Open Writing

I often wonder why I can recall events from my childhood and have problems remembering things that happened yesterday. Today, out of the blue, a funny feeling came over me. In my minds eye I could remember, hear, and feel the emotion. I see an event that took place in a little town of about five or six hundred some 60 years ago. I must have been around ten years old.

The town was a very segregated place. Although no one was physically hurt a little girl and her mother were emotionally hurt in a way which I cannot imagine will happen ever again.

Farm land bordered the town, which had a barber shop and two other shops. The girl and her mother were abused because of the color of their skin. Now I can imagine this happening to me, and my heart almost bursts thinking of such a thing.

This community of rurtal farm families is very close to the state line separating Gerogia from the sunshine state of Florida. There were no doctors, no phones and life was simple. People were happy, or at least they seemed to be.

Just across the Florida line there's another small town, Jasper. A doctor there delivered babies and treated the sick from miles around. He drove a horse-drawn buggy when he had to go out to other towns. To most folk he must have seemed very rich. Everyone looked up to old Doc Ashley. He knew just how to treat the elderly. When their arthritis and rheumatism flared up they knew where to find him. He always carried a big black satchel with lots of tonic water and herbal concoctions in it.

One such lady who was black lived right on the main street of the little town. Ms. Hattie had helped birth many a white child in that farming community. She kept her yard swept so clean foot prints were easy to see. Ms. Hattie was one of old Doc Ashley's patients. She was somewhere in her late eighty’s I’m sure and had rheumatism something fierce. Her daughter Edna Mae lived with her and took the very best of care of her mother. Edna Mae was slim and beautiful. A quiet lady that tended to her business and her mother and was not much of a talker. She always wore a white, stiffly starched and ironed apron.

Why, all the folks in the town saw to it that Ms. Hattie and her daughter had plenty of fresh vegetables from their gardens and meat as soon as it come out of the smoke house. This family was always looked on as being part of the community. After all Ms. Hattie had helped birth their own children.

But it seemed that old Doc Ashley paid more and more visits to the home of Ms. Hattie. Gossip started flying. Was poor Ms. Hattie getting ready to leave this world? Folks visited and checked in on her on a regular basis. She was getting very feeble.

When folks ain’t looking stuff happens. I guess that white, starched and ironed apron must have hid Edna Mae’s swollen belly for the nine months. But sure enough Edna Mae had a beautiful little girl. And one didn’t have to look twice to see that she was half white. She had beautiful hair and her skin was even more beautiful. Her mother named her Joy.

But in that mostly white town, people didn’t have much to say about Joy. Everyone knew she belonged to old Doc Ashley but no one talked about, or if they did so it was in private. The good doctor’s visits became less and less frequent. Joy grew fast and a teacher, Miss Pauline, agreed to teach her at night. Edna Mae would clean the teacher’s house in lieu of pay. No black child went to the one public school in that little town...Everything was still humming along at a very slow pace.

Ms. Hattie was so very fond of her young grand daughter and Joy’s favorite thing to do was sit on her grand mother’s bed and read to her. She idolized her grand mother.

One cold winter day the town’s church bell began to ring at early dawn. Ms. Hattie had died in her sleep. No newspaper was needed for the news to spread all through the town and country side that Ms. Hattie was dead. Folks from all around began to bring in food to the now mourning daughter and grand daughter, Edna Mae and Joy.

The men of the town called a meeting to talk about where to bury Ms Hattie since there was no private or public black cemetery. There was no question in anyone’s mind that Ms. Hattie would be laid to rest in the biggest cemetery in town. The white folk cemetery. “It ain’t nothing but right” was repeated as the men folk nodded their heads.

The day of the funeral will forever be a dark and sad day for me. A day that I will never forget. As the funeral procession was on the way to the cemetery it had to pass right by Ms. Hattie’s house on the main street. The crowd followed very quietly behind the body of Ms. Hattie being carried by a horse drawn wagon. I don’t think anyone was prepared for what happened when the procession started by Ms. Hattie’s house. There on the porch sat her daughter and her grand daughter weeping and crying, “Why can’t we go to bid her farewell, oh God why can’t we go?”

The crowd just marched on and no one looked their way.

I felt shame and I felt hate, and I felt every emotion a little girl of about twelve years old could possibly feel. But most of all that day taught me the meaning of what real love is all about. It does not concern itself with the color of a person’s skin. Love is kind, love does not hate, love is color blind, and love is the only language God really understands,