Women’s Work: Remembering Bert
Most of my memories of my late grandmother Bertha, lovingly known as Bert, are of her working, and not the punch-a-clock-at-a-jobsite kind of work that you get paid for either.
Whatever the occasion — family gathering or public something or another, there were many of both in her tightknit community — Bert was always in service to others.
She was cooking and cleaning and making sure those around her were cared for.
She wasn’t too dainty or delicate that she couldn’t do some heavy-lifting. It wasn’t at all uncommon for her to work alongside the men. For example, at a boucherie. A boucherie is a Cajun ritual of slaughtering a hog. This requires a squad of capable collaborators, a minimum of three, each with a specific task as you see there’s the killing of the hog, the draining of the hog’s blood and then the boning-out and carving of the hog. And, of course, there’s the cooking of just about every cut of the hog — ears, feet, snout and all because there’s boudin (a type of sausage), cracklins (fried pork skin) and hogshead cheese to be made.
So, you see, she did the women’s work and could handle some of the men’s work too. Gender roles be damned.
Simple and plain, Bert was a hard worker.
Born in 1930 in Rideau Settlement, a heavily-wooded area of family-owned farm land near the village of Palmetto, in south central St. Landry Parish, Bert was the eldest of three children born to Leo “Snow” Romar and Theresa Guidry. Rideau Settlement once spanned more than ten thousand acres. That’s approximately a 20 mile-square foot area of land owned by free people of color! Today, the population of Rideau Settlement has been greatly reduced since transitioning away from being a predominately agrarian society. However, most of the land is still owned by the descendants of the free people of color who purchased the original homesteads. St. Landry Parish is one of the 19 original parishes of Louisiana designated post-Louisiana Purchase in 1803. My family has been in Louisiana since the 1800s.
As a young girl, Bert worked. Bert worked in the field hoeing and picking cotton and then there was the housework too. Her mother died when she was 8 years old so she had to grow up pretty fast. Her father, my great-grandfather, who I remember as a jovial guy who loved to rub his whiskers on your face when you hugged him, purchased 20 acres in Rideau Settlement for $25 an acre in 1949. The land was entirely forested and had to be cleared to build the family home and to start raising crops — cotton and corn, grown primarily to feed the horses and mules that plowed the land.
Bert married James Ovide Bush Sr. at 16 and left Rideau Settlement for Rosa, also in St. Landry Parish, where she raised 13 children and a handful of grandchildren on the Bush homestead of 20 acres that in its heyday yielded crops of sugar cane, soy bean, corn, and, of course, king cotton. The Bush family was the largest and only black farmers in Rosa.
My uncle Leo, who we call Mike, is my grandmother’s second oldest. Like me, his earliest memory of Bert is of her working: “She would be out in the field pulling corn and hoeing cotton.”
All the neighborhood women worked in the field too. My uncle Mike said it wasn’t at all odd for women to work side by side men in the field. “From about 1951 to 1961, we were the farmers and worked on our land. We would pay people two cents a pound for cotton,” said uncle Mike, who lives on land his grandfather, my great-grandfather purchased in Rideau Settlement nearly 70 years ago. The street he lives on is named Snow’s Road after his grandfather, my great-grandfather.
In those days, my uncle said flour, rice and maybe beans were the only store bought items, everything else was grown right on the land — mustard greens, tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, pumpkins, snap beans, field peas and black eyed peas. Watermelon and cantaloupe too.
“When we got hungry, we went to the chicken coup and got eggs. If we wanted chicken, we would wring its neck, scald it and have it for dinner the same day,” said my uncle, Mike, 67. “We never went to the grocery store to buy meat. We had guinea (fowl), ducks and lots of pork. Every now and then we would have beef after we killed a cow.”
I have a stack of my uncles Immaculate Conception School report cards, signed by my grandmother, from this period. Years ago, when I was reviewing them I noticed excessive absences and inquired why. The answer was simple: Work was the priority. When you were old enough to work, that’s what you did. You stayed home from school to work the fields.
“In September, we picked cotton and pulled corn. We would start school right before Thanksgiving, but then around April and May, we would leave again to go to the fields to hoe cotton and plant corn,” he said. “After ’62, things got mechanized and we started using machines to pick cotton and herbicides to kill the weeds.”
Once the work shifted, Bert began to give her time to Immaculate Conception Church, a Black Catholic Church founded in 1897 in LeBeau. She was a faithful parishioner there and is buried in the small cemetery on the grounds. For many years, she helped plan the largest fundraising event there, the bazaar.
She made time to sit with the elderly. She found time to deliver newspapers. She invested her time in civic engagement too. She was involved with her local NAACP chapter. Bert was also a poll commissioner for more than 30 years working every single election — local, state and federal. She believed in the importance of voting and lived long enough to see the first black man serve as the commander in chief of the United States.
There she go, always putting in work.
Bert wasn’t privileged in the sense that she traveled the world exploring and sightseeing far off lands nor did she have a formal education. She left school in 11th grade. Truth is, most of life she observed and participated in from her perch off Highway 71 surrounded by her more than 42 grandchildren, 48 great-grandchildren and one great-great grandchild. But she knew stuff, had a quick wit and a thirst for knowledge and reading.
She passed in May 2010 at the age of 80. The last time I saw her was about a year before. We talked about the book she was reading, Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and about activist and once-Green Party presidential candidate, Cynthia McKinney and how she was surrounded by the Israeli Navy on a flotilla attempting to deliver aid to the Gaza Strip. She knew I visited Gaza back in 2009.
The collective understanding of work is it is the activities required in order to earn a living. However, most of my grandmother’s labor was unpaid. It was survival based. Caregiving mainly. The job of caregiving is undervalued, under paid if paid at all; and oftentimes, goes unnoticed as long as it continues uninterrupted. It’s the invisible work that needs to happen to make things run smoothly and it’s oftentimes thankless. You know, mainly “women’s work.”
I spent half of the morning looking for a letter she wrote me back in 2001: I didn’t find it. In it, I remember she told me how proud she was of my work as a writer and asked me to send her more of my newspaper articles to read.
The point of this is that I’m writing again, Bert; and I’m inspired by you to do the women’s work of holding ish down. If I can document the lives and praise the work of strangers, surely I can do the same for the women in my life.
Asé…
