The African-American Experience (from my history units)

She was my twenty-first client. An overall-clad toddler was attached to one hand, and a mini-cart was in the other. This middle aged, slightly overweight black woman seemed ordinary enough as she requested a bag of groceries from my Pittsburgh church’s cooperative emergency food pantry (operated by forty churches).

I was one of the afternoon volunteers entrusted with this duty.

Number 20 had been Jessie.

Jessie lived nowhere. Amid the blue, acrid haze of Pall Malls and the shiny, stainless steel coffee pots sat the fallen angels of my city. Street people languished in the dawn of an inner-city diner, mercifully permitted by the management to stay.

A country breakfast or the deluxe waffle belonged to the clean-shaven postman, but not to the street people. They waited for their 10 A.M. mushroom soup at the soup kitchen.

Street people were created slowly. A reposed car. An unpaid mortgage. A lost job. Eventually the street person was born, and all that remains of the former, everyday person were wistful excursions into the real world through long gazes at the television in the Sears showroom window.

On this particular day Jessie was dying, and she knew it. Two months ago her left foot was severely cut when she stepped on a piece of a Pepsi Cola bottle thoughtlessly thrown against the library wall by youths. It still bothered Jessie that kids would waste a nickel. “Kids,” she growled. “Everything is given to them!”

A St. Francis Hospital emergency-room physician sutured her wound, but the root-cracked sidewalks, her oversized shoes, and too many days without a shower have doomed her. Her friend Sidewalk Sally—so named because hher home was a discarded refrigerator box placed over a sidewalk heat vent—suffered a similar injury last year, and her foot was amputated. Jessie would rather die, and the awful smell coming from her foot reminded me that she soon would.

“Jesus loves his little Jessie . . .” she continued to sing.

Dawn was past, noon was over too, and the food closet is opened. But night would soon come.

Jessie knoew that sreet people must move now too. Jessie stepped onto a downtown bus. She will sleep in a women’s shelter tonight.

A child on the bus is screaming. Jessie gives her a generic brand chocolate-chip cookie carefully saved in a napkin.

At the end of the bus ride, Jessie steps off into night. Tomorrow, if they’re alive, the street people will again stagger into downtown to continue the endless, empty cycle of the people of the street.

But Number 21 was in front of me.

“Hello,” I offered without looking up from my work pad. “My name is Jim.”

Number twenty-one replied with a quiet, defeated “Viola.”

I was a long way from home. ­McGehee was 1600 miiles away. I was pastoring a tiny, dying inter-city sandstone church in the middle of the worst part of Pittsburgh. My church was much larger than my 40+ congregation needed. Its pink sandstone walls were scared by generations of Pittsburgh smoke.

I was interrupted by an old friend, a wonderful lady who attended my church. Number 21.5 I guess! One did not control interruptions in this business!

She visited our corner almost every day. Harbinger of hope, preserver of continuity. She gently lay neatly cut one inch squares of white bread under the blue and white sign that warned would-be villains that there was a “Neighborhood Watch” ubiquitously watching over this community.

Some said that this lady was crazy. We whose stories are so complete and well rehearsed are suspicious of those with stories we do not know or cannot comprehend. But she had no story. Or, at least she was not talking. She offered us very few hints-a frayed coat two sizes too large, her pockets stuffed with West Penn Hospital brochures entitled “Cancer-You can survive!” That was all we knew. She came to church once a year and she never spoke. The old woman who ruled Friendship and Roup remained an anonymous citidal.

She guarded her pieces of bread from unscrupulous ants, barking blue jays, and mischievous school children. Her face was all seriousness-no trace of a smile. For her work was sacred and important, even if no one else thought so.
But I did. I thought that her work was important. And even if I did not know who she was-she accepted my friendly “hellos” with a suspicious frown-I appreciated this eccentric lady who brought bird song to a community muted by hard luck. She stood alone at our corner next to two abandoned buildings ravaged and neglected by time. She brought beauty and hope to a community that desperately needed both.

One Easter this lady visited my church. Some of us have been here all year, week after week, struggling to beat the world back so that the birds will eat our pieces of bread. Others haven`t been here since Christmas or even last Easter. We all are trying to make it. That is all—nothing fancy—just make it one more day. Passing thathat final exam. Balancing work responsibilities and school responsibilities. We are silent today. We have a story to tell, a story we need to tell, and someday we shall. But today we want to listen to the preacher, we want to hear the organ, we want to sing the songs of victory. Because we are the bread lady. We are bringing song again to a community muted by hard luck and hopelessness.

“Unusual name,” I thought. I once knew a Viola. Twenty years ago, in McGehee, my family sub-contracted most of our game cleaning to a thin, tobacco-chewing woman whose granddaughter was named Viola.

Viola’s claim to fame was her gift: She could clean, dress, and fillet largemouth bass faster than any person alive. Her hands moved like wild birds.

Her gift generally unappreciated, Viola now lived in poverty in one of the worst sections of Pittsburgh.
Twenty years ago Viola lived with her grandmother every summer and fall.

Her grandmother’s house was a plyboard shack, absent of indoor plumbing or electricity. Viola had never ridden in a car, never been ten miles from where she lived, and had no hope of doing either in her lifetime. She ate cornbread, mustard greens with a little lard, and great northern beans. She had never visited a dentist or a medical doctor, and she never would. Her world was full of poverty, hopelessness, and despair. And danger–her brother was one of the last lynching victims of the Ku Klux Klan before Governor Faubus sent an aide to speak to Uncle George MacMillen, the grand dragon of the KKK and a ruling elder in my church, and advised him to employ more “subtle ways to keep the niggers in line.”

Viola’s shy granddaughter affectionately called Viola “grandbaby.” Every summer Grandbaby visited her grandmother, and for six days a week, Viola chopped old Man Smith’s cotton. With expertise and enthusiasm unmatched anywhere in Desha County, Arkansas, young Viola single-handedly massacred whole acres of crabgrass that threatened the young cotton. With her six-foot hoe, she effectively equalized the equation. And she was also one of the fastest pickers too. Not as much of a phenomenon with a cotton bag as she was with a cotton hoe, but Viola was still quite competent. My Uncle Sammy Smith knew he owed his cotton-growing success to a wiry little chopper from Marianna, Arkansas, who happened to visit her fish-cleaning grandmother every summer.

“Viola. That’s V-I-O-L-A, “said the woman sitting in front of me. “Do you have any ground meat today?”

I was lost in a remembered cotton field.

This woman in front of me, number twenty-one, was my Old Man Smith’s cotton chopper from Marianna, Arkansas.

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