Sister Days (excerpts)

January 1

“Honey, I went to a Negro History meetin’ tonight,” said the voice on the phone. “Well, they had several speakers…. There was one pretty young colored girl who … gave a nice talk about Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth and many others … and I noticed that everybody would name a couple of folk and then add ‘and many others….’ “Now I can’t think about the many others without thinkin’ of my grandmother…. Toys? She’d pull up a clump of grass, tie it in the middle to make a ‘waist line’ and then comb the dirt out of the roots so she could braid them in two pigtails, and that would be a ‘grass doll’ with ‘root hair’ … and the boys got barrel wires for hoops and pebbles and a ball for ‘jacks.’ “Every minute of Grandma’s life was struggle…. After the kids was off to bed she’d sit in her rockin’ chair in the dark kitchen, and that old chair would weep sawdust tears as she rocked back and forth. She’d start off singing real low-like … ‘I’m so glad trouble don’ las’ always,’ and switch off in the middle and pick up with ‘Savior, Savior, hear my humble cry’ … and she’d keep jumpin’ from tune to tune … ‘I’m gonna tell God all of my troubles when I get home’ … and she’d pat her feet as she rocked and rassled with death, Jim Crow and starvation. All of a sudden the rockin’ would stop and she’d jump up, smack her hands together and say, ‘Atcha dratcha!’ and she’d come back revived and refreshed and ready to go at them drat troubles…. “I bet Miss Tubman and Miss Truth would like us to remember and give some time to the many others.” On this New Year’s Day, this day of Imani (faith), the final day of Kwanzaa, with the words of author Alice Childress from her book Like One of the Family, published in 1956, we honor all of our sheroes and sister-griots– our Tubmans, Truths, and many others– who have brought us thus far by faith, forging our Sister Days. National Women and Womenhood USA Kwanzaa: Faith ***************

February 1

In 1898, herstory’s shero, Harriet Tubman, was eking out an existence in Aubusrn, New York, in a modest two-story home with a bed, dresser, side table, oil lamp, and Bible, which she could not read but acted upon religiously. During the Civil War, the Union had employed her Underground Railroad conductor’s skills as an army spy, scout, guerrilla strategist, and the first woman in American history to lead a military expedition (see June 2). For her services, she had been promised a pension, but, like other promises of compensation and reparation to former slaves, that pension had never come to pass. A Hero to both the Black and women’s movements, the widow of a Civil War veteran and a veteran in her own right, at seventy-five-plus years of age, with no regular income, “General Tubman,” as she was known by admirers, petitioned the federal government for the two pensions rightfully due her. Her papers were handed from one official to another and ignored; she filed an affidavit and signed her X: “I claim for my services above named the sum of Eighteen hundred dollars.” When her claim was finally honored, five dollars had been shaved off the minimal twenty-five dollars awarded her per month until her death in 1913. As Dr. Martin Delany, Harvard’s first Black medical student, said at the depth of slavery, “To know the condition of a people, one has only to know the status of its women.” From the treatment of this extraordinary woman, the condition of African-Americans was dour indeed. What status did we accord ourselves? After her death, the home she had willed to the AME Zion church sank into disrepair and was allowed to close. Thinking better of ourselves by 1953, funds were raised and her home restored as a national landmark. And, on February 1, 1978, when the first “Black Heritage USA” stamp was issued, the nation paid long overdue official tribute to freedom’s angel, the “Moses of her people,” Harriet Tubman. Wednesday, February 1, 1978 New York Heroes and Sheroes USA Self-affirmation

March 1

Deep into the winter of 1692, Tituba, an enslaved twenty-year-old charged with caring for her owner’s children, retold the tales of jombies and spirits from her own childhood that sent her charges wild and ignited the hysteria that was the Salem Witch Trials. On March 1, 1692, hearings began with evidence of witchcraft. Because Sarah Good, for example, was seen near the farm of her neighbor whose crop had gone bad, she must be a witch. Faced with the logic of Puritan New England, Tituba – the embodiment of “culture clash” – didn’t have a chance. A slave with no interest in upholding such a system, the spectre of mass executions made her a pragmatic enough “witch” to “confess.” Still, she was sentenced to death. But with true absurdity, hers was the rare case when being a slave was a protection – because her execution would have deprived her owner of his property. It also deprived her of exoneration. When the governor released those awaiting trial, she was unable to pay the cost of her thirteen months in prison and was sold for costs. Repenting the excesses of the Frenzy, in October 1697, colonial governors limited the extent of future righteous indignation. In lieu of execution, blasphemers, atheists, and any who denied the Bible as divine would receive time in the pillory or six months in prison, have his/her tongue bored with a hot iron, or be seated on the gallows with a rope around the neck. In the seething cauldron of 1690s society, Tituba’s tales were the spark inflaming existing biases against such traditional taboos as the outsider, the outcast, and the woman in possession of her faculties. To study the era is to know that given the temper of the times and the psychology of the zealous, any group of people can justify anything in the name of piety; all it takes is power gone mad. Saturday, March 1, 1692 Massachusetts Culture USA Messages