Copyright © 2009 Judith J. Bentley
You pull out a hundred dollar bill for a 75 cent lunch.
“Ms. B, you make money like this?”
No, I come from the comfort of the cloistered corporate cocoon--
where our profits are kept in a city of style
Mother Teresa never visited.
We have zero tolerance for the likes of you
and the concentration camp we didn’t create
where you were orphaned and homeless, where you live
in boarded up buildings locked in rooms you will never leave.
And since your mother is a drug addict and prostitute
and your father’s permanent residence, the federal prison --
by the way, we’re making room there for you too--
you have nothing to look forward to.
There’s no one home to help you with your homework
and since you have been told you will never amount to anything,
you don’t do any. So let me see if you can spell “despair.”
Our new President explains that you were born into
“history’s confinement” where the poorest of the poor are housed,
a repository for the remaining legacy of slavery and violence,
where your daily bread is forced ignorance and internalized rage.
There are no jobs for you except the local street drug trade.
Over the brain dead megaphone, a stimulant or sedative we take
with our office cups of cappuccino or on the way home
to our suburban housewives, we occasionally hear how you’ve become
your own firing squad, saving us the trouble.
Otherwise, you attract little public notice
except when we see you slumped over
your schoolroom desk, your teacher’s arms folded tightly
across his chest. We would certainly not hold you.
In our committee conversations you are statistics
we consider with our tactics and rhetorical strategies.
We may alter our curriculum next year
to include civics lessons if it doesn’t cost too much.
That’s what a Harvard researcher says we should do.
She should know--she visited your classroom once
so she could write a book. Maybe it’ll be a best seller.
Well, I’m taking my kids to Italy next week.
It’s so cold in this City in the Winter.
But first, I’ll pray in church this Sunday,
“Give us this day our daily bread.”
Now for that story I promised you.
“Once upon a time in a City called Calcutta.…”
[Note: Judith Bentley is a writer, poet and legal assistant in a national law firm headquartered in Richmond. She served as one of two lead teachers in Richmond’s first alternative school.]
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Mother's Memories
Copyright © 2008 Judith J. Bentley
In December, 2008, when I visited my 94-year-old mother in her Simpsonville, South Carolina home, I asked her to tell me about her early childhood and growing up years. I only had one sitting with her. My sister Kate had the chance for another sitting when suddenly on the next day, Mother started talking again about her life. Kate ran to get paper and pen. Hopefully, we can put our notes together.
my notes from Mother’s words:
“Well, we played together every day in Greenwood. Rebecca was my best friend through life. It’s wonderful to have a sister. If you don’t, you don’t know what you’re missing. Then there was the extended family – 3 unmarried stepsisters – they were all school teachers who came home in the summertime and at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Back then school teachers were not allowed to marry. One lived in Raleigh; one, in Winston-Salem, and one taught at Greenwood High School. One of them – “Sister” – was partial to me. Every Christmas and Thanksgiving we’d buy a “turkey on foot.” We kept the turkey in a pen in the chicken yard and at night you could hear it going “gobble, gobble, gobble.” When it came time to kill the turkey, Mother was the one who had to do it. She plucked all the feathers. Then she had to singe it to get the stubs from the feathers out of the skin. She would clean it and wash it thoroughly before cooking it. She did all the cooking everyday and Rebecca and I washed up the dishes. Mother was a marvelous woman. She taught me how to sew, crochet and knit and she taught school too. In those days, you didn’t have to have a college degree to teach school. She taught in a one-room school before she met my father.
“We had a farm in Cokesbury County which was 7 miles from Greenwood. Father drove out to the farm every day. Negro families lived in shacks on the farm. They were sharecroppers. We had watermelons, pigs, and vegetables. Mother did most of the gardening. We had fruit trees in the yard – peaches, pears, apples – and father kept bees in the back so we had honey too. The Secret Life of Bees shows what life was really like during slavery.
“I went to Greenwood High School where I studied and made good grades. Anna Mae Stalnaker was a close friend. We lived on one side of the schoolhouse and she lived on the other. She married and went into a nursing home where she later died.
“After high school, I attended Lander College. I lived at home during my college years and walked to Lander everyday. Rebecca went to Winthrop. All of us had scholarships – those were the old depression years. The DARs gave me a scholarship. Bill got a scholarship from the Citadel. Father had a wealthy friend who told him that if he’d name his son after him, he’d see to his education so that’s how my brother Mitchell Hiers got his name. The wealthy friend paid for Mitchell’s education.
“During the Depression we ate a lot of grits. There were no new pair of shoes for Easter either. In the summer I worked on Saturdays at the dime store. We had scuppernong vines in the backyard on both sides of the house. When they were ripe, the four of us would gather them in paper bags. There was a stone wall in front of the house. We’d set our positions on the front wall and sell our bags of scuppernongs for ten cents each. All four of us sold scuppernongs. That’s how we paid for our paper and pencils all the way through high school and college.
“Bill joined the CCC (Civil Conservation Corps) which President Roosevelt had created to train young men to build bridges and highways. Then he was accepted into law school at the University of Pennsylvania and after he got his law degree, he opened an office in Oregon and married a girl from Pennsylvania – Mary Keichline. She died of cancer from operating an x-ray machine. Bill and Mary had three girls – Martha Lou and Laura (who were close) and Elizabeth. After Mary died, Bill remarried and Elizabeth, who was a spendthrift, lived with him and kept house so Bill left the house to her. Rebecca taught at the DAR school at Tamasse and eventually married Clay Alexander. Mitch lived in Georgia.
“My B.S. degree was a double major in math and science – I studied algebra, geometry, trig, calculus -- all the math courses -- and chemistry, physics and biology. Of course, I studied languages early too – German and French. After I graduated in 1935, I taught German at Newberry College for two summers. Then I went to Emory University the next summer to study to qualify to teach full-time at Newberry College. That’s when I met your father and we got married in December so that was the end of my plans to teach at Newberry College. Your father served as a Methodist minister first in Fincastle and I was a young bride then and worked as a substitute teacher. Dick was born at Jefferson Memorial Hospital. "
Here Mother ends this interview.
***********************************************************************************
When You are Old
by William Butler Yeats
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
In December, 2008, when I visited my 94-year-old mother in her Simpsonville, South Carolina home, I asked her to tell me about her early childhood and growing up years. I only had one sitting with her. My sister Kate had the chance for another sitting when suddenly on the next day, Mother started talking again about her life. Kate ran to get paper and pen. Hopefully, we can put our notes together.
my notes from Mother’s words:
“Well, we played together every day in Greenwood. Rebecca was my best friend through life. It’s wonderful to have a sister. If you don’t, you don’t know what you’re missing. Then there was the extended family – 3 unmarried stepsisters – they were all school teachers who came home in the summertime and at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Back then school teachers were not allowed to marry. One lived in Raleigh; one, in Winston-Salem, and one taught at Greenwood High School. One of them – “Sister” – was partial to me. Every Christmas and Thanksgiving we’d buy a “turkey on foot.” We kept the turkey in a pen in the chicken yard and at night you could hear it going “gobble, gobble, gobble.” When it came time to kill the turkey, Mother was the one who had to do it. She plucked all the feathers. Then she had to singe it to get the stubs from the feathers out of the skin. She would clean it and wash it thoroughly before cooking it. She did all the cooking everyday and Rebecca and I washed up the dishes. Mother was a marvelous woman. She taught me how to sew, crochet and knit and she taught school too. In those days, you didn’t have to have a college degree to teach school. She taught in a one-room school before she met my father.
“We had a farm in Cokesbury County which was 7 miles from Greenwood. Father drove out to the farm every day. Negro families lived in shacks on the farm. They were sharecroppers. We had watermelons, pigs, and vegetables. Mother did most of the gardening. We had fruit trees in the yard – peaches, pears, apples – and father kept bees in the back so we had honey too. The Secret Life of Bees shows what life was really like during slavery.
“I went to Greenwood High School where I studied and made good grades. Anna Mae Stalnaker was a close friend. We lived on one side of the schoolhouse and she lived on the other. She married and went into a nursing home where she later died.
“After high school, I attended Lander College. I lived at home during my college years and walked to Lander everyday. Rebecca went to Winthrop. All of us had scholarships – those were the old depression years. The DARs gave me a scholarship. Bill got a scholarship from the Citadel. Father had a wealthy friend who told him that if he’d name his son after him, he’d see to his education so that’s how my brother Mitchell Hiers got his name. The wealthy friend paid for Mitchell’s education.
“During the Depression we ate a lot of grits. There were no new pair of shoes for Easter either. In the summer I worked on Saturdays at the dime store. We had scuppernong vines in the backyard on both sides of the house. When they were ripe, the four of us would gather them in paper bags. There was a stone wall in front of the house. We’d set our positions on the front wall and sell our bags of scuppernongs for ten cents each. All four of us sold scuppernongs. That’s how we paid for our paper and pencils all the way through high school and college.
“Bill joined the CCC (Civil Conservation Corps) which President Roosevelt had created to train young men to build bridges and highways. Then he was accepted into law school at the University of Pennsylvania and after he got his law degree, he opened an office in Oregon and married a girl from Pennsylvania – Mary Keichline. She died of cancer from operating an x-ray machine. Bill and Mary had three girls – Martha Lou and Laura (who were close) and Elizabeth. After Mary died, Bill remarried and Elizabeth, who was a spendthrift, lived with him and kept house so Bill left the house to her. Rebecca taught at the DAR school at Tamasse and eventually married Clay Alexander. Mitch lived in Georgia.
“My B.S. degree was a double major in math and science – I studied algebra, geometry, trig, calculus -- all the math courses -- and chemistry, physics and biology. Of course, I studied languages early too – German and French. After I graduated in 1935, I taught German at Newberry College for two summers. Then I went to Emory University the next summer to study to qualify to teach full-time at Newberry College. That’s when I met your father and we got married in December so that was the end of my plans to teach at Newberry College. Your father served as a Methodist minister first in Fincastle and I was a young bride then and worked as a substitute teacher. Dick was born at Jefferson Memorial Hospital. "
Here Mother ends this interview.
***********************************************************************************
When You are Old
by William Butler Yeats
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
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