winged honeybees and lilac chrysanthemums. But what was that last little poem he spoke so softly into my ear? Oh yes, Through the dark but priceless channel, the hidden traveler is thrust to Light. Then, at the appointed time, with silent breath and pupils still, the final flight is Birth.

There you are, my curious tiny friend! You slide so quietly, elegantly down from your lacy lair on that glistening strand, I barely noticed your easy entrance. Little spider, from day to day, little fellow, you will never know when your sudden end will descend. So wander on unhurriedly, my friend. I will keep your secret as long as I can. You just pray that Sara and Naomi will not notice you on my nightstand. I tell you now, that will signal your swift demise.

Sara and Naomi, my dear sisters, have come to my little house on water’s edge to await my pending death—passing as they would prefer to say. Every day they wake up early, and before the morning sun can break into the house, I can smell that thick chicory coffee brewing on the kitchen stove. They dress like older sisters dress who have come to tend to a dying brother, with cheerful smiles, big aprons, and soapy washbasin in hand they come into my room to wash my hands, my feet, my face and other limbs and chucks of me. Then with their backs slightly turned, I insist on washing certain discreet portions of my brotherly parts. They shave me and insist on spoon-feeding me, and then retreat to the porch just outside my window.

Out there with the flowerpots and hanging lilac baskets, my sisters dutifully drop unsuspecting houseflies with their Louisiana fly swats; they trade their notes on me—my life and who they think I am. With a bluesy rhythm, they sway in the old porch swing, gently rocking through a field of memories. With colorful sail, their voices ride the salty breeze and through my window drift broken bits and pieces of my life as tenderly woven by my sisters. Sara, who would never miss a stitch in one of her cozy quilts, and dear Naomi, who can recall with amazing detail our every childhood misadventure, really do not know, cannot really know, where time and travels in the deep and shallow tides have taken me.

The story of my life! I should have written a book. Precious little, do they really know of me, my ups and downs in the steady and dangerous streams—hopeful dreamer, rural Mississippi schoolteacher, homeless drunk, unfinished poet, grieving husband, promising preacher’s son, broken father, Carolina field hand, professor, ragtime piano player in a Harlem madam’s raucous place, a meandering soul hopelessly in love with a prostitute, a pathetic shelter for raging demons? Yet these shifting mirrors of me are but a random sample of the roles and scripts I have lived. So much has been hidden by time, pride, and bittersweet lies. I suppose that is the strange irony of the familiar. We know so much; still we can know so little. But Sara, with her joyous Baptist hymns, and Naomi, with her earthy, down-home laughter, has brought sweet melancholy and remembrance to this strange and unrehearsed event.

I know the end of me is near. My room is now the patient waiting room. The partially opened windows and blinds of my quiet room stare at me with an occasional glance, as I listen and look for the rattle in my throat and the stiff cupping of my hands. Surrounded and guarded by four tall pine bed posters, I lay here as the centerpiece of a morbid attraction. Family and friends slowly approach the side of my bed, but no one seems to quite know what to say. Every day, they come leaning over me, touching my face, holding my hand. They smile, they nod, and they struggle to tell some curious and often humorous tale. Well, this is the final drama. I am about to be declared the dearly departed.

Will today be the day? The morning sun is young and risen to brighten my awakening. I woke up! I made it through another cool end of night. I wonder if today will be the day? My light blue three-button suit, the one with the checkered vest, is clean, pressed, and ready. My poker dot tie and Sunday socks are neatly folded. I am ready. I suppose, I’m ready. I guess at any moment somebody will stick a white lily in my hand. I hope they won’t put that undertaker’s white powder all over my face. The kind that makes you look deader than dead. And though your eyes are glued shut and see nothing, they stick your eyeglasses on you. Looking pretty silly in that stiff wooden coffin, I would say.

Because of Sara and Naomi’s porch recitals, my mind has been teased to browse through the cloistered store of my memories, the dim and bright galleries and hidden treasures. The fresh and gentle winds quietly fill my room with the river’s infatuating, magic aroma. I can smell the hint of the sea, the sand, and the cranberries. I hope sweet Miriam’s ferry arrives on time.

Oh, the River! The Ferry! The Crescent City! If only once more I could walk out and gaze from the coastline of that sassy Mississippi River and stroll the hot cobblestones of the French Quarters to bid one fond farewell to my sultry New Orleans, the Zulus and the Indians at Mardi Gras. New Orleans! My city, my soul! One Hurricane, sir! No ice, no umbrella. Just listen to that boisterous river horn! Loud it blares its hurried, brassy outburst. But its booming, glaring echo signals no hurry to the lazy river barges that slink low-slung in the winding Mississippi like weighty crocodiles at the unsparing nudge of tiny tugs.

My mind is working! I must be careful not to ramble. I must be careful not to lose my mind before I die. My parting utterances must not be a string of nonsensical mutterings baiting my sympathizers to nod in baffled agreement. They will never say of me, Oh, poor Daniel went plum crazy on his deathbed. Talked crazy talk something fierce! No babbling, near icy idiot will I be! I will just keep still and mostly silent, painting a faint smile to greet the company of my farewell, while my mind organizes my memories—all those crisp and persistent little invitations to visit the winding stairs and amble floors of my mind and recollections. Yes, I had thought that someday I would write a book about me. My story! Only I know it well.

I am not surprised that the early-morning light has found Sara and Naomi up and about, and me with my mind hard at work. Early rising and getting busy was the rule of our family home, our house on Carrolton Street in the colored section of New Orleans. I was born in that house on January 23, 1902. I can still see my little feet dangling from the old porch where I loved to romp and play amid the smell of honeysuckle and sugarcane, and the sound and sight of riverboats gliding down the Mississippi beneath the sultry steam of the Louisiana sun. The porch seemed so tall then, the modest house so large. But that’s where it all began for me, Daniel Ellis Howard.

When I cast the eyes of my mind back over the roads and trails I have traveled, I find more precious than ever the memories of my childhood and family. Our parents, Augustus and Judith Howard, anchored our home. They provided an unpretentious but sturdy roof over our heads and a strong sense of family togetherness. Not only for my sisters and I but also for my Nana and my father’s sister Aunt Zenobia and her husband, Uncle Raven, and an assortment of transient others—that innumerable host of major and minor relatives who were quick to look us up, supposedly, for just a few days. I cannot remember a fair stretch of time when it was just our family in that house. There were always those near-faceless figures that suddenly appeared on our doorstep late in the night, rattling the family tree for a place to sleep. Sometimes, I would be called upon to give up my little bed, but room would be made. The next morning, the introductions would begin, Oh, that’s cousin June Berry and his new wife, Miss Ida Mae. They will be here until they can scrape up enough fare to catch a train to Chicago. Oh, that’s cousin Ella Louise Quail. She’s been sick down home in the country and is up here to see a good doctor. Oh, that’s your cousin Jupiter Wigglesworth. He’s going to be here until his mother finds steady work. Oh, that’s your Aunt Virgina’s husband’s brother’s sweet daughter. She’s here to go to school. Oh, that’s Oliver Twist. Charles Dickens dropped him off for a few nights, but it’s OK. He can sleep in the back room with Uncle Remus and Huckleberry Finn.

It is still so crystal clear and unfaded in my mind: our house, my home, and my father’s church next door. When I think of that house, I think of my dear Nana, my mother’s mother. If Nana were with me now, she would hold my hand and preciously pray to Jesus and tell me to look for the lights. Just look for the lights! I can almost hear her now, just whispering in her coarse voice, saying to me, Daniel, sweet child, jus’ look fo’ de-lights! Just keep looking fo’ de-lights. You’se goin’ to meet yo’ Jesus face to face! Nana believed that a great and brilliant light led the dying, who were saved, to Jesus and blissful eternity.

My Nana! Everybody called her Miss Cora. Her name was Cora Margaret Wells. She was born a slave in 1859. I can still recall her beautiful early-morning singing of hymns and spirituals. Her strong voice of bended-knee devotion would fill our kitchen and spill through every room and out of the door. There was something in her voice that spoke of pain and tragedy, yet filled the morning air with bright promise. There was a bitter-sweetness in her colorful deep voice. It was as if all of her troubles in life, and there were many, had been made into a soulful music box and planted way down into the very depths of her soul. The bitter untold miseries and indignities had become triumphal melody. She sang a lot about heaven, the Big Upper Room, as she called it.

I was so happy when my Nana moved from the nearby rurals of Mount Pleasant to New Orleans to live with us. It was in the winter of 1909. I was seven years old. But not wishing to be an idle or bother, Nana took right to the kitchen where she set up her cooking and baking kingdom. And where I was duly crowned my grandmother’s little prince of corn bread, buttermilk, and hot biscuits that dripped with sweet homemade sugarcane syrup. Nana would bake fresh biscuits every morning and a hot pan of corn bread every evening. She was just a miracle worker with that bread dough and rolling pin. While Nana sweated over the stove, I would roll around on the kitchen floor with my flatfeet, waving in the air from side to side and with my body wiggling in every direction. I was just a handful and would always get in the way. But to my Nana, I could do no wrong. I was born with what they called a weak heart, what they now call a heart murmur. And for that reason, my Nana declared that I was a delicate child. I quickly learned how to use my weak heart to turn up the emotional fire and excitement in Nana: I would limp into the kitchen and say, Nana, I’m so tired. I don’t feel good, I think I’m going to faint. No! I think I’m going to die. Bury me in the colored cemetery in Baton Rouge. I would clutch my chest and fall against the wall or into a chair. Nana would get so upset. It was my way of getting out of my chores or not going to school or avoiding a well-deserved punishment. My Nana was quick to politely tell my parents, Y’all be care-full with dat po-boy or Leaves dat child ’lone. Y’all knows he’s got a sickly heart.

Although Nana appeared content, satisfied, to live with us in New Orleans, her heart and spirit remained in that little Louisiana town, Mount Pleasant. It was only thirty-two miles from New Orleans. It was a typical run-of-the-mill, dirt-poor hamlet in the rural and segregated South. Nana’s house was a small, but neat former slave cabin with a tin roof. When the rain fell heavy, I imagined in my mind all sorts of whimsical tunes being played out on that tin roof by the falling chilly rain. But my favorite amusement at my Nana’s was chasing Nana’s old red rooster Melvin. What a name for a rooster, Melvin. That cock-eyed old rooster would strut around the front porch and yard as if he were an imported, plum-colored peacock that owned the place. I would pretend to ignore that old rooster by whistling and casually looking up into the sky, until he got naturally cocky and comfortable in his reigning space. Then like a streaking bolt of lightning out of nowhere, I would take off after him. With his wings flapping and fluttering, he would run wildly screeching to a safe place under Nana’s house. I never caught that old Lord of the Yard rooster. He was quick and keen. I guess that is why I begged Nana over and over again to cook that haughty rooster, pluck his tail feathers, and throw old Melvin into a spicy hot boil. Yes, yes, cook that cocky rooster all day in that big black cast iron pot in the front yard in a fine batch of rice, okra, and a taste of red pepper. But I was too young then to grasp and catch Melvin’s needful role in the henhouse.

Waking up early in Nana’s house, the mornings, whether early spring or fall, were most often cold and tingly, until she lit the fire in the old woodstove. But with an extra tight tug and tuck of what seemed like a mountain of quilts, Nana would say to me, Lay still, Daniel, I’se got wood lit, twill be warm’d in a’ spell. I would just lie there beneath the weight and warmth of Nana’s quilts and smell the pinewood crackling in the potbelly stove and smell that robust chicory coffee brewing. Soon, Nana would send me out to collect eggs from the henhouse—Melvin’s place.

Nana had her prized chickens, mostly Speckles and Rhode Island Reds. Like her rooster Melvin, some of Nana’s hens had names: Patty, Sallie, Minnie, Jackie, Millie, Mattie, Dixie, Penny, Miss Henny Penn, Maggie, Pumpkin, Beulah, and so forth. The secret of a longer life for a hen in Nana’s yard was to have a name. Because she had some quicker plucked and fried hens, she just called yard birds. It was from that squatty, squawking ranks of the unnamed bunch—those yard birds, that on special occasions, their tender chicken body parts landed on Nana’s table all golden brown and happily passed around. But Nana had a ritual and process to her chicken killing: she would put her sentenced-to-fry victims on the board. That meant that they were taken off the ground and put up in the henhouse on boards and fed good grain to clean them out. That was the death row of the chicken coop. Then when the day of strangulation and frying arrived, no one could wring and snap a chicken’s neck like my Nana. With one quick twist and jerk of her wrist, that chicken’s head would be in her hand, absent its body, feet, and limbs. That no-name chicken would run around headless, madly flapping its wings in the dust in desperate search of its most vital body part. But to no avail. That chicken’s head, with its eyes still looking, was in Nana’s brisk big hand.

When I was growing up, Mount Pleasant was about gritty sawmills and grinding, blinding fields. It was really two strange worlds in one dusty, deep-South, strictly segregated town. White people lived on one side of the tracks with privileges of hope attached to them at birth. Black people lived on the other—where every day they breathed a heavy air of hopelessness and helplessness so thick that it seemed to poison every notion of ever doing better. Like hardship and poverty were an inescapable destiny. They were a hundred light-years past poor. You know, so poor that you could dip poverty and misery with a long handle spoon on Christmas morning. There were no paved streets on the black side of Mount Pleasant. Just a dirt road to nowhere. Every black person lived somewhere off that road. A little trail or well-beaten path through the thickets here and there led to a small collection of cabins or shanties of black families struggling to barely survive. Prosperity to a black man was simply the ability to just keep something on the table. Something!

In a little clearing near the footbridge in the woods, Mount Pleasant’s black folks had a tiny church and a lively honky-tonk standing in eyeshot and shout of each other. Both invitingly belting out the clef and pitch of hard times. The kind of blue spirituals and desolate groaning birthed in the bleak hardships of a harsh life in the segregated South, yet at times sprinkled with glimpses of a hopeful day to come. The church songs and the honky-tonk rhymes and rhythms were different in object of devotion, but they shared a veiled sameness in a strange mix of melancholy and restlessness, coupled with a stifled but stilted hope in the soul. The church and the honky-tonk presented one of two choices to cope with relentless poverty and oppression: Jesus or corn liquor. The bare wood floors of both had been battered and bleached by the tuneful leaping feet of those caught in fleeting moments of escape and jubilation. It was of little wonder that my Nana always talked about going to heaven, because life for black people in the rural South was a breathless hell. Imagine having lived your whole life in a backbreaking, impoverished, segregated patch in the woods, having only known a handful of escapees.

But that hell held one place of ready refuge for me, my Nana’s front porch. Porches! My whole life I have been fascinated and drawn by porches. Especially the ones where the young and curious could crawl and hide beneath to kidnap some grown folks secrets. More than house with all its nailed walls and rooms of separation give me a big porch to greet and meet life as it passes by. A room, spacious or cramped, is still a room, a walled-in spot, and a road less space. But the porch, the whole parade of life glides by that boundless balcony.

Nana’s porch was a simple wooden platform of oak planks stilted on blocks of burnt-red bricks. That was the gathering place. My seat was on the bottom step. It was there that I listened quietly to learn of who we were and what was to become of us. Good and tragic news, fears, tears, hopes, dreams, wanderers, peddlers, and laughter all gathered at my Nana’s porch. It was a talking place for the elders. Some of my most precious moments in life were the moments I spent on my Nana’s bottom porch step just listening to the older people share their stories, their plantation experiences, their trials and humiliations, the slave quarters, the beatings, their being viewed as just another animal in the field, the abuse of it all. I locked them safely in my memory. Of course, some had witnessed more gruesome events that they would not have mentioned in my youthful presence. It was a busy, friendly, often sobering porch. Nana swaying in her cane back rocking chair, Miss Stew, Miss Jack, Butter, Mr. Earl, Sister Birdsong, Mr. Methuselah, Miss Sara Sudler, and Shouting Bradford. That bottom step was my seat, my listening post. I wish I could sit there now and listen to the elders and wait for Nana to shout, "Daniel, hare come yo’ Sweet Lucy! Sweet Lucy. How I adored and impatiently waited to see my Sweet Lucy.

Sweet Lucy on Nana’s porch! Sweet Lucy was a concoction of boiled well water, tea, berry juice, sugar, green mint, and whatever handy herbal ingredients Nana could throw in for good taste. Sometimes Nana would throw in fresh or sun-dried apple slices or lemon wedges and, always, a piece of sugarcane. When certain ingredients were scarce or out of season, Sweet Lucy was mostly water and mint. I loved that Sweet Lucy no matter the mixture because Nana would always give the impression that she made it just for me. In summer, it was a tasty, mildly cooled-in-the-well porch drink, something to be sipped on a hot night or sultry afternoon. In winter, it was warmed on the stove, and I think it may have been blessed with just a touch of corn liquor to ease the wind and chill that settled in the bones. But I loved my Sweet Lucy and I had a special cup. It was made of tin with a little round and curved handle that Nana kept in a special corner shelf in her tiny kitchen. That was my cup; nobody could touch or drink from Daniel’s cup. Yes, my cup, and my seat on the bottom step. That’s where I first heard about my uncle Lester, Nana’s only son and my mother’s only brother. Lester was lynched by the Klan.

Nana cried every time Lester was mentioned. One late August evening, I listened in fear and terror as Nana retold the story of that terrifying night when some white men rode up to her cabin on their big horses in their white sheets and hoods with their fiery torches and demanded Lester. They cursed at her, they screamed, they threatened to burn my Nana’s cabin to the ground. Somebody in town had said that a young colored boy had sassed and looked wrongly at a white woman and they were going to teach some young nig’ra a lesson.

My poor Nana pleaded with those murderous night riders. She told them, that they had worked in the fields all day and that Lester was right there working side by side with her. But it didn’t matter. They dragged Lester out of the house and down the steps into the dark, deadly night. Nana was crying and screaming, calling on Jesus. She offered them her cabin and her land and whatever she had. As they dragged Lester down the steps, he screamed and cried as loud as he could. As a dying child with no hand to clutch, he shrieked in horror, crying out, Mama, mama, help me. Don’t let me die! Don’t let them kill me. But there was nothing my Nana could do. Lest they kill her and discover my mother hidden under the bed. She never saw Lester alive again. The next morning, when it was thought to be safe, Mr. Earl and some of the other men went looking for Lester, really looking for his body. They found him in the woods hanging from a tree. He had been brutally beaten and burned. Lester was seventeen.

When they brought Lester’s body back to Nana, they laid him on the porch. Nana said she sat next to his body and just held his swollen head. They had plucked out both of his eyes and stuffed them in his bloodied shirt pocket. Most of his teeth had been crushed in his mouth. She sat there for hours and the anger welled up in her and she decided not to bury Lester that day. My mother was quickly and secretly sent to Nana’s brother because Nana had decided not to let Lester go quietly to the grave. Late that afternoon, Nana put Lester’s body in a borrowed wheelbarrow and headed for town. She knew they might kill her, but at that moment, she did not care. Nana said, as she pushed Lester in that wheelbarrow every now and then, drops of his blood would at times fall from his hand. She said she had heard a preacher once say that when Jesus was on the cross, when he was bleeding, angels were sent from heaven to catch each drop of blood before it reached the ground. Because if one drop of his blood had reached the ground, the whole earth would have been destroyed. So every time drops of Lester’s blood reached the ground, Nana with her fingers rubbed it into the soil, in hopes that some of Mount Pleasant’s evil land would be destroyed.

As Nana pushed Lester’s bloodied body down the small main street of Mount Pleasant, the blacks in town fled. Nana in her heart believed this might be her last day of life, so she began to sing hymns as she walked. They were jeers, threats, cursing, and mean stares, and other whites just looked away. When she reached the center of town, she sat the wheelbarrow down in the middle of the street and began to sing every word and verse of Amazing Grace. After that, she lifted the wheelbarrow and rolled Lester’s body back home and sat on the porch that night, still singing, waiting for the Klan to come. They never did.

There were curious lessons on that bottom step. Every so often, someone would speak of Africa. They would share little tidbits about what each other knew as they tried to piece together a story about themselves and where they had come from and how they got to Louisiana. Nana never talked much about Africa; I guess she knew so little. But she did know that she was from the Ibo tribe and that her mother had been brought from Africa to Jamestown, Virginia. Through a lens of mellowed memory, I can clearly see that those captives who gathered on my Nana’s porch had no real surety of their ancestral history just oral tidbits passed through the splintered generations; merely bits and pieces of family history. They knew they were from Africa. But where in Africa? Unlike the Germans, the British, the Irish, the Jews, the Italians, the Greeks, the French, the Spaniards, the Scandinavians, the Icelanders and others, they could not point to a spot across the Atlantic where they had come from. There was no such thing as visiting family in the old country. No village, no town, no hamlet they could call their ancestral home. No name to connect to a clan. They bore the names of those who bought and sold their ancestors. Black people range from Smith to Fisher to Higbee to McCracken to Brewster to Carpenter to Goldberg to Snider to Dill to Reynolds to Franklin to Quill. Not only the friends of Nana’s porch company, but all blacks who were emptied out of Africa to Brazil, Cuba, Peru, Jamaica, Nicaragua to Mexico, and elsewhere. Our very names are lies; but like the once pagan Christmas trees, we have transformed the meaning. All Nana’s porch company had were bits and pieces of who they were, and oral family stories and secrets of who they might be—true identities. Family history for them began on a slave plantation and was still being written by a cruel hand.

Although Nana’s cabin sat on the fringes of the plantation where her family had been enslaved, the major fields where the slaves toiled and suffered brutality were in walking distance from Nana’s, but my mother never allowed any of her children to set foot on one inch of that part of the land. It was forbidden ground for us. I often wondered about that land. Those seemingly endless, shadowy acres where my great-grandparents and my Nana were slaves. In the images etched in my mind, I could see them out there in the red-hot burning, sun-picking cotton with bent bodies and bruised fingers filling cotton sacks, slaving in the plantation fields for nothing. No personal reward, hope, or gain. Every now and then, Nana would walk us over to the little colored cemetery to visit and pray at the graves of her parents, Mose and Judith Williams, and her only son, Lester. That’s all they had in the end, a simple grave in the poorest ground and a wooden unfinished headstone.

My Nana, was a busy midwife. She delivered countless black and not-so-black babies. And because it was considered a family disgrace to have a child born out of wedlock, occasionally Nana was called upon to take in some young woman in trouble—in trouble meaning pregnant. Young women who lived outside of Mount Pleasant and as far away as up North, who had become pregnant without the benefit of marriage, if possible, were sent off to small rural towns or to relatives elsewhere to have their babies and then returned home with some sort of excuse for the neighbors like having been away at boarding school or tending to a sick relative. At times, the baby would be placed temporarily in the responsible hands of someone else. Then, after a respectable period of time, the parents of the young woman would come and take the baby home as a nephew, niece or a cousin that they had decided to rescue and raise as their own. Back then, practically nothing shamed the black family more than a pregnant, unmarried daughter. Back then!

Nana was known for taking care of the sick, but she was a midwife and herb medicine maker. She held so many healing remedies in her memory made of combinations of mint, sage,