I Am Beautiful: A Celebration of Women in Their Own Words

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were not permitted to speak. They might have demandedthat the men of the church notice Earth.Which always leads to revolution. In fact, everyonehas known this for a very long time. For the other,more immediate and basic reason my mother and theother women were not permitted to speak in churchwas that the Bible forbade it. And it is forbidden inthe Bible because, in the Bible, men alone are sanctionedto own property, in this case, Earth itself. Andwoman herself is property, along with the asses, theoxen, and the sheep.I can imagine some latter day Jezebel in our community(Jezebel apparently practiced a Goddess-centered,pagan religion one of those the God of the OldTestament is always trying to wipe out) having thenerve to speak up about being silenced. And thesmugness with which our uninspiring and indifferentlytrained minister, Reverend Whisby, might havedirected her to a passage from the New Testamentthat is attributed to Saint Paul: "Let women keep silencein the churches." He would run his pudgy fingerunderneath the sentence, and she would read itand feel thoroughly put down. For God wrote theBible, she would have been persuaded; and everyAlice with mother, Minnie Lou Walker, 1979I could not seehow my parentshad sinned...I didnot see that theywere evil, thatthey should becursed becausethey were black,because mymother was awoman. Theywere as innocentas trees, I felt.word, even every word about murdering the sucklingbabies of your enemies and stealing all theirworldly goods, was Truth.I remember going with my mother to get waterfrom the spring. What is a spring? Many will ask, justas I did. It is a place in the earth where water justbubbles up, pure and sweet. You don't ask for it, youdon't put it there. It simply appears. There was onedown the hill from our house, in a quiet grove oftrees. Someone years before had put a piece of aterra-cotta culvert around it, with a notch in the lipfor overflow. We'd dip our battered aluminum bucketsin the shallow well, always careful to spot wherethe crawfish might be hiding, and perhaps sit for aminute before trudging back up the hill. How onearth did the crawfish get in there? I'd ask. They arealways in healthy springs, was the answer. Yes, butwhy? I don't know, that's just the way it is.But why is that the way it is? Where did they comefrom? There were no other crawfish for miles around.I never saw them in the creek, for instance, where mybrothers and I waded. This was a mystery that wasnot explained by my mother's final exasperated"God brought them."I was happier with my father's explanation: "Wellyou see, these crawfishes used to live over 'roundBuckhead, but it just got too goldarn hot on accountof all them fires the lumber company makes cleaningup the slag...so they held a crawfish convention,kinda like our revivals, and they resolved to moveEast. So they traveled and they traveled and one daythey came to this place where there was this prettylittle girl sitting looking down in the water. And youknow crawfish love to be looked at, so..." In fact, neitherof my parents knew how the crawfish got intothe spring.On the one hand I could strain to imaginea large white man in a white robe—unfortunatelyreal-life white men in robes belongedto the Ku Klux Klan—lovinglycarrying two tiny crawfish down the hill toplace them in our spring, or I could fantasizeabout the stouthearted crawfish pioneersleaving Buckhead with their SearsRoebuck Catalog, crawfish-size, suitcases.Because of the criminal exploitation inherentin the sharecropping system-inwhich the landowner controlled land,seeds, and tools, as well as records of account,sharecroppers were often worse offthan slaves, which was the point. Sharecroppingwas the former slave owners' revengeagainst black people for having attainedtheir freedom. It is no wonder thatunder such complete subjugation and outrightterrorism that included rape, beatings,burnings, and being thrown off theland, along with the entrenched Southerncustom of lynching, people like my parentssought succor from any God they wereforced to have. The idea that as descendantsof Africans and Native Americansand Europeans—Scottish and Irish—on both mymother's and my father's side, they might have hadtheir own ancient Gods, or that as free human beingsthey might choose a God uniquely perceived bythemselves, never entered their minds, except negatively.The "heathen" from whom they were descendedknew nothing of salvation, they were warned inchurch, and any God except the one in the Bible wasjust another illusion produced by Satan, designed tokeep them out of heaven. Satan: always described asevil, in color, black or red. African or Native American?Never admitted to be also a son of God, made$820 O N THE ISSUES • Spring 1997
also in the image of his creator, just the shadow sideof him. And yet everyone in our family and in ourchurch understood instinctively who Satan was. Hewas the other side of "the son of God" we always sawin the white people around us. Never did we see"Jesus" among those who insisted we worship him.Only Judas, and every day."Pagan" means "of the land, country dweller, peasant,"all of which my family was. It also means a personwhose primary spiritual relationship is with Natureand the Earth. And this, I could see, day to day,was true not only of me but of my parents; but therewas no way to ritually express the magical intimacywe felt with Creation without being accused of, andridiculed for, indulging in heathenism, that otherword for paganism. And Christianity, we were informed,had fought long and hard to deliver us fromthat. In fact, millions of people were broken, physicallyand spiritually, literally destroyed, for nearlytwo millennia, as the orthodox Christian Church"saved" them from their traditional worship of theGreat Mystery they perceived in Nature.N THE SIXTIES MANY OF US SCARED OUR PARENTS1profoundly when we showed up dressed inour "African" or "Native American" or"Celtic" clothes. We shocked them by wearingour hair in its ancient naturalness. They saw usturning back to something they'd been taughtto despise, and that by now they activelyfeared. Many of our parents had been taught that theworld was only two or three thousand years old, andthat spiritually civilized life began with the birth ofJesus Christ. Their only hope of enjoying a better existence,after a lifetime of crushing toil and persistentabuse, was to be as much like the longhaired rabbifrom a small Jewish sect in a far-off desert, as possible:then, by the Grace of His father, who owned Heaven,they might be admitted there, after death. It would besegregated, of course. Who could imagine anythingdifferent? But perhaps Jesus Christ himself would bepresent, and would speak up on their behalf. After all,these were black people who were raised never to looka white person directly in the face.I think now, and it hurts me to think it, of how tormentedthe true believers in our church must havebeen, wondering if, in heaven, Jesus Christ, a whiteman, the only good one besides Santa Claus andAbraham Lincoln they'd ever heard of, would deignto sit near them.The water we collected had many uses. We drankit, we washed dishes, clothes, and ourselves with it.We watered our livestock and my mother's vegetableand flower gardens.On Saturday night everyone in my family bathedfrom head to toe, even though this meant half a dayspent carrying pails of water up a steep hill. The waterwas heated in the big black wash pot in the yard. OnSunday morning we rose, washed our faces, had ahearty breakfast, and went off to church. As the smallest,I was bathed by my mother, dressed by my mother,fed by my mother, and wedged into the front seat ofour secondhand blue-and-cream Packard between mymother and father. They had worked hard all week forthe landowner's benefit; this was their only time ofpleasure, of rest, other than an occasional Saturdaynight film at the local picture show. We spent most ofthe day in church, listening to the minister, who stoodon the carpeting my mother had laid and read fromthe Bible I had dusted. Sometimes there were wonderfulstories: Daniel in the Lion's Den. The Three WiseMen. David and Goliath. The Life of Christ.Everybody loved Jesus Christ. We recognized himas one of us, but a rebel and revolutionary, consistentlyspeaking up for the poor, the sick, and the discriminatedagainst, and going up against the bossmen: theorthodox Jewish religious leaders and rich men of hisday. We knew that people who were really like Jesuswere often lynched. I liked His gift for storytelling. Ialso loved that, after Moses and Joshua, he is thegreatest magician in the Bible. He was also, I realizedlater, a fabulous masseur, healing by the power oftouch and the laying on of hands. Much later still Ilearned he could dance! This quote from The Acts ofJohn, from the Gnostic Gospels, is worth remembering:"To the Universe belongs the dancer. He whodoes not dance does not know what happens. Now ifyou follow my dance, see yourself in me."But basically, according to the Scriptures: We hadsinned. I did not know then that the root of the word"sin" means "to be." Woman was the cause. All ofour life we must suffer just because we existed.Worthless, worthless us. Luckily enough, we woulddie, but even then only a very small number of uswould get into heaven. There was hell, a pit of eternallyburning fire, for the vast majority.Where was hell? I wanted to know. Under theground, I was informed. It was assumed most of thewhite people would be there, and therefore it wouldbe more or less like here. Only fiery hot, hotter thanthe sun in the cotton field at midday. Nobody wantedto go there.I had a problem with this doctrine at a very earlyage: I could not see how my parents had sinned. Eachmonth my mother had suffered from what I wouldlater recognize, because I unfortunately inherited it,as bad premenstrual syndrome. At those times hertemper was terrible; the only safe thing was to stayout of her way. My father, slower to anger, wasnonetheless a victim of sexist ideology learned fromhis father, the society and the church, which meant Ibattled with him throughout childhood, until I lefthome for good at 17. But I did not see that they wereevil, that they should be cursed because they wereblack, because my mother was a woman. They wereas innocent as trees, I felt. And, at heart, generousand sweet. I resented the minister and the book heread from that implied they could only be "saved" byconfessing their sin and accepting suffering anddegradation as their due, just because a very longtime ago a snake had given a white woman an appleand she had eaten it and generously given a bite toher craven hearted husband. This was insulting toSpring 1997 • O N THE ISSUES 21
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Page 11: thors suggest are naively "grateful
Page 14 and 15: One Flew Over the Coup:The Sculptur
Page 16 and 17: Desperate Measures:A mother battles
Page 18 and 19: BUSINESS REPLY MAILFIRST-CLASS PERM
Page 20 and 21: ON THE ISSUESS p r i ng 19 97theonl
Page 22 and 23: ported their effort to keep the chu
Page 26: the most drowsy intelligence, I tho
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Page 37 and 38: Touring Bosnia with Swanee Huntand
Page 39 and 40: After her husband's attack, Margare
Page 41 and 42: feminomicsCOLLECTIVEENTREPRENEURSHI
Page 43 and 44: croloan programs. Chicago's Connie
Page 45 and 46: BY RUBY R O H R L I C H1I OW COULD
Page 47 and 48: At the end of World War II, Rita re
Page 49 and 50: and we are working to make life bet
Page 51 and 52: My 1st gift to:AddressCityMy 2nd gi
Page 53 and 54: ooks& filmsThe battle between femin
Page 55 and 56: Roiphe's descriptions of her own fa
Page 57 and 58: IEImary caretaker and the wish to n
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Page 61 and 62: ain't never done nothing for him? I
Page 63 and 64: said the deputy director of an Amer
Page 65 and 66: SWANEE HUNT (from page 33)amassing
Page 67 and 68: Looking for Another Great Feminist

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