Whoever You Are, Wherever You Are, It's Okay

By Erma Gordon-Starr-Gibson

I know that in this life, it doesnt matter who you are. There will be hills and valleys. I know that wherever you are will be a choice that youll make for the best situation that you are in at the time. When a decision is made , one never knows if its the right one or the wrong one. But we must take a chance and pray for the best .
Thank God that who I was then, with all the mistakes and sins Ive done, God didnt hold it against me. He gave me another chance to make it right...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 8, 2010
• ISBN: 9781465323545

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Growing Up on Star Route

And they brought young children to him, that he should touch them. And his disciples rebuked those that brought them. But when Jesus saw it, he was much displeased, and said unto them, suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not. For of such is the kingdom of God. Verily I say unto you, whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein. And he took them up in his arms, put his hands upon them, and blessed them.

—Mark 10:13-16

AT NIGHT, MAMA would take the leftover supper and put it in bowls in the refrigerator for our school lunch the next day. Sometimes we had meatless meals. Maybe it was good old collard greens, candied sweet potatoes, and corn bread. Mama’s cooking was especially good because the vegetables were fresh out of the garden—a family garden that kept us fed all year long until it was planting season the next year. We worked the soil, plant the seeds, weed the plants, and gather everything that looked like it was ready to be picked or pulled up. If we wanted to eat all year, we had to work like hell to prove it. Working in the garden in the Mississippi sun sho’nuf wouldn’t no joke.

The hot sun bladed down on me and parched my skin with the blackness of burnt meat. My skin smelled musty. And I was sticky from the sweat that had my clothes sticking to my body as if I had socked in a hot water hole to cool off.

I had dried patches of body salt, which had come from the sweat all over my face, and had cake of salt in the wrinkles of my skinny neck that felt rough and grainy.

But, Lord have mercy, it was sure worth it all when I smelled the aroma that came from my mama’s kitchen on Star Route. I knew that the workday would soon be over, and I could soon sit at the table and eat one more of my mama’s delicious good old home-cooked meals.

She boiled and slowly cooked them greens in pieces of fresh salted-down pork from one of the hogs that we had stored in the smokehouse for the winter eating and them plump fresh hand-dug sweet potatoes laid in syrupy sugar that had been smoothed and slimmed down in its own sweet juice that would make ya wanna slap ya grandmamma when you tasted them. There was no food that could be cooked that would compare to the Southern home-raised food that my mama seemed to put so much love in cooking.

Hog-killing day wasn’t so bad after all when I sat at the table eating the fresh meat. My dirty fingernails, rough fingertips, and sore knees didn’t look and feel so bad when the flavor of them delicious taters got in my mouth. I hated to dig any kind of potato. Although I did it all, working the ash potatoes and the sweet potatoes, I would work like a slave all over again if I could sit at the table and feast on just one more of my mama’s fresh Southern homegrown vegetable cooked meals.

I worked on my knees bent over with a fork and a knife in my hand. Squatting was worst on my back, so the knees would take the hit. The knife was to cut around the dirt to push the dirt loose from the potatoes; maneuvering the fork would help me use the knife and my hands to better free the potatoes from the ground. Then the potatoes had to be picked up and put in croker sacks and stored under the house for the winter.

Mama’s corn bread was made with buttermilk that was milked from old Bessie, the cow, and churned for butter till my hands were red and sore. Yes, I can see me now sitting on a bucket beside that old cow pulling them long pink tits one after another as I watched old Bessie’s right front leg and prayed that she didn’t kick the devil out of me. I felt as if my eyes were in a race to watch the hot milk fill my tin bucket and to watch which direction her leg would go at the same time. All I wanted to do was to just finish pulling the milk out of them poor old wrinkled tits so that I could leave that poor old cow’s sore tits alone. Milking the cow was one of the scariest things for me to do as a little Black girl being raised in the country.

Churning the strained milk was another story. The fresh sweet milk had to be strained for cow hair or any bad particles that could have gotten into it during the milking time.

I used a real thin torn rag from a white sheet or cheesecloth, if we had it, to string the milk. The strained milk was poured into the churn, and the churn was placed next to the heater in the living room overnight to sour and to be churned for butter and buttermilk the next morning.

I beat the milk with the churn dasher up and down for hours before it looked as if there would be even a bump of butter. My hands would be red and sometimes a blister would show up and burst before a full cake of butter would settle on the sour milk. I would churn fast then slow, fast then slow. I would be exhausted to the point of tears before butter came. It seems like hours before even a speck of little yellow bumps of butter would appear on top of the milk in that churn. Oh, but when the yellow bumps started, it wouldn’t take long before big thick fluffy yellow butter was all over that creamy sour milk. I just loved to gather the soft creamy butter off the milk. I played with it to make all kinds of designed little butter cakes before the butter was put in the refrigerator to set.

My mouth forms with saliva as I think about the taste of fresh country butter in between some good old delicious and fluffy hoecake biscuits, dipped in my Daddy’s sweet tasting sorghum molasses that piled my plate in the mornings. It always went good with fried wieners or fried bologna.

If we had a few chickens left from the chicken killing the year before, it was fried chicken for breakfast. We might have luck up on a jar of home-canned wild blackberries to feast on at the kitchen table. Now, for me, this was good eating. I was never at a loss for words if somebody at the table finished eating before me and wanted some of my food. They always heard my famous words Your eyes may shine and your teeth may grit, but none of my food you will get!

It was the good taste of Mississippi food that caused me to learn how to sop a biscuit and make designs from the juice in my plate or lick my plate clean until the last drop was gone ’cause the food was sho’nuf’ finger-licking good.

CHAPTER 2

Pratt Chappell, the Little Wooden Schoolhouse

MAMA WAS A schoolteacher. She started teaching in 1948 at Big Creek School. She worked there until 1950. Then she worked her way up to move closer to home as a teacher in Derma School. She taught there from 1951 to 1953. Word got around about a one-room school that had an opening for a teacher. The school was in Gore Springs, which was a few miles from where we lived. Mama answered the call and was the only teacher at Pratt Chappell School teaching about twenty-five children.

Pratt Chappell was one of twelve Black school/church buildings started around 1917 in Calhoun County, Mississippi. A school/church building is where the Black church is held on Sunday and, Monday through Friday, is where the segregated Black school is in session. The school went up to eighth grade. If a Black child wanted to finish twelfth grade, he or she would have to live or commute to Eupora, Mississippi, which was about twenty miles away from any of the twelve church/school buildings. The schools/churches within the twenty-mile radius in Calhoun County were Calhoun City, Pratt Chappell, Saboulaglas, Denton Town, Derma, Big Creek, Piney Grove, Minter Spring, Doolittle Town, and St. Author School.

Pratt Chappell School was named after my Uncle James Pratt’s father, Bob Pratt, because the land was given to him to build a church/school where Black folks could walk a few miles from home and get religion and be educated at the same place.

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Uncle James tells how the church/school were built from logs that was cut and taken to the sawmill to process wooden planks. He tells of how his father farmed on his land and how he got a bunch of neighbors together to build the church/school. He said the building had two doors, one in the front to enter and one in the back to exit. It had four windows, two on each side. It was a long and wide building with a hip tin roof and a tin pipe sticking out from the top shaped like an L, making it hard for birds to get inside and allowing the smoke from the burning coal or wood to escape outside. The school’s design looked like a shotgun. The school frame sat on cement blocks. Underneath the school was not closed and could be used to store cut wood or coal bins. The floors were large slabs of wood, and the cracks were so big between the wood slabs that the ground could be seen through the cracks. The school walls looked dark, dreary, and naked. The heater was a big potbellied stove with a long pipe going up to the ceiling that stuck out through the tin roof.

The stove had four eye plates on the top. Each plate had a place to put a heavy iron prong so the plate could be lifted up to throw in coal or small pieces of wood to keep the heat going. The iron plates were also used to heat food that was brought for our lunch. That big potbellied stove heater would keep the entire school heated during the winter. If it got too warm to use the woodstove to heat food, Mama used an electric hot plate.

The memories that old potbellied stove brings… I can still remember the days when I stood as close as I could in front of the stove to get warm after going outside. I stood there for a long time to warm my front and back until I couldn’t take it anymore. The heat felt so good next to my cold body, and I paid the price to have whitish-blotched two-tone legs as a penalty to get warm. After I sat down at my desk, I noticed my legs on both sides; back and front had spots of whitish blotches. The next day, it was worse. I went back to school day after day and did the same thing to keep warm after recess. My two-tone legs cleared up in the spring.

During the early fifties, all the schools and churches were segregated. Pratt Chappell was my very first school. I started school before school age because my mama was a schoolteacher in a one-room schoolhouse and her school was also our day care.

She taught the students, and she and the students took care of us. There were six of us, and we all had an early education.

The school became a fun spot to go because of the twenty-five or so children who attended and of the excitement and energy that they bought with them. Student desktops would open up, and all their personal belongings were inside. I used to love those desks. My mama was the teacher and had the run of the school. I was her bad little rotten girl. I would raise the kids’ desktops up and see what they had inside. It wasn’t so much toys that I was interested in. It was their lunches. I would get lucky sometimes and find cookies or candy. I would help myself. I knew they wouldn’t tell. I was a lying, bad little girl whose mother was their teacher. All the kids wanted to be my friend. I knew they would share some of their lunch if I saw them eating it. But they tried hard not to let me see them eat the good stuff. They would sneak the good stuff and eat it before I caught them because I would see the paper in the wastebasket.

What else was I to do? I got tired of collard greens, or turnip greens, and my only dessert was sweet potatoes, which were candied or baked, and that was it. But rambling in the kid’s desks always bought a delicious surprise.

I drew them stick people and gave them a picture if they gave me food and not tell Mama.

I ran in front of everybody in line and grabbed the large tin dipper to be the first to drink water from the water bucket during recess. Mama bought her children Dot, Diane, Earlean, Ira, and me little tin water cups with lead covers. I loved that little tin cup. It folded up and down. I loved to get water from the water bucket and fill my little tin cup. I walked slowly to my seat in the back of the room, working hard holding my breath, praying not one drop of water would spill from my little tin cup. It became a game. I watched that cup all the way to my seat to make sure I didn’t lose one drop. I walked slow then speed up to see if I could make it to my seat without a spill. After I made it to my seat without a spill, I took my time and slowly slipped every little drop. That was some of the best well water that I had ever drunk.

Our water at home didn’t taste like that. It was some kind of water spring near the school where the water ran down into the stream all the time. Mama had us kids hauling lots of buckets of water from the spring to the school. It was some of the best-tasting cold water that I have ever tasted. I would get my hands and couple them together and just lay on my belly to drink handsful of water and then slowly slip the water from my coupled hands until it was all gone.

Recess was my favorite time of the day. I loved playing hopscotch. We would draw three large square boxes on the ground going up, two square boxes in the center going across, and one square box at the top connected to the center boxes. Throw a heavy object the size of a coin, a small rock, or a piece of glass in the square. Then hop on one foot over the square that had the small object in it to the next box, then use both feet to straddle the center, and then use one foot to hop to the top square, turn around on the one foot, and do the same back down, always to hop over the square with the thrown object and not land on both feet. If you lost your balance and you landed on both feet, you were out of the game. If the object landed on the line between two squares and you were successful to jump over the object on one foot to the next square all the way to the top and back on one foot competing against your partners, you won the game.

I did the jump rope game using a heavy sea grass rope. Mary Mack was my favorite song to jump rope. It was slow and easy to jump to that tune. You know how it’s done, one person on each end of the rope and a person standing in the middle to jump the rope. When the two at each end twirls the rope in sync with each other, the person in the center is to jump over the rope before the rope hits the ground.

The tug-of-war games that we played were fun. I always wanted to be on the side with the team who had the most, the fattest, and the tallest kids.

No one wanted me on their team ’cause I was too little and skinny, but I was one of the teachers’ brats and there wasn’t much any of ’um could do about it. They always put me on the end ’cause I wasn’t much good being the first or in the middle. So quite naturally, I was the first to land on my back and most of ’um fall on me. I pulled with all my might. Sometimes my hands would be blistered or have peeled-off skin from the rope. But it didn’t matter. I had to prove to myself that I could be just as good and tough as the rest of ’um. My side had to win, and the bruises, burns, and pain weren’t important to me, only the win was.

The schoolkids were always protective of me. They didn’t want me to get hurt. There was a time that I did get hurt—skinned knees, blood running down, crying, and the whole bloody mess scene. Somehow, Mama didn’t get the whole truth from the kids or me. I told Mama that everything was my fault. It was that day that changed the way the kids played with me. They accepted me in all the games that they played without an argument. They put me in the front line as they put their hands around me, hoping that if we fell, it would be backward and I would be on top and not hurt. That didn’t always happen; sometimes it would be the other way around and they would fall on me. I was tough though. I always managed to come out dusting myself off and laughing. Anyway, if I did get hurt, I wouldn’t admit it. I always wanted to play tough anyway.

Hide-and-seek was another favorite of mine. I would always hide in forbidden places. I could do that. Remember, my mother was the schoolteacher. I could do almost anything that I wanted as long as my mother didn’t catch me in the act. Lies were told to keep me out of trouble. I made many friends at Pratt Chappell School after being friendly and bullying my way with threats. Although I was mischievous, I had a way with people that would allow us all to get alone.

I could go on and on about that little one-room schoolhouse where my mama taught. It is one of those childhood memories that have shielded me and prepared me for my adult disparity.

CHAPTER 3

Where Did I Come From?

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I WAS THE second oldest of my father and mother’s five children together. My oldest sister, Dorothy, was born during my mother’s first marriage. And my daddy brought into the family his second youngest sister, Aunt Ree, whom he raised. The nine of us were one big happy family. I was mean-spirited, fast assed and grown, and badder than two fighting adult pit bulls put together. I was a born leader. I had no problem getting other kids to follow me. I set my standards by demanding what I wanted. I fought and whopped ass if I didn’t get it. In other words, if I said jump, you had better say how high.

I would always get in trouble. I would make my mother so angry that it would be me who would speed up the process of tail beating day. When everyone had gotten in trouble, Mama would sit us down in a row and whop us one by one. Even if you didn’t remember what you were getting a whopping for, Mama did. And if she didn’t, she would say, You’re getting a whopping for what you should have done and didn’t do.

Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it (Proverbs 22:6).

My parents were very strict disciplinarians. They were workaholics. They stressed the importance of work ethics so much that our work lifestyle started the Earlie and Alline Children’s Work Camp Movement, or so I thought it did. I truly believed Daddy worked us kids harder than any other folks worked their kids in all of Calhoun City, Mississippi.

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My father was a well-carved piece of artwork. It was as though Jesus took his time making that fine man. Some folks would say, He is fine as homemade wine. All the women loved him. He never had a problem getting one. Before my mama got with my daddy and after Mama was with my daddy, women wanted him.

Daddy had the good looks and the flirty charm. He has been known to be married thirteen times to twelve different women and married one twice. I reckoned some of ’um would have liked to believe they were married to him. But they lived with him just the same, which, in my eyesight, made it legal.

Daddy was light bronze in complexion. He had dark brown eyes. He was medium built, about 165 pounds. He stood about five feet nine inches. His high cheekbones and fine structured facial features were pleasing to the eyes. He attracted some beautiful women too. My mama was one of them.

My mama was a beautiful round-faced light-skinned woman. Her smile would charm any sad face into a relaxed, pleasant demeanor. She had a cheerful, jolly laugh and was fun to be around. She seemed to always be happy.

Mama had shoulder-length sandy-colored brown hair. Her eyes seemed to change colors from hazel brown to brown. She weighed about 194 pounds, and stood close to five feet eight inches. She was shapely plump and held her weight and shape in perfect proportion. She was a lady in every letter of the word. She shared lots of laughter and smiles to others, and people seem to adore her. She was kind and caring. It seemed to be difficult for her to say no to others. She seemed to make time for others who were in need. She was very intelligent, so much so that she was chosen to be an elementary school teacher after she graduated from high school and taught before going to college. Some white people paid for her college education so she would be qualified to be a licensed schoolteacher.

My mother’s oldest sister tells me that Mama chose her sister Carrie Bell to be her assistant. Aunt Carrie Bell also attended college to become a licensed teacher and taught elementary school for forty years before retiring from public education.

My mother valued education and stressed the importance of a good education and hard work ethic. She said we will need it to prepare for a better life.

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My father’s fifth-grade education and his common sense allowed him to work the physical body toward his goals. And my mother’s bachelor’s degree allowed her to work and maneuver the mind toward her goals. Although they were opposite in the educational arena, they thought alike in the goals that they wanted to accomplish.

They were our first examples to model common sense and hard work. For us, they lived what they preached to us about.

The Lord will not put anymore on you than you are able to bear.

I remember one of the wives of my father who predicted to us that we would never amount to anything. Thanks be unto God, her prediction didn’t come true.

I continue to hear the echo of our mother’s words when she said, A good education and hard work will prepare you. I continue to vision our father’s hard work and perseverance. Years later, all of my parents’ children have earned a bachelor’s or better degree/s in the arts. It was hard work, but yes, Daddy and Mama, thank God, hard work paid off.

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Debra, the oldest of the five, has a bachelor’ degree in business administration. She is a registered nurse and works as a congregational health parish nurse at Hopewell Missionary Baptist in Lawrenceville, Georgia. She is a divorcee and the mother of four sons; Darryl Gates is owner of Metro Towing; Alden Gates, is a Heating and Refrigeration Technician, in East Saint Louis, IL; Everett Gates Sr., is an Independent Trucking Contractor, in Stone Mountain, GA and LaMont Gates is in Law Enforcement, in Las, Vegas, NV, grandmother to ten grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

Debra has the hard work ethic of our father and the business mind like our mother. She networks and handles the business and legal matters and is available for any health-related issues concerning our family.

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