Memories of the drama, of my mother and my father, of the lingering pain and guilt of growing up in the Deep South during the racist 1960s rushed in as I read “The Help,” by Kathyrn Stockett, a book set in Jackson, Mississippi, during the height of the Civil Rights movement.
“The Help” is the tangled, emotionally complex story of African-American maids and their white mistresses, told in the voice of two of the maids and a young white woman who is sympathetic to their plight. Just at the time that Dr. King and Rosa Parks are becoming familiar names in this hotbed racist town, so are some of Jackson’s African-American maids coming to a deepening realization of the irony of their lives: The white women, afraid the Black women carry disease, force their black maids to use a separate toilet in the garage. This -- even as the black women cook the white women's meals and tend their babies. One of those white babies grows up to be sympathetic. And she goes on, with the secret help of these and other maids, to write a book exposing the shame, injustices and degradation suffered by Black women as they raised the families of the very people who hated their race. Even if they didn’t truly hate them deep in their hearts, they had to act like they did. The Junior League and even the governor of Mississippi were watching.
I, too lived in the Deep South in the 1960s – in the little town of Greenville, S.C., in the foothills of the Blue Ridge.
I, too, had maids or baby sitters.
There was Velma, who loved to sing Negro spirituals, who had half a dozen children of her own, whose stairs inside her darkened home had rags on them instead of carpet, which we saw when Mama defied Southern culture and took us into her house to pay our respects after she died.
There was Florence with her downcast eyes.
There was another maid, a beautiful young woman with caramel skin, who undid her bra one afternoon in the back yard because me and my sister wanted to see what a breast looked like.
I also had a mother who sympathized and a father who didn't.
My father was from Greenville, Mississippi, not far from Jackson. He was one of nine children, born in 1933 to a father who was a sharecropper and who eventually walked to college so he could be a teacher. My father’s father eventually moved the family to Greenville, S.C., -- Mississippi racism and all.
(My dad, at 16)
I once heard my uncle whispering to the other adults in the living room of my grandmother’s old wrap-around porch house, where they were all sitting after Christmas dinner: “They need to send them n... back to Africa.”
Those words rang in my ears like I'd been slapped – I can still see my uncle stopped in his rocking chair as he made his proclamation.
The words rang strong because of Mama.
In Mama’s view, the “n” word was one of the worst words anybody could utter in anybody’s presence, but especially in the presence of her four daughters. Good Catholic girls she was determined for us to be, we were not allowed to hear or say “shut up,” “butt” or even “hate.” But the worst word of all was the word that started with an “n.”
My mother was half Lebanese and half Deep South, her father born of Lebanese immigrants, her mother of a Seneca County, South Carolina, war lieutenant and a proud Cherokee Indian who never learned to read.
My mother looked more Lebanese than Southern, her hair, dark, her skin, olive-complected.
With black eyes and high cheekbones, she was Sophia-Loren exotic in a community that celebrated lily white.
As immigrants, Mama’s relatives empathized with the minority, so much so that Mama’s family became responsible for starting the three black Catholic churches in South Carolina.
A few years before my godfather, Mama’s uncle and my great uncle, Uncle Jamile died, I called him in South Carolina and asked him to tell me the story of how the bishop commissioned three black Catholic churches, one in Greenville, one in Charleston, and one in Columbia.
Uncle Jamile, who was a real estate developer, who made his money along with the rest of the family starting grocery stores that went on to become the Bi-Lo chain, fanagled a scheme with the bishop: He would secretly buy three pieces of land like he was going to develop it for commercial purposes. He would then turn around and sell each parcel to the Catholic church for 99 cents. The church would turn the parcels into churches for Black people.
This is the good part of my mother we grew up identifying with.
And then there was Essie, my mother's mother, who was also part of Mama, and us.
Essie, herself an abused, angry child who ran away to the orphanage when she was 12, had her own story of pain, which she cast onto my mother like a spiderweb, maybe because she was beautiful and smart and beloved by the Lebanese side of the family.
My mother was Essie’s whipping post. Essie threw cast-iron skillets at my mother’s head and told her she was stupid. When my mother tried to sing, she smirked. “Shut up that mouth! You don’t know how to sing!” Essie, who worked as a nurse at night and slept during the day, made my mother take care of the next three siblings. The siblings were born when my mother was 9, 11, and 14. When she was 17, my mother married my father so, she said, she could escape.
I only saw my grandmother be physically abusive once, when I saw her throw a tub of pimento cheese at my aunt’s head. Otherwise, what I saw of Essie's wrath was psychological. She stomped through the 900-square foot house so that it shook, bellowing at nobody. Her husband, a mouse or smart, who’s to say, never had much of a job, never said anything, but sat glued to a wing-back chair in the living room in front of the TV.
I only knew the stories of abuse because my mother told me.
Our relationship muddied by co-dependency, my mother used these stories too many times when I was young to explain her depression, her misery, and ultimately, her inability to cope with motherhood.
In later years, Essie became the excuse for her explosion. When she was 33, when my sisters and I were 14, 13, 9 and 7, she divorced my father and became a poor role model for responsibility, the willful, wild adolescent she never got to be.
I never saw physical abuse against my mother.
But I caught sight of Essie’s hold on my mother once, when Mama was in her 50s, and I was in my 30s. I was at my grandmother’s house with my mother, sitting on the couch. We were talking, I don’t remember about what. My mother said something Essie didn’t like.
My grandmother turned to my mother and screamed from deep inside her, like the bass of a cello or King Kong. “You better shut up your goddamned mouth, girl!”
It wasn’t so much Essie’s visage or her words that showed me the truth.
It was the way my mother shrank before my eyes, from a grown woman to a small, scared child. “Yes, ma’am,” my mother said, her dark eyes widened in fear, glued to my grandmother’s, her body shaking next to me on the couch.
My mother, her self esteem nil, her depression augmented by the burden of four children at the age of 26, strong, clung to the plight of the downtrodden, as if they were her blood kin.
She was most at home with the small.
When I got invited to a junior high sorority mother-daughter tea in eighth grade, she sat in the piano room with the girls while the other mothers had coffee and cake in the other room.
She was quiet at dinners at my father’s mother’s house, where the table was long and the tea, sweet, where the Southern women would cast long, disgusted eyes at my mother’s dark hair and high cheek bones.
My mother was most of all at home at the Black Catholic church that her family started.
Her rich relatives attended and supported the high-church Catholic church in town, St. Mary’s. They even paid for her to attend St. Mary’s parochial school from first through twelfth grade.
Our own home church, the one my sisters and I attended, was Our Lady of the Rosary, the smaller Catholic church in town, where we also went to school. Mama was always putting on a face there, trying to be like the other mothers.
(This photo is my mother in later years, when she was 61, meeting my youngest child for the first time.)
But where Mama let down her guard, where she was most herself, where I felt like smiling when I was with my Mama, was at St. Anthony’s, at the Black Catholic church named after the man who is the patron saint of lost things and missing persons.
The Black people there would stretch out their hands in greeting to her as if to tell her she was good and strong, and perfect just as she was. And she would outstretch hers. And when it came time to sing, my mama would close her eyes and throw back her head and open her mouth and release her Essie-squelched voice with the people she was most comfortable with.
Although after the divorce, my mother worked 14-hour days at a nursing home, when I was little, my mother only worked one year, as a secretary at the utility company.
That's when she hired the maids. I was 9.
I remember Florence and her downcast eyes, specifically related to two occasions -- once, when I was reading a school book that had the word "bunk" in it, as in "bunk bed."
I didn't know what a "bunk" was and so I showed Florence the word in my book and asked what it meant.
She stopped ironing. “You makin’ fun a me?” she asked.
"No, ma'am, Miss Florence," I said, confused.
On another occasion, she asked me if I wanted “sam-min” for lunch.
"Yes, I love salmon!” I said.
She shook her head and lowered her eyes and wouldn't speak to me.
I didn't understand what happened until I saw her making me a sandwich.
She had been asking me if I wanted a sandwich for lunch, and I thought she said salmon.
I tried to tell her I didn't understand. But I could tell she didn't believe me.
I see now she thought I was trying to shame her.
Of course, I remember the beautiful young woman with her beautiful body, being so brave as to show me her beautiful skin. She was proud and confident.
But who I remember most of all is Velma.
Velma was a very large woman, I remember, who sweat profusely in the Southern summer heat.
The scent of her sweat was rich and deep, nothing I was familiar with.
Her sweat was comforting, a comfort like my own mother never could comfort me.
I have no memory of my Mama, so hardened by Essie, ever taking me in her arms or so much as smoothing a hair on my head.
But I have a vivid memory of Velma on one of those sweltering Southern afternoon summer storms, an electrical storm with its sudden lightning and thunder.
I was frightened.
And big Velma, drenched with sweat in our un-air-conditioned house, stopped ironing and sat down in the rocking chair in the living room.
“Come on,” she said, holding out her slick, sweaty arms to me.
I climbed up onto her ample lap.
She closed her eyes, and her arms around me.
And she rocked and patted my back and held me as she sang.
