(Note to reader: This is the second reflection that I submitted, on October 31, 2019, to my Southern Hip-Hop class in the Fall of 2019 at Kennesaw State University. This blog goes along with the one I submitted last on June 8. In this reflection I write about Jesmyn Ward's book Men We Reaped and make correlations between her book and events that I had either heard about in my family concerning racism or events I experienced myself.)
Jesmyn Ward - Author of Men We Reaped
(Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)
The reading of Jesmyn Ward’s book Men We Reaped opened my eyes to the southern African American culture of the United States, so much so that images expressed in her writing made me think about images that I saw as a child growing up in southern Louisiana. Also, Ward’s images brought to mind many instances that my mother told me about, being a young white girl growing up in the south, some that she probably had wished she never witnessed. This reflective paper is to document the correlations between the images in Ward’s book and juxtapose those with the images my family experienced throughout our time living in south Louisiana from the 1950’s to the early 1980’s.
I was born in the south-central Louisiana town of Morgan City in 1971. Around this time Morgan City had a population of about 16,000 people and was the biggest town in St. Mary Parish, with Franklin being the parish seat. My grandfather was sheriff of St. Mary Parish from 1964 to 1984 and was a sheriff who supported the African American people, which was about half the population of the parish, and other minorities living in the parish. In fact, he was elected sheriff for five terms mainly because of the African American vote. In his early years as sheriff, he hired some of the first African Americans in the departments’ history.
My mother, Mary Baudoin, who was born in Texas during World War II because of my grandfather being stationed during the war at Garner Field in Uvalde, was moved back to Franklin when she was several months old and lived in Franklin from that point until she married my father in 1962. My mother reminisces still to this day about her observations of growing up in Franklin as a privileged white girl whose father worked in law enforcement. She observed the way African Americans and other minorities were treated in this small town. My mother was raised to respect all people by my grandparents, just as I was raised to respect all people by my mother and father. My grandparents taught her, as my parents did me, to not judge a person by the color of their skin.
Some observations. For many decades, Franklin City Cemetery had a small section of the cemetery that was cordoned off for African American burials and had a fence separating it from the white section. My mother remembered seeing this as a little girl. She always said that when that fence came down, she would have some hope that the town could move forward without racial bias. That fence didn’t come down until the early 2000’s, the last time the whole family was in town for my grandfather’s funeral.
My mother told me a story of when Brown vs. The Board of Education was first enacted in St. Mary Parish. The principal of one of the public schools in Franklin lived two doors down from where my grandparents lived. One night my mother was sleeping in her room. She happened to wake up and notice a flickering coming from somewhere outside. Getting out of bed she went to the window and parted the curtains to observe a wooden cross burning in the front yard of the principal’s property.
Not all racial incidents that occurred in St. Mary Parish during my mother’s childhood were directed at African American’s necessarily. She remembered a time in the 1950’s when a Chinese American man decided to open a laundromat in the small little downtown section of Franklin. Franklin was even smaller than Morgan City, with a population of about 6,000 in 1950’s, steadily decreasing over the years to the present. White supremacists in the area threatened the Asian man because of his business being in Franklin. This man did not scare easily however, and he opened the business anyway, with it facing Main Street (the actual name of the main thoroughfare through Franklin) having a large plate glass window facing the street. One day my mother, when she was a young teenage girl, took a trip across town with my grandfather to visit a friend and passed in front of the laundromat to see the Asian man hanging by the neck from a rope in the front window of his shop. Of course, these incidents that my mother observed as a little girl were of a different time element than what Ward mentioned in her book. I’m sure Ward’s mother and grandmother would have experienced similar events firsthand.
My parents brought me up to love all people as human beings and not to prejudice them and that is the way I have always acted. In fact, I rarely had dated any white women myself before marrying my wife in 1999, who is of Indian descent. (Since the writing of this reflection I have divorced, in May of 2021.) When I mention that my wife is an Indian woman, most people think of a Native American. I tell them “dot, not feather” referring to the culture from India. My attraction has been to Indian women for quite a while, and still is.
My wife and I, around the time we were first married, traveled to Louisiana to visit my grandfather, who was not well. My grandfather lived in an old slave cabin behind a big plantation house that faced Main Street in Franklin. The plantation property, decades before, had been split and the sections sold off, so my grandfather lived in the cabin, which was a separate piece of property from the plantation. Since his passing in 2003 the cabin and the property that it sits on has been sold back to the current owner of the plantation.
The owner of the plantation house was throwing a very lavish wedding reception for his daughter and new son-in-law and decided to invite all of his neighbors, just out of respect and to basically tell his neighbors that a major party would be happening that night. My grandfather was too sick to attend but told us to go in his place. My wife and I decided to take him up on the offer and attend, thinking that if we wanted to drink, we could because we wouldn’t have to drive and just walk next door.
The reception had a live band, a huge outdoor tent with tables and chairs with a dance floor, all the liquor one could consume for free and several pirogues of boiled shrimp and crawfish. The main house had nothing but desserts in each room. After eating outside, my wife and I decided to go into the house to see what desserts were available. One room had just pies, one had just cakes, and one had just pastries. We had never seen anything like it.
At one point my wife and I separated in the main house to each get individual desserts. When she returned to me she had a look of anger and hurt on her face. I asked her what was wrong and she said she wanted to leave. Since our desserts were on disposable plates, we decided to walk back to my grandfather’s house next door. Upon us walking back and entering the house my wife told me that in the short time that we were separated, as she was standing at a table getting a piece of pie, an elderly white man sitting in a chair at the edge of the table said to her sarcastically, “you get out in the sun a lot, don’t you”. She told me she gave the man a look of contempt and turned and walked off to find me. She decided not to tell me right then and there what had happened because she knew I would have gone off on the man, no matter what his age. When it came to any racist remarks against my wife, I had zero tolerance. My mother was with us, staying with my grandfather, and when she heard my wife’s story upon entering my grandfathers’ house, she said to me that some people could be so ignorant and to not pay any attention to them, but I so wanted to do something and had to take some deep breaths to calm myself down.
Ward mentions that while in school several white boys were attracted to her, but they wouldn’t act on asking her out for a date because of the judgement they would get from their families and community. When I was in middle school in Louisiana, I had an attraction to an African American girl named Nina. From what I remember she came from an affluent family. I don’t remember exactly what happened between us but it seems her family probably didn’t take kindly to her dating a white boy like me. My parents were all for it and I honestly could have cared less about what the community thought, but maybe this was a naïve way of thinking on my part back then because of the racist comments and acts that could have cropped up in this rural parish. It seemed that our relationship didn’t go any farther than maybe me asking her out. I think she liked me but her family didn’t care for the relationship. I remember Nina was somewhat light-skinned and very pretty.
Ward talks about how her mother used to work at a mansion owned by affluent white people and how her mother cleaned for them. When I was a young boy and even into my teenage years, my grandmother always hired an African American woman to come cook and clean. Her name was Margarite and she came once or twice a week to cook meals that lasted throughout the whole week. Margarite cooked soul food, some of the best I ever had. She did a little cleaning also, in which I felt sorry for her because my grandmother was messy and never threw anything away, even junk mail. I think my grandmother always felt that the things she saved could be useful for someone, someday.
One thing I do remember, which seemed to be indicative of the south, is when Margarite walked to my grandparents’ house. Margarite lived in the African American section of Franklin, which was only a couple of blocks away from my grandparents’ house across the railroad tracks. Margarite always came to the backdoor of my grandparents’ house, never to the front door. It’s reminiscent of the servant coming to the backdoor, from an earlier era. My grandmother paid her very well. I don’t know if coming to the back door was an arrangement between my grandmother and Margarite but I don’t think it would have made a difference to my grandmother. I’m not sure if Margarite came to the back door because it was expected of her or because it was out of respect. Probably a little of both.
Remembering the various instances of racism directed at Ward in her educational career made me think back to my childhood and instances I had heard directed toward minorities in Morgan City. I had more African-American friends than I did white friends in school. I don’t remember instances of racism outside of school concerning my friends. When I was in middle school, from fourth thru sixth grade, I lived a block away from the school. I had a basketball hoop in my front yard and invited several African-American friends to come shoot hoops with me after school occasionally. I told them that they could come by anytime to play, even if I wasn’t home, which wasn’t a good idea. One time one of the neighbors complained to my parents that they saw them playing basketball when no one was home. I don’t remember exactly what came out of this but I probably couldn’t have them over anymore. The neighbor, to my remembrance, was not racist but just felt uncomfortable that these kids were playing hoops when no one was at home. I tried to be careful after that when inviting someone to play.
In the school yard, I heard remarks said against certain minorities but, interestingly enough, I don’t remember anything directed toward African American kids at my school. I’m sure it existed but I don’t recall anything or never heard anything specific. St. Mary Parish had a fairly large Vietnamese community, most of them living in extreme poor conditions in the small eastern end of the parish called Amelia, which was nothing but divvy bars and scrap metal establishments. I do remember some white kids one time talking about some of the Vietnamese students in my school and referring to them as “chinks” but the problem was that I didn’t quite understand what that meant at the time so didn’t think anything of it.
Another thing I tried to do was invite my African American friends to hang out somewhere in Morgan City or go to the movie together. I didn’t get much of a response because I think that, in the small rural town of Morgan City, where racism was prevalent, they might have been afraid to be seen with a white boy outside of school activities. Also, I believe that most of my African American friends didn’t want me to visit them at their homes because mainly white neighborhoods and black neighborhoods were separate back then and my friends didn’t want me coming into their neighborhood because either they didn’t want me to see what conditions they lived in or they were protective of me going into their hood. It is somewhat different now I believe. I think that my African American friends coming to my house was okay for them because most of the time I was there and also it was so close to the school.
There seemed to be more African American kids at my school who were either in the poor or middle class and very few that were of an affluent family, but that didn’t matter to me because I saw their wonderful personalities and kindness in them, or of anyone for that matter, instead of how much their parents made in income.
In Ward’s book she mentions that people of other ethnic groups had placed themselves in opposition of African American people so they wouldn’t be aligned with them. I seemed to see this firsthand when I was young. From what I remember with the different ethnicities at my school, most were either African American or Asian. There was only one Indian girl at my school, and if I hadn’t been so shy when I was young, I would have asked her out because she was beautiful and smart. The Asians were mostly Vietnamese, but they didn’t converse or hang out with the African Americans and either kept to themselves or mingled with the white kids. I had a friend who was Vietnamese while in school and he didn’t speak much English, so I tried to teach him a little. In return he taught me a little Vietnamese, which has totally escaped me now.
Jesmyn Ward’s book was a difficult read on many different levels because of her poor upbringing and racism directed toward her. It was reminiscent of various images and instances that I remember as a child, as well as my mother when she was a young girl. I’m glad I read this book because it has made me become even more cognizant of the lives of southern African American people in the United States.
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