Notes from a Sharecropper’s Daughter

As long as Mama knew that she had me, had given birth to me, I still had my mother. Her words and her spirit could continue to be my foundation. Dementia on hold. I walked through the door of Mama’s apartment, a one-bedroom on the seventh and top floor of a senior citizens building in Brooklyn. The seniors there called it the penthouse floor, a likely place for Mama, who sat upright in her burgundy recliner facing the door. A small, sturdy frame, shrinking with age, moist cinnamon skin, preserved well with Vaseline petroleum jelly. She was of the generation of Black women who wore wigs every day, escaping the rituals demanded to maintain kinky, curly Black hair. Mama was what we called a proper lady, although she discreetly dipped snuff every day, Railroad Mills, blue-and-white label. At the time many women in the rural South dipped snuff, a small ball of powdered tobacco tucked in her right jaw. Mama sat with a Maxwell House coffee can to spit in near her chair. She washed it out first thing every morning. Even with dementia, she dressed every day in a cotton print house dress, a brunette wig, Ella Fitzgerald style, and a little red lipstick. 

 

“Hey, how you doing? What you up to?” I asked as I entered. She looked up and smiled as I entered but did not say anything. I moved in closer. “Do you know my name?” 

 

Mama looked up at me. “I can’t call your name right now, but I do know that I had you.” I took a deep breath; I wanted to hug her, but she was not the hugging type. I feared that one day she would not know me, that she would be with me in body, not the familiar spirit that had given me such strength to do all that I had done. 

 

I smiled. “Well,  since you have claimed me, I can tell you my name is Mary, your sixth child, and your baby girl.” I sat on the arm of her chair, throwing my legs over her lap. “Don’t you want to show your baby some love?”

 

“Well, I hate you,” she replied, pushing me away with seemingly newfound strength. She stuck her tongue out at me with a slow and sly smile, indicating that her keen sense of humor, her ability to take something in and turn it around was still intact. I moved away, poked my lips out, as if I was about to cry. Demonstrating the pain she had inflicted on me, I placed my hand on my heart. “Lord, help me ’cause my mama don’t love me no more.” I never questioned whether Mama loved me or not; I knew in my heart, soul, and mind that she would die for me. I think that all of my brothers and sisters would say the same thing about Mama. 

 

When Mama began to show signs of mental decline, my sister Bettie took her for a visit to a psychologist for a battery of tests to determine cognitive ability. Mama was still feisty and made it difficult for the psychologist, who seemed to have little cultural awareness. When he asked her what day it was and what state they were in, she responded: “You a doctor and you don’t know that. You asking me something that you supposed to write down first.” Mama did not believe in sharing much with strangers, and if she thought that they thought that she wasn’t smart, she made a point of acting dumb; she enjoyed messing with their minds. She was too frustrating for that doctor, who did not seem to have the patience or interest in trying to develop a relationship with a proud uneducated southern African American woman with a wicked sense of humor. 

 

Dementia is a mask that slowly covers and encompasses body and soul. It started with forgetting something on the stove, the fire alarm going off, making her famous sweet potato pie and something not tasting right because she forgot the butter or eggs. It was hard for her to take in her forgetfulness. She was losing her independence slowly and she did not like it. She refused to talk about it, and for a while we joined in her denial. Until it kept happening—calls in the middle of the night when she got up to have a snack, forgot to turn the stove off, and the fire alarm went off, yet again. 

 

We slowly began to apply for and obtain services for Mama—a home attendant to shop, cook, do light cleaning, and help with personal hygiene when necessary. There were three of her seven children in a position to assist her, Bettie, Clint, and me. The others had moved back to North Carolina. Bettie moved in with Mama so she would not be alone in the evenings. I managed Mama’s finances, and Clint, whose auto shop was nearby, stopped by during the week to check on her. Mama did not appreciate my method of paying bills once a month. She liked to pay her bills when they arrived. She told my sisters, “Y’all done put a shit ass in charge of paying my bills.” 

 

Thereafter, I would walk into her apartment stating, “The shit ass is here to pay your bills. Aren’t you lucky to have me?” It became the family joke, the most highly educated relegated to the status of shit ass. I knew that it was important for Mama to be in charge of her own life as long as she could. The struggle was how to help and allow her to do that while maintaining a schedule and way of life that I felt comfortable with. I did not want to become the angry daughter, begrudging what I felt was my responsibility to a parent who had loved and cared so well for me. 

 

As Mama declined, Daddy took up the role of patriarch, parent in charge. He called and checked on his children more often, orchestrated gatherings at his apartment, where he taught me to play poker. Daddy and Mama had separated after thirty years of marriage and remained on friendly, even caring terms for another forty-three. In Daddy’s last years, he spoke to me more about his mistakes as a husband. He was a tall, dark, handsome, charismatic man who loved to flirt. He was of the generation that believed a “man” was expected to sleep around while staying in the role of husband and father. He preferred women who were considered loose, sexually free, who hung out in after-hours joints, and drank corn liquor, unlike his Christian wife. My parents never considered divorce; they learned to live separate lives. 

 

Daddy was first a sharecropper, then a factory worker at Burlington Mills in North Carolina. As a migrant to New York, he found a job in a printing factory, joined the union, and worked there until retirement. We lost Daddy on May 20, 2010. He died of heart failure at the age of ninety-two in his bed as he wished. 

 

Mama did not take in his death until one evening at her apartment. We were sitting at her kitchen table eating when I said something about life after Daddy’s death. All of a sudden, Mama gasped, “What?!” She finally got it. The interesting thing about dementia is that there are those moments of clarity, where the afflicted person comes to life with all the vitality of the past. It is so short, like the blink of an eye. From that moment on, Mama ate less and seemed to begin her descent into the unknown world, following her husband of seventy-three years. Now she could not live without him. 

 

We had  Daddy’s going-home service in a Brooklyn funeral home with the blues songs he loved playing during the viewing, before taking his body for burial in Wagram, North Carolina. Daddy looked like he was proudly sleeping, chin held high. It was at Daddy’s burial that I recognized the honor given the dead regardless of their color and background in Wagram, our hometown.

 

Mama died five months later. She came to pick up her children at my sister Annie’s farm house in Maxton, in a white hearse, followed by a long limousine. The hearse moved slowly down the dirt road. The procession was led by the county sheriff on a motorcycle with flashing lights, this being a part of his role in the small town. Spring Branch Baptist Church sat back from the road. It used to be a white wooden structure; now it was brick, not much larger, but modernized. The church was filled with family and friends when the immediate family arrived. I attended Sunday school, got religion, and was baptized by this church in a creek the old-fashioned way, dressed in white holding hands as we sang “Take Me to the Water to Be Baptized.” I even sang on the children’s choir and fell in love with the music and the preaching in the Black Baptist Church at Spring Branch. 

 

I sat with notes in hand, staring, holding my emotions with tight control. The usher touched my shoulder and pointed to the microphone. It was my job to thank the pastor, the church, community for all of their support of our family during our time of grief.  To let them know  how special it was to have Mama’s going-home service at a church where she and her family were members for generations. It was at her funeral that I started telling others of Mama’s sayings and their value to me and my sibling. “Child, it’s not what you say; it’s how you say it.” “If you take one step, the good Lord will take two.” Holding on to Mama’s sayings keeps me close to her spirit, helps her to live on in me. 

 

When the sheriff led the funeral procession to the graveyard, there were at least thirty cars, lights on, as far back as I could see. As we moved down the road, all cars that were not a part of the procession pulled over and stopped until the entire procession passed. When we got to the intersection, there was an officer blocking traffic. The young white officer stood with hat on chest, head bowed, as the hearse passed with the body of a former Black woman sharecropper and domestic worker. Could he be the son of the man whom my family worked for as sharecroppers? The white boy who called Mama Hattie, not Miss Hattie like all the Black children? 

 

At the gravesite I looked over and pointed out the house across the road to my son; it was once the home of our family. The house was boarded up, showing its age. As a child, I played in this graveyard with other children. The pain and joy of those memories, owning our first house before losing it and migrating to New York.

 

Not remembering difficult times or suffering is like dementia, a fear of repetition. I am the baby girl, the sixth of seven children, a sharecropper’s daughter. I was too young to be of much use in the fields, so I started school in August. My parents and older siblings worked in the fields until harvest in November. As a teenage migrant to New York City, I wanted nothing more than to forget my past. I worked hard to lose my Southern accent, dressed less country, dropped Maybelle, my Southern name, never told anyone my first job was picking cotton. I wanted and needed to assimilate, to feel like I belonged. 

 

As the first generation of my family to obtain a college education, I now feel tasked with remembering. I have walked by faith into unknown territory, using my intellect along with the memory of my parents, whose shoulders I proudly stand on.