A Life in Motion

8. Another Kind of Mother—and Grandmother

— 200 — A plain person in a little house on a little piece of land in the dunes. With a typewriter that is my road to sanity, looking at my lithograph of the pregnant woman in utero in the beautiful blue water, the golden woman. I type and she sleeps, poised for what—I can’t say. There’s something beseeching about her, not begging or praying, but beseeching, hopeful. Naked, her legs drawn up, her elbows pointed, her head turned to one side, she floats, orange and light in the blue. I like the feeling. It’s warm and comfortable, she’s making a baby; she is a baby again making a baby; she’s dreaming of the baby and the life she will have with the baby, and the baby’s life. Journal entry, describing a lithograph by Ruth Weisberg, Sunday, August 30, 1982 In my will, I list eight people as my“children” or“grandchildren .”None are biologically related to me.Two—Marietta and Jimmy Hedges—have been my godchildren since their births almost fifty years ago. All eight have allowed me to feel that my life has human meaning, that I have been able to give a few others the love I felt most keenly from my grandmother in my childhood. First there was Alice. At the end of August 1965, I returned to Baltimore from Mississippi with Alice Jackson after a tensionfilled drive north, trying not to think about the possibility of being 8 Another Kind of Mother— and Grandmother — 201 — stopped and interrogated and having to explain that I was taking this young black woman away from her family to live with me.Alice was seventeen. She had been my student in the Freedom School I ran during Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964. I had met her parents for the first time when I drove from Jackson south almost to the coast and then up a gravel road to their home. It was late on a hot afternoon. The courtly Reverend Jackson offered a warm greeting and an apology that we were going to wait outside a few minutes for others. “They’ll all be out in a minute. They’re getting ready.” He smiled another kind of smile. This one told me I’d understand all of it. “We’re going to have a meal out here.” And soon, Mrs. Jackson emerged, moving slowly, followed by Alice and the others—three more sisters—Jackie, two years younger; Irene, four years younger; and little Clarie who was five— as well as a young brother. Each walked down the steps of the small houseaboveus,carryingsomething.Onlythefamily’seldestsonwas missing; he had left for the Army, perhaps headed for Vietnam. Afterabrief grace,inwhichtheReverendmentionedthejourney Alice was about to take, we ate rich, delicious, steaming Mississippi food: fried chicken, mashed potatoes, collard greens, corn bread, and we drank Kool-Aid or cold tea.Alice was very quiet. There was no conversation that I can remember,and there were no tears.I said several times how much I was enjoying the food.After the meal,the Reverend took me aside and asked me to promise I’d go to church on Sundays. “Yes, of course,” I responded. “There are many black churches in Baltimore, and I’ll find one that suits Alice.” I wish now that I had talked with Mrs. Jackson, but I know why I couldn’t make the effort. Only a week earlier I had driven into the Mississippi Delta to interview a woman in her farmhouse kitchen, where she was preparing that night’s dinner for her six children, her husband, and others who worked on the farm. During the interview , Ida Little asked me almost as many questions as I asked her, and eventually, she, who had many young children and very little income, stopped talking about her needs in order to comfort me about the fact that I had had no babies. She could guess how sad I — 202 — must feel, for, she said, no matter how little she had, no matter how hard she had to struggle, her children gave her comfort. She would not part with one of them for all the money in the world. Was she reading my mind?Yes, I would have loved to take one of her darling children with me. And here, a week later, as I sat with this large family, I could not get...