A SHORT TRUE STORY:

MY MOTHER THE LAWBREAKER: A Recollection from a Southern Childhood

1948 — the time of the last known lynching in the Piedmont hills of South Carolina. It was the year that Strom Thurmond, staunch segregationist that he was (except in the bedroom) became a Dixiecrat: “All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the nigger into our homes, our schools, our churches," he proclaimed. He carried four states, then was elected by write-in to the U.S. Senate.

In that melancholy era, black South Carolinians could not aspire to be a bus driver, a police officer, to work inside the cotton mill, or to check out books from the public library. Their schools were funded at the rate of 25 to 50 cents to the dollar of white public schools funding. But lest the reader scoff at this, understand that this was an improvement, because previously the Palmetto State provided no funding – zero -- for black schools. No funding in turn was also an improvement over things that came before, because in previous eras teaching blacks to read was a crime punishable by law. Sims’ South Carolina History, a required course of study, assured 7^th graders that “Negroes” were quite happy with the institution of slavery. So much so, according to Sims, that they often sang and danced to express their joy. Yet even in that feudal darkness, there were those who actions sparkled in the night like lightning bugs in June.

Saturday was shopping day for my mother, Rosa Jane Thackston Guthrie, Miss Rosa as she came to be known. If you think the reader’s going to be provided a serving of molasses that sentimentalizes one’s mother here, you’re quite wrong. Mama was far too complex, far too tough an old bird for that. She had survived early on the death of her own mother. Then after her father was stricken by chronic recurrent pellagra, she endured life in an orphanage down on the Georgia border. She survived a husband, my father, who was that most difficult of all creatures, a poet, an idealist, a visionary. Not, Menshevik that he was in his heart of hearts, that he wasn’t a hard worker. He was simply convicted that the engines of commerce were suspect; tools, in short, of the Devil. He was more concerned with devising and helping to effect a more perfect world and with composing the poems he published from-time-to-time than at earning money. Mama even survived the Guthrie children. Six of us spread out between her sixteenth and 42^nd birthdays plus the occasional needy cousin or displaced uncle or grandparent thrown in for good measure. Though each of us had our own ideas about what was and what was not important, she managed to in no uncertain terms to convey the clear understanding that she had aver-arching standards and expectations for each of us. (The universal caveat for reluctant scholars was often voiced; “You want to end up digging ditches? Do your homework, child!”)

On that Saturday of glorious Carolina springtime when the breeze is already as warm as a lover’s embrace, we walked the half-mile to the bus stop, passing those fields next to our house where the green bolls of cotton were peeping open to show the white tufts within. We passed by the brick house, the biggest and nicest house around, where Mrs. Anderson, tall, attractive, dignified, and authoritative, ran a brothel for soldiers from nearby Camp Croft, and turned left to pass by the row of faded and weary russet-colored frame houses inhabited by the Dirt Eaters, children who practiced pica; the compulsion to spoon up and consume the red clay of that place. We crossed the timbered bridge, rich with the smell of creosote that crossed above the Southern Railroad and stopped at the crossroads where the bus into town stopped. Once in town, Mama did her shopping at Carolina Cash; a bit of dark blue dotted Swiss fabric to make a dress, some buttons, a zipper. She was a seamstress, They taught you things like that at the orphanage, so she pumped away on the foot treadle of that Singer sewing machine. She not only sewed for her family but took in sewing so she could buy schoolbooks for less fortunate children. Education, shamed as she was by being denied education past the 10^th grade, was her North Star. We caught the bus again to return home, seating ourselves in the bench seat that runs parallel to the wall behind the driver.

Just as the driver began to pull the silver-handled lever to shut the door, one last passenger struggled aboard. My mother knew the elderly black woman, a woman whose eyes told of aching feet and whose etched face and struggle up the stairs of that bus bespoke the weariness of her years. She placed her two shopping bags, one of them already ripped at the top, on the floor. She stood beneath the sign that stated that white passengers were to sit in the front of the bus, colored in the rear. She into the collar of her dress and removed a knotted handkerchief from within, extracted a 9 cent token and let it ka-ching into the fare box. She looked toward the back of the bus as engine roared and the bus lurched and clattered away from the curb.

Mama followed her gaze, and saw that no “colored” seats were available. Mama sat her own parcel on the floor, half arose and reached for one of her shopping bags. “Lillian, Honey, let me help with those bags and you sit down right here between John and me.”

The old woman, still holding on to the shiny pole of the bus, hesitated, then grabbed the other bag, then plopped down on the seat, sighing. “Thank you, Miss Rosa.”

The bus driver glanced back to confirm the anomaly that was occurring behind him, then chose to cut his glance back straight ahead drove that bus. From the passengers, there were angry glances, tight-lipped grimaces, but in the end, no one said a word. Many turned and looked fixedly out the window.

Why did these events play out in this benign manner? In other instances in my Southland, blacks had been beaten to death by our home-grown terrorists for such affronts to the status quo. In my home town a block from where we had boarded the bus, a generation previously, a uniformed black soldier whose unit was in transit to France during World War I had been dreadfully beaten in the lobby of the Cleveland Hotel. He went in on a Sunday morning to pick up a newspaper on order of his commanding officer. His offense was that he didn’t remove his garrison cap when ordered to do so by a white man lounging about in the lobby (This tragic incident is well described in Diane McWhorter’s meticulously researched and painstakingly documented CARRY ME HOME: BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution.).

Certainly my mother always exuded a certain moral authority. Then, as now, sometimes it’s simply easier not to know what’s going on.

So, it is by this deed that Miss Rosa, my mother, became a criminal, a breaker of the law of the Sovereign State of South Carolina, law that was taken very seriously and usually enforced quite rigorously, as subsequent events in South Carolina such as the Orangeburg Massacre at S. C. State University (Damned darkies walked right in the bowling lane and tried to buy tickets.).

Mama’s life was in so many ways quite circumscribed by her origins and by a dirth of opportunity in general. She had endured early on the visitation of the Dark Angel that snatched her nine-months pregnant mother into its maw when she was five. She had suffered the more and the pestilence called pellagra, familiar as chiggers in the South until the 1930’s, grasped her father and held him in its firm embrace. These occurrences and the resultant sense of abandonment and despair were scribed on her very soul, marking and shaping her person as the sculptor’s chisel cuts the stone. Even so, she was a dreamer of dreams. She provided, in her endless sympathy for the underdog, even to the point of becoming in the above instance a lawbreaker, but a criminal who provided a shining example of decency that glows on though she is gone. In this small act (Small? And what if a million South Carolinians had actually committed such decencies, had actually acted on the faith they laid claim to and celebrated with such pomp and arrogance every segregated Sunday morning?). She was a reminder that even in the most dismal of circumstances, there have been people of conscience who by their acts of kindness, provided hope; who demonstrated a belief that things should be better and that some day, some how, no matter the demagoguery of such unctuous hypocrites as Strom Thurmond or his predecessors, race-bating fascist hate-mongers such as Governors Cole Blease or Pitchfork Ben Tillman.

But wait. The story of my mother here is ancient, over half a century old. Skin color no longer dictates the seating arrangement on the bus. But before becoming dismissive, one might read some chilling contemporary stories; the story of a good American falsely accused of espionage, apparently because it was though that this would help the political ambitions of a few. This is detailed in Asian-American physicist Wen Ho Lee’s book MY COUNTRY VERSUS ME. Read there of our current police state tactics and pernicious racism at work. Take a close look at our Drug War, which is racist to its very core. Examine at the record of John Ashcroft’s Justice Departments and the imprisonment of thousands on the flimsiest of pretexts following 9/11. And one could continue.

Miss Rosa died some few years ago in her 93rd year and is grieved by the very wind that murmurs through the pines of that place. Yet if I could speak to her once more, I would say, Miss Rosa, even though you are gone, with your ability to see with a heart once broken the plight of those less fortunate, Miss Rosa, with your willingness to do the right thing even if it was risky business, Miss Rosa, now long gone, how we need you now.

My Mother, Miss Rosa, the lawbreaker.

“My Mother the Lawbreaker” is adapted from a presentation for Toastmasters at MIT, Cambridge, MA. August 30, 2002

The Chickasaw Plum - Volume I - Number 4 - December 2004

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