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Saved for a Purpose
A Journey from Private Virtues to Public Values
By James A. Joseph Duke University Press
Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7554-8
CHAPTER 1
Growing Up Black in Cajun Country
I was born in 1935 in a small rural community in Louisiana called Plaisance. It was the year that our legendary governor Huey Long was assassinated. This chance connection seemed of no consequence at the time, but it took on a different meaning some years later when our portraits shared a wall in the Louisiana Political Hall of Fame. Set in St. Landry Parish, where large oak and pecan trees mixed with open grasslands, rabbits, and armadillos, Plaisance was a farming community that served as home to several generations of Josephs.
A few miles from where I was born, the Opelousas Indians once had a thriving settlement. There were very few traces of the earlier settlers who roamed the swamps and lagoons intermingling with the lush vegetation and diverse wildlife of the backwoods, but the community bore their name. The Cajuns and Creoles who followed them wasted no time in placing their stamp on the local culture. The two groups had very different origins and passed on distinct cultures, but their music had somewhat similar sounds and their cooking and folkways shared similar characteristics. The Cajuns were the white descendants of French-speaking Catholics who fled Canada in the late 1700s rather than pledge allegiance to the British crown. The Creoles were the light-skinned blacks with mixed blood who had a close French connection and a history of having been regarded as a distinct cultural group. But despite the present emphasis on the culture and cooking of the Cajuns and Creoles, both were heavily influenced by the Africans who settled in Louisiana as both slaves and freemen.
Few places in the world were more ethnically mixed than the area of southwestern Louisiana where I grew up. All of us, despite our differences in color, reflected in some way the fusion of Acadian and African culture with the equally varied cultures of the American Indians, Spaniards, French, Germans, Scots, Irish, English, Caribbean islanders, and other Latin Americans who intermixed at various junctures to form what the local people now call a "cultural gumbo."
My father looked like a Cajun and spoke fluent Creole, yet he did not identify with either group. His grandfather, Jules Joseph, was of German descent, but my father was self-consciously African American. My mother had Native American blood, but it was her African features that stood out. We were called "colored" then, but we were soon identified as Negroes and celebrated our African connection later when we became known as African Americans. My mother never let us forget that we were the descendants of kings and queens who flourished in very sophisticated African kingdoms when the ancestors of some of those who insulted and marginalized us roamed around Europe as barbarians. It was not unlike Disraeli's reaction to a taunt in which he responded, "Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the right honorable gentlemen were brutal savages on an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon."
My mother was a very proud woman. She had only completed the eighth grade when she was forced to drop out of school to help bring in the family crops. But her father, who was largely self-taught, was regarded as one of the most literate persons in the parish, and he taught his daughter the love of learning. It was my mother who constantly reminded my brother John and me that we had to be twice as good as any white person in order to have half a chance at success. My mother, like my father, saw education as the potential escape route from the boundaries and burden of race. While they prepared their children for a new era they believed to be on the horizon, they sought against poor odds to better prepare themselves as well. My father finished college one year before my older brother John, and my mother finished high school one year after I graduated from college. While we had limited assets and even more limited income, we never thought of ourselves as poor. Even among the most deprived in the local black community, there was a fierce sense of independence and self-reliance. Our worth and our identity were to be found in the quality of our minds, the mystical character of our souls, and the spiritual connection we shared with the universe. As long as we were prepared to outthink and out-work those who positioned themselves as our adversaries, our time would come. This was heady stuff for kids who read by a kerosene lamp and hated the darkness because it sometimes meant we had to stop reading. The little money we had was needed for food rather than light.
Surrounded by Books
We grew up surrounded by books. Many had been used before and begged or borrowed, but we treasured them as if they were newly printed and bound in the best leather. My father's favorite book was the Bible, and he had a library before he had a car. It was while surrounded by his books that I used to sit for hours dreaming that I was a philosopher or a poet, a politician or a preacher, actually writing in my mind a future speech or sermon. And while I did not fully understand the contemporary politics from which I was legally excluded, I came to cherish Pericles's famous oration on the meaning of democracy as if it were my own. While still very young, I suffered with Socrates and studied Aristotle. I quoted Shakespeare and praised Longfellow. I was probably the only kid in elementary school to talk with my teachers about the writings of Bishop Fulton Sheen and the speeches of Douglas MacArthur while playing with toys my father made by hand because he could not afford to buy them.
When my brother John started school, I freaked out when told I was too young. He was about to be six and I was four, but while I could not legally enroll, the teachers allowed me to tag along from time to time. We were still living on my grandfather's farm, and we walked miles through rain and mud and sometimes waded in floodwaters, but we understood that our future depended on our being able to acquire as much education as we could. The state of public education for blacks in St. Landry Parish and throughout the South was deplorable, but this little schoolhouse in Plaisance was more precious than we knew at the time. As I was to learn later, it was one of over five thousand schools constructed for use by blacks as part of a program started by the philanthropist Julius Rosenwald at the suggestion of his friend Booker T. Washington. The Rosenwald Fund, which overhauled the structure of African American education, not just in Louisiana but throughout the South, required that blacks match its grants by contributing cash or labor to the construction of the schools. Black ministers, farmers, tenants, domestic workers, and small business owners joined together to buy and clear land, contribute lumber, and in some cases build the schools themselves. They also raised matching funds by holding festive rallies, planting and selling cotton, and raising and selling hogs. Fiercely independent and reticent to seek help from whites, the hard-pressed but resourceful Plaisance community became an active partner in providing a community school that, along with the local black churches, remained at the center of black life while serving as a symbol of black self-advancement and achievement.
It would have probably startled Julius Rosenwald no end if he had lived to see this little school set a career path for one of its former students to one day become a spokesperson for benevolent wealth as head of the Council on Foundations. It was only much later that I heard of Julius Rosenwald and still later that I learned that I had actually studied in one of his schools, but his largesse became a critical part of the examples I used to make the case for private philanthropy before congressional committees, opinion leaders, and wealthy families. It was a great example of both the value of collaboration and the multiplier effect of strategic philanthropy. During the period of the fund's work between 1913 and 1932, one in every five black schools constructed in rural areas was a Rosenwald School, serving one-third of the South's rural black schoolchildren.
One day, soon after enrolling in the Rosenwald School, my family moved to our own farm. It was not that we had accumulated large resources. It was simply the willingness of an aging farmer to bet on the hard work of my father, who walked clearly and even self-consciously in the footsteps of my grandfather. My mother and father got up early on the morning of the move. While my father readied the horses, my mother began to pack the wagon. John and I did not fully understand why we were moving, but our parents' enthusiasm was contagious. When the wagon was loaded (there really wasn't much to move), my brother and I happily took up positions in the back, watching the old house disappear in the distance as we moved slowly toward our new home.
It was fall, and the pastures were brown and the fields not yet plowed, but there was a tranquility that in its silence spoke to us of fond memories and happy dreams. Along the way, we talked about the happy days ahead. John and I would share a room to ourselves and we would one day be able to afford new bicycles and maybe even ride them to school.
We were not the most successful farmers. While my father's first love was the church and the pulpit, he worked hard in the fields only to find the market for his corn and cotton severely depressed. But I remember the joy and exhilaration of our rides into town to gin and sell cotton. The wagon was packed with as much as the raised sides could contain. The real fun was the return home with the meager, but welcome, money the sale of cotton brought. Always, there was the stop on the way home to pick up some cheese and sardines for my mother. This was the only real luxury she allowed herself. She loved her family and wanted every extra penny to be saved for our individual advancement.
It came as a surprise to learn that after two years we were moving again, this time into the city. The church my father founded was now beginning to generate some income and he had been called also to pastor a second church in Opelousas, the small town that served as the hub of St. Landry Parish, with local government offices, a cotton gin, small stores, a post office, and a church in almost every neighborhood. There must have been some irony in the fact that the house my father bought was across the street from a cotton gin. My brother and I still shared a room, but there was an indoor toilet and running water. We had to pinch ourselves to make certain we were not dreaming. We would be going to a city school and we could now watch the wagonloads of cotton as they arrived rather than packing them ourselves.
The Boundaries of Race
Opelousas was to be the beginning of our contact with whites. Julius Rosenwald had always hoped that the black schools he had caused to be constructed would start the process of bringing whites and blacks together, but they remained segregated for many decades. While the Rosenwald schools focused on reading, writing, and arithmetic, and often did a fine job at that, many of them followed Booker T. Washington's emphasis on preparing black Americans for the jobs likely to be available to them, so they also taught agriculture, shop, gardening, and dressmaking. Yet it was this coming together to study and learn that opened new vistas for my generation and led to an emphasis on other disciplines that better prepared us for new economic and political roles. Out in Plaisance, we had worked our grandfather's land, gone to the black school and a black church, and saw whites only when we came into town. In Opelousas, our next-door neighbor was white. We were told that this was all right as long as we kept in our place. The conventional wisdom, we soon learned, was that in the South blacks (we were called colored then) could get as close to whites as they wanted as long as they did not get too uppity, while in the North they could get as uppity as they wanted as long as they did not get too close. It was many years before I understood this little bit of homespun wisdom, but it seems ironic now that those of us who were educated and self-affirming were first called uppity, later arrogant, and now elitist when we challenge or dare to compete with those with truly elite backgrounds.
It was the same irony that Frederick Douglass wrote about in his own life in Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. He was assigned by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society to travel through part of the state with a white society member to sign up subscribers to the antislavery journal the Liberator. He wrote later that he was generally introduced to audiences as "chattel — a thing — a piece of Southern property with the chairman assuring the audience that it could speak." The abolitionist leaders wanted him to simply tell stories of his life as a slave, but he grew tired of this and wanted to engage his audiences more broadly on the philosophy of slavery. "It did not entirely satisfy me to narrate wrongs," he wrote. "I wanted to denounce them." Because of his speech and demeanor, people said that he did not talk or act like a slave and would not be convincing if he got into philosophy. It would be better for him to act like chattel and use plantation speech rather than seeming as learned as his audience. There was a price to be paid for being uppity.
My brother and I were not dissuaded by this charge that blacks with our ambition and bearing were being uppity. We thrived at the St. Landry Parish Training School in Opelousas. Not only were we good students with good grades, but we got to travel to other schools around the state to compete in various forms of interscholastic competition. I was not very good in sports, as whites somehow assumed all blacks were, but it was a time in the black community in which great orators were analogous to great athletes. The spoken word well delivered was a powerful and honored skill. It was not just a way of telling a story or communicating a thought. The speaker who could mesmerize an audience with the poetry of his words provided not just useful information or empowering insights but often a form of entertainment for audiences with few outlets to expand their imagination or open their minds to new possibilities.
None of my classmates were surprised that while some of them went out for athletic teams, I chose to compete in original oratory and won the Louisiana state oratorical competition. I could not afford the expense of traveling to the national competition, but instead of feeling exhilarated about my victory at the state level, I felt disappointed that it was segregated and I did not have the opportunity to compete against whites. I longed to prove that I was just as good and likely better than most in the exercise of the mind as well as in the art of communication. The victory won me special attention. It helped me to become student body president, and while the annual homecoming showcased our best athletes, I was the one who got to escort the homecoming queen and to bask in a glory once reserved for athletes.
The decision to compete in oratory also led to the practice of putting my thoughts in writing, as I often take flight from the present moment to pen a few notes on a small pad or a notecard for use in a future speech or simply to inform a future conversation. Even in later years as I traveled or sat alone with my thoughts, writing became an important way of grounding my thinking in something more profound, often helping to clarify what I believe or to raise my consciousness of the values I should hold.
I developed a distrust of absolutes, questioning the notion of finality in the development of an idea or completeness in the evolution of time. I saw my life as a journey, and while I did not know where it would lead, I felt confident that it had a purposeful destination.
Our teachers at Opelousas's only black public high school were tough and uncompromising in their insistence that we study, work hard, and excel in whatever we did. They didn't stop with academics. They were determined to develop the whole person, placing as much emphasis on character formation as on academic excellence. Mrs. Emerson, my English teacher, worked on my self-confidence as well as my writing, spelling, and grammar. Mr. Douglas, my math teacher, also served as my speech coach, often keeping me late after school preparing for an oratorical contest. He made me repeat phrases and practice delivery sometimes until my throat was sore and my voice hoarse.
We may have had secondhand books, but our teachers were determined to see that we developed first-class minds. I was surrounded with heroes. The white kids across town may not have ever heard of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and W. E. B. Du Bois, but I knew all about them, identified with them, and wanted to be like them. I could never get enough information about the black heroes who rebelled against the status quo and refused to let others define who they were and what they could become.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Saved for a Purpose by James A. Joseph. Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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