70 Years and Beyond

I'm not feeling the racial tension in our society that I keep hearing about today in the  news and social media. I grew up in North Carolina with Jim Crow Laws. However, I never felt anyone or any race was superior to me and my race. There are some white people I like and some that I don't like. There are some black people that I like and some that I don't like. I can't think of anything a white woman can do that I can not do. Economically I may be a little challenge. However, I feel that there were times when I could have made better financial choices. Today, I am good. And, I feel good.

My mother's mother, Beady Davis Howell, was the granddaughter of slaves and the daughter of sharecroppers. They lived in the area that is now known as Goldsboro, North Carolina. My grandmother, a beautiful woman, who had she been born a few decades later would have been sought after by the fashion magazines and the top model agencies.She was slim, tall, had high cheek bones and was a very fashionable woman. My grandmother made a living from picking cotton and tobacco when she was younger. And then, during the  time I knew her, she made a living by taking in washing and cleaning other people's homes. I don't remember having long conversations with my grandmother . . .My grandmother's funeral would have been normal if the woman driving the car we were in had not burped.

I'm going to start with a story that starts at 1976. I'm 26 years old living in New York city. I'm an actress, of course, as an actress, you're always looking for your next job. So I get a call that they're looking for a Prissy for a musical version of Gone With the Wind.Now I had heard about a musical version of Gone With the Wind a few years prior. I think it started on the West coast and then it ended up in London. I don't know what happened to it after that. So this was a call -they were trying to cast a Prissy for a Dallas Summer Musicals, a production that would go to a few other cities.And if everything went well, it would come back to Broadway in the fall. So I wanted to audition. Plus I, I loved watching, Butterfly McQueen in that movie. And so I thought, well, yeah, I'd like to be Prissy and a musical version of Gone With the Wind. 

Church was very important in our lives. It was the place where we would go to meet new people, be with our friends outside of school, and socialize. Because of Jim Crow laws, there weren't a lot of places where we could go to do these things. So church became that place. Our Lives revolved around three different places. They were school, church and work, if you were an adult. I loved church. One of the things I loved best about church was that we got to dress up. It was the one place I could go and wear really special, pretty dresses and wear all those crinolines that made my poofy dress stand out, far far from my body. My mother dressed us well, not just for church.My mother believed in dressing, but then, the whole community seemed to be about being dressed and taking pride in how we looked. It's not that we had a lot of money. We didn't. My mother was a domestic. She made 25 cents an hour. My father worked for the United States post office as a mail handler. My father was an alcoholic. So a lot of times we didn't see a lot of that money. So it wasn't about the money. It was about pride. It was about feeling good.