Thanks for this great piece, Sis!! Not sure if I’ve ever shared that like you, I am also a Black American descendant of slaves born and raised in Charleston, SC. My people are from Edisto (site of the Stono Rebellion), one of the barrier islands where the Gullah were more isolated during slavery which allowed them to retain, directly from West Africa, a lot of the “history full of languages, customs, foods and culture” about which you spoke and with which I was raised for all my growing up life.
I’m pretty sure I’m a bit older than you are though, because during strict segregation, from kindergarten to 6th grade at least, I didn’t even have the choice to go to integrated schools. Like your mother (and most Black Mamas back then), my mother also only had a high school diploma but was sharp as a whip. She was the oldest of my grandmother’s 15 kids and the first to move to “town,” which is what everybody on the island called going to Charleston.
She married my father after he returned from the Korean War and together they decided their three kids would get the best education they could afford — so working three jobs, they enrolled us in Immaculate Conception School (ICS), one of Charleston’s few Black, Catholic schools (no we weren’t Catholic, but money’s green, right?) right around the corner from our rented home downtown (where almost all of the Black folk lived). Because segregation was in full effect then, the city and the diocese had built a couple Catholic schools connected to the only Black parish in the city as “a tribute to the city and a blessing for the Negroes of Charleston.”
They brought in Black nuns from the Oblate Sisters of Providence in Baltimore to teach us. Even though they were all Black, the curriculum was not — ever. The nuns themselves were fully assimilated and never taught us anything about our Black selves, except for adherence to respectability politics to include speaking “proper English.” Luckily we had our “real” village all around us, both on the island and in the city (to include the late, great, Septima Clark) just as you did.
We moved from downtown into our “movin’ on up” home near Hampton Park when I was in the 6th grade. We were the second Black family on the block, but two families were wa-a-a-y more than enough to get the white folk scatterin’ the hayell outta there. They closed ICS when I was in the 8th grade and, because my parents had been divorced for two years and money had to be stretched in other directions, we couldn’t go on to the Catholic, Bishop England High which, by then, was integrated.
So, we went to the, what used-to-be “the good” white public school around the corner from our new home which had been gutted by white flight. Replaced by most of the white teachers who’d fled as well, were absolutely, phenomenal, young Black teachers who’d gone to HBCU’s and brought us a history we’d never learned before. I learned about James Baldwin, James Weldon Johnson, Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, Richard Wright, W.E.B. DuBois, Frantz Fanon, Mary McLeod Bethune, Frederick Douglass, Marcus Garvey, Zora Neale Hurston, Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Hamer and a bevy of other great Black writers and historians. “I knew where I belonged at my schools” — those teachers helped me, find me.
White Supremacy wins not only when they divide us, but it also wins when they strip the little culture we have.
White Supremacy wins when they get us to hate everything about ourselves — so much so Black people believe that what we teach and the way we teach is inferior.
No shit, Sis — no shit.
Also like you, I can go to any Black community and be at home. Having been in the military myself, and in that life with the husband who spent 20 years there (I didn’t) and then worked as a civilian for 20 more, I seek out my “village” wherever we’ve lived. And I’ve always found them with arms wide open — welcoming, and familiar.
Though I’m married to an Italian-American who became “white,” I’ve always been unapologetically Black with him because 1) my sons identify as Black and they gotta know who they are and from whence they came and 2) he needed to always know with whom he’d be dealing if he planned to stick around. And he did, for 40 years so far.