Branches of the Vine: the Price of Admission: Re-Imagining the Bible Belt South for a Nu World Order

By O.M. Davis

Its all quiet now in cities like Birmingham, Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Newark, where blacks once protested and rioted against their segregated conditions in the 1960s and women burned their bras during the Womens Liberation era in the 1970s. But for five years, O.M. Davis, a pioneer in equal employment opportunity, analyzed employment practices and wrote affirmative-action plans for public- and private-sector clients throughout the United States. This was concurrent with her CEO refusing to pay her comparable wages as whites and males, citing that although qualified, she had two strikes against her of being black and a woman. One CEO stated that she had delusions of grandeur, while the other stated that she was ahead of her time.

From 1968 to 1999, O.M. Davis used the court of law to redress her fight with CEOs across race and gender lines for pay equity and inclusion. Along the way, she weaves in her enslaved Native American Cherokee ancestry, a world conference of women, and anecdotes of spiritual inspiration.

Davis cites the family as the key to her success. In Branches of the Vine: The Price of Admission, she gives you an inside look at her story of inspiration, embedded in her stable, nuclear Christian family background, which she accessed to function in todays society.

By looking deep within herself, she interweaves her enslaved bloodline where her re-imagination of past conditions empowers her with knowledge of unity and diversity. As a contemporary woman whose world pivots on individualized, systemic gender and race discrimination, it also becomes the stuff on which she renders decisions in the business world. There are certain basic truths that are so solid in the foundation of our being that it can become monumental for any era or new/nu world order.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Dec 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781452564852

O.M. Davis

O.M. Davis was born in Sulligent, Alabama and graduated from the segregated Brighton High School, near the Birmingham area. She received a B.A. degree from Quinnipiac University, Hamden, Connecticut and did postgraduate studies in the MBA for Executives program at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Rutherford, Connecticut.

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PART 1

THE

IMAGINARY

PLAYGROUND

APRIL 1, 2012

Dearest Dad,

Now that I have retired from the workforce, I have come full circle and back to the family unit where it all began. In 1983, a year prior to your death, you asked me about the book that I had promised to write. I was still keeping a journal, trying to make sense out of new encounters where I was considered an outsider. I did not know that I was following my own value system, which I thought was universal. In the end it came down to my role models, you and Mom. Your marriage of forty-five years that ended with your death was the stability that, unbeknownst to me, was what carried me through all the challenges that I encountered.

My retirement became effective on December 1, 2010. It took me a year to heal before I could go back and put into perspective all the information gained during my work years. Looking back over those years, my writings unfolded as raw experiences and wounds that came out on paper as generation of knowledge. These writings became my clearing board and the building blocks for the next adventure. In taking it all in as an adventure, where I was simply looked upon as an alien as to my gender (female) and race (African-American), I became visible. I wrote myself in, so I was invisible, and I used my pen to do so. In so doing, the wandering soul of my enslaved, unnamed great-great-great- Native American Cherokee grandmother’s gaze upon the two children forced on her through rape slowly receded. I came to understand the meaning of her gaze.

In moving through the public and private sectors of the work world, I found that my imaginary friends from my childhood of gods and goddesses took on new meaning. My subconscious had been programmed to understand the basis of Western civilization by simply reading and learning about Greek mythology in the fourth grade. My physical and mental senses knew when they were insulted. I have found that in my research to resolve problems, the present seems to take care of itself. I have learned that process is often more important than the end result. This came about because of a conversation with Professor George Kent, my former black college professor at Quinnipiac, who later become a faculty member at the University of Chicago. Upon graduation, I had planned to go to Spain and write great fictional romance novels, but I was taken aback when I was questioned as to what love was all about. It was a question that remained with me, for I had forgotten that I had made a vow to myself to search out the truth upon leaving home for college.

In writing this book, where I was about choosing my own desires and following my bliss, I had to go through a lot to find out that a woman, especially one of color, was excluded from visible positions, regardless of skills.

The males and whites I encountered had their own stereotypical versions of a black female from the South. They seemed not to know that the segregated Jim Crow, apartheid Birmingham area employed steel and coal wage workers. It was not farm country. Although the black multimillionaire A.G. Gaston made headlines with Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1960s, many did not make a connection between black people being wage earners or having their own businesses and institutions.

Of course, you recall the Roman smithy god Vulcan who sat atop Red Mountain looking down upon Birmingham with his buttocks exposed. The good white women ensured that his front was buttoned up in the blue overalls of the steel furnaces that belched pollutants for miles around. Many steel and coal workers died with black lung disease. As a child, when we traveled, I loved for you to drive through the area at night. The furnaces belching to the sky made the city so alive and electrified, as if on a sunny day. I was so in control of myself that as the first of our family to work within private industry and a Fortune 500 corporation, I had to write to ensure that I knew what I knew.

In the first generation of knowledge, which I call The Imaginary Playground, recounts the period of growing up in the Jim Crow, segregated South, where my imagination transcended my surroundings. Our close-knit nuclear family of grandparents, uncles, and aunts abounded with love. This went from the family to the surrounding community, which comprised the church and the school. My playmates, imaginary gods and goddesses, were invisible role models, which laid fallow until I needed them later on in life. The church was key in building skills during the summer of leadership youth Bible school. I held all authority figures accountable for their actions, because you were my role model. I always had a thing about the Old Testament Herod and Pontius Pilate. At bedtime, there was the oral history of maternal grandparents, the enslaved Native Americans, and paternal grandparents and their struggles from tenant farmers to landowners. There was also the racist Ku Klux Klan marching and the near-death experience of road rage. The Jim Crow schools provided some fun times, as the parents were involved with these schools to ensure their success. The importance of education overrode all of the negatives.

Upon leaving home, Mom made it a point to tell me that I did not owe the two of you anything; whatever you did for us, it was because of love. I had no burdens to bear except to be happy.

The second generation, which I call The Medium Is the Massage (McLuhan’s message becomes the massage) is where I began to get a sense of being a thing and property of others, with society’s blessings. As a transplanted Southerner in the Northern environment, I was expected to fit into some kind of stereotype that had been predefined and inexorably fixed. I dropped out of college to simply research the black female in the American setting. I read all the stereotypes for black women and concurrently read a lot of books by English writers on women in general.

With limited knowledge, I knew what I did not want. I refused to divide myself by race or gender based on white, male, or institutionalized expectations. I found that I could forego material or other comforts for my own mental psyche. I refuse to enter an interracial marriage and move out of state because his parents would not accept me. In other instances, I refused the terms of sex as the condition for my getting housing or allowing whites and males to terminate me without cause. When a black male manager terminated 80 percent of the blacks, which included me, to make room for incoming whites, I refused to accept it. Although I did not know what laws were in place for incidents like this, I knew that the company had a federal contract. I wrote a complaint letter, and I was reinstated. Upon joining another federal program with a creative component to become a two-year college trained black and Hispanic students to be paraprofessionals, I spoke out. A two-week strike ensued, protesting the fact that certificates would be awarded to students who could not read and write. Prior to this event, I spoke out again when the program was going to be replicated for inferior educational purposes by the repressive South African regime. The fact that some professional blacks would support such a program left me devastated, as I could not understand why they would support such a program geared to black and brown people.

In the third generation of information, which I call Crossing the Burning Sands, I see a system of white and male power brokers acting like they speak for black people and using these two traits as a sense of entitlement for anything they decree. This came about in my next job, where white executives in not awarding me a promotion told me that I had two strikes against me. I hired the Madison Avenue white attorney that represented the Black Panther Party. I did all the talking, and I won.

In my next Fortune 500 company job, I had to seriously deal with myth and reality in working in private industry. Again there was the male and white situation. When a white male and a black man bonded together to terminate me, an inner voice told me to kill both of them. I was on the brink of a double murder and suicide when I pulled back, remembering Mom. Once the tears were over, I wrote my own historical perspective of the genesis of American reality as I saw it. The black race was a whole new people forged on this soil. We were nu people, and my enslaved ancestors had called on Jesus Christ to be their Savior. That was all that was necessary after I had done the best that I could. My history was sacred, as much blood had been spilled. I saw that I was the sum product of the bondage blood of my ancestors and that I was a nu me. I did not have to kill. I now knew that I could not give up my life so lightly. I felt humbled and vowed never again to feel so low as to want to kill for workplace matters. I sued the company and made a settlement. The use of attorneys taught me that I alone must look after my own interests or be excluded from the loop. Spending a couple of years as an underemployed worker, I met a whole new population of people and moved in circles that I otherwise would not have encountered.

The fourth generation, which I call To Be or Not To Be, is about attending the 1980 UN Mid-Decade Conference for Women in Copenhagen, Denmark. I was trying to decide whether or not to become an expatriate. I was tired of interviewing for positions where males expected me to reward them with sex to be hired. With over 220 countries in attendance, I was able to gain some insight as to what was happening to women in the underdeveloped world, as well as the Western world. I interviewed the fundamentalist women of Iran, talked with prostitutes, lesbians, and female leaders of states. Again, God must have been pointing the way for me, for how else could one explain my having dinner with the leader of McGill University’s student takeover and the model for the planning of the aborted murder of my boss and the white vice president. Upon coming home, I found a job and ended up confronting a white female college professor who gave a paper on structural transformation. Her paper chided black females for being left out of the system again, a blatant dig at the 1970s women’s liberation movement. It was there that I learned of the acceptance of privilege and its price. It was awarded to those who did the system’s bidding on the bended knee of worship or lying prone, sex becoming the crucial condition for employment.

When a black female manager handed me my termination paper that was initiated by the white director, I sought a black male counselor, who gave me the book, The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building. I came to terms with the manager’s collaboration and failure to take a stand. I had taken a stand on a white executive demanding sexual favors in the workplace, so I should have foreseen this as my ending.

In the fifth generation, which I call The Squeeze, I recognized a repetition of gamesmanship where the incoming predominant decision makers were all black, with no higher-level accountability. Recognizing that the black CEO will inherit a system in which I will again be underpaid and riveted in place by a white and male power infrastructure, I demanded my back pay for two years of working without the title at a higher-level position. I received it, resigned, and moved on.

The sixth generation, which I call Ahead of Her Time, was taken from a guy talk conversation by a CEO, in which he said that I was not being given the same conditions as whites because the system was not ready to recognize black women as visible.

Having just left one organization where the system downgraded and underpaid blacks to maintain many functional white illiterates, I quietly set up a system with legitimate policies and procedures and objective criteria for general use—and for my eventual day in court. Each day, my creativity was riveted to the walls with plots and subplots of black-on-black sabotage, third-party sexual harassment, and favoritism from leadership and those in the loop. Each day, I rose to meet the CEO’s challenge to maintain his empire, which was the equivalent of cutting off his balls in his race- and gender-hatred games.

I was now dragging the system into the new millennium, kicking and dying all over the stage like a Greek tragedy. There were bodies all over the stage. All I had to do was to try and write a script to put them out of their misery. Yet I cried tears of pain and laughter, for I was part of the human condition. No one was above the law.

Each day that I wrote and created my own scripts, based on my very own human experiences, I realized that my former professor George Kent had a point about my not knowing the inward workings of America. It was good that I stopped and took in what he said. For the greatest fiction is that life is based on rules and procedures when one is ignorant of those rules.

The greatest fiction was what others had created for my persona. The nonfiction of simply being free as a human being was beyond my imagination. Thus, I can say to George Kent that the real-life tales of adultery, emotional blackmail, harassment, and greed were more than I could ever have imagined. On the other hand, my imagination had no boundaries in meeting those real-life dramas. It was interesting how my childhood imagination from playing with gods came into play. Those petty Earth gods, white and male, with leadership authority always reminded me of Herod and Pontius Pilate. Here on Earth, they were not above the law.

The global village now knows that there is a nu world order. While white women have enjoyed the global status of respect based on their skin color, that has not been the case for women of color. In the past, on a global basis, males often saw a black female as an easy sexual mark or a prostitute. Based on America’s history, our historical women of color fought for the rights of black males first in order for the woman of color to have her rights. We now have a president of color born of a mixed-race marriage between a white mother and a Kenyan father.

Having navigated the courts and challenged executives for my basic civil rights, I have shared this information with many female friends. It has become my pleasure and delight to use my pen like a sword to cut through sexual and gender games. As we enter the twenty-first century, it is utterly fantastic to have arrived in this place and time and to have peace of mind and to sing of one’s self without having to simulate the oppression.

As I close this letter upon entering the second decade of the twenty-first century, I am indebted to Mom and Dad. For it was her love that allowed me to pause and think about the taking of a human life for vanity or a material thing. Vengeance is not mine! I am indebted to my dad for his self-reliance and belief in education. There is something about death that clarifies manmade events and those that occur through an act of God. As always, I will now see both of you in my dreams.

Until we meet again.

STEPPING INTO THE GAZE

I do not know when I first became conscious of the fact that the gaze of my great-great-great-grandmother was fastened upon me. Perhaps it was somewhere in my mother’s telling of the story that was passed on to her and has since remained with me.

In scenes from my childhood, I am listening to her story with my brothers; my mother is holding a baby in her arms. I am fighting with my brothers for space in mother’s bed, somewhere near the bottom; certainly not at the top, for that would make me a baby. We are in the house that my father, an Alabama steel mill worker; it was built with his own hands in 1941. He is working the swing shift.

Mother’s soft voice begins with a slight whisper: If you are not quiet, you are going into your own bed. Mother said that great-grandmother Schollotee told her that her mother told her that her mother was sold into slavery, and she never saw her again. She said that my great-great-grandmother did not know how old her mother was when her mother was sold. She remembers that she and her sister were sitting on the porch, locked into each other’s arms, looking at their mother on the day she was sold. They dared not cry, for their mother held them steady in her gaze while she stood yoked at the neck and chained to a parcel of slaves.

Somehow in later years, I imagined the girls were between three and five years old. A look could silence children at that age. In later years, I found this to be true; Mother’s grandmother was the younger of the sisters.

There was a parcel of slaves, Mother began, and they were lined up to march. She was at the very end of the line. She looked at the children until her neck was yanked forward as they marched over the rise of the hill and disappeared. The children, who were part white, stayed with the plantation master, who spoke German.

The haunting eyes of a mother standing tall, not crying, simply looking at her children always made me cry. Didn’t she cry? I would wail. No, she didn’t cry, my mother would say emphatically. She simply looked at them, and the children looked at her.

Years later, when I read of the treatment of slaves in Deep South states like Alabama and Mississippi, I recalled my unnamed ancestral great-great-great-grandmother. Since my great-grandmother spoke German and had remained on the plantation, I deduced that her grandmother was the younger of the two sisters on the porch. Her sister was later kidnapped by professional slave catchers, who came on horseback and simply rode off with her.

The maternal side of my family produced many images from stories handed down, and I always wondered about my maternal great-grandfather, W T; he was half-Creek and probably of German ancestry. He married my great-grandmother Schollotee, who was part Cherokee and more than half German. Schollottee’s mother (my great-great-grandmother) became a breeder women. She gave birth to two children in the same year, 1865, by a German of the same household, where the unnamed great-great-great had given birth and was later sold. This was the story that was handed down to me. Schollotee was given 160 acres of land upon her marriage to W.T. (Tom).

Another forty acres was added through an inheritance from a great-grand-uncle. By the time great-grandmother Schollotee was thirty-three, she was a widow with six sons and four daughters. My great-grandfather was thirty-nine when he died. There is the story of my great-grandfather, W.T., laboring in the fields with his shoulder-length hair, walking behind two mules. He had a large goiter that hung heavily from his neck. He worked very hard to farm the 160 acres. The story told is that he worked himself to death. He and an uncle were left in Alabama when his father headed with his second wife out to Oklahoma for the land rush at the turn of the twentieth century. Some of the uncles and brothers worked in the slaughterhouses in Kansas City. The Oklahoma records show that his brother, whose name was Monroe, abused his wife, Winnie Beth. She, the sister of Schollotee, gave birth to fourteen children. She listed this as the cause for their divorce.

My mother talked of a farm with a wraparound porch and fancy carriages and horses. I always thought of them as beautiful carousel horses, like one still sees on the old merry-go-rounds.

There is something about the red clay hills of Alabama. As a school-age girl, I often thought of the red clay mud as being part and parcel of my exterminated Native American ancestors. As I sat in the hot, sweltering classroom listening to Alabama history, my thoughts were always of the Indians. One particular teacher had a style of teaching that seemed to make everything alive; hence, it is still easy for me to remember Alabama history. Alabama is an Indian word that means to clear the thicket. In the early days, the land was overgrown with thicket and underbrush. There was every kind of small game animal, along with bear and mountain lions. The Choctaws cleared the underbrush and thickets. After they cleared the land, other small tribes moved in, as they saw that the land provided all the food that they could gather.

The red clay soil of Alabama was perfect for building mounds that were similar to the Aztecs and the Mayas. The Moundville Indians were noted for their head-flattening, which was considered a mark of good rearing.¹ They were not warlike. These earthen mound dwellings suited the varied temperature of Alabama, which froze the rivers in the winter and baked the red clay in the summers. Once a year it might snow. Lush vegetation flourished in the summer, spring, and fall.

There were four major tribes: the Chickasaws settled in the northwest, while the Cherokees settled in the northeast. The Creeks settled in the southeast and the Choctaws in the southeast and central regions. These were the tribes that Great Britain, France, and Spain encountered when they started land acquisition in the 1500s. Chief Tuscaloosa, nearly seven feet tall, fought Hernando de Soto. The tale is told of his going to a peace conference in what is now Mobile. Upon seeing that it was a trap, he ran out the backdoor and vanished.

During the next two hundred years, these tribes became known as the Civilized Tribes. Their homes were built in the style of Europeans. The Indian women dressed in European styles of the day. At the time, the Europeans bickered among themselves and brought in mercenaries, such as Hessian soldiers, to assist them.² At one time, the Choctaws fought with the French, and the Chickasaws fought with the British. Finally, in 1763, the Treaty of Paris divided Alabama among the three powers, which the United States did not redeem until the Louisiana Purchase of 1813.³ During this time, some Indians acquired cotton plantations and slaves. As the South began to grow, Alabama found herself bound on the north by Tennessee and on the east by Georgia, on the South by Florida and the Gulf of Mexico, and on the west by Mississippi.

Between1830 and 1842, the Indians were forced from their land and moved to Oklahoma. The trek to Oklahoma was marked with bodies along the way and the stream of tears shed for the dead.

Often, I would sit in school and listen to the teacher and gaze outside; I could picture Chief Tuscaloosa, larger than life, riding in the midst of his warriors with a beautiful white feathered war bonnet, only to disappear and never be seen again, though his spirit remained forever with his people.

Often, I thought of my unnamed great-great-great-grandmother. Yet in my mind, those are my bedtime stories for creativity. There is the brown-skinned Native American woman standing tall, gazing upon her two daughters. Her gaze takes in the sight of two female children wrapped in each other arms. Their abundant curly blond-brown hair frames their round wide eyes, fixed on her for some direction. They knew that they were not to utter a word or cry out. Her neck is fitted with a iron collar and yoked with a chain to a parcel of slaves ready to march out. She is at the end of the line. She simply feasts her eyes upon them, shocked. What will their father do with them?

When one does not cry, then tears are all gone, and one is simply resigned. Tears give hope. She was a mother without hope. She was also a warrior without hope. She had been bought as chattel property. Rape was now her term and condition. She had become a breeder woman, who gave birth to two children in twelve months, fathered by a white German plantation master. She was still in shock And now she was being sold again. How did she come to be sold the first time?

She was a Cherokee and a member of one of the Five Civilized Tribes (Muscogee/Creek, Seminole, Chickasaw, Chocktaw), and her nation once controlled the mountain areas of Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, and north to the Ohio River. She was purchased in North Carolina. As a member of the Eastern Band, she and her parents were part of the forced removal on the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma; she escaped in 1838 to the Great Smoky Mountains.

Perhaps there were no tears because she knew how she came to be in the Smoky Mountains. They were among the five hundred or so who killed a soldier who prodded the aging mother of Tsali (Charlie) with a bayonet to move faster on the trek to Oklahoma. The escapees were allowed to remain free only if they surrendered someone to pay for the death; otherwise, seven thousand soldiers would comb the mountains for them. Tsali surrendered, along with his brother and three of his sons. They were shot by a firing squad of the Cherokee Nation.⁴ Such a great love in war does not bring forth tears. He remained a beloved martyr.

Thus, the unnamed great-great-great did not cross into Oklahoma, which comes from two Choctaw words meaning red people. As a woman of the Cherokee Nation, the unnamed great-great-great was fluent in both English and Cherokee. The language had been written and developed in the prior generation by Sequoyah, when the Cherokee Nation was at its height.⁵ As the offspring of the war branch of the Cherokee Nation who repudiated the sale of Georgia lands in 1835 to the US government, her parents were activists. If that was the case, then there was also the possibility that her band, known as the Eastern Band, might have been involved in the assassination of several hundred of the five hundred leading Cherokees who had signed the treaty to cede the land to the government.

On the other hand, the peaceful portion of the Cherokee Nation took the legal route and appealed their forced removal from lands in 1819 to the US government. They lost the appeal. Then the State of Georgia attempted to buy the land. The Cherokee Nation then enacted a law forbidding the sale on punishment of death. The State of Georgia retaliated and outlawed the Cherokee government and confiscated the lands. Although five hundred Cherokee leaders signed off with the Georgia government for strips of land in Oklahoma, they only represented a fraction of the people.

There was John Ross, born of a Scottish father and Cherokee mother. His spirit was with his Indian heritage and bowed to the inevitable. He requested to personally lead his 16,000 people to Oklahoma, because of the insensitivity of the soldiers. It took them over six months to get to Oklahoma in 1839. About 25 percent of the people died along the way.⁶

In all probability, the 1842 Ashburton Treaty put a damper on the slave trade. Serious prohibition of the slave trade commenced, with the United States and Britain guarding the high seas in 1845.⁷ With the sanction of President Andrew Jackson, the negative and hostile environment against the Native Americans in all probability gave the professional slave catchers a lot of leeway.

If this is true, the unnamed great-great-great might have been a young woman around twenty or younger when captured. She would have known her tribal history and her place in it. In her world, the tribes were divided into seven matrilineal clans that were dispersed into war and peace areas of permanent villages. In the Cherokee world, her Indian female role model of beloved woman could have been a source of inspiration.⁸ However, in Alabama, she had nowhere to run, unless it was to the Seminoles. In the white world of slavery, I am sure she had no love for the condition of the white plantation mistress. She saw her as a white with power, regardless of whether she used it or not. In the Indian world, captured women and children who were enslaved were treated with kindness.

As a part of the remnant Eastern North Carolina band sold to the Southern state of Alabama, the unnamed great-great-great’s world was already split up. There was the forced removal from their homes to Oklahoma; those who escaped were living in the Great Smokey Mountains of North Carolina. Her sale or kidnapping could have taken place any time between 1840 and 1845. If Great-Grandmother Schollotee was born around 1859, her mother, so traumatized by the loss of the unnamed great-great-great and then later with the theft of a sister, would have been between three and five years old.

It was generally known that Indians did not survive in slavery. Once their spirit was broken, they refused to work and simply died. Thus, the probability is high that the unnamed great-great-great died soon after she was separated from her children. To have a mother sold and then a sister stolen shortly afterwards by professional slave catchers must have shattered great-great-grandmother to pieces, a legacy she passed on to her two daughters, Schollotee and Winne Beth. How disheartening for a Cherokee, whose nation developed its own language and alphabet and had its own newspaper, to then be reduced to a thing, no longer a free spirit.

Great-grandmother Schollotee remembered, foremost, the look that was described to her of her grandmother. Her mother, also a breeder, must have known some Cherokee history to have given a daughter a Cherokee name like Schollotee, with the double e. The other daughter was Winnie Beth. Thus, two generations were bred by a Germanic overseer.

The Emancipation Proclamation of Slaves was written on January 1, 1863. The hostilities were not over until 1865. This must have been a very difficult period for enslaved Native Americans. They were caught in the ongoing crossfire of being exterminated when the Southern states were threatening secession over balance of power based on the status of new states being admitted to the Union

The unnamed great-great-great was removed from the Smokey Mountains and became a sex slave for breeding in a Germanic household. What kind of women did these white humans marry? Their men seem to define them and give them respect and privileges within the narrow confines of producing a male heir. They were always attached to a male, be it father, brother, or husband. I wonder whether it was possible that the unnamed great-great-great could read and write and not the mistress of the house. If that was the case, she in all probability knew of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who were trying to elevate the role of women, who they felt were degraded in marriage.⁹ Yet the unnamed great-great-great must have had no language for such philosophical nonsense. In her world, males and females ruled alike according to their spirits.

As a general policy, wouldn’t the Native Americans have perceived the whites as enemies? If that was the case, then the unnamed great-great-great remained in a hostile state until the very end. The white female’s history on rape was as old as Europa, the stuff of myth and books. It would be another hundred years before Rosa Parks arrive on the scene and then another twenty-five years before rape is other than the term and condition for women.¹⁰ On the other hand, for the enslaved African female, rape was the natural state for her term and condition in life. Yet the white mistress perceived the enslaved African woman as a threat. How did this come to be?

How did the enslaved African woman perceive the white humans that she encountered? Certainly, the attack on her by white males in the white male imperialistic system was nasty and vicious. She had come from an old culture that predated the Bible. She had come from a culture where marriages were covenants that sealed nations in peace. Such was the marriage of Moses to the Ethiopian woman. In general, the selection of a mate in marriage was left to parents; the option of rejection was not something that would have been normal for her. Thus, what she would have been dealing with was the manner in which mating took place. This blood bond did not contain the village’s sacred blessing or any sacred ritual in the culture in which she was later placed. The issue that came from her body was mere human machinery, male and female alike.

The world in which she came from honored polygamy founded in a religious, social, and economic framework, where a man could have up to four wives. However, a man had to give the bride’s family a token of appreciation. Each wife headed her own household and took care of her children. The shock of the first set of enslaved African women must have been the total lack of respect of the white father for his children by her. However, everyone knew who the father was. In the African community, the upkeep of the children was the mother’s responsibility. The horror of all horrors must have occurred when some enslaved African males were forced to work alongside the women in the fields.

In the simple mind of the enslaved African woman, the white female had not advanced far because she gave her child over to a slave to nurse and then had slaves run her household. She did not even know that she was number-one wife or how to gain respect. The adversarial attitude of the mistress toward her must have been a shock; this placed her as an equal. In her world, everyone knew his or her role. The enslaved woman and the mistress shared a common tie of gender; yet they were both castigated by the same system. The white mistress was linked to her husband, father, and brother to provide visibility and definition. The slave mistress was exploited by the same three. She was property to be exploited by the general system, its overseers, and anyone to whom they gave the privilege to exploit her. The bicameral breakdown of the American society based on race and gender for exploitation had now begun.¹¹

As a child, I wondered about the strangeness and casual abuse between husbands and wives. My father did not abuse my mother. I also wondered about the interpretation of the Bible. Since I was living and swimming in the ocean of the segregated South, I felt something was missing but did not know what it was. I attended the Colored Methodist Church; in the 1950s, it was changed to Christian. Around the age of twelve, I joined the church and became a Christian. During church service, I recall listening to the strong masculine voice from the pulpit referring to women as some kind of clamoring vessel. I felt the women parishioners were uncomfortable. I caught the feeling without understanding it.

There was some connection. When I made the connection that Ethiopia was in the land of Africa, I was taking the regular two-week Bible study for children at our church. The pastor’s wife was very interesting. We learned how to make numerous things,