It's in your hands - Sisterspeak

ONCE upon a time, as most fables begin, there was an old, wise blind woman. The daughter of slaves, she lived alone in a small house outside of town. She had a reputation for wisdom and was honored far and wide. One day some impudent young people decided to play a mean trick on the woman. They came to see her and posed a question. "Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead." She didn't reply, for she couldn't see them, much less what they are holding. They repeat the question. "Is the bird living or dead?" Her silence is her answer. She is thinking, because she knows their motive. If she says the bird is living, they will kill it. If she says the bird is dead, they will still kill it to fulfill her prophecy. She waits so long that the young people snicker. They have her, they think. When she speaks, it is slowly and her soft voice is a reprimand. She says, "I don't know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands."

Author Toni Morrison opened her Nobel Prize acceptance speech with that classic fable 10 years ago. Sister president Johnnetta Cole has been known to use it in her lectures. In this New Year, the tale bears repeating. The question is still relevant, but especially for Black women, who hold so many lives in their hands. What will we do with the life that we hold in our hands? Is it alive and vibrant? Or is it already dead and useless? What happens to our Black children? The ones we had or the ones we are raising? Will our relationships falter, after surviving so much systemic pressure? Who will teach our daughters and care for the elderly?

We received much of our wisdom from the mother wit of the smart old women who were the scions of slaves. They did so much with so little, and yet today sometimes we women have trouble doing a little with so much. We can learn much from women like Georgia's Cora Lee Johnson, who had a dream and fulfilled it. One of 10 children, she was married at 14 and sharecropped cotton. She lost six babies working in the field and eventually moved from Georgia to Florida with her husband. She came back to Georgia to care for her ailing mother, and during that time, her husband found another woman. When her mother died, she stayed in Georgia and got a factory job, but she was injured in an auto accident on a Saturday, and was fired on Monday morning while still in the hospital. She says, "I was 62 years old, a poor, uneducated, disabled, Black woman. I didn't have much confidence, but I decided I couldn't just sit down and do nothin'." She started a sewing center in a small town southeast of Macon, Ga. She got no encouragement. Her family thought she was nuts. But she had a dream and now she's helping other women have a dream. She not only teaches sewing, she teaches life values to welfare mothers, some of whom never had anybody to teach them or to love them. In a book called Women of Courage, Inspiring Stories From the Women Who Lived Them by Katherine Martin, she talks about her life and her support of other poor women. "I try to be there to tell 'em, to love 'em, whenever their parents put 'em out. I let 'em know somebody still loves 'em, 'cause I'd've never started the sewing center without some powerful women helping me grow and lovin' me."

Powerful women with their earthy and pithy mother wit have saved more Black girls' lives than will ever be known. Smart girls stayed close to those old women to pick up those stray bits of wisdom. I know I soaked up such wisdom as a child, beginning with toddling around my great-grandmother's wheelchair. She was born in slavery's shadow and with little formal education she relayed her rock solid faith to her children through the genius of the spirituals of our heritage. In our fight against disillusionment, despair and the evils of a racist society, my great-grandmother would sing softly in an old, cracked voice, "Didn't my Lord deliver Daniel?" When we thought we couldn't go on, it was "walk together and never get weary." When it was time to serve others, "we must cheer the weary traveler," until it was time to "steal away."

Our mother wit has saved us and carried us from plantation to boardroom. The poet Rita Dove says, "You start out with one thing, end up with another, and nothing's like it used to be, not even the future."

And now that we are on the other side of the river, with a new millennium and a new year in front of us, what will we do with our hard-fought and blood-won futures? One thing we know for sure, the answer is in our hands.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Johnson Publishing Co.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group