A Love All Our Own

It’s not Wonderland. It’s New Jessup. Let’s normalize talking about Black communities as loving communities

Auntie J, left, Me, and Auntie Mel, right.

We raced up, down, and around back roads to get that ferry. The Gee’s Bend, Alabama annual May Day Parade waits for nobody, and we were also on our way to meet some of Gees Bend’s famed quilters. Auntie J was behind the wheel, I was in the passenger seat, Auntie Mel was in the middle row seat, and my play nephew Jaden was in the back-back of Auntie J’s new car minding a child’s business. With untold miles of forested road ahead, Auntie J asked, 

“Hey Mel, where is our turn?”

Auntie Mel sucked her teeth. 

“What do you mean, Where is our turn? Johnnie? You don’t know!?” 

Our 6:30 am planned departure from Montgomery had become 6:47 on a day when minutes mattered. We were rolling to make up the time.  

Up came the GPS, which confirmed that our turn was still ahead. At the intersection, three men who could have been Pop, Raymond, and Percy Campbell were standing in the yard of what may as well have been Campbell Auto. Completing the scene were two old cars for sale that looked like they were straight out of 1950s New Jessup. 

“Look at those old cars!” I noticed aloud. Whoosh, pop, pop, ding, pop, ding, pop went the gravel under the chassis when we went from jamming up the road to a full, skidding halt in the auto shop yard. 

“Get out and take a picture!” This was Auntie J.

“J! What are you doing? We’re gonna miss the ferry!” That’s Auntie Mel.

“Girl, hurry up and get out!” Auntie J said again. “You’re gonna make us late.”

“You better go on and do as she says or we’ll never make it,” Auntie Mel sighed with her velvet resignation.

The men in the yard stood silently watching like guys unbothered by much of anything people do.

I stepped out and snapped some pictures and I’m so glad I did. The moment I got back in, Auntie J mashed the gas and we were off again. To this day, one of us needs only mention “the drive to the ferry” to raise crying laughter. So when you see Raymond’s Aunties J and Mel and their mild fussing in Moonrise Over New Jessup, now you know the extraordinary and loving women that inspired them.

Auntie J and Auntie Mel are my play aunties, but they willingly, unequivocally loved me from the moment we met. One of the traditions about Black community that is so special to me is the way we have historically embraced one another. As Gwendolyn Brooks tells us:

We are each other’s harvest:

We are each other’s business:

We are each other’s magnitude and bond.

In Moonrise Over New Jessup, Alice is born into a community of care long before she enters the titular side of town. She was raised by loving parents, and shared her childhood with a sister who she adored. After she is forced to leave the place where she was born and raised, this tradition of loving community is continued by the man on the bus recognizing a young woman in a troubled haze; continued by a shoeshine man recognizing a young woman in need; continued by Pastor and Mrs. Brown recognizing their ability and duty to help one of God’s children; continued by Miss Vivian recognizing talent and determination. New Jessup embraces Alice into a tradition of care. Her life is not perfect, but she is buffered and fortified by the pieces of love, large and small, that people are able to provide along the way.

So when someone gives Moonrise Over New Jessup the subcaption “Alice in Wonderland,” I say hmmmmm. New Jessup is not Wonderland, the implication being that Alice stepped into a place of fairy stories and wonder that could never exist in real life—so I say hmmmm. Why is a loving, caring Black community like New Jessup hard to believe in?

Skepticism calling generational love and care rare to impossible throughout the Black community bears interrogation. Because we must acknowledge that anti-Black language has been weaponized in generations of newspapers, magazines, books, advertisements, radio and television programs, movies, billboards, etc. to create and reinforce stereotypes and gross mischaracterizations about Black life. So while I understand where the Alice in Wonderland quip comes from, I say hmmmm to those who adopt this limited, reductive understanding of Black communities without question or hesitation.

The Crisis is one of several Black newspapers that has been fighting to counter this narrative for more than a century. Established by the NAACP in 1910, The Crisis has been vital to bringing issues affecting the Black community to the forefront. In 1912, the NAACP began publishing an annual Crisis called the The Children’s Number, which was intended to teach Black children racial uplift and pride. But each Children’s Number also included gruesome press reports about church bombings, lynchings, and myriad anti-Black atrocities alongisde children’s games and fairy stories. After the Red Summer of 1919, when W.E.B. DuBois received a letter from a young girl stating that she, “[hated] the white man just as much as he hates me and probably more!” DuBois argued that continuing to expose children to white racist hate in the pages of The Children’s Number was failing to achieve their aims, and would ultimately have a deleterious psychological impact on them. He said:

“To the consternation of the Editors of The Crisis we have had to record some horror in nearly every Children’s Number—in 1915, it was Leo Frank; in 1916, the lynching at Gainesville, Fla.; in 1917 and 1918, the riot and court martial at Houston, Tex., etc.

This was inevitable in our role as [a] newspaper—but what effect must it have on our children? To educate them in human hatred is more disastrous to them than to the hated. To raise them in ignorance of their racial identity and peculiar situation is inadvisable. Impossible.” 

His point was simple, yet profound: when we feed our children a steady diet of violence and anti-Blackness, we are using our own breath to prioritize Black otherness and inferiority. When we regard ourselves with skepticism and suspicion; when our lack of value to others is the centerpiece of the narrative, we are doing the destructive work of white supremacy for it by elevating the idea that the only real Black contribution to American history is otherness, degradation, exploitation, mutilation. This leads to frustration and fatalism in our children and contributes to their feeling that hate is the only answer for hate.

But DuBois was saying: this is our ink. Let us use it to prioritize us, our excellence, our children’s innocence. Let us prioritize the souls of Black folks and who WE ARE. The Brownies Book was born in 1920. DuBois and Jessie Redmon Fauset designed The Brownies Book as, “A Monthly Magazine For the Children of the Sun. Designed for All Children, But Especially For Ours.” The mission of The Brownies Book was seven-fold:

(a) To make colored children realize that being “colored” is a normal, beautiful thing.

(b) To make them familiar with the history and achievements of the Negro race.

(c) To make them know that other colored children have grown into beautiful, useful and famous persons.

(d) To teach them delicately a code of honor and actions in their relations with white children.

(e) To turn their little hurts and resentments into emulation, ambition and love of their own homes and companions.

(f) To point out the best amusements and joys and worth-while things of life.

(g)  To inspire them to prepare for definite occupations and duties with a broad spirit of sacrifice.

Their goal of printing children’s issues was to reinforce love for our community, not to teach generations of children to hate. DuBois and Fauset wanted to offset the impact of what was happening TO our communities from OUTSIDE our communities by demonstrating that pride, love, determination, creativity, and brilliance had always existed among us. Loving community is how we have survived on this soil, and, God wiling and the creek didn’t rise, it would continue to exist. The Brownies Book was thus intended, and designed, to fill Black children with self-love, empathy, and racial pride; not stir up the empty energy of hate. [For more in depth discussion about The Brownies Book, see this spectacular article by Anna Holmes in The Atlantic, and Naomi Coquillon’s wonderful work on the Library of Congress blog found here].

Black love is deep, immense, ancestral. Our fight is different so our love hits different than white, cishet male, Judeo-Christian standards of normalcy. The ways that Black people love on each other—in our towns and settlements, neighborhoods, churches, schools, families, benevolent societies, friendship circles; at barbecues and our home houses; at each head nod in a crowd—should be celebrated. If we didn’t have generational strength and love in our communities, we wouldn’t be here today.

The way we love our communities, our people, ourselves is borne of common experiences, struggles, and stories. It is learning to make biscuits with a scoop of this and a pinch of that because two generations ago an ancestor who couldn’t read understood the importance of passing along our culinary stories. It is continuing the tradition of community gardens in food deserts so that the community can eat. It is Auntie Mel and Auntie J waking up at the crack of dawn on their day off to drive me to Gee’s Bend, teasing and talking and skidding the whole way. It is neighborhoods recognizing who is addicted, who has mental health challenges, who is having trouble at home, who needs a firm hand of guidance, and who are the next ones to do the community proud. It is marching. It is telling stories. It is advocating.

I defy anyone who stands up any neighborhood as a universal standard of perfection. But I sure hope we all communities that are perfect for us. 

My community has all kinds and extends throughout the diaspora.

By the grace of God, we made that ferry. Classic cars rode in the May Day parade alongside eighteen-wheelers, four-wheelers, motorcycles, and folks from young to old waving from convertibles and truck beds. Every single vehicle was CLEAN. Muscle cars rocked the earth like only muscle can do. My plate overflowed with pulled pork, collards, macaroni and cheese, some of Auntie Mel’s catfish and a little of Auntie J’s oxtail. While we were eating, Auntie J asked a man walking by why he was there. He turned out to be Mrs. Lucy Mingo’s son Mark, who invited us to her home to meet one of the most famed quilters of the Gee’s Bend Collective and one of the early members of the Freedom Quilting Bee.

We pulled up to the yard, and a group of men were on the porch. Raw-boned with brown skin tanned and creased by blessedly long life, three or four were enjoying conversation. When my aunties and I got out of the car, talk ceased until one man called out,

“Well, who all we got here?”

When Mark started to talk, the man on the porch said quickly, “Didn’t nobody ask you. We know you.” Then he zeroed in on me and said, “We asking who’s these young ladies you have with you.” It wasn’t so much a challenge as it was seeking familiarity. Everybody knows that question asks not only who you are, but who your people are.

“Yessir, good afternoon,” I greeted him the way you do when you are a stranger arriving at somebody’s house out of the clear blue sky. “My name is Jamila Minnicks, and my people are the Young family out of Demopolis.”

He smiled. 

“Whatchu know about some O’Connor Young out of Demopolis?” he asked me. Now it was my turn to smile. 

“Sir? Do you mean O’Connor senior or junior?” The men on the porch laughed. We all laughed, and then we took a solid minute to figure out that maybe I am, somehow loosely kin to Lucy Mingo née Young and her brothers out there on that porch. 

I am a Black woman embraced, steeped, and fortified by my folks wherever I go—whether I am related to them or not. Just like Alice and so many of us in this world. That’s not Wonderland—that’s as real as it gets. And it has been our saving grace for generations.