Tag: community

Flying Toward Forever by Marla Cantrell

Posted on by Louise Canfield


Eunice Iola Mondier was my grandmother. Small and short and black-headed, with crystal blue eyes, she attended the Second Baptist Church. She sold Beauty
A person sitting on the ground in front of water.Counselor makeup. Even then, when I was a girl, I felt as if she should have attended the much bigger First Baptist Church, as if she should have sold Avon cosmetics. Those were names a person could get behind; they were A-list material. At least that’s what I thought when I was all of nine years old.
Which is a nice way to say that my family was very nearly poor and not well connected, which seemed at the time to
matter more than almost anything else.
Not that she ever said that to me. Her life suited her just fine. She wore old clothes and drove quick new cars in bright colors with wide racing stripes. She wore big straw hats and spent afternoons fishing. She got her hair done on Fridays and spent the rest of the week sleeping with a pair of satin panties on her head to keep her up-do up.
My best friend’s grandmother wore a bun, made her own clothes, and baked like she was getting graded on it. What she talked about, when I sat at her cozy kitchen table, was the weather.
My own grandmother defied storms, standing in front of her picture window as lightning struck, as hail pelted the catalpa tree, as thunder shook her little house.
You don’t learn to crochet from a grandmother like mine. You don’t learn to bake, or clean, or do cross stitch.
I did learn from her, though. She taught me the books of the Bible when I was in her Junior Sunday school class and gave me a religious charm bracelet as a reward. She picked up a raft of kids on her way to church, from places that made our trailer, that we’d parked right behind Grandma’s house, look palatial. She sang in the choir, her alto voice so low that it verged on being bass.
At home, she talked back to soap operas and indulged in a little gossip, both things my parents disapproved of. But she also took in her full-grown nephew after he suffered a brain injury that made living alone impossible. What I remember most was how she seemed to delight in him, and in doing so he got a lot better than anyone expected him to.
When I got engaged at a ridiculously young age, she kept her mouth shut and bought me a can opener. “Man’s gotta eat,” she said, and that’s all she said. Later, when the marriage failed, she told me about her first love, Alonzo Willett. I had seldom heard his name, even though he was my grandfather. The story of his treatment of my mother and grandmother was cautionary and filled with so much pain it rarely got told. But on this day she said, “There’s no love like your first love, and he was mine.”
The statement solidified everything I knew to be true about my grandmother. She was not easy to pigeonhole. She taught Sunday school, but smoked clandestinely, a big no-no in the Baptist faith. She shunned divorce but had gotten one from Alonzo in the 1930s when her community considered it treachery to do so. She remarried a saint of a man soon after, someone she loved dearly, and when he died, she went out and found a third husband. “If something happens to him,” she said, once, her head held high, “I’ll go get me another one. I can’t live without a man.”
As far as I know my grandmother never wrote anything other than a few letters, so I don’t get my writing gene from her. And she didn’t read excessively. A few magazines, the Bible, her Sunday school lesson. She had a collection of Reader’s Digest condensed books that did little more than frustrate me, so I didn’t get my incessant need for stories from her either. I don’t think I got my brains from her either. She was a dozen times smarter than I will ever be.
I like to believe I got a dose of kindness from her, but I might be flattering myself. I do know that I’m glad she wasn’t the pie-baking, hand-sewing, fairy tale-reading grandmother I thought I wanted when I was younger. She was tough like cowboys are tough, and soft they way women whose hearts are broken early sometimes are. When I think of her now, it is always when she is behind the wheel, her foot hard on the gas pedal, her eyes just barely scaling the top of the steering wheel. I want her to slow down, but she can’t, and so keeps going, until the road turns to silver beneath her and the sky opens up and takes her away.

Standing with Mother Emanuel

Posted on by Louise Canfield


It’s been two weeks since the horrific shootings at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston,  and we’re hearing a lot about A person sitting on the ground in front of water. Standing with Mother Emanuel. There are inspiring speeches, demonstrations of community solidarity, outpourings of outrage, grief and support to the community.  I pray we have at last turned a corner in our violent history, but experience tells me we have a fragile peace.

Our good intentions so easily get swept away by the whirlwinds of everyday lives, responsibilities and private crises.  Perhaps we succumb to  the emotion of the moment without understanding the promises we’re making.  Perhaps we’re just indulging in righteous indignation. In any case, A person sitting on the ground in front of water.we’ve been here before.   I am old enough to remember the Freedom Rides, Rosa Parks,  the March on Washington, Selma;   the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and of course, the historic election of our first African-American President.  But I also remember too many rally calls to re-dedicate our wounded nation to  racial equality, peace and justice in the aftermath of  yet another act of racial violence.

Over the period of 1963 to present, there have been 45 riots  over 23 states involving African-Americans in the United States; nine from 2001 to present.  To name a few;  Watts (1965), “The Long Hot Summer of 1967 (nine states),  Rodney King (1991) and of course Ferguson (2015). (1) And  yesterday in Charlotte NC,   Briar Creek Baptist Church, was struck by an arsonist.  Its parishioners are predominately African-American, and  once more a hate crime investigation is underway.

No matter your views on any of these tragic incidents,  we are clearly doing something wrong.  Hordes of solutions have been proposed and implemented with varying success; legislation, government programs, church programs, peace marches, and no doubt these  efforts have averted some of the violence.  But clearly, there is no simple solution. Trite as it sounds, I believe that enduring change among people happens one person at a time.  Slowly, but it happens.

I have learned much about race relationships, and many other things, from my grandchildren.  The youngest, JJ, started first grade in a new school that enrolls children from over 50 zip codes in the Houston area.  After his first day, he remarked warily,  “I don’t know, Mom, there are a lot of strangers there!† She reassured him they would soon be friends.  And they were.

Perhaps it’s learned, perhaps wired behavior,  but whatever the origin, we are wary of strangers.  And rightly so; after all,  we teach our children about “stranger-danger.†  But there’s another kind of “stranger danger” – the danger of blaming strangers for our troubles  when we have no understanding of theirs.  We all do it; I’d like to think, mostly unconsciously. But the “strangersâ€Â Â we need to befriend are not the guy walking toward us  at night in the long overcoat, or the teenager cutting us off on the freeway, but the people in our daily lives.  The woman at the auto parts store, the guy at the pizza parlor, the high school student at the dry cleaner, the checker in the grocery line, the postman and yes, the unwary telemarketer who interrupts our dinner by doing her job.

When our communities were small and everyone looked pretty much the same,  we  accepted each other,  often grudgingly,  for who we were.  We had to, we depended on each other.   Attacks on each other were rare and almost always  localized to a few people  with some sort of private feud.    Now most of us live in cities where  hundreds of  anonymous faces encounter us on the street, in cars,  busses, and airplanes.  Unless we have school-age children, most of us know only a few of our neighbors.  We may recognize familiar faces on our daily commute or in coffee shops for years yet never speak to each other.  Instead we are mesmerized by our electronic devices, oblivious of those around us.    More and more of our “friends†are  on social media.

It’s not enough.  We need community.  If we befriend that neighbor who looks a little different, we may reconsider reporting him to the neighborhood association for weeds in his lawn.  Maybe we’ll find out he’s carrying for his critically ill wife.   Perhaps if we learn about the trials of the working mom from the harried checker in the grocery line we might start contributing to, or even working at, the local food bank.  If we communicate in Spanglish with the lady at the laundry, perhaps we will both improve our language skills and come to know each other as neighbors and not competitors.   At least the efforts will make someone’s day a little brighter.  However we do it,  we need more friends and fewer “strangers† in our lives.

For centuries Southern women have been the cornerstones of the family.  These strong women held their families together through enduring hardships and stood for justice at no small cost to themselves. They were our role models.  And the values they passed to us  are our gifts  to our children and their children.  I believe it is my responsibility to my children and grandchildren to live out my commitment to justice,  not just in the aftermath of tragedy, but in my daily encounters with those around me.  If I do nothing, my grandchildren can only conclude it was unimportant to me, and if I have any influence on them,  by example, not worthy of their time.    I have no illusion that community-building will stop racial violence, but I do believe that one person at a time,  we can build communities that make a  difference.

Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, founded in 1816,  is the oldest African Methodist Episcopal church in the Southern United States.   The original church was burned down by in 1822 by white supremacists and rebuilt in 1865.  Her pulpit has hosted such luminaries as Booker T Washington, Martin Luther King,  Coretta King, and most recently Barak Obama.  She has survived an earthquake and a hurricane and severe structural damage due to lack of funds for repair. (2)  But She is  still standing.   Are we?

Note:  The previous post from Zetta Brown was written the week before the Charleston shootings.  It exemplifies by its content and responses from readers, that the kind of community suggested here can indeed exist and flourish.   I welcome your comments..

(1) List of Ethnic Riots, Wikipedia (2) History,  Emanuel African American Episcopal Church http://www.emanuelamechurch.org

Images are from the public domain

The Sew and Sew’s

Posted on by Louise Canfield


A person sitting on the ground in front of water.That’s what they call themselves.  Of course they do.

They might admit,  if they got to know you, that it’s a little trick we use to behave in a manner likely to meet resistance.  Admit we’re fixin to cause a fuss, but in a good way.  We’re coloring outside the lines here,  (we’re “so and so’s” );  you’re going to have to do without us for an entire day every week.  No cooking, no cleaning, no taxi…but hey, it’s for a good cause; we’re sewing.   Confusing, huh.  But who can argue with it?  And there  are several of us, so if you are a disgruntled husband, employer, kid, or relative who wants our attention, you’re not alone.  Get over it!

They meet once a week to sew for local hospitals, have “dinner” together and just talk, but mostly to sew.  And they are prolific.  Blankets, caps, pillows, aprons, smocks, quilts,.. whatever hospitals request. There is an assembly line of cutters, sewers,  finishers.  Patterns are “pieced” to conserve fabric, and leftovers bigger than a 4″ square are made into quilts.  Quilt blocks are fashioned from pages of expired phone books.  No one is paid, rewarded or recruited.  Fabric is donated…or sometimes someone finds a sale.  These are women with busy lives; families, jobs;  all the time demands  we all have.  And yet here they are,  every Thursday,  all day.  And every month, boxes of finished products are loaded into the trunk of an ancient Lincoln and distributed to hospitals and nursing homes.

Of course, the idea is not new.  Women have gathered to quilt and sew for centuries.  As children, my cousins and I played under the quilt frame in my grandmother’s living room.  I remember how excited we were  to watch the frame holding the growing quilt lowered from the ceiling.  For a wonderful afternoon, we were allowed to play here in our private “fort”,  bordered by black lace-up brogans and long gingham dresses,  accompanied by the chatter of soft voices, the tinkle of ice in sweet tea glasses, the crackle and hiss of logs burning in the fireplace, the occasional chair scraping on the hardwood floor.   We knew something important, something special was happening.  We didn’t know what; we just wanted to be there.

These were not quilts for display, they were for warmth against the cold winter nights. They weren’t from designer fabrics, but from scraps,  worn out clothing or flour sacks.  (And yes, flour really did come in cotton sacks; I had dresses made from them..)  Everyone worked on all the quilts and the finished products were shared by all.  By the winter there would be enough for all the families.  But it wasn’t about just making quilts;  it was about sharing.  Sharing news, joys, sorrows,  hopes,  home remedies, recipes, prayers.  Always prayers.  Especially during the war times.  There was no Google, no health insurance, no Dr. Phil or Oprah, no psychiatrist; all they had was each other.  It had to be enough.

But those were different days. These ladies don’t need quilts for warmth. They really don’t need quilts at all.  These women have traveled, held jobs outside the home,  attended college.  The tangible needs met by their grandmothers’ sewing circles are now met in other ways.   Social media provides instant communication with family and friends.  Thanks to immunizations and antibiotics,  devastating diseases have been eradicated by vaccines and antibiotics.  On the surface, the sewing circle would appear to have outlived its usefulness.  Yet it persists, and if anything, is growing.

I suspect this is because the sewing circle feeds the soul with the spirit of community,  and I think this  was what I sensed as a child.  I think we hunger and always have, for the sense of belonging and contribution that comes from spending time with  neighbors; from cheerfully responding to the needs of others,  giving without thought of return.  In our fast-paced,  egocentric  society,  I think we feel the need for community more than ever.  It’s certainly  true for me and I am truly grateful to these ladies and thousands of other like them for preserving this beautiful tradition.

.A little disclaimer here; I know these ladies.  I grew up in this community; our grandmothers were friends and relatives.  And as wonderful as they are, they are not unique.   There are sewing circles in church basements,  community centers and private homes everywhere, quietly continuing the traditions of the sewing circle.    And I suspect if you asked any one of them why she does this, you would be met with a blank stare, and possibly a seat at a sewing machine.

So the next time the newscast gets you down, your kid scews up Again!,  someone loses a job, or you’re just having a bad hair day,  maybe look up a sewing group.  Might just mend your soul.  God bless’m.