Unsung Heroines

In observance of February as Black History Month, I have focused my Sunday lessons for the past two weeks around the profound contributions of Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks, respectively. In her own time and place, each of these women furthered the cause of freedom for African Americans in this country. You may listen to or watch recordings of these lessons.

There are many other well-known and lesser known heroes and heroines of the black community, those who spoke, stood, fought and died for freedom, equality and justice. I could choose any one of them to use as an example of Unity’s fifth basic principle which states that we are to live the Truth we know.

However, as I have considered my lesson for this coming Sunday, I have thought more about the many unsung heroes and heroines, the men and women who suffered indignities and hardships, and who day after day continued to get up and show up for life, no matter how unfair it may have been. I would like to share personal reflections of two such women.

I was born in Washington, Georgia; a town that has the distinction of being the place Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, held his last Cabinet meeting and voted to dissolve the Confederacy. While things have changed in the century and a half since 1865, in the 1960s and 1970s there was a distinct atmosphere of discrimination and prejudice, and while not to the same extent, sadly continues today. I did not live there growing up, but we spent a great deal of time there with both sides of my family.

As a child, I would often visit my maternal grandmother in Washington for weeks at a time during the summer. Every day, I walked from her house to the city pool where I would stay until closing time. I loved to swim and play in the water. It never occurred to me at that time that there was anything wrong with the fact that there were no black children playing in the pool. They had their own pool on the other side of town.

Sally was a black woman who worked for my grandmother when I was young. I loved Sally. She was kind and caring. She always had a smile and a warm hug for me. I didn’t understand why Sally couldn’t stay and eat with us. Instead someone had to drive her home to the other side of town where she lived in a small weathered frame “house” that most of us would consider a shack. Every morning, she would be waiting on her porch when we came to pick her up, ready for another day’s work. She never had the advantages of an education or a job that paid a decent wage simply because she was a black woman living in the legacy of slavery in the South. Still, she persevered.

My paternal grandmother lived outside of Washington in a little community called Ficklin on the land where my father was born and raised. My uncle, aunt and their two daughters lived with her in a two-story white house with colonial columns. It was not a fine house, but a large family farm house. I spent many summer days and nights there as a child, as well.

A young black woman that everyone called “Fuzz” lived with and worked for my grandmother. I now feel embarrassed to think where the name “Fuzz” came from, but that is what she was called. Her real name was Ida Ree. She came to live with my grandmother as a teenager and stayed with her until my grandmother’s death. It wasn’t until I was older that I learned that she came to live there because her mother couldn’t afford to care for her, and knowing that she would have room and board at my grandmother’s, sent her to live with her.

As children, my cousins and I often played board games. When we were finished playing and ready to go do something else, we left the board and the playing pieces all over the floor. When we returned, we always found the game neatly put away. After a bath at night, I would leave my dirty clothes on the floor. The next morning, they would be washed and folded. It was as if “Fuzz” was a fairy who followed us around, cleaning up our messes.

I now recognize that even though she was ostensibly embraced as part of the family, that in many ways she was treated little better than an indentured servant. Her room was upstairs in the coldest, draftiest part of the house. It was furnished with a single iron frame bed and a mattress not much better than a cot. The walls and ceiling were clapboard and the floor bare wood.

She cleaned the house, worked in the garden, walked around the farm and picked wild blackberries in the summer heat for my grandmother’s famous blackberry jelly. She showed up. Day after day, she lived her life with grace and humility in the shadows of the white people who could not and would never understand the privilege they enjoyed.

Sally and Ida Ree are just two of the many unknown and unsung black heroines who day by day, year after year, endured the hardships and injustice of a society who judged and treated them as less than. I will never know what their lives were truly like. I will never know what pain they endured. I do know that through their adversity, they persisted. They survived. They triumphed.

I salute them. I honor them. I thank them. Their legacy lives on in the lives of all of us who were touched by their strength, kindness, love and fortitude.