Voices of Our Foremothers

I am quite disappointed that this will be the last time I blog for this class. I had never blogged prior to this class and now I have become quite fond of it. I have enjoyed reading all about African-American women and their literacies and discussing my opinions on them. My last blog will be on Voices of Our Foremothers by Sunny-Marie Birney.

Birney is an African-American woman who was adopted by people of European descent. Her essay Voices of Our Foremothers discusses and explains how she used her “foremothers” of education to guide her in life. She discusses how she was thankful for being adopted, but at the same time she felt like a motherless child because she was disconnected from her culture. She also discusses her relationships with her female African-American teachers and how they helped guide and became some of her foremothers. She explained how each one helped her become the woman that she is today and she thanks them. She also pays tribute to other African-American female educators such as Mary McLeod Bethune, Emma Wilson and Lucy Laney.

I directly related to this article because I want to become a teacher. In this article Birney talked about educators I had not heard of, for example Ms. Emma Wilson. I did not know that she was the founder of Ms. Bethune’s elementary school and Ms. Bethune is someone who I consider to a be a foremother. After reading this essay I can add another to list. I also directly related to this article because like Birney I want to be able to teach young African-Americans about their history, I want them to be informed and be able to know that they come from greatness.

Hidden Lessons

“Negative status for Black American females … need to be examined for greater understanding. (page 41)” Many times we take in the negative experiences of our life and think nothing more of it. We often times view it as just another mishap in our lives, because we ultimately expect it to happen. We never think about the effect that it actually has on us. As Lillie Gayle Smith says in her essay, “Unearthing Hidden Literacy: Seven Lessons I Learned in a Cotton Field,” she never really thought about her actual life experiences and the positive aspects of it until it was really brought to her attention in a Black Women’s Literacy Class. Just as Smith only stated her past experiences when it was used for boasting, we do the same thing. She did not see the positive connection between life and the cotton field. This is not all her fault though. Many African Americans are unsure of what should and should not be seen as positive so they automatically assume that what is seen as negative in one place is seen as negative all the way around. As an individual, we have to think about all aspects of a situation, whether it be negative or positive, and how we can use them as lessons in our everyday life.

As Simple as A Knife and Fork

“Lessons From Down Under: Reflections on Meanings of Literacy and Knowledge from an African-American Female Growing Up In Rural Alabama” is an essay by Bessie House-Soremekun that explains how she viewed literacy growing up in Alabama. In this essay she describes why literacy among African-Americans is important, the informal and formal literacies of the American South and how each have impacted her. She explains that literacy is a big part of her life because everyone in her family is literate and promoted it. Her mother, grandmother and uncle were all school teachers and her father was a military man. They all went to college and wanted their children to do the same. She talks about coming from a large close knit family and explains that African-American literacies begin at home with oral storytelling (informal literacy). She also goes on to explain how the informal literacy she learned at home helped her to understand the “formal” literacy that led to the unwritten rules of the south.

House-Soremekun spends a lot of time with her grandmother who is also named Bessie. Her grandmother was born and raised in the late 1800’s. In her essay she re-tells multiple stories that her grandmother has told her, but the one that stood out to me the most was the one her great grandfather. After being emancipated the first thing House-Soremekun’s great grandfather did was go out and by himself a knife and fork; something that he was deprived of because he was a slave. He and the other slaves were forced to eat from troughs with the pigs with no utensils. By not giving them utensils the slave owners were enforcing the fact African-Americans were barbarians. This made me think about my life today. Many of my friends tease me because I eat just about everything with a knife and fork. They call me “proper” and make jokes like “afraid to get your hands a little dirty?” I used to get upset, but after reading this I will not because my ancestors did not have any utensils at all. I feel truly blessed because I have the choice to use a knife and fork. It may seem silly but, this was something African-Americans were unable to do before.