**The late U. S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall was born on July 2, 1908 with the birth name “Thoroughgood” and he attended the HBCU Lincoln University with poet and writer Langston Hughes, entertainer and musician Cab Calloway and with the future President of the newly independent nation Ghana (formerly the Gold Coast) named Kwame Nkrumah. Marshall died January 24, 1993.
I learned late on Monday, 17 June 2013 that one of my Aunt Minnie Belle Veal’s protégées passed this April 2013. She was Ambassador Gayleatha Beatrice Brown(June 20, 1947 to April 19, 2013).
A Howard University alumna, “Gay,” as I called her, was the first person I knew that worked for Randall Robinson’s TransAfrica, the first person who wore braids before they became popular. In her usual “I-will-not-have-any-of-it” style, my “Aunt Beh Beh” (Minnie Belle Veal) drove from Edison, New Jersey, all the way to Gay’s graduate school, the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, after someone there mildly suggested that Gay, a Black girl from a working class family in New Jersey, should not seriously consider a career in Foreign Service. And then—with the hell-and-be-damned-with-you that is the best of Black America—she became a diplomat and later an ambassador.
I remember her as someone who loved my Aunt Minnie Belle more than life. The book she gave Auntie in 1969 was The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. I ended up reading the copy of the book she left for my Aunt. I remember Gay as someone who liked her eggs scrambled hard, like me. I fixed them several times for her and myself on one of the extended visits to Atlanta that she took with my Aunt Beh Beh. The last time I saw her both of my parents were still alive, but my Aunt Minnie Belle had just passed and Gay had arrived for her funeral. Now, all of them are gone.
In the usual routine of graduate students and, I guess, members of the foreign service, Gay and I lost contact with each other due to moving around. She quickly went from being a U. S. Diplomat in France to her later years when she served as Ambassador to two countries on the continent of Africa, Burkina Faso and then later Benin.
I received an email earlier in the day from a former female student of mine. This student was about to embark on studies that are not so traditional for women in general, to say nothing of Black women. Later in the evening I decided to look up Gayleatha on the Internet. I had found her before and quickly forwarded the hyperlinks. This time I found her again, but what came up first was her obituary and the Funeral Service for Gayleatha Brown, which I did not expect. I thought about my Dad, who has been gone now for twenty-six years, who was as proud of Gayleatha as he was of his sister Minnie Belle. As my head raced, my first impulse, in the wee hours of the morning, was to call Mama to tell her that Gayleatha was dead. It dawned on me, as I reached for the phone, that Mama was also gone.
With the exception of a few cousins on my Dad’s side of the family, most of the people that I knew whom Gay’s passing would upset, have already passed on themselves. I would tell you how I am holding my chin up, trusting in God and all of the usual stuff that people say at a time like this. However, I have had about as much death as I care to take in one year.
I lost Mama, a beloved cousin; and while I have two loving families, I had a couple of family members who decided that I made a good emotional punching bag since they could not vent their dissatisfaction with themselves on anyone else. Additionally, someone who I thought was a friend proved to be anything but one.
Now, I know that I have not earned this and that I have no control over any of this. And in spite of how truly bad I feel, late Monday into the wee hours of Tuesday morning were not completely awful. After all, I heard from a former student who is planning to study and do great things; and I made a quick acquaintance of a Vassar College Professor who likes my blog and who does his own bit of social commentary. I just wish that the day had ended on a better note. Nevertheless, in spite of the fact that I learned of her passing, I remain grateful to have known Gay.
So, all I ask is that you pray for the family of the late Ambassador Gayleatha Beatrice Brown. Pray for my students and for all young people who desperately need her example to do the kind of work we all need them to do. As for me, I am, right now, not much in the mood for anything. And I make no apologies. That is just the way it is, for now.
“If you plant it in the earth, give it just enough sunlight, just enough water, and just enough nurturing, it will yield something.” – Syble Wilson Allen Williams (1921 -2013)
Now, when I think of teaching, I think about my Mama’s gardens and the first time I read the quote by author Gail Godwin who said that, “Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths pure theatre.”
A while back, I did not exactly understand the connection between teaching and theatre or any connection to my Mama’s conceptualization of gardening. After all, was it not possible to be a gardener or agriculturalist without being an artist? Even further, when I thought of theatre or any performance art, I thought and continue to think of people trained to act, sing, dance (or all of the above), and who are on stage for the sole purpose of entertaining and enlightening a receptive audience.
The idea that a teacher and students were engaged in any kind of performance art escaped me until I stood in front of a classroom and gave a lecture without reading from any notes. My Mama, Syble Wilson Allen Williams, understood the performance element in teaching the first time she set foot in a classroom to teach.
Only after she died, however, did I begin to understand some other things about the “pure theatre” or the creativity of teaching that was not readily apparent to me when she was alive.
I remember how she would begin to count to ten in order to get her kindergarteners to take their seats. “One…Two…Three…” she would say slowly and deliberately. The objective was to have all of her students seated BEFORE she reached the number ten. They would scramble to their chairs, each one determined not to be the last child to make it to his or her seat.
Then there were Mama’s famous gold stars that she posted next to the names of those kids who ate all of their lunch—they were the fabulous members of the “Clean Plate Club.” Many children decided to sample a vegetable that they really did not want to eat in order to earn that gold star. Yet, she was at her most creative with her classroom gardens and her trips to the farm.
After Mama’s funeral service, our cousin James—who served as one of her pallbearers—told me that before her funeral began, four of her pallbearers were discussing their trips to farms and the gardens they helped to plant and tend when they were mere kindergarteners in her class.
Four of Mama’s pallbearers were her former kindergarten students. I remember when she made the switch from teaching third grade to kindergarten. I also recall her comments about children who grew up in the city. While she loved city life, she noted that children in cities rarely got much, if any, exposure to farm life.
Mama was born on a working farm in a tiny Georgia hamlet about forty minutes away by car from Atlanta. She lived there until she was about nine years old. Around her ninth birthday, her family migrated to Atlanta, as did so many Black rural families during and after the Great Depression. The beauty is that Mama’s appreciation for her agricultural roots ultimately became a wonderful lesson for her students.
Back in the 1970s when she started teaching kindergarten, she told me one day that too many of her students really did not know anything about where their food came from or the teamwork required to run a farm.
Eventually she located a nice man—whose name escapes me now—who had a small working farm in McDonough, Georgia complete with crops, chickens, pigs, and cows. I only remember him as a middle aged, brown-skinned man who seemed tickled to death that the work he did as a farmer had some intrinsic value to Mama and her young students.
Every year she taught kindergarten she included a trip to that farm in McDonough, Georgia so that “her children” could witness the interaction of farmer and crop and cows and chickens. The cows’ manure fertilized the soil that yielded the crops. It was all organic and interactive. Every year, she would have her five-year-olds plant a garden in their classroom.
She would gleefully remark how they would become mesmerized when they would see something that they had planted in the soil begin to grow. “Their eyes just light up at the first sight of the smallest bud,” she would say. For me, the strongest memory was her garden at our house and her household plants.
Each year she grew tomatoes, cabbage, collards, and squash on a strip of land in our backyard. I also recall one year she grew the hottest jalapeño peppers ever grown in the history of humankind—I remember it well; I ate one of those peppers and needed a couple of pitchers of ice water to cool the heat.
Then there was her endless sea of green plants that lined our porch and windowsills. She often noted that the tomatoes might not grow as big as you wished, but if you nurtured those seeds, you would still get tomatoes. This was her lesson to her kindergarteners and to me: you always get something back if you plant something and nurture it.
Mama’s gardens and farming adventures were lessons in sheer creativity. In these activities were a science lesson, another lesson that taught respect for animals’ contributions to our welfare and an appreciation for our natural environment, a lesson in how any one of us who had patience could nurture a plant from a seed or seedling to full bloom. Even further, when I think of how many people never want to revisit their childhoods, I am comforted.
Mama found beauty, resilience, and lifelong lessons in her own childhood, a childhood that she spent helping her parents and grandparents tend to plants and animals on the old family farm. Her students got a chance to share in a part of her upbringing.
On a nearly cloudless, sunny day in February of 2013, Mama had six pallbearers: one was a dear cousin, another was a family friend, and four were her former kindergarteners. These six dignified, hardworking, respectable, responsible, and well-educated Black men—all over the age of forty—donned white gloves, and hoisted Mama’s coffin and took her to her final place of rest in the soil—soil she respected.
Proudly, I watched them, as I am sure she did. And then I thought, “If you plant it in the earth, give it just enough sunlight, just enough water, and just enough nurturing, it will yield something.”
The year was 1721. The city of Boston experienced one of the most serious outbreaks of smallpox in its history. One Puritan minister, the Reverend Cotton Mather—best known for his participation in Salem’s witchcraft trials—watched his male slave Onesimus with continued curiosity. Onesimus, who was born in Africa, had been in the company of people suffering from smallpox, but he never contracted the disease and became sick.
Cotton Mather had, years earlier, asked Onesimus why he did not get sick. Had he ever had smallpox? Onesimus replied, “Yes and No.” He told Mather that he had endured a procedure when still in Africa that forever cured him of smallpox. He explained that you took a thorn and punctured the pustules of a person who had smallpox; the smallpox fluid that came out of the pustules saturated the thorn. You then took the thorn and rubbed the smallpox juice into the skin of a healthy person. Occasionally the person who had this procedure done would become mildly ill for a short time, but once they recovered, they would never have smallpox again.
Onesimus noted that this procedure had been done for centuries amongst his people—the Garamantes—in Africa. The Garamantes appear in the written records of the Greek historian Herodotus in the 5th century. Herodotus considered them a great nation. We know about Onesimus and his African ethnic identity, along with his people’s knowledge of inoculation and immunization from Cotton Mather’s letters to government officials and physicians. Initially, when White Bostonians learned that Reverend Mather had gotten this information from his African slave Onesimus, they said that what Mather was suggesting to them was nothing more than “African Witchcraft.” Eventually the desire to stay alive outweighed White Bostonians’ racism, and people there began to receive inoculations against smallpox. Go figure.
Take the time to consider that the only thing that has changed about immunization and inoculation procedures is the instrument medical professionals use to perform them. Some scholars argue that an early form of smallpox inoculation had been developed centuries earlier in India. Indeed, the Chinese developed a method of blowing the scabs from smallpox sores up healthy people’s noses, which was successful. Yet this method was not as effective as the introduction of smallpox “juice” into the skin of healthy people. Suffice it to say that there obviously was a continued exchange of ideas between Africans and Asians. Needles have replaced thorns used by early Africans, but this nearly ancient science was accurate and well on its way to perfection long before any European or Euro-American doctor ever set foot on the North American continent. If you and your children are healthy and have never suffered smallpox or any number of preventable diseases, then thank an African slave named Onesimus. Thank the Garamantes of Africa.
Books:
Instead of a video game or $200.00 sneakers, give a kid (and yourself) a book! The story of Onesimus and Cotton Mather is located in numerous books. Mather’s own medical book, diaries, and letters all give credit to Onesimus. However, there are several other books worth reading.
Invisible Enemies, Revised Edition: Stories of Infectious Disease by Jeanette Farrell (for children age 12 and up), (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2005)
1001 Things Everyone Should Know About African American History by Jeffrey C. Stewart, (Three Rivers Press, 1998).
The African Background in Medical Science: Essays on African History, Science and Civilizations by Charles S. Finch, (Karnak House, 1990).
Blacks in Science: Ancient and Modern (Journal of African Civilizations; Vol. 5, No. 1-2) edited by Ivan Van Sertima, (Transaction Publishers, 1990).
I do not typically write about Education per se. Two of my favorite bloggers ModernDayChris and Matt Wilson of Everything Needs to Change do the best writing about the subject, particularly the education of children in our public school systems from Kindergarten to 12th Grade. This essay is not so much a critique as it is a reminder about something often forgotten when conversations and analyses take place about what is wrong or right or that needs fixing in American education overall.
First, let us be honest. Not all American public education is flawed; it is often unequal based on race and/or socioeconomic factors. It can also suffer from certain regional economic problems, which are beyond the scope of this essay. The quality of American higher education runs the gamut from mediocre to the best in the world. Yet, there are certain actions and habits that can help any student regardless of the quality of that education. Of course, the best education nurtures these habits. So here goes…
For the record, I was possibly the world’s worst Biology student. After routinely making grades of “A” in subjects like History and English, I nearly flunked Biology in high school. I will not bore you with the stories about my nausea and headaches when I had to dissect some dead animal preserved in formaldehyde—That is a whole other essay by itself. When I had to take Biology in college, I determined that I needed to not only study, but also come up with some creative ways to study. After getting a lousy two out of twenty identifications correct on a Biology Lab Practical Exam, I arranged a meeting with my professor. (For those of you who have forgotten what a lab practical is, it is simply a test where you identify bacteria, amoebas, and other items physically located in a biology lab, many of which are under a microscope.)
My professor informed me that he typically set up everything in the lab on Saturdays. I asked if I could come by on Saturdays. He said that I could, and that I could stay as long as I wished so that I could examine and take notes about all of the items in the lab. Off to campus on Saturday I went carrying my notebooks and an assortment of colored markers so that I could literally draw what I was examining so that I could study it at home, over and over again. On nearly ten consecutive Saturdays, I also got a chance to talk at length with my Biology professor.
I joked with him that a historian’s brain dealt with a lot, and it did not have much room for Biology. My professor admitted that he had never been a good student of History. We both took note of the fact that History typically tells a story; and it also typically argues a thesis, which is why you can find so many different History books about the same event that argue entirely different positions about why that event happened. This is why Law students typically have to have some academic background in History—History teaches you to see more than one side of an argument. Biology, however, is another matter. That amoeba cell that you just examined under that microscope is going to remain an amoeba cell. You can either recognize it or you cannot!
During these Saturday sessions, I had the opportunity to ask my professor numerous questions about everything in that lab. I swiftly took notes of everything he said. When both he and I were taking breaks from the subject matter, we discussed History, Politics, Performance Arts, and whatever was happening in the news. He quickly discovered that while I would never be a great biologist, I was a good student in History, and a burgeoning intellectual. So, what is my point?
The point here is I listen to students and some educators talk about subjects they describe as not preparing students for the kind of work they will be doing as adults. “Why do I have to take Biology if I am never going to use it?” That is a fair question. Yet, my experience with taking a subject I might not have to use or need to use taught me several important lessons about the intrinsic value of a good education beyond the mere mastery of any particular subject matter.
First, when I made a solid “B” as my final grade for Biology, I knew I had earned it. No one—and I certainly did not—really wants to go back to school on Saturdays. I went back and stayed long hours and it paid off. Second, because I was often the only student in the lab on those Saturdays I was free to speak with my professor without interruption. Technically, I got free tutoring lessons simply by showing up and availing myself of his expertise. Third, my professor witnessed me making an extra effort in a difficult subject. While professors do not grade for “effort” (nor should they), it does not hurt for an instructor to see a student put in extra time in order to master a difficult subject. Fourth, I learned that I could conquer that which was difficult.
I also finally understood lessons that my mom and my uncle, both educators, often emphasized throughout my childhood and adolescence: Education is as much about endurance as it is anything else. And as my mom often stated: You cannot expect a student to become the next Einstein if he or she cannot get along with other students (teamwork) and also willingly and creatively work on difficult subject matter. Importantly, both Mom and my uncle insisted that one of the keys to a good education was the “social” skill of learning how to navigate difficulties and put in extra time without resorting to short cuts or cheating or other forms of skulduggery. Tackling a subject that one is not good at forces a certain level of creativity—that is creativity often born of unorthodox or unconventional ways to retain and master the subject matter, and pass the class.
It is right about now that the folks that know me well would assume that I would go into one of my soapbox sessions about the necessity of arts education in schools, and how the arts make students more creative and help with spatial reasoning and a host of other skills, including enhanced skills in Mathematics and Sciences. Well, I am not going to do that, exactly.
Exposure to the arts certainly enriches and develops creativity; and I have never met an artist that was not creative at something. Yet, creativity is not the exclusive domain of the arts or artists. I have met many individuals who did not have an artistic bone in their bodies, but who were highly creative people. If students are to develop into productive individuals who can think their way through and out of complex problems, regardless of academic discipline, then education needs to not only expose students to the arts, but it should also advocate that creativity—artistic or otherwise—is an essential skill for all academic disciplines. Furthermore, arts education advocacy need not exist on, nor should it lay sole claim to, some creative island minus its other academic counterparts. Perhaps, this is where the real debate about education needs to begin. More to come later…
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Leslye Joy Allen 