To Black mothers, with love: a tribute in words and paintings - includes poetry

Ebony, May, 1991 by Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Albert Rice, Mari Evans, Langston Hughes

THE father and his worship is Asia; Europe is the precocious, self-centered, forward-striving child; but the land of the mother is and was Africa. . . . Nor does this all seem to be solely a survival of the historic matriarchate through which all nations pass, - it appears to be more than this, - as if the great Black race in passing up the steps of human culture gave the world, not only the Iron Age, the cultivation of the soil, and the domestication of animals, but also, in peculiar emphasis, the mother-idea.

I CAN remember when I was a little, young [slave] girl, how my old mammy would sit out of doors in the evenings and look up at the stars and groan, and I would say, "Mammy, what makes you groan so?" And she would say, "I am groaning to think of my poor children; they do not know where I be and I don't know where they be. I look up at the stars and they look up at the stars!"

My mother . . . had little time in which to give attention to the training of her children during the day. She snatched a few moments for our care in the early morning before her work began, and at night after the day's work was done. One of my earliest recollections is that of my mother cooking a chicken late at night, and awakening her children for the purpose of feeding them.

The Black Madonna

Not as the white nations know thee O Mother! . . .

Yet thou art she, the Immaculate Maid, and none other,

Crowned in the stable at Bethlehem, hailed of the star.

See where they come, thy people, so humbly appealing,

From the ancient lands where the olden faiths had birth.

Tired dusky hands uplifted for thy healing.

Pity them, Mother, the untaught of earth.

I AM A

BLACK WOMAN

I am a black woman tall as a cypress strong beyond all definition still defying place and time and circumstance assailed impervious indestructible Look on me and be renewed

MOTHER TO SON

Well, son, I'll tell you: Life for me ain't been no crystal stair. It's had tacks in it, And splinters, And boards torn up, And places with no carpet on the floor - Bare. But all the time I'se been a-climbin' on, And reachin' landin's, And turnin' corners, And sometimes goin' in the dark Where there ain't been no light. So boy, don't you turn back. Don't you set down on the steps |Cause you finds it's kinder hard. Don't you fall now - For I'se still goin', honey, I'se still climbin', And life for me ain't been no crystal stair.