In Full Color Page 8
I’d gained some confidence working with Zach and Izaiah’s hair, but Esther’s hair was much more challenging. Some friends of Larry and Ruthanne’s in Libby had adopted a Black baby a couple of years before Esther was born and, knowing how interested I was in Black culture, they’d asked me if I’d like to style her hair. I was happy to do it, so I’d already had a bit of practice by the time Esther’s hair was long enough to braid. As soon as Esther had an inch of hair to work with when she was ten or eleven months old, I started moisturizing and styling it with the Luster’s Pink Hair Lotion I’d ordered in the mail, but she was very tender-headed, so the days I washed her hair and detangled it were her least favorite.
Thanks to my prior experience, I was also aware of the effects of “shrinkage,” the natural tendency for virgin Black hair to coil and appear much shorter than it actually is, especially in humid weather. Black hair that’s six inches long can appear as short as two inches in length when it’s coiled. Shrinkage isn’t bad per se—it’s actually a sign of healthy hair—but it’s often perceived as such by a white culture that associates long hair with femininity and beauty. Nearly all the classically beautiful women portrayed in Western children’s lore—in Walt Disney movies, that would be Cinderella, Snow White, Princess Jasmine, and Belle—have long, flowing hair. Tiana, the first Black princess portrayed in a Disney film, released four years after Larry and Ruthanne adopted Esther, hardly ever wore her hair out, and she definitely wasn’t wearing an Angela Davis Black Power afro at any point in the movie.
To help Esther avoid shrinkage, I braided her hair in a variety of styles. The first time I styled her hair, I had her sit in a chair while I stood above her, but the angle wasn’t right, so I moved her to the floor as I sat on the couch with her head between my legs. I moved her head from one knee to the other while I worked, but she would still fall asleep from time to time. When she woke after I’d finished, she ran to look at herself in the mirror, smiling from ear to ear and swinging her new braids back and forth while I told her how pretty she was. Sometimes I strung beads in various patterns in her braids. Other times I used ribbons that matched her dress. I learned how to do two-strand twists and part her hair in a variety of geometric patterns. Her favorite hairstyle was cornrows with beads, which pleased me because underhand braids such as these held better and looked neater than the overhand French braids Ruthanne had let me wear as a child. Styling Black hair is a labor-intensive process, but braiding Esther’s hair was always a great source of joy for me.
At the time, I was so focused on taking care of Esther I didn’t realize the extent to which I was also performing an act of rebellion against Larry and Ruthanne and their decree against braiding my own hair once I turned twelve, thanks to the passage from the Bible (1 Peter 3:3) discouraging personal adornment. Ruthanne was particularly opposed to Esther’s hair being braided in “elaborate” and “worldly” ways that were “too fancy” and “vain”—until she realized how fortunate she was to be getting help from me and saw how much time these braids saved us when detangling Esther’s hair. Esther had a habit of rubbing the back of her head on her mattress when she slept, so if her hair wasn’t braided, it would always tangle in the back.
To help Esther see how beautiful her natural hair was—and give her something to read beyond the Bible and Grandma Schertel’s books about Br’er Rabbit—I made her a homemade book titled Ebony Tresses. Ruthanne had convinced me that while I was a good artist, I wasn’t much of a writer, so I asked her to help me turn some of my thoughts into poetry. “My hair is powerful, coiled, and comely,” we wrote in the book. “Glistening with oils and sculpted with care.” The book included full-color illustrations I drew of Esther wearing her favorite natural hairstyles and a paper doll that looked like her and had six hairstyle options, allowing her to change the doll’s hair whenever she pleased.
Styling my siblings’ hair undoubtedly deepened my connection to them. The many hours I spent cutting and braiding their hair not only strengthened our bond but also awakened a part of me I’d never been allowed to express. In the process of doing something I enjoyed (styling Black hair) for those I loved (my brothers and sister), I felt like I was free, free from the confinement and oppression of the household I grew up in and free to be myself, if only in those moments.
Chapter Eleven
Million Man March
WHILE SERVING AS COUNTY COMMISSIONER, Larry traveled to Washington, DC, to attend the National Prayer Breakfast, an annual event that celebrates the importance of prayer and faith in our lives, and there he met Merle Morgan. When Merle told him he was looking for help with the fine-art greeting card company he ran with his wife, Edita von Uslar-Gleichen, Larry mentioned that I was a budding artist and might be available to work as an assistant. The two of them worked out a deal, the exact details of which I was never privy to, that involved me working for the Morgans and staying with them at their home in Arlington, Virginia, for two months when I was seventeen.
I was excited to learn about the business side of art publishing from someone who’d managed to create a successful career for herself doing it. Turning watercolors she’d made of well-known Washington monuments and buildings into calendars, posters, and greeting cards, Edita had become especially popular with politicians on Capitol Hill.
The focus of my artwork at the time was mixed-media collage. Living in an area where good paints were impossible to buy, I relied on a variety of other materials: thread, recycled paper, animal skins, whatever I could find. I entered my best pieces in competitions at the county fair. Grand champions earned five dollars, blue ribbons two dollars, and reds a dollar, but even though I won plenty of ribbons, this income stream never added up to very much.
I was looking forward to seeing how Edita made a living as an artist, but when I arrived in DC, I discovered that my role wouldn’t be limited to the art publishing business but also included being a nanny and a cook. Some days I delivered greeting cards to the offices of senators and members of Congress but I was just as likely to be asked to entertain the Morgans’ four little kids. Living in a community full of rich white people for the first time in my life, I felt like a second-class citizen. I was the help. Despite the hard work and long hours—I once had to work twenty-three hours in a row!—I loved being in DC and longed to see and do as much as I possibly could while I was there. Unfortunately, the only time I managed to get out of the Morgans’ house was to deliver greeting cards with Merle or help Edita with the shopping.
While I’d been educating my younger siblings about Black history and culture, the name of one university kept popping up in my research. When you consider the many fine historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the United States, Howard University always comes at or near the top of the list. Its alumni directory reads like a Who’s Who of the world’s best and brightest in law (Vernon Jordan, Thurgood Marshall), literature (Ta-Nehisi Coates, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison), politics (Stokely Carmichael, David Dinkins, Andrew Young), music (Sean Combs, Roberta Flack, Crystal Waters), and acting (Anthony Anderson, Ossie Davis, Taraji P. Henson).
In a speech given to Howard’s graduating class on May 7, 2016, President Barack Obama called the university “a centerpiece of African American intellectual life and a central part of our larger American story.” He continued, “This institution has been the home of many firsts: The first Black Nobel Peace Prize winner. The first Black Supreme Court justice. But its mission has been to ensure those firsts were not the last. Countless scholars, professionals, artists, and leaders from every field received their training here. The generations of men and women who walked through this yard helped reform our government, cure disease, grow a Black middle class, advance civil rights, shape our culture.”
For anyone as interested in the Black experience as I’d become, how could I possibly take a trip to Washington, DC, without visiting the campus of Howard University? But when I expressed my desire to spend an afternoon there, the Morgans noticeably crin
ged. “Oh, we can’t let you go there,” Merle said. “It’s in a very dangerous area.” He described it as being in an “inner city” neighborhood, code language that meant “Black, poor, and violent.”
Coming from northwest Montana, I wasn’t intimidated by the idea of venturing into so-called bad neighborhoods. Where I grew up, you took your life in your own hands every time you wandered off the beaten path in the fall. Hunters would drink beer and drive their trucks into the mountains to “road hunt,” looking for something—anything—to shoot. When Merle told me that he couldn’t let me venture into a bad neighborhood all by myself, what he was really saying was that I was a white girl and therefore shouldn’t visit parts of town that were predominately Black. That he may have been more concerned about my gender than the color of my skin didn’t take the sting out of his comment. His attitude was in keeping with the times. A verdict had recently been announced in the O. J. Simpson murder trial, and the racial tension it had dredged up still lingered. For its entire ten months, the trial shined a spotlight on the country’s racial dysfunction. The case was so divisive, President Bill Clinton was briefed on what sort of security measures would be put in place should the verdict incite riots.
Amidst this racially charged climate, Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, urged Black men from all over the country to come to DC and gather on the National Mall on October 16, 1995, for what would become known as the Million Man March. The event’s keynote speaker, Farrakhan spoke for two hours to one of the largest gatherings of Black people in American history. Some of Black America’s most influential figures, including Maya Angelou, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King III, Cornel West, Jesse Jackson, Stevie Wonder, and Marion Barry, also spoke that day.
In the many speeches that were given over the course of the ten-hour-long event, several themes emerged, namely atonement, reconciliation, and responsibility. The audience responded by exhibiting an unprecedented display of unity and love. Men from every part of the country and all walks of life could be seen hugging, laughing, and crying. Toward the end of the day, Minister Farrakhan asked members of the audience to pledge to take responsibility for their own actions and an active role in improving the Black community. In the immediate aftermath of the March, nearly two million Black men registered to vote and the NAACP enjoyed a surge in membership.
The March received attention from news outlets around the world, and in words and images they relayed the almost church-like atmosphere that prevailed during the gathering. There was no smoking or drinking. Not a single fight took place. No one got arrested. Everyone cleaned up after themselves. Many of the attendees fasted. Others spent much of their time praying.
When reflecting on that historic day, many of those who attended the event describe having gotten goosebumps. Sadly, I never got to experience that feeling myself. During dinner with the Morgans the night before the March, I voiced my intention of going downtown the next day to join the event, even if that meant observing from the fringes. As upset as I’d been about not getting to see Howard University, I’d been given a second chance to be involved with a uniquely Black experience and I felt compelled to participate and support it somehow. I was hungry to be part of something that was bold and beautiful, something revolutionary, something historic. Simply hearing Maya Angelou or Rosa Parks speak would have been a dream fulfilled!
My enthusiasm had little effect on the Morgans. Edita just sighed and shrugged her shoulders, as if to say she wanted no part in the discussion. Merle did most of the talking, telling me he simply couldn’t allow me to go because he and his wife were responsible for my safety and they were scared of the trouble such a gathering might cause.
Sequestered in this way, I escaped into the pages of any books I could get my hands on. Having gained an appreciation for books about Black history and culture while reading to my siblings, I now gravitated toward them on my own.
Reading The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman provided me with some much-needed solace. Because the narrator is a 110-year-old Black woman, I would never know what it was like to walk in her shoes, but I could still relate to aspects of her struggle. I certainly wasn’t enslaved, as Miss Pittman had been as a little girl, but it wouldn’t have been too much of a stretch to call me an indentured servant to the Morgans (and to Larry and Ruthanne before them). I was dependent upon them for the food I ate and the bed I slept in, and if I quit working before I’d fulfilled my obligation to them, I’d have no way of getting home. Larry wasn’t buying my return plane ticket until Merle had paid him for my services, and Merle wasn’t paying Larry until I’d done my time.
Miss Pittman’s plight and her perseverance resonated with me. I knew what it was like to be a child and have to work as hard as an adult, and how it felt to be used and abused. I also understood the pain that comes from being treated like less than a full human being—mostly on the basis of my gender rather than my perceived race—and the fortitude required to fight this sort of injustice. At the end of the book, when Miss Pittman joined the civil rights movement and dedicated herself to fighting for social justice, I knew that’s what I wanted to do with my own life someday.
A more academic but no less influential book I read while living with the Morgans was Beyond Charity: The Call to Christian Community Development, which I’d found in the Christian bookstore in Libby before I’d left. It appealed to me because it addressed the two most important aspects of my life: religion and race. The book argued that the current approach taken by those considered to be good Christians (mostly white) when addressing the plight of disadvantaged communities (mostly Black) had failed. It took the wraps off the sort of cheap Christian charity I was all too familiar with, and showed how flawed and outdated the model of the “white savior” rescuing the “noble Black savage” was. It also encouraged its readers to go beyond giving sympathy (and, yes, charity), asking them to do the kind of meaningful, hands-on work that might lead to some actual change.
Beyond Charity was written by Dr. John Perkins, an older Black man who’d been raised by sharecroppers in New Hebron, Mississippi, where poverty and racial injustice were the predominant features of nearly every Black person’s life. After a police officer shot and killed his older brother Clyde, seventeen-year-old Perkins fled to California, vowing never to return to Mississippi. But in 1960, soon after his son Spencer convinced him to start going to church, he converted to Christianity and returned to his home state, where, along with his wife Vera Mae, he founded a Christian community-development ministry.
After nearly three decades of ministry work that saw the creation of several health centers, thrift stores, and churches, as well as numerous programs (including adult education and leadership development) and at least one daycare center and cooperative farm, Perkins formed the Christian Community Development Association, a network of Christians from across America committed to following the example of reconciliation provided by Jesus Christ. By moving to and living in some of the poorest neighborhoods in the country, they hoped to break down any barriers that might have existed between themselves and their neighbors.
Perkins was also active in the civil rights movement. On February 7, 1970, he was arrested while taking part in a protest march in Mendenhall, Mississippi, and taken to the Rankin County jail, where the white sheriff beat him so badly a mop had to be used to clean his blood off the floor. When his family visited him at the jail, his fourteen-year-old daughter Joanie took one look at her bloodied and beaten father and shouted, “I hate white people. I will never like them!” before running out of the room.
The experience left an equally big impression on his sixteen-year-old son Spencer, who would go on to devote his life to reconciling the racial divide in the United States. He believed that the solution to the country’s race problem would not come through the law but through religion, and to that end he encouraged churches to become more inclusive, embracing people of all races. Spencer didn’t just talk the talk; for more than a decade he lived in an in
tentional Christian community called Antioch, where white and Black families lived side by side, pooled their wages into a single bank account, and shared all their meals.
Living one house over from Spencer at Antioch was Chris Rice, a white man and the son of Christian missionaries. Together, the two men directed Reconcilers Fellowship in Jackson, Mississippi, served as coeditors of Reconcilers magazine, and traveled the nation preaching about reconciliation. They also coauthored More Than Equals: Racial Healing for the Sake of the Gospel, another influential book I read during my time with the Morgans.
Reading More Than Equals was a thrilling experience for me. It laid out a clear vision of the practical yet powerful work that could be done to heal the racial divide. The authors proposed that, in absence of making reparations, white people should move back to the cities they’d fled decades earlier during the “white flight” era. As Black people in the South moved to northern cities during the Great Migration of the first half of the twentieth century, white people responded by embarking on a migration of their own, fleeing inner cities in favor of the suburbs. Their ample resources and the cities’ attention to public services left with them. Rice and Perkins suggested that the white people who returned could share their financial resources with the surrounding community and create a world where Blacks and whites could live together in peace and harmony, enjoying an equal amount of privilege. While living on the East Coast, it wasn’t hard for me to see that, while the civil rights movement might have accomplished the goal of giving Black Americans equal access to jobs and schools, it didn’t guarantee equitable treatment for them. Anytime I left the house, I could see the difference between equality and equity and what sort of impact that had on people’s lives, and it inspired me to want to help the Black community realize economic and social justice.