From left to right: Martha Southgate, her mother Joan Southgate, and sister, Letitia Baldwin

MARTHA SOUTHGATE: Women Warriors

At 48, I have reached an age that truly feels like the middle of things. I have a 10 year old daughter, Ruby, and an 80 year old mother, Joan. I look at my daughter and sometimes see my own 10-year-old face. I look at my mother and see what I’ll look like if I’m blessed to live for many years to come.

From this perspective, I feel I can see motherhood much more clearly, both the highs and the lows. I find the culture’s current obsession with motherhood as a state of being tiresome. I’m not a woman who ever fiercely wanted to be a mother, though I’m grateful to be one. As an adolescent and a young woman, I looked at children with mild interest and some wariness. When my husband and I decided to have a child and I got pregnant with relative ease, I counted myself lucky but I didn’t feel like my life’s purpose had been fulfilled or that I now had more reason to live than I had before. I was pleased. I enjoyed breastfeeding, I deeply love my son and my daughter. But there’s always been more than that to me. I think I learned that from my mother.

My mother will be the first to tell you that she has loved being a mother to me and to my two brothers and my sister. But it was never the only thing that drove or fulfilled her. She was an adoption social worker, an abortion clinic counselor, a community organizer before community organizing was cool. On May 1, she set out on her second walk of many hundreds of miles to raise money for an Underground Railroad Education center in Cleveland. In the 1980’s, I was an organizer myself for a little while-until I discovered that while I admired the goals, I hated the day-to-day work of community organizing (I don’t know how Barack did it-all that doorknocking! All those meetings! Yikes.)

One of the great blessings (among many) that I received from my mother was that she didn’t insist that I be just like her. And what’s more, she raised me to be a feminist. This helped me to have the courage to be myself. When I finally confessed to her that I hated organizing, I left the field with her blessing. She encouraged me to get out of Cleveland and head for the big city, once it was clear that’s what I wanted. And she’s always, always had my back. She once called me her “courageous worrier.” And I’ve never forgotten it. Yes, I worry about how things will turn out-but I’ve tried not to let that stop me in whatever endeavors I’ve set out on. I hope to pass the same spirit on to my daughter-and keep that spirit of fierce iconoclasm and joy alive for generations to come.

Martha Southgate is the author of 3 novels, most recently Third Girl From The Left. She is working on a new novel to be published by Algonquin Books.

Jill Nelson (left) with her mother A’Lelia Nelson at Wilson’s Restaurant in Harlem, 1981.

JILL NELSON: Beach House Memories

”O.K., Jillo. Let’s see what went wrong with this sucker over the winter.”

This is what my mother said each spring just before she turned the key in the old brass lock at her house on Martha’s Vineyard. Words spoken with a mixture of dread and defiance, as if she were expecting the worst and was determined to overcome it, whatever the it of winter on an island in a house closed for seven months of the year might bring.

Finding the right key, jiggling it in a lock buffeted by sand, salt and Northeast winds, then throwing a hip against the heavy door to force it open was a part of the experience. Once inside, my mother, about whom the only thing small was her physical stature, would begin inspection. She’d stride in that slue-footed way she had of walking through rooms it seemed we left just yesterday, frozen as they were in that moment the previous fall when the weather abruptly turned too cold to stay in a house warmed only by fireplaces.

Always, a beach towel remains draped over a chair, a few glasses and dishes, remnants of the last meal before closing, rest in the rack beside the sink, a newspaper dated fall of the year before serves as archaeological evidence of our having been and gone. An errant ball floats in the green felt of the table, awaiting the return of the cue ball and would-be pool sharks; the jukebox we gave my mother on her 70th birthday is frozen on that final selection: B5, Etta James, ”Don’t Go to Strangers,” or E7, Bob Marley asking, ”Could You Be Loved?”

In this annual sometime-around-Memorial-Day ritual, which we performed together for over 25 years, sometimes the expression on my mother’s face is apprehensive. She searches for the land mines of summer homes: leaks in the shingled roof; havoc wreaked by birds that came through the chimney and panicked themselves to death; an unlocked window and empty liquor cabinet, the debris left by some thirsty, basically harmless year-round resident.

Yet more often her brown face is filled with joyous anticipation and then relief as she opens doors and rediscovers the pleasures of her summer home. Each year in early spring my mother buys outdoor furniture to be shipped to the Vineyard house, left on the back porch by the UPS guy pending our arrival. And every year I argue that we have enough, don’t need it. Only recently have I come to understand this is her way of gently grooming, sprucing up, making sure the house can accommodate all of us, and more.

Then outside to the yard and gardens, to see what flowers have appeared, what bushes meticulously planted have disappeared, what unknown, perhaps unwanted but more likely welcomed species of flora or fauna has migrated to our yard from gardens unknown.

Outside the kitchen window is a tall tree with shiny reddish bark that my mother ordered from somewhere years ago and swears is a cherry tree, although we have yet to see a blossom or a hint of fruit. She stands with her hands on her hips, head tilted back, looking up. ”Where are my cherries?” she asks, shaking her head, and we both laugh.

Together, we raise windows, lower screens, sweep floors swept just before closing up yet each year miraculously coated with a thin blanket of sand, turn mattresses and make beds with sheets that smell sweetly of salt. As she gets older, my mother does less and I do more. Often, as the sun sinks down and the illuminated cross above the Methodist Tabernacle switches on, my mother sits in the wicker swing on the glass porch, sipping the summer’s first libation, as I finish washing the last of those little panes of glass. It is my mother who says, the sucker open and intact: ”Slow down, Jillo, you work too hard. You remind me of my mother. Relax.”

My family has spent summers on this small, strange island since 1955, when I was 3, in this house since my parents bought it when I was 15. New Yorkers, we live in an apartment nine months of the year. In the winter my father is a dentist, my mother president of the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company, the four of us their privileged offspring. When summer comes my father is a golfer, explorer and dreamer, my mother the queen of cookouts and easy living, a woman who laughs in the twilight, dispenses dollar bills for trips to the penny arcade and Flying Horses Carousel, spends lazy cocktail hours on the porch with friends and, best of all, forgets the importance of bedtime.

Even as the children become adults the Vineyard house remains the center of the life my mother built for her children and we build for ours, a place where we are always welcomed, loved and most free. When my daughter is born in 1972 I rush her there before she is 6 months old, into that warm house and the cold Atlantic. Last year we took my infant grandson into the ocean across the street, baptized him into Vineyard life beside the jetty where my mother swam for almost 50 years. Now, people tell me I remind them of her.

It amazes me that a house can be so accommodating. Hearts have been mended and seduced here, tears of all varieties shed in these rooms, much lost but more gained inside these walls. This place, like ocean water, is good for what ails you.

My mother died on Jan. 20, 2001, her last gift to me erasing Inauguration Day. We are late that year, but in June my daughter and I go together to open my mother’s house. We finagle that stubborn lock; walk through rooms frozen in a diorama of my mother’s last summer. A pair of the enormous shades she always wore, a stack of newspapers, notes made in her elegant, looping script, all slightly sandy.

Outside, I pass my mother’s cherry tree, festooned with delicate blossoms. That summer it will, for the first time, bear fruit. I stand beside that tree and thank my mother for her being, this house, these rituals.

Nowadays, months before my daughter and I go to the island to open that sucker, I spend hours looking for lawn furniture.

Jill Nelson is the author of the bestselling Volunteer Slavery, which won an American Book Award; Straight, No Chaser; and Finding Martha’s Vineyard: African Americans at Home on an Island. Her new novel, Let’s Get It On, a satire set on Martha’s Vineyard, will be in bookstores June 1.

Troy Johnson at age 4 in 1966 with his mother Myrtle Johnson

TROY JOHNSON: A Close Encounter With Mom

4,700. This is the number of miles I traveled, in a car, with my mother and two teenage daughters this past March. We planned a circuitous route from Seattle, Washington to New Orleans, Louisiana; 18 states in 14 days. My mom would see the Pacific Ocean, the travel along the Colorado River, drive through Rocky Mountains passes, visit Mount Rushmore and even shop the Mall of America—all for the first time. At 71 (her actual birth date is not known) it promised to be a trip of a lifetime.

Her seemingly intrepid son, however, was worried about car problems, too many bathroom breaks, rednecks, the quality of the hotel rooms, food, money, keeping to a tight schedule and the potential for intergenerational conflicts over what constitutes fun things to see and do. I was both looking forward to and dreading our North American excursion.

One unanticipated consequence of the trip was that I got to know my mother much better. We spent two solid weeks sharing hotel rooms, meals and touring the country in our rented SUV. I had not spent this much time with Ma since I was a young boy.

My mother’s personality has not changed, however, my understanding of her and her tactics for raising me has changed. My mother is a classic “Do what I say, not what I do,” type of parent. She is a lifelong smoker who taught me the importance of not picking up the habit. She is overweight yet instilled in me the importance of eating right and staying fit. She was not happy in her marriage but managed to help me appreciate the importance of a lifelong, committed and loving relationship.

I often wondered how she did this. Our road trip made it obvious – she did it by staying on top of me. Even as an adult, a few years shy of 50, ma did not hesitate to remind me to drive carefully, “You don’t need to speed, Troy, slow down.” or to moderate my drinking, “Do you really need that second glass of wine?” or to make sure I got enough rest, “Don’t stay out too late, you need your sleep.”

That does not mean that I always heeded mom’s sage advice. Even though the automobile speed limit in Montana is no longer “reasonable and prudent,” that did not stop me from cruising at 110mph when ma was not paying attention.

Ma stayed on top of me her entire life. She raised me in East Harlem during the 1960’s and 70’s, in a time when gangs were rampant and drugs were widespread. She constantly reminded me, often contrary to what everyone else was doing, to “respect your elders”, or to “Never hit a woman,” and “Don’t throw that on the ground, put that in the garbage can,” or “Troy you better save your money,” and above all “Boy, you betta get down on your hands and knees and thank God for all that you DO have.”

What I thought of as nagging as a teenager I realize, as an adult, was training. My mother trained me to do the right thing; even before I knew the difference between right and wrong. Her warnings are with me, even when she is not. They served to form the basis of a moral core that has served me well all my life. For this and many other reasons I will always love and treasure Ma.

I hope I can be as successful as Ma, as I try to teach my daughters—contrary to what their dad might do—that driving faster than 110 miles per hour is not a good idea when the posted speed limit is 75,,even in Montana or when no one is looking.

Troy Johnson is the founder of ALLBC.com (The African American Literature Book Club) and is the Senior Book Editor of Harlem World Magazine.

William Jelani Cobb and his mother Mary Bester Cobb

WILLIAM JELANI COBB: Standing Tall and Smart

There are really just two things you need to know about Mary Bester Cobb of Bessemer, Alabama. The first is that she’s tall. On purpose. My mother is tall in the way that other people are Catholic or Jamaican or Harvard grads — as a key element of her identity. My father was 6′2 and I’m certain that I owe my existence to the fact that he wasn’t 5′9.

She’s also intentionally smart. Not obnoxiously, but the lamp is definitely not hidden under a bush, either. If IQ was income she would be one of those people in the upper tax brackets. She hates ignorance the way that rich people hate taxes; the way a reverend hates sin. One year my warped version of an April Fools joke involved informing her that the mother of her next grandchild was a woman whom I’d met six weeks earlier at a party, invited home and barely remembered. She was quiet for a heavy moment and then asked “Well… is she intelligent?”

Mary’s main goal in life was to ensure that her children would be both tall and smart. This might seem like she was setting her aims too low until you realize it had nothing to do with genes and everything to do with history.

Here’s something else you should know: in 1943 Bessemer, Alabama was a place that wanted neither pride nor intellect from its Negroes. There is a special entry for Bessemer in the glossary of insults visited upon black folk in those days; the slouching of black shoulders was a point of municipal pride. And smart? If you want to spark a particularly unpleasant conversation, try asking my mother about the Bessemer Public Library circa 1949, when a skinny six-year-old got the notion that she wanted a library card.

OK, one last bit of information: Mary, well, she’s the defiant type, too. Standing erect was her way of turning a walk down the street into her own personal civil rights march. Her payback for the library incident was the singular pursuit of every and any book she could get her hands on between then and now.

Somewhere around 1977, a former child of Bessemer took her son to the Queens Public Library and insisted that he look the librarian in the eye and inform her in plain English that he wanted a library card. I still remember my scrawl of my eight-year-old signature on the white cardboard square.

At the age of 54, my mother enrolled in New York University, where she would earn her Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in social work. The early days were trying — she had not been in a classroom since the Bessemer days. But she did have an ace up her sleeve: a son who was purposefully tall, publicly smart and a sounding board for her early essays. A dividend paid on that thirty year old library card. In some way my mother’s response to that long ago world is at the heart of my own decision to become an educator and a writer.

Not everything we inherit is in the genes.

William Jelani Cobb is an Associate Professor of History at Spelman College and the author of To The Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic and The Devil and Dave Chappelle and Other Essays.

BERNICE L. MCFADDEN: Dysfunctionally, Stubbornly, Lovingly

I tend to visit my mother on Sundays. Usually, our time together is spent in what has always been considered the heart of her home: The kitchen. The sun has had an ongoing love affair with that part of the house; often fanning its golden rays across the lemon colored walls like the plumes of courting peacocks.

Over the years my mother and I have been many things to one another, often exchanging roles of caregiver, educator, and advisor.

I am her first-born, the child that has been with her the longest. We know each other quite well, which does not always translate into understanding each other with the same familiarity. For example, she has made no qualms in pointing out to me one of the reasons as to why I am still single, “You’re stubborn!”

In return, I admonish her about her ever-increasing obsessive-compulsive behavior.

I complain about it even though I understand her need to connect with something and then ride until it’s dead. For forty years her life revolved around work and family, and then one day she woke up to find herself unemployed and a widower. Her children were gone, taking her grandchildren with them and leaving her alone. There was no one to cook for, to clean up after or to quarrel with, and so she began to fill the lingering hours with distractions that would muffle the echo of heartbeat bouncing off the walls of the empty rooms in her home.

Her current obsession are brainteasers – mind-strengthening games. Her favoritse are the word jumbles. I walk into the kitchen to find her seated at the butcher-block kitchen table, head bowed over a book of jumbles and with her jaw clenched in concentration.
The jumble she is working on today features words that have to do with Thanksgiving. I lean over her shoulder and point to the first word:

URKYET – “Turkey,” I say.

“Oh yeah!” she cries, “I would have never gotten that.”

I pull two bags of frozen scallops and sweet potato fries from the freezer, pour oil in the frying pan and set it on the waiting blue flame.

“Fried food is no good for you. Why don’t you just put it in the oven and bake it.” She states without looking up from the book.

“I don’t wanna.” I say and push my lip out like a defiant ten-year-old and then I point to the second word:

SSDREING – “Dressing,” I say.

“You’re so smart,” she says, snapping her fingers, like she had nothing to do with my intelligence, like she didn’t read to me every night, and when I became a mother myself stepped in and took care of my daughter while I attended night school. She says that as if she wasn’t the one who encouraged me to pursue my dream of becoming an author, as if she didn’t have my back from day one….

When the fries and scallops are ready I pour them into a plate and set it down on the table between us. We consume the greasy treat with our fingers as we study the next word in the jumble.

YLMFAI
Family! She squeals with delight.

Yes, for better or for worse, through thick and through thin, obsessions and stubbornness, till death do us part – Family.

Bernice McFadden is the author of six critically acclaimed novels, including the debut bestseller Sugar and Nowhere is a Place, which was one of the Washington Post’s Best Fiction titles for 2006. She also writes sexy, humorous fiction under the pseudonym Geneva Holliday.

Tananarive Due (seated) with her mother Patricia Stephens Due

TANANARIVE DUE: Battle Scars

My mother, Patricia Stephens Due, inspired me and my sisters for a lifetime…but not for the reasons we thought when we were children.

In 1960, when my mother was twenty years old, Patricia Stephens was one of five Florida A&M University students (including her sister, Priscilla) who spent 49 days in jail after being arrested at a sit-in at a Woolworth lunch counter in Tallahassee, Florida. They chose to stay in jail rather than to pay a fine—becoming the first “Jail-in” in the student sit-in movement.

Her activism came with scars. Mom has worn dark glasses inside and outside since 1960, when a policeman threw a teargas bomb in her face during a nonviolent march in Tallahassee. During voter registration campaigns in nearby Quincy in 1963 and 1964, she and other civil rights workers had to hide behind furniture when their Freedom House was sprayed with bullets—and police did nothing. She was arrested and suspended from school several times, but she never flinched or wavered. She and my father, civil rights attorney John Due, served as daily, living examples that individuals could change the world.

Mom was our folk hero. As children, my sisters Johnita, Lydia and I wrote essays and papers about our parents—particularly Mom. (My mother and I write about her experiences in the book Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights.)

As time passes, I am no less grateful for the sacrifices my mother made in her quest for equality…but my greater awe is reserved for the decisions she made as a mother.

By the time my youngest sister, Lydia, was born in 1969, my mother had observed how activists were so focused on the struggle outside that they sometimes overlooked their own households—and their children suffered. So, she became a foot-soldier in her own home instead.

My sisters and I were practically home-schooled on black history and civi l rights so we would know, as my mother put it, “where we had come from.” She made sure we were active in the NAACP Youth Council, serving as an advisor so we could try to improve the world in our own ways. She was the strictest mother on our block. She volunteered in our schools, keeping up with our progress—and one teacher called her “The most intimidating woman I’ve ever met.”
Acting lessons. Music lessons. Dance lessons. My mother never tried to force us into activities to fulfill her own dreams—only to make sure we could discover our own.
As children, my sisters and I were enchanted by my mother’s strength and bravery outside of the home—but now that I have my own five-year-old-son, Jason, her daily example of motherhood is the most enduring light that shines.

Tananarive Due is a novelist and screenwriter who has won an American Book Award and an NAACP Image Award. She lives near Los Angeles.

Errol and Tomi Louise

ERROL LOUIS: A Magical Trip With Mom

Back in 1965-1966, my mother and I took a magical trip to the stars.

I was about to turn 4 years old. My dad, an NYPD officer, was usually at work, and my three older sisters were off in grade school. My younger brother hadn’t been born yet.

That left Mommy and me alone in our apartment in the Manhattanville Houses, a public housing development in West Harlem. Sometimes we would walk to the library on 125th Street or take a trip to the corner store, but what I remember most are the times we stayed home and watched the space program unfold on our black and white television.

This was the year of the Gemini mission, when the government sent a pair of astronauts into orbit every few weeks, working out the problems and procedures that had to be mastered in order to land a man on the moon. Mom and I watched every dramatic mission from liftoff to splashdown, learning all about Titan rocket boosters and spacewalks and docking maneuvers.

When strangers and relatives remarked that her toddler was using big words, talking about spacesuits and orbits and such, my mother said I was naturally curious. But that wasn’t the half of it: she was — and remains to this day — a voracious learner bent on finding out everything about the world. We kids were along for the ride.

Born in Florida during the dark days of segregation, my mother did not conform to any of those stereotypes of southern-born matriarchs who would spend all day cooking and scrubbing and quoting Bible verses from memory.

None of that for my Mom, who put limits on the time spent on domestic chores. “You can have a neat house or brilliant children – not both,” she told my father.

“Look at these hands,” she would tell us kids, holding them up. “They’re delicate. Your mother is a princess.” That usually meant things had gotten too messy, and it was time for us to get sweeping, washing clothes and taking out the trash.

It also meant, by extension, that we were all royalty, too – we just happened to be living in the projects, and later the suburbs of New York City – and were expected to act the part. In other words, no profanity, no talking back to grownups, no fooling around in class — and unflinching love and loyalty to our little band of aristocrats.

Mom was a kind of mad scientist when it came to child-rearing. She said we were like her plants, and that she was cultivating us like the wild riot of lilies, tulips and mums she filled our house and yard with.

When I was in 5th grade, Mom stopped our dentist just as he was about to throw out cartons of old magazines that were cluttering up his waiting room. Several years worth of Time, Newsweek, New York and Cosmopolitan magazines ended up at our house, where she mixed them in with my comic books. I put them in chronological order and read them all, over and over – it was like reading a grand epic– and to this day, I keenly remember long-forgotten feuds and political intrigue from the Nixon and Ford administrations and the rise of feminism (a subject of keen interest to Mom).

She was distinctly nonchalant when two sisters and I ended up at elite universities – Harvard, Yale Bryn Mawr, Rensselaer. My mother never went beyond high school, but would have aced any of them.

Thirty years later, my wife and I never even considered putting our son in day care. He’s been spending days with my mother (at her insistence). She had him reading flash cards before his first birthday.

I have studied with, or interviewed, billionaires, Nobel prize winners and certified geniuses. None, in my mind, will ever match the brilliant woman who showed me — before my first day of kindergarten and long after — that the sky is no limit.

Errol Louis is a columnist and editorial board member of the New York Daily News, host of “The Morning Show” on 1600 AM WWRL radio, and a CNN political analyst.

REVEREND AL SHARPTON: Victories and Battles

My mother was the center of my life.
She raised me as a single parent after a traumatic breakup with my dad that dislodged us from a middle class black suburban life to the center of a housing project and welfare- subsidized upbringing. She made the transition, however, seem almost expected, and never gave me a sense of anything less than high expectations in life.
I never even felt I was underprivileged until I later studied sociology at Brooklyn College, because though she became a domestic worker and though I had to stand in line with her for food stamps and other government handouts, she would constantly preach to me about how life is not about where you start but where you are headed.
Eventually my sister succumbed to the streets and went to federal prison. For many years, it was just my mother and I against the odds. I suppose as I grew in the ministry and civil rights work, I wanted to succeed to vindicate her faith in me and her unyielding faith in God.
Five years ago, she became afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease. When I visit her she no longer recognizes me or shares the memories of our journey. She does not know the victories or battles of the last several years, which tends to sadden me deeply. But I’ve come to know that the measure of greatness in Ada Sharpton is not the journey she has forgotten, but the lessons she made me remember.
Mothers produce the flowers when they blossom, they are only an extension of the seed of the mother that planted them in the first place.

Reverend Al Sharpton is the President and founder of the National Action Network (NAN), and one of America’s most-renowned civil rights leaders.