I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: The Way Life Was

  • say it plain, say it loud

    say it plain, say it loud


    Benjamin Mays was the child of former slaves,. He was born on an isolated cotton farm near Ninety Six, South Carolina in 1894. His parents were sharecroppers. The darkest years of Jim Crow segregation were just descending on the South; humiliation, mob violence and lynching by whites were common threats for African Americans. Mays learned at an early age the searing lessons of racial inferiority. He had a vivid memory of being stopped with his father by a group of armed, white men on horseback. “I remember starting to cry,” Mays wrote. “They cursed my father, drew their guns and made him salute, made him take off his hat and bow down to them several times. Then they rode away. I was not yet five years old, but I have never forgotten them.”2 (American RadioWorks: A Century of Great African American Speeches)

    In 1940 following a fascinating journey from this inauspicious beginning Mays became the President of Morehouse College, a respected black school for men in Atlanta; Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Morehouse graduate in 1948 and considered Mays to be his “spiritual mentor and intellectual father.” On April 9, 1968 five days following the assassination of King, Mays delivered his eulogy in an open-air memorial service on the Morehouse campus where a crowd estimated at over 150,000 people attended.

    As we celebrate the actual birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929) with a federal holiday in the United States in 2024, the words of the Mays eulogy still speak plain and loud.

    “God called the grandson of a slave on his father’s side, and the grandson of a man born during the Civil War on his mother’s side, and said to him, ‘Martin Luther, speak to America about war and peace. Speak to America about social justice and racial discrimination. Speak to America about its obligation to the war. And speak to America about nonviolence.‘

    Let it be thoroughly understood that our deceased brother did not embrace nonviolence out of fear or cowardice. Moral courage was one of his noblest virtues. As Mahatma Gandhi challenged the British Empire without a sword and won, Martin Luther King Jr. challenged the interracial injustice of his country without a gun. And he had faith to believe that he would win the battle for social justice. I make bold to assert that it took more courage for Martin Luther to practice nonviolence than it took his assassin to fire the fatal shot. The assassin is a coward. He committed his dastardly deed and fled. When Martin Luther disobeyed an unjust law, he accepted the consequences of his actions. He never ran away and he never begged for mercy. He returned to the Birmingham jail to serve his time...

    Morehouse will never be the same, because Martin Luther came by here. And the nation and the world will be indebted to him for centuries to come… 

     I close by saying to you what Martin Luther King Jr. believed. If physical death was the price he had to pay to rid America of prejudice and injustice, nothing could be more redemptive. And, to paraphrase the words of the immortal John Fitzgerald Kennedy, permit me to say that Martin Luther King Jr.’s unfinished work on earth must truly be our own.”

    Say it plain; say it loud. America remains indebted to Martin Luther King, Jr. on what would have been his 95th. birthday in a new century, and his unfinished work on earth must truly be our own. We have much to do.

    Onward.

  • hail, hail – the gang’s all here – what the heck do we care now?

    hail, hail – the gang’s all here – what the heck do we care now?


    Sometimes a song won’t let go of you for reasons known only to the universe and your memories. I published this piece in March, 2018; but the song (first published in 1917) has been playing in my head again so I thought this post was worthy of a second look. What the heck do I care now – let me explain.

    Christmas memories seem strange on Good Friday, but then the mind often ignores time or at least is able to reconstruct its meandering corridors to bring buried secrets to the surface of consciousness.

    One of my favorite Christmas gifts when I was a child growing up in Richards, Texas in rural Grimes County was not one I received but one  I gave to my maternal grandmother Louise whose name I shortened to Dude when I was unable to pronounce Louise. Louise became “Dude-ese,” then simply Dude.

    I was two years old when my dad, mother and I moved into my grandmother’s small Sears Roebuck designed house in Richards in 1948. We lived in that little house with her for eleven Christmases, and each Christmas she gave me two new pairs of underwear she bought from the general store where she clerked six days a week from 8 in the morning until 6 in the evening with an hour for lunch. Two new pairs of underwear wrapped in last year’s red paper she carefully saved, used again and again, tied with a gold string and a tiny tag signed in her scrawling handwriting Lots of love, Dude.

    The Christmas before we moved away from Richards I bought Dude a present at Mr. McAfee’s drug store from money I saved from my allowance. I had never bought her a gift before and was so excited about my purchase: a door chime that played Hail, Hail – the Gang’s All Here. I hadn’t told anyone about my gift, so imagine the look on Dude’s face when she opened it. Just what she needed, she said, and had me believing it.

    Dude had been 50 years old when we moved in with her and was 61 when we moved away to a town 70 miles from Richards leaving her with a disabled adult son, no transportation since she never learned to drive, and very little income. My family came back to visit her every two weeks; whenever the front door opened we were welcomed with the chimes playing hail, hail – the gang’s all here, what the heck do we care? On those weekends her gang was there.

    I was totally unaware of what loneliness combined with the loss of laughter and love must have been for her the other days and nights of her life at that time because I was, after all, a self-absorbed teenager whose only experience with loneliness was self-imposed and transitory. I was never at a loss for laughter.

    By the time I graduated from high school, my grandmother’s life had the beginnings of her roller coaster battle with depression that would plague her for the rest of her days – a war really – on battlegrounds she fought in doctors’ offices and hospitals,  fought sometimes with medicines, sometimes without medicines, sometimes with electroshock therapy.

    My visits to see her became less frequent when I went away to college, and I remember being surprised on one of those visits to discover the door chimes no longer played when I opened the front door. Surprised, but totally unaware of the significance. Her gang was no longer there.

    This morning I was taking a shower and for some reason the shower song du jour was Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here which brought the Christmas memories of my grandmother’s door chime pouring over me like the hot water that rinsed my hair. Dude was the first woman to love me unconditionally with all her heart. I hope wherever she is today her gang is there, too because I want her to be surrounded with the love she gave each of us in the little Sears Roebuck home in Richards.

    Dude (1898 -1972)

    ********************

    Slava Ukraini. For the children.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • the mystery of the unknown children

    the mystery of the unknown children


    The children in these photos had significance to my mother who lost interest in her family history somewhere along the road to losing her memories. Pretty and I found these pictures among hundreds of them dumped haphazardly in boxes in my mom’s garage when we were cleaning out her house to move her from her home in Rosenberg to a memory care facility in Houston in 2007. I could identify most of the people in her large collection, but I am clueless on these children whose photos had no names anywhere. I love these photos for the times and places they represent, but what wouldn’t I give to know who they were and what their relationship was to my mom.

    who is this little girl framed by flowers?

    she had five identical pictures of this little boy –

    but no name on any of them

    this little girl seemed happy with being photographed

    these two little girls didn’t look happy at all

    Blackburn Photography took this formal portait –

    still in photography business in Houston today

    The moral of this story (if there is one): ask questions today of the ancient ones in your family if you want to avoid unsolved mysteries in your future. Starting the new year is a good time to begin. My Uncle Marion might have said “discover more in 2024.” I say go for it.

    *****************

    Slava Ukraini. For the children.

  • visions of sugar plums dancing in my head

    visions of sugar plums dancing in my head


    I know I posted this piece earlier in the year,

    but the story belongs in my holiday musings.

    Enjoy.

    I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills – oops, no that wasn’t me; that was Meryl Streep saying the first line from one of my favorite movies Out of Africa.

    I meant to say once upon a time I had a plum tree in the far southwest corner of our back yard on Worsham Street in Montgomery. The first year we were there that plum tree rained plums like pecans off a pecan tree in San Saba, the pecan capital of Texas. For reinforcements to help with the harvest, I first asked my next-door neighbor Jon who brought a ladder to pick the ones higher than I could reach on a tree that was twenty feet tall. He also was the first to suggest we should make plum jelly, an idea I rejected as ludicrous because I didn’t cook anything anymore. Enter my cousin James Paul, my mother’s brother’s son, who lived nearby and volunteered to help make plum jelly because he had my Aunt Mildred’s recipe. Hm. He had a secret family recipe for plum jelly so maybe this was a sign I couldn’t ignore.

    Okay, what’s next, I repeated to James who stood beside me in the kitchen but appeared lost in a trance for what seemed to me to be an inordinate amount of time. His eyes were closed so long I began to wonder if he’d drifted off to sleep. James, what’s next, I said louder with more than a bit of impatience.

    Well Cuz, I think we need to put a bunch of these plums in some water and boil them for a while. That’s what we maybe need to do first, he finally said.

    What? I asked. You think we maybe need to start by boiling some plums in water for a while? What kind of recipe is that?

    Yeah, I seem to be having a little problem remembering the exact order Mother did things in, he replied. It’s been more than fifty years ago since I was a kid watching her, you know. I figured it would all come back to me, and I think it probably will. Besides, I thought you’d be more help. He stared at me – I stared back.

    Then the lunacy of what we were doing hit us both, and we started laughing together. We were having a good time. It was fun to try to re-create a simpler period in our lives when our people made some of the food we ate in our home kitchens, to reconnect to the lost sense of that family we’d had in those earlier days since we basically were apart our entire adult lives except for an occasional Christmas when our paths crossed in random moments under one roof. We shared the same family roots that gave us joy in our early childhood days, the family that gave us our hopes and dreams for the future. For James and me on a Sunday afternoon in my Worsham Street kitchen in the third act of our lives making plum jelly was an act of faith.

    But what we needed at the moment was a recipe.

    James Paul called his older sister Charlotte who matter-of-factly reminded him their mother always used the recipe enclosed in the SureJell box. So much for secret family recipes, I thought. I could feel the wheels coming off my Colonel Sanders vision for a plum jelly empire. We opened one of the dozen SureJell boxes I bought the night before at the Brookshire Brothers grocery store and followed the directions that were indeed included with purchase. Charlotte was always the practical one and had a better memory than her brother and her cousin put together when it came to her mother’s cooking.

    *************

    Four hours later, eleven pints of plum jelly jars formed a line like red soldiers on the white kitchen counter. Each lid popped as it sealed to salute us for a job well done. James held a single jar to the light from the window over the kitchen sink and declared it to have the perfect clear plum color. We were happy cousins that afternoon and talked about how good the jelly would be on toast at breakfast. I wanted to taste the final product as soon as we finished, of course, but James told me it should set for a couple of days first. Naturally, he would remember that. We promised to call each other as soon as we took the first bite.

    The taste of the jelly James and I made from plums on a tree in my own yard in 2010 defied description. I called him two days later after the jelly had time to set and asked him what he thought. Cuz, that jelly is about the best I ever had in my life, he said. I’ve eaten it on two pieces of toast this morning. It’s sweet, but still has a little perfect tart taste to it, too. And what did I tell you about the color? Prettiest reddish pink color I ever saw on jelly. I can’t believe we really did make it, can you? I had the most fun I’ve had in a long time. We’ve got a fig tree over here at our house in Navasota that’ll be producing before long. We ought to try making fig preserves, don’t you think?

    Yes, that sounds good. I’ll have to bring your mother’s pots and pans back to you. Fig preserves should be a cinch for us now that we’re experts in the jelly business. I don’t know about you, but I think it’ll be tough for me to buy Smucker’s or Welch’s jelly again with any enthusiasm. Couldn’t agree more, he said. We just have to make what we have last through the winter. That could be a problem, I told him, and we both laughed. 

    I’m not sure if the taste improved with the intensity of the labor or the love James and I shared that Sunday afternoon in our hot Texas kitchen, but I know I ate peanut butter and plum jelly sandwiches for the rest of the summer. My neighbor Jon and I also had a great time together when we made his version of plum jelly from a cyberspace recipe he Googled which was much quicker to make than the SureJell one, or maybe I was just getting the hang of it… or maybe Jon did all the work.

    ****************

    Slava Ukraini. For all the children everywhere.

  • the provenance of my mid-century modern Christmas letter

    the provenance of my mid-century modern Christmas letter


    In days of yore before Pretty introduced me to her antique empire vernacular, I couldn’t distinguish vintage from antique from retro to mid-century modern. Provenance was a self-discovery word from watching countless episodes of Antiques Roadshows with her on Monday nights after I gave up on the NFL when Plan B free agency ruined the game for me. TMI.

    My mother loved her Christmas cantatas at the church, decorating for the holidays, wrapping gifts, baking her homemade fudge, divinity and specialty Osgood pies – baking was her therapy during the two weeks away from her second grade classrooms once she could relax from the stress of the musical performance. My mother often told me “practice makes perfect” when she sat for hours at her piano working on a particularly difficult section of a piece. She was pursued by her passion for perfection.

    But her signature holiday delights were the Christmas cards our family received every year from friends and family members who were separated from us by distances in a world before Instagram, Facebook, Linked In and X. The address book Pretty and I found when we closed her house in 2007 was in tatters from decades of use – addresses scratched out, crammed with new ones on the same line. She never let go of her Christmas card list.

    My dad, on the other hand, barely glanced at the cards when they came in with the exception of the Christmas card letters which he felt were far superior to cards sent and received. I can hear Daddy saying to my mother, Jimmy and Maggie Jones have the right idea – they always take the time to write a letter even though they are as busy as we are. (Remember my dad loved to write letters.)

    In December, 1964 my thirty-seven year old mother must have been particularly wigged and frustrated by her inability to “get everything done” including her holiday cards mailed on time so she and my thirty-nine year old father agreed to jointly construct their first and, as far as I know, only mid-century antique family Christmas letter. Daddy had a secretary at his new position as Assistant Superintendent of Instruction at Lamar Consolidated in Rosenberg, Texas – clearly he enlisted her to set up and type the letter to save time for Mama’s mailings. I know this because my name is misspelled in every block.

    Ho, ho, ho – that was just the provenance. Here’s the letter. Enjoy.

    *****************

    Unbelievably it is Christmas again. Pretty and I enjoy this season greatly because it’s a special time of sharing. We know of no one we’d rather share our happy highlights with than you all year long right here in cyberspace. Our wish to you is, of course, for a Merry Christmas, but more than that, we pray that God will bless your lives richly in the coming year.