Authors draw on roots, pass on the legacy
Civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer left a lasting mark on Billie Jean Young's life.
Known as a Mississippi Delta freedom fighter, Hamer "challenged the Democratic Party in 1964 to be the party of inclusion," said Young, a poet, stage and film actress who teaches at Mississippi State University.
But when Hamer died, Young could not pay her last respects to her role model.
"I was in law school and I couldn't attend her funeral," Young said.
So she wrote a play about Hamer instead.
Young, a featured author during the recent Amelia Book Island Festival, recited poetry and performed a short piece from that play Oct. 1. She joined fiction writer Cassandra Darden Bell and professional storyteller Mary Jackson Fears for the program "Roots, Recollections and Relationships" at the Peck Community Center in Fernandina Beach. The three writers spoke about their craft and the sources of their inspiration.
Young's life began to parallel Hamer's at birth. Born into an Alabama sharecropping family like Hamer's, Young's career has consisted largely of social activism through anti-poverty and civil rights organizations. Early in her career, she worked for the Southwest Alabama Farmer's Cooperative Association to help low-income farmers in west Alabama get fair wages. In 1981 she moved to Mississippi where she co-founded and directed the Southern Rural Women's Network to bring self-empowerment to women in rural communities. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur foundation named Young a MacArthur Fellow in 1984.
"When I moved to Mississippi, I felt I still owed something to Miss Hamer," Young said. "I put together a portrait of her life."
The two-act drama, "Fannie Lou Hamer: This Little Light" is contained within Young's book of poetry, Fear Not the Fall.
"I call it 'the little book that could,'" Young said. "One of the reasons for that is, I always wrote, however, I didn't always have a publisher," she said.
When Mary Fears looked for published information about black people who lived in America prior to emancipation, she found very little. What she read in school text books contained stereotypical, one-dimensional accounts, Fears said.
"Some of what I read made me angry, so angry that I decided to do some research on how our people served (America)," she said.
Fears, a retired public school media specialist, compiled her research in Civil War and Living History Reenacting About People of Color. The book "tells in detail what life was like on Southern plantations when the war was raging," she said. "I tell stories about the role of African Americans in the Civil War."
Fears' book includes biographies of some obscure, but noteworthy black people who lived during that era. Both the free and the enslaved were often skilled and served in various capacities for the Confederate and Union Armies.
"You don't read anything about that in the school books," Fears said
Readers of Cassandra Darden Bell's novels often ask if the stories are about her or her family.
"I emphatically say 'no.' It's not my family," said Bell, a former news editor and reporter. "A lot of fiction is just a replica of what we deal with in everyday life."
The dilemma faced by characters in Bell's Mississippi Blues is a recurring theme within families, the author said. Brothers and sisters often struggle with "how to divvy up property" inherited from a parent and with "children not knowing what to do with what they've been left with," she said.
"Beverly," the book's protagonist, "started telling me the story," she said. As she wrote, Bell began to experience her characters' internal struggles, she said.
"Believe me. When I was writing Mississippi Blues, I was feeling (the) same emotions . . . laughter to tears," she said.
Despite conflicts, "family has been the thing that helped African-American people survive," Bell said.
"It's interesting how each of these authors have drawn on their roots and their families," to write their books, said Margaret Rose Gladney, who wrote the introduction to Young's book. Gladney, associate professor emeritus of American Studies at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, nominated Young's book for the festival and introduced the three authors at the program.
"Billie Jean in her poetry is reflecting on her own life" and her family's influence, Gladney said. And Fears genealogical research teaches "so much about the history of African-American people that has not been documented and tends to be left out." Fears wrote the book Slave Ancestral Research: It's Something Else, to guide the descendants of slaves through the process of tracing their family tree.
"The novel Mississippi Blues is about a contemporary African-American family struggling with the dissolution of family ties," she said. Metaphorically, the conflict over land represents the question of "what to do with the intangible values that held them together," she said.
"What is important to hold onto and to pass on, that is addressed by all three authors."
Young has passed on Hamer's legacy of social activism by performing "This Little Light" in North America, Africa, China and in Central America. The literary work has impressed even those who have never heard of Hamer, Gladney said.
"Everywhere she takes it, there's a connection to what Hamer stood for."
gjenkins@fbnewsleader.com
