He Included Me: The Autobiography of Sarah Rice

Preface

Preface A the beginning of Invented Lives, Mary Helen Washington questions why the traditions of black culture seem to be predominantly masculine and asks, "How does the heroic voice and heroic image of the black woman get suppressed in a culture that depended on her heroism for its survival?" However they may have been suppressed, the voices and images of these black women have begun to emerge in the past decade and to fill out the whole story of the black experience in America. Sarah Lucille WebbRice is a remarkable woman whose life story is a significantaddition to this record. Born in rural Alabama in 1909, she was the third child of a young schoolteacher named Lizzie Janet Lewis Webb and her husband, Willis James Webb, a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal church. From an early age, she worked with the rest of her family to wrest a living from a small sharecropping farm, raising cotton and corn, field peas, greens, and other garden vegetables on which their survival depended. She went to school as far as it could take a black child in those days, through the ninth grade, and then began teaching in rural Alabama schools herself. She married a handsome farmer and became a mother, but that first marriage did not work out. Then a long span of hard times began with the depression. These took her eventually to Florida, where she had to become a worker in private homes to support herself and her son. Eventually she met and married Andrew A. Rice, a good and devout man who was her companion until his death in 1983. In the years since her moveto Jacksonville, Florida, in the late 19308, she has won a respected place for herself in her community , as a political leader, as a major figure in her church on the statewide level, and as the confidante and wise friend of white employers as well as her own extended family and wide circle of black vn viii Preface friends. Her courage, her integrity, her dignity, her generosity, and her robust humor pervade the story she tells ofher life. He Included Me is an oral narrativethat is part of a tradition reaching back at least two hundred years in North America. The tradition actually began on another continent, with African storytelling, but was first recorded on our shores in slave narratives told by those who escaped from southern bondage before the Civil War. The most famous of these is of course Frederick Douglass's Narrative, and its plot structure is typical in the way it recapitulates the narrator's physicaljourney up through adversity to freedom and some measure of success. In our own century such leaders as Booker T. Washington (Up from Slavery, 1900) and James WeldonJohnson (Along This Way, 1934) continued to see their lives in this black Horatio Alger pattern. But these men were unusual among their people in being able to write their stories and have them published commercially. Literacy set them apart from the vast majority of black Americans and involved them in a literary mode dominated by white men and white idioms. The most vital currents of narrative art in black culture have been oral, and this stream of verbal tradition began to be collected by folklorists, sociologists, and anthropologists during the early decades of the century when black writers like James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, and Langston Hughes were learning to capture their cultural heritage in poetry and fiction. The WPA projects of the 19308 recorded the accounts of former slaves telling their life stories, while at the same time many of the musical forms of black narrative and poetry sung by such folk artists as Robert Johnson and Huddie Ledbetter were being recorded in sound studios. Most of these examples of oral tradition were brief or fragmentary in form, however, and although they preserved valuable cultural materials, they did not include sustained narratives of individual lives. Then came the social upheavals of World War II and the civil rights movement. In 1969 a Harvard graduate student named Theodore Rosengarten met Ned Cobb, an eighty-four-year-old survivor of twelve years of imprisonment for activities associated with the Alabama Sharecroppers' Union. A collaborationbetween the two men produced ix Preface a remarkable oral autobiography that became a model for the newly developing genre of oral history. Rosengarten worked with Ned Cobb for two years, in thirty...