My Selma
My Selma was a place that emitted the rich, clean odor of black dirt and sour clay, that smelled of sage pork sausages, ham, and biscuits, the breakfast scents all blowing through dew-covered Johnson grass and across foggy highways at five a.m. on any morning.
We sometimes went barefoot outdoors, leaving our shoes up on the porch in case the ground was unbearable. Selma’s weather could be hot enough in the summer to blister bare feet on a sizzling sandy sidewalk, or so cold in winter that rag-covered water pipes burst under houses, creating miniature ice castles in the dark.
My Selma was beautiful! With fields of white cotton, corn, long sweet potato vines, and watermelon patches. With untamed land in abundance, thickets where no man had ever walked, and red clay roads where wild game crossed with hunters and dogs in high pursuit.
The sounds of Selma were the late-night lonely whistles of the L&N Railroad trains coming or going, rumbling across the sidings on lower Range Street, not far from our house, and in the mornings, cocks crowing to help raise up the morning sun as citizens prepared themselves for school, work, or church. Radios played the sounds of Wilson Pickett, Tyrone Davis, Johnny Ace, Mahalia Jackson, and Martha Reeves and the Vandellas.
Sunday mornings were dedicated to religious music on those same radios, and to Brown family drives in the country, crowded in the back seat of our Chevrolet station wagon with my three older siblings—Noonchi, Ben, and Louvenia—and my younger sister, Chauncey, in front with Mama and Dah—to Orrville, Alabama, twenty-two miles away from Selma, to attend John the Baptist Church and visit my three mischievous cousins, my quiet uncle Lott, and my wonderful full-body, smelling-good-like-food, pillow-soft-bosomed aunt Susta, who loved to rock Chauncey to sleep on her front porch in her straight-backed rocking chair.
From the car windows I could survey the Selma I knew and loved. Barns with grains in storage and freshly picked cotton for quilt making, sacks of down feathers plucked from pheasants, chickens, and geese, bales of hay in stacks, and root cellars stocked with Ball jars of fruit preserves and freshly canned vegetables put away in the fall as reserve. And, on the sides of the barns, salt licks for the cows in the fields. Beside the barns, our smokehouses were laden with cured hams, beef, and pork shoulders. Once the fires were lit, our smokehouses were never unattended. At dusk or even in the night, if the menfolk weren’t gathered around the fires, sipping drinks, smoking tobacco, joking and gossiping, ghosts and haints of our families past kept watch, still resisting the call from the other side.
Sundays were special in Selma, and everyone knew just about where everyone else was or was supposed to be.
Either you were home or you were in church. On Sundays it was only home or church—even for my older brother!
I know the Selma where Sunday dinners were prepared starting at six in the morning, as the breakfast dishes were being washed. Supper started at half past four in the afternoon with trays of biscuits passed around, dripping with butter and laced with fig preserves cradling the middle.
Visiting preachers and deacons, who were also our teachers at Payne School, Knox Academy, and R. B. Hudson High School, joined us at our tables to speak with us about what was “going on in Selma.” The clergy enjoyed Mama’s wholesome cooking and tried to show good manners by asking for “just one more biscuit, please,” wanting more, yet setting an example at the dinner table for the children, their students.
One of our teachers was the Reverend Frederick Douglas Reese of Ebenezer Baptist Church, who would baptize me when I was “made ready” at the age of twelve. In 1964 Reverend Reese was president of the Dallas County Voters League, and in 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. supported his effort to protest against the suppression of Black voting rights by coming to Selma.
Selma’s youth were mostly proud and obedient. We attended church on Sundays and respected our elders and our teachers. We never begged and were willing to do work, no matter how menial, to help provide for ourselves and our families. Reverend Reese’s sermons on many occasions addressed the youth of Selma as he verbally applauded us for our good behavior.
Selma families kept what little they had as clean and decent as possible. There was always something to give to the have-nots, such as a plate of food or a bag of clothing from a neighbor. If my daddy, Berl Brown, whom we called Dah, knew of anyone hungry, he would drop by with a cardboard box brimming with beans, squash, greens, tomatoes, bread, milk, and meat—Zeigler’s souse meat, bologna, or hot links—accepting only a smile as payment.
Dah loved Zeigler’s souse meat (also called hog’s head cheese). He loved anything that Zeigler’s made. He would praise Zeigler’s bologna, which could be used as a sandwich meat; it could be warmed and served with a hot plate of collard greens; it could be fried in lard as a breakfast meat, accompanied by grits and eggs. Delicious. And for us children, the red plastic casing around each slice became a toy bracelet or even a ring when twisted around a finger.
The hot links, a bit more expensive, were puffy hot-dog-like sausages that popped in your mouth and spewed savory juices with a little bit of hotness all over your tongue. Zeigler’s was king in the South because of their quality meats. Picnics were made perfect with bologna sandwiches, and when church affairs ran low on food, there was always a red roll of Zeigler’s bologna and a loaf of pillow-soft Colonial white bread to help fill in the gap.
In my Selma, fruits and vegetables were a part of most meals as well, but not everyone could afford them. Dah had a farm and was generous with what we grew there.
The poor and needy could receive small donations from Selma churches, where used clothing and loose change were offered to tide families over. A good neighbor drove the underprivileged to doctors’ offices if they were sick. At other times, the disadvantaged would walk, whether they had five dollars for the visit or not. Sometimes the families would bring a cured ham, or offer to cut the doctor’s lawn or perhaps wash his car as payment, anything to keep their appointments, and the doctor sometimes accepted whatever they offered. However, these bartering exchanges were infrequent because the doctor had bills to pay as well.
There was just not enough to go around for all the people. I saw examples of this every day from a very young age.
I also knew the Selma where Negro preachers, Negro teachers, Negro doctors, Negro florists, and Negro owners of candy stores were revered for having made it. My father made a respectable living working for the railroad, although his job took him away from home for weeks at a time. We of the colored working class drove fine cars: Cadillacs, Pontiacs, and new trucks. Some drove motor scooters, most were willing to assist others when they could. Negro store owners looked out for the youth of Selma and for our families by giving store credit or part-time jobs. Corner stores were convenient places to work and shop because they sold almost anything, including a streak of lean or a piece of fat rib meat for cooking collards or turnip greens.
But also I grew up in a place where Negroes were looked on as less than the people they were, less than human beings, by many of the white citizens.
Listen—and allow me to apologize in advance for the words I am using, but you should know that Negro men, grown men, not just boys, were addressed by whites by their first name or “boy,” and Negro women and girls were referred to as “gal” or addressed by their first name, which was arguably less painful than being called a nigger, which was not some misguided term of endearment like some young Black people nowadays bandy about between themselves—“My niggah, what’s happnin’, niggah?”—No, nah! You were the nigger in the South: shiftless, lazy, dumb, good-for-nothing darkie. And when the term nigger was put on you, hostility, anger, and disrespect were attached.
I grew up in a place where white men and white women rode through Negro neighborhoods in posses, on horses, dressed in white sheets with pointed hoods and carrying torches of fire used to set shack houses ablaze and ignite standing crosses on lawns to terrorize Negroes or white “nigger lovers” and set fear in the children.
Dallas County! I grew up in your biggest town, with your people, as a citizen of Alabama, watching white men and white women drive through our town every day with Confederate flags and loaded shotguns on racks in the rear windows of their pickups. AND, dear Dallas County, by the way, I grew up knowing that Negro men had been hunted down and hanged from trees in the backwoods all over your 980 square miles, just like the hundreds murdered all across the Great State of Alabama.
Humph! And let’s not forget the Negro citizens who worked as sharecroppers, picking cotton from sunup till sundown for just two, three, four dollars a day.
It was welcome work, it was necessary work, but it was awful hard work.
“You gittin’ three, and summa y’all gittin’ fo’! We need a bale today and I know summa y’all can brang in a hunnard pounds easy,” yelled Old Credo, the Negro straw boss who supervised the twelve to fourteen pickers on the fields Dah rented and cultivated. “Miz ’Gusta been here since five this moaning and it’s break time now in a minute, and she already got her hunnard for the day. The way you do it, is you pick with both hands over under, over under. But if you picking with one hand and holding the sack on your shoulder with the other un, you never gon’ make any money.”
The straw boss yelled, “Miz ’Gusta! You gon’ git that rent money by the morrow, right? Mr. Brown gon’ give you eleven dollars plus another one fifty on top of dat.”
For the landowners and the straw boss, the Negroes’ work was never enough.
For the Negroes, the pay was never enough. Never enough to provide food and milk for the young, hungry, sick. Never enough to provide clothing and shoes for the children to attend school. And that’s what part of the game was. To hold them niggers down and keep them smiling, keep them in
dilapidated houses,
uneducated,
segregated;
often imprisoned,
or working in roadside chain gangs;
no food,
rotten food,
not enough food.
Suffering every indignation, and castration of body and mind.
In my Selma, a Negro family could be woken up in the middle of the night by a posse of angry drunken white men, pulled from the shotgun shacks they called home, which were then set ablaze because according to the ringleader, “So-and-So up in there owes me money.” Babies, toddlers—innocents who were moments ago piled up in feathered beds, cozy with dreams in their heads—now lay wailing in the yard on rock-hard soil, where grass never grows and morning dew clings to nothing, as a wife and mother, clad in a dingy outing gown, scrambles fast to reach a bloodied husband beaten by the white men in their rubber fishing boots—tall white men! Smelling of moonshine and staggering on their feet. Legions of evil, them. All!
Devils gotten loose in Alabama,
Lord,
Ah ah ah men dar rah.
Beatings …
lynchings …
and other acts of terrorism were the results of anything the raging white man saw fit to kill or destroy as a show of power, sending a message to frighten the people. This ceaseless hostility and pressure put upon the people made it difficult to breathe throughout the South and the Delta.
I grew up in a place and time where white men
looked with lust at Negro women,
made lascivious eye contact with Negro women,
took advantage of Negro women,
under a faraway ebony sky
while silver stars twinkled and all God’s creatures hummed live music, witnesses to the crimes of man’s inhumanity against woman for the same passion and desire that so condemned many Negro men to death—men tortured and killed with ropes around their necks for disrespecting a white woman by only making eye contact.
Emmett Till! I call your name.
Mack Charles Parker! I call your name.
Willie Edwards Jr.! I call your name.
Willy Webb, Daniel Edwards, Joe Spinner Johnson, I call your names.
Let’s not forget Mrs. Viola Liuzzo, killed on a dark Alabama highway by Klansmen and an FBI informant, and so many others destroyed senselessly for their pursuit of justice and equality …
I grew up in a place and a town where the right to vote was not allowed to Negroes. Where registration lines stretched several blocks long as people waited, unable to use restrooms, eat at lunch counters, or shade themselves from the sun or rain. Talk “too loud” in line or look at a deputy or sheriff “the wrong way”: that was a careless thing to do, especially with the sheriff and his deputies eager to inflict untold suffering and indignation at every chance.
When Negroes finally reached the registration area or the courthouse door, they were told, “We closed!” or poked fun at because some of them couldn’t write or spell their names.
“What’s wrong wit y’all folks? You cain’t spell! You cain’t write! Can you sang? Come on, let me hear ya sang sumthin’!”
Then the white registrars would all break out laughing at the humiliation of the person.
Colored folks were always speaking to each other. They didn’t have to know you. If they passed you in the street or passed by your house, they greeted you with a “hey” or a wave. But most Negro people humbled themselves in close proximity to whites. Negro men and women quite often stepped aside to allow a white woman to pass as the men tipped their hats and the women cast their eyes low. You had better.
Alabama!
Selma!
I recall the long rows of folks waiting in voter registration lines—of proud, finely dressed colored men in fedora hats and matching coats. Women in elegant dresses, silk sheers or red fox stockings, handbags held on an upright arm or in a gloved hand, with straight-held bodies and serious faces pointed toward the courthouse, a people of pride and integrity, who had awakened that morning with grim determination:
I woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom … Hallelujah!
I remember hearing first, and then seeing, urine stream from a woman just in front of Mama and me, forced to wait in a nonmoving line for hours, because the reservoir of a tightly held bladder couldn’t hold no more! A dam burst and water streamed under her freshly ironed dress and stained the silk stockings as it made its way to a dirt sidewalk.
Copyright © 2023 by Willie Mae Brown.
