streaked with gray. I loved Big Mama and she stood up for me, stressing first and foremost self-sufficiency and schooling. A black man without an education don’t stand a chance, she would always say.
The debate between the philosophies typically associated with Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois was represented in my own family in the differences between my paternal and maternal grandmothers. Big Mama was with Du Bois: education was primarily what would advance the race, and staying in school and doing well there was what mattered most. She was grounded in that idea during her childhood in the Bahamas, where education could clearly lift at least some black people into the elite.
In contrast, Grandmama and my own mother thought that getting a trade was more important. Coming from a farming family in South Carolina, they put more emphasis on hard work as a path to success, like Washington did. My maternal grandmother, mother, and aunts on that side of the family all thought that being economically independent first and foremost was more important than book learning—and that was what they saw elevating black people economically, to the extent that was possible in the segregated South. They emphasized hard, manual labor with an immediate payoff, rather than intellectual work, which might never pay off in that punishing and unpredictable environment.
Of course, context was an important consideration for both Du Bois and Washington: both recognized that neither strategy could be pursued exclusively and that in some settings there were limits on what could be achieved through education or business success alone. My grandmothers reflected this complexity as well.
Although Big Mama put more stress on education, she did not see it successfully lift her family in America during my childhood and she recognized its limits in places where racism radically constricted opportunities. Grandmama, of course, had seen that all her life, which is why she thought striving for maximum economic independence was more productive than wasting too much time on school performance.
I would ultimately side with Du Bois on the primacy of education for myself. However, it would be a long time before that became evident, before I even knew that this was a complicated fault line in black history that had intellectual heroes on both sides. And I think much of the credit for my success today belongs to Big Mama and the important role she played in raising me.
Big Mama took a special interest in me and in my second-oldest sister, Brenda. She took me in when my parents split—but Brenda had lived with her since she was a toddler. At that time, my mom couldn’t handle raising so many young children so close together in age. Beverly was born just ten months after Brenda, leaving MH with a two-and-a-half-year-old, a ten-month-old, and a newborn. What began as a temporary arrangement after Beverly’s birth in April 1962 wound up becoming permanent for Brenda.
I should note here that these kinds of informal child custody transfers were common among my extended family and friends when I was growing up. Many of my cousins and friends lived not with their mothers, but with their grandmothers or aunts. Although the practice of aunts or grandmothers raising their relatives’ children has been attributed to the effects of crack cocaine on mothers, again, the rise of these arrangements preceded the marketing of that drug and is much more complicated.
In my family, I’d say that mistrust in or misuse of contraception played a much greater role. My mother, for example, wouldn’t take the Pill, because she said she didn’t know what was in it. She felt it might sterilize her permanently or could be part of some conspiracy to destroy the black family. We’d all heard about the Tuskegee syphilis experiments and how black men had been left to suffer a curable disease just to allow white scientists to see how it progressively destroyed their bodies and
The debate between the philosophies typically associated with Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois was represented in my own family in the differences between my paternal and maternal grandmothers. Big Mama was with Du Bois: education was primarily what would advance the race, and staying in school and doing well there was what mattered most. She was grounded in that idea during her childhood in the Bahamas, where education could clearly lift at least some black people into the elite.
In contrast, Grandmama and my own mother thought that getting a trade was more important. Coming from a farming family in South Carolina, they put more emphasis on hard work as a path to success, like Washington did. My maternal grandmother, mother, and aunts on that side of the family all thought that being economically independent first and foremost was more important than book learning—and that was what they saw elevating black people economically, to the extent that was possible in the segregated South. They emphasized hard, manual labor with an immediate payoff, rather than intellectual work, which might never pay off in that punishing and unpredictable environment.
Of course, context was an important consideration for both Du Bois and Washington: both recognized that neither strategy could be pursued exclusively and that in some settings there were limits on what could be achieved through education or business success alone. My grandmothers reflected this complexity as well.
Although Big Mama put more stress on education, she did not see it successfully lift her family in America during my childhood and she recognized its limits in places where racism radically constricted opportunities. Grandmama, of course, had seen that all her life, which is why she thought striving for maximum economic independence was more productive than wasting too much time on school performance.
I would ultimately side with Du Bois on the primacy of education for myself. However, it would be a long time before that became evident, before I even knew that this was a complicated fault line in black history that had intellectual heroes on both sides. And I think much of the credit for my success today belongs to Big Mama and the important role she played in raising me.
Big Mama took a special interest in me and in my second-oldest sister, Brenda. She took me in when my parents split—but Brenda had lived with her since she was a toddler. At that time, my mom couldn’t handle raising so many young children so close together in age. Beverly was born just ten months after Brenda, leaving MH with a two-and-a-half-year-old, a ten-month-old, and a newborn. What began as a temporary arrangement after Beverly’s birth in April 1962 wound up becoming permanent for Brenda.
I should note here that these kinds of informal child custody transfers were common among my extended family and friends when I was growing up. Many of my cousins and friends lived not with their mothers, but with their grandmothers or aunts. Although the practice of aunts or grandmothers raising their relatives’ children has been attributed to the effects of crack cocaine on mothers, again, the rise of these arrangements preceded the marketing of that drug and is much more complicated.
In my family, I’d say that mistrust in or misuse of contraception played a much greater role. My mother, for example, wouldn’t take the Pill, because she said she didn’t know what was in it. She felt it might sterilize her permanently or could be part of some conspiracy to destroy the black family. We’d all heard about the Tuskegee syphilis experiments and how black men had been left to suffer a curable disease just to allow white scientists to see how it progressively destroyed their bodies and
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