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79 pages

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Stories Seen Through Screen Doors
The Roots and Branches of Black Southern Experience
A truth seldom recognized is that there are almost as many African American southern experiences as there are states and cities in the South. Our lives as southern black people intersect, but they also diverge into unique patterns of learning, growth, and discovery. The stories contained in this collection illustrate some of those similarities as well as the differences. Wanda Macon shares with millions of African Americans a southern soil that is rich in family, church, and racial repression, but she also highlights the spiritedness of a tomboyish young girl, too smart for her preschool age, formed by a variety of occurrences in her small southern community. "The Courts," a horseshoe shaped neighborhood and home to twenty-three families located in fictional Friarsdale, Mississippi, is the site for experience, memory, reflection, and locating one's self in the history of the geography as well as the history of family and community.
By Trudier Harris, University Distinguished Research Professor
Department of English, The University of Alabama
Tuscaloosa, Alabama

Sujets

Vie de famille

Relations familiales

Fiction

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Publié par	AuthorHouse
Date de parution	06 juillet 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781665502085
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

STORIES SEEN THROUGH SCREEN DOORS

THE ROOTS AND BRANCHES OF BLACK SOUTHERN EXPERIENCE

DR. WANDA MACON

AuthorHouse™
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.authorhouse.com
Phone: 833-262-8899

© 2020 Dr. Wanda Macon. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 07/29/2022

ISBN: 978-1-6655-0209-2 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6655-0207-8 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-6655-0208-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020918992

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the Holy Bible, King James Version (Authorized Version). First published in 1611. Quoted from the KJV Classic Reference Bible, Copyright © 1983 by The Zondervan Corporation.
Dedica tion
to
Beverly Ann McCray -Ray
1956- 1995
A Sister-Fr iend
A Spirit Filled With Sto ries
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“To God Be The Glory For The Things He Has Done”
To the kindred spirits who have crossed the River Jordan, I thank you for all the stories I have come to know. I want to thank you for nurturing and continuing to guide me through my life’s journey: my great-grandparents: Virgil and Vinella; my granddaddys: Thomas Jones and Tommie McNeal; my grandmamas: Ora and Cora; my mama: Odester; father, Bailey; great-aunts: Sally, Velma, Hattie and Olander, and aunts: Beatrice & Amelia, and uncles: Sam and Frank.
I extend thanks to my supportive and encouraging family members, without their love and inspiration, I would not have been able to conquer the mountains often placed in my path. My sisters: Jeanette, I thank for her wisdom and continued connection to our past; Claudette, for her mothering and guidance; Ella for her strength, and Doris for believing in me and encouraging me; my brother, Leon, whose unmarked grave was discovered in 1994 in Ulster County, New York. He passed on his creative genius to me, gave me my first book, Aristotle’s Poetics, taught me my ABC’s and passed his love of reading on to me; my youngest brother, Joseph, who lost our mama when he was a child; I want you to know that we embrace you and love you as intensely as Mama did. To my two in-laws, Wendell and Maria; I thank Wendell for giving Ella the space to always be a giving sister; Maria, I thank you for loving my brother unconditionally. To my Clarksdale Community, friends, extended family and teachers, I want to say “something good is in all of us; we just have to dig deep sometimes to find it.” I am grateful to my extended families: Mr. and Mrs. Hughes Clayton, who have continued to support my efforts financially, emotionally and spiritually, and the Pounds and Magees of Bassfield who fed me and made me a true member of their family. I also want to thank my Bahamian family, Carl and Yvonne Rolle, for making their home my home when I needed a place of refuge. During my tenure at Jackson State University, Jackson’s version of the Delaney sisters, Dr. Doris Ginn and Mrs. Mae Nell Smith, became my friends and kept me laughing. To my god-child, Lyneisha, who kept me grounded during my days of writing and editing.
I began this book with the gift of a writer’s box from a dear friend, Dr. Carol Quin, who I thank for her continued encouragement and support. To Jeff, who assisted me in carrying all the emotional baggage I brought with the stories to my college experience, I thank you. Thank you, Trudier Harris, for your presence at The Ohio State University that laid the foundation for a friendship that continues to propel me forward and for your reading and editing of this manuscript as well as the writing of the foreword, for you are a true sister-friend. I also wish to thank John Stewart, whose subtle guidance helped me listen to the inner spirits and exposed me to another world at The International Book Fair of London which introduced me to interested publishers and for his reading of the manuscript.
I thank the Folkhouse Group of Columbus, Ohio for providing me with a creative venue of expression. Thank all of the creative professors who helped give flight to my creative genius, and especially Dr. Robert Canzoneri, whose southern spirit reached out to mine. To my girlfriends: Margaret Smith, Angela Robinson and Monica Granderson, who kept me hoping and laughing during our girl talks. To my Sistuhs With Books, I want to thank you for continuing sharing the love of reading with me. During the final stages, I want to thank my homeboy, friend and colleague, C.Leigh McInnis and his beautiful wife, Monica for assisting me in preparing the text for publication.
In addition to the aforementioned, I want to thank Kyler and her mother, Delores for keeping me connected to Beverly, my best friend of thirty-four years. I also want to thank all of my friends whose names go unmentioned for accepting my absence when I was working and to all the students who never complained when it took me longer to return their papers. To Jackson State University and the Department of English, thank you for your workload which made me realize the importance of not losing sight of a dream.
Finally, I am grateful for the geniuses of Dr. Margaret Walker Alexander, whose words of wisdom that she so openly shared on our road trip to North Carolina in 1998 encouraged me to write and share my stories
FOREWORD
The Roots and Branches of Black Southern Experi ence
A truth seldom recognized is that there are almost as many African American southern experiences as there are states and cities in the South. Our lives as southern black people intersect, but they also diverge into unique patterns of learning, growth, and discovery. The stories contained in this collection illustrate some of those similarities as well as the differences. Wanda Macon shares with millions of African Americans a southern soil that is rich in family, church, and racial repression, but she also highlights the spiritedness of a tomboyish young girl, too smart for her pre-school age, formed by a variety of occurrences in her small southern community. “The Courts,” a horseshoe shaped neighborhood and home to twenty-three families located in fictional Friarsdale, Mississippi, is the site for experience, memory, reflection, and locating one’s self in the history of the geography as well as the history of family and community.
Home to attend her grandmother’s funeral, the narrator re-visits The Courts and, while roaming the house and looking through the screen door of her family’s old home, allows memories to flow as this “looking out” onto life and history offers up its reflections on the shaping forces that have led to her maturity and adulthood. Whether it is the adventure of climbing a large tree against her mother’s will (“SeeMo”), or shooting and winning marbles from a neighboring boy (“Pots”), or using a slingshot to zing chinaberries at the boys who have the privilege of attending school when she is too young to do so (“Chinaberries”), the young Omniella Delores (“Omnie”) Johnston is the impetus to the grown woman reviewing how she came to be who and what she is. Layers upon layers of memories converge with grief to illustrate that life constantly gives and takes. Survival is a matter of confronting, ordering, and accepting all of one’s experiences, allowing them to wash over one in a ritual that can be saddening but is ultimately triumphant.
We meet the young Omnie as a perennially disobedient pre-schooler whose repeated switchings are not sufficient to curtail her forbidden activities. Ever penitent, the young Omnie is also ever exploring and therefore ever learning. From her willingness to listen to her Aunt Frances share the family’s secrets surrounding its complicated-at times incestuous-relationship (Christmasville Road”), to the perverse ways in which her young neighbors introduce her to the sexual potential of her body (“Pots”; “Chinaberries”), Omnie exhibits an individuality that holds our attention. The sassiness for which she suffers so much punishment is also the sassiness that defines creativity and learning. She is far ahead of the other children in school when she is allowed to enter, even though she is entering early. She is finally sent to school, a development for which she has desperately begged, because she has almost burned down the home of Mama Rosetta, the elderly neighbor who has agreed to keep her while Mrs. Johnston works (“Chinaberries”).
Viewed as old before her time, “touched in the head,” and having been here before, Omnie possesses an awareness uncommon to three and four year olds. Her superior intellect and intuitive nature, however, cannot save her from the pain of racism. When her brother Edgar delivers her heart’s desire in the form of a German Shepherd puppy (“Omnie”), she must suffer through the consequences of the growing dog’s actions when a white man in the neighboring community believes that the dog has attacked his son. A child’s love for a pet transcends all communities, but its manifestations for a small black girl in Mississippi in the 1950’s resonate in ways far beyond the simplicity of owning an animal.
For all the experiences Macon captures in the stories here, none is more vivid than Omnie