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Branches of the Vine: The Price of Admission
Re-Imagining the Bible Belt South for a Nu World Order
By O. M. Davis
Balboa Press
Copyright © 2012 O.M. Davis
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4525-6484-5
Chapter One
April 1, 2012
Dearest Dad,
Now that I have retired from the workforce, I have come full circle and back to the family unit where it all began. In 1983, a year prior to your death, you asked me about the book that I had promised to write. I was still keeping a journal, trying to make sense out of new encounters where I was considered an outsider. I did not know that I was following my own value system, which I thought was universal. In the end it came down to my role models, you and Mom. Your marriage of forty-five years that ended with your death was the stability that, unbeknownst to me, was what carried me through all the challenges that I encountered.
My retirement became effective on December 1, 2010. It took me a year to heal before I could go back and put into perspective all the information gained during my work years. Looking back over those years, my writings unfolded as raw experiences and wounds that came out on paper as generation of knowledge. These writings became my clearing board and the building blocks for the next adventure. In taking it all in as an adventure, where I was simply looked upon as an alien as to my gender (female) and race (African-American), I became visible. I wrote myself in, so I was invisible, and I used my pen to do so. In so doing, the wandering soul of my enslaved, unnamed great-great-great- Native American Cherokee grandmother's gaze upon the two children forced on her through rape slowly receded. I came to understand the meaning of her gaze.
In moving through the public and private sectors of the work world, I found that my imaginary friends from my childhood of gods and goddesses took on new meaning. My subconscious had been programmed to understand the basis of Western civilization by simply reading and learning about Greek mythology in the fourth grade. My physical and mental senses knew when they were insulted. I have found that in my research to resolve problems, the present seems to take care of itself. I have learned that process is often more important than the end result. This came about because of a conversation with Professor George Kent, my former black college professor at Quinnipiac, who later become a faculty member at the University of Chicago. Upon graduation, I had planned to go to Spain and write great fictional romance novels, but I was taken aback when I was questioned as to what love was all about. It was a question that remained with me, for I had forgotten that I had made a vow to myself to search out the truth upon leaving home for college.
In writing this book, where I was about choosing my own desires and following my bliss, I had to go through a lot to find out that a woman, especially one of color, was excluded from visible positions, regardless of skills.
The males and whites I encountered had their own stereotypical versions of a black female from the South. They seemed not to know that the segregated Jim Crow, apartheid Birmingham area employed steel and coal wage workers. It was not farm country. Although the black multimillionaire A.G. Gaston made headlines with Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1960s, many did not make a connection between black people being wage earners or having their own businesses and institutions.
Of course, you recall the Roman smithy god Vulcan who sat atop Red Mountain looking down upon Birmingham with his buttocks exposed. The good white women ensured that his front was buttoned up in the blue overalls of the steel furnaces that belched pollutants for miles around. Many steel and coal workers died with black lung disease. As a child, when we traveled, I loved for you to drive through the area at night. The furnaces belching to the sky made the city so alive and electrified, as if on a sunny day. I was so in control of myself that as the first of our family to work within private industry and a Fortune 500 corporation, I had to write to ensure that I knew what I knew.
In the first generation of knowledge, which I call "The Imaginary Playground," recounts the period of growing up in the Jim Crow, segregated South, where my imagination transcended my surroundings. Our close-knit nuclear family of grandparents, uncles, and aunts abounded with love. This went from the family to the surrounding community, which comprised the church and the school. My playmates, imaginary gods and goddesses, were invisible role models, which laid fallow until I needed them later on in life. The church was key in building skills during the summer of leadership youth Bible school. I held all authority figures accountable for their actions, because you were my role model. I always had a thing about the Old Testament Herod and Pontius Pilate. At bedtime, there was the oral history of maternal grandparents, the enslaved Native Americans, and paternal grandparents and their struggles from tenant farmers to landowners. There was also the racist Ku Klux Klan marching and the near-death experience of road rage. The Jim Crow schools provided some fun times, as the parents were involved with these schools to ensure their success. The importance of education overrode all of the negatives.
Upon leaving home, Mom made it a point to tell me that I did not owe the two of you anything; whatever you did for us, it was because of love. I had no burdens to bear except to be happy.
The second generation, which I call "The Medium Is the Massage" (McLuhan's message becomes the massage) is where I began to get a sense of being a thing and property of others, with society's blessings. As a transplanted Southerner in the Northern environment, I was expected to fit into some kind of stereotype that had been predefined and inexorably fixed. I dropped out of college to simply research the black female in the American setting. I read all the stereotypes for black women and concurrently read a lot of books by English writers on women in general.
With limited knowledge, I knew what I did not want. I refused to divide myself by race or gender based on white, male, or institutionalized expectations. I found that I could forego material or other comforts for my own mental psyche. I refuse to enter an interracial marriage and move out of state because his parents would not accept me. In other instances, I refused the terms of sex as the condition for my getting housing or allowing whites and males to terminate me without cause. When a black male manager terminated 80 percent of the blacks, which included me, to make room for incoming whites, I refused to accept it. Although I did not know what laws were in place for incidents like this, I knew that the company had a federal contract. I wrote a complaint letter, and I was reinstated. Upon joining another federal program with a creative component to become a two-year college trained black and Hispanic students to be paraprofessionals, I spoke out. A two-week strike ensued, protesting the fact that certificates would be awarded to students who could not read and write. Prior to this event, I spoke out again when the program was going to be replicated for inferior educational purposes by the repressive South African regime. The fact that some professional blacks would support such a program left me devastated, as I could not understand why they would support such a program geared to black and brown people.
In the third generation of information, which I call "Crossing the Burning Sands," I see a system of white and male power brokers acting like they speak for black people and using these two traits as a sense of entitlement for anything they decree. This came about in my next job, where white executives in not awarding me a promotion told me that I had two strikes against me. I hired the Madison Avenue white attorney that represented the Black Panther Party. I did all the talking, and I won.
In my next Fortune 500 company job, I had to seriously deal with myth and reality in working in private industry. Again there was the male and white situation. When a white male and a black man bonded together to terminate me, an inner voice told me to kill both of them. I was on the brink of a double murder and suicide when I pulled back, remembering Mom. Once the tears were over, I wrote my own historical perspective of the genesis of American reality as I saw it. The black race was a whole new people forged on this soil. We were nu people, and my enslaved ancestors had called on Jesus Christ to be their Savior. That was all that was necessary after I had done the best that I could. My history was sacred, as much blood had been spilled. I saw that I was the sum product of the bondage blood of my ancestors and that I was a nu me. I did not have to kill. I now knew that I could not give up my life so lightly. I felt humbled and vowed never again to feel so low as to want to kill for workplace matters. I sued the company and made a settlement. The use of attorneys taught me that I alone must look after my own interests or be excluded from the loop. Spending a couple of years as an underemployed worker, I met a whole new population of people and moved in circles that I otherwise would not have encountered.
The fourth generation, which I call "To Be or Not To Be," is about attending the 1980 UN Mid-Decade Conference for Women in Copenhagen, Denmark. I was trying to decide whether or not to become an expatriate. I was tired of interviewing for positions where males expected me to reward them with sex to be hired. With over 220 countries in attendance, I was able to gain some insight as to what was happening to women in the underdeveloped world, as well as the Western world. I interviewed the fundamentalist women of Iran, talked with prostitutes, lesbians, and female leaders of states. Again, God must have been pointing the way for me, for how else could one explain my having dinner with the leader of McGill University's student takeover and the model for the planning of the aborted murder of my boss and the white vice president. Upon coming home, I found a job and ended up confronting a white female college professor who gave a paper on structural transformation. Her paper chided black females for being left out of the system again, a blatant dig at the 1970s women's liberation movement. It was there that I learned of the acceptance of privilege and its price. It was awarded to those who did the system's bidding on the bended knee of worship or lying prone, sex becoming the crucial condition for employment.
When a black female manager handed me my termination paper that was initiated by the white director, I sought a black male counselor, who gave me the book, The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building. I came to terms with the manager's collaboration and failure to take a stand. I had taken a stand on a white executive demanding sexual favors in the workplace, so I should have foreseen this as my ending.
In the fifth generation, which I call "The Squeeze," I recognized a repetition of gamesmanship where the incoming predominant decision makers were all black, with no higher-level accountability. Recognizing that the black CEO will inherit a system in which I will again be underpaid and riveted in place by a white and male power infrastructure, I demanded my back pay for two years of working without the title at a higher-level position. I received it, resigned, and moved on.
The sixth generation, which I call "Ahead of Her Time," was taken from a "guy talk" conversation by a CEO, in which he said that I was not being given the same conditions as whites because the system was not ready to recognize black women as visible.
Having just left one organization where the system downgraded and underpaid blacks to maintain many functional white illiterates, I quietly set up a system with legitimate policies and procedures and objective criteria for general use—and for my eventual day in court. Each day, my creativity was riveted to the walls with plots and subplots of black-on-black sabotage, third-party sexual harassment, and favoritism from leadership and those in the loop. Each day, I rose to meet the CEO's challenge to maintain his empire, which was the equivalent of cutting off his balls in his race- and gender-hatred games.
I was now dragging the system into the new millennium, kicking and dying all over the stage like a Greek tragedy. There were bodies all over the stage. All I had to do was to try and write a script to put them out of their misery. Yet I cried tears of pain and laughter, for I was part of the human condition. No one was above the law.
Each day that I wrote and created my own scripts, based on my very own human experiences, I realized that my former professor George Kent had a point about my not knowing the inward workings of America. It was good that I stopped and took in what he said. For the greatest fiction is that life is based on rules and procedures when one is ignorant of those rules.
The greatest fiction was what others had created for my persona. The nonfiction of simply being free as a human being was beyond my imagination. Thus, I can say to George Kent that the real-life tales of adultery, emotional blackmail, harassment, and greed were more than I could ever have imagined. On the other hand, my imagination had no boundaries in meeting those real-life dramas. It was interesting how my childhood imagination from playing with gods came into play. Those petty Earth gods, white and male, with leadership authority always reminded me of Herod and Pontius Pilate. Here on Earth, they were not above the law.
The global village now knows that there is a nu world order. While white women have enjoyed the global status of respect based on their skin color, that has not been the case for women of color. In the past, on a global basis, males often saw a black female as an easy sexual mark or a prostitute. Based on America's history, our historical women of color fought for the rights of black males first in order for the woman of color to have her rights. We now have a president of color born of a mixed-race marriage between a white mother and a Kenyan father.
Having navigated the courts and challenged executives for my basic civil rights, I have shared this information with many female friends. It has become my pleasure and delight to use my pen like a sword to cut through sexual and gender games. As we enter the twenty-first century, it is utterly fantastic to have arrived in this place and time and to have peace of mind and to sing of one's self without having to simulate the oppression.
As I close this letter upon entering the second decade of the twenty-first century, I am indebted to Mom and Dad. For it was her love that allowed me to pause and think about the taking of a human life for vanity or a material thing. Vengeance is not mine! I am indebted to my dad for his self-reliance and belief in education. There is something about death that clarifies manmade events and those that occur through an act of God. As always, I will now see both of you in my dreams.
Until we meet again.
Stepping Into The Gaze
I do not know when I first became conscious of the fact that the gaze of my great-great-great-grandmother was fastened upon me. Perhaps it was somewhere in my mother's telling of the story that was passed on to her and has since remained with me.
In scenes from my childhood, I am listening to her story with my brothers; my mother is holding a baby in her arms. I am fighting with my brothers for space in mother's bed, somewhere near the bottom; certainly not at the top, for that would make me a baby. We are in the house that my father, an Alabama steel mill worker; it was built with his own hands in 1941. He is working the swing shift.
Mother's soft voice begins with a slight whisper: "If you are not quiet, you are going into your own bed." Mother said that great-grandmother Schollotee told her that her mother told her that her mother was sold into slavery, and she never saw her again. She said that my great-great-grandmother did not know how old her mother was when her mother was sold. She remembers that she and her sister were sitting on the porch, locked into each other's arms, looking at their mother on the day she was sold. They dared not cry, for their mother held them steady in her gaze while she stood yoked at the neck and chained to a parcel of slaves.
Somehow in later years, I imagined the girls were between three and five years old. A look could silence children at that age. In later years, I found this to be true; Mother's grandmother was the younger of the sisters.
"There was a parcel of slaves," Mother began, "and they were lined up to march. She was at the very end of the line. She looked at the children until her neck was yanked forward as they marched over the rise of the hill and disappeared. The children, who were part white, stayed with the plantation master, who spoke German."
The haunting eyes of a mother standing tall, not crying, simply looking at her children always made me cry. "Didn't she cry?" I would wail. "No, she didn't cry," my mother would say emphatically. "She simply looked at them, and the children looked at her."
Years later, when I read of the treatment of slaves in Deep South states like Alabama and Mississippi, I recalled my unnamed ancestral great-great-great-grandmother. Since my great-grandmother spoke German and had remained on the plantation, I deduced that her grandmother was the younger of the two sisters on the porch. Her sister was later kidnapped by professional slave catchers, who came on horseback and simply rode off with her.
The maternal side of my family produced many images from stories handed down, and I always wondered about my maternal great-grandfather, W T; he was half-Creek and probably of German ancestry. He married my great-grandmother Schollotee, who was part Cherokee and more than half German. Schollottee's mother (my great-great-grandmother) became a breeder women. She gave birth to two children in the same year, 1865, by a German of the same household, where the unnamed great-great-great had given birth and was later sold. This was the story that was handed down to me. Schollotee was given 160 acres of land upon her marriage to W.T. (Tom).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Branches of the Vine: The Price of Admission by O. M. Davis Copyright © 2012 by O.M. Davis. Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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