From Ordinary To Extraordinary — Grandma Moses
Extraordinary people know there are many chances but only one life
— DRAFT —
This is a draft chapter of a book to be published this fall 2021 entitled Be Somebody — Extraordinary Lives. It will discuss the nature and cause of eminent and successful lives with some contrasting material on failure and disappointment. Please note, some chapters are in final form while others are in such a rough state they are better unread. Changes will occur frequently. If you have comments, please note them on the Medium page. The full list of chapters can be found here:
The Time Modality
- The only metric by which all others must be measured
- The mantra “Do Something. Be Somebody”
- No ambition is lost, just not begun
- Failure is nothing more than a temptation to start again
- Now is the best time to start winning
Cases:
- Annie Robertson “Grandma” Moses
- Dr. Reatha Clark King — Do Something, Be Somebody.
- Thomas Carlyle — Just Start Over
Who hasn’t been on a family road trip when one of the children asks, every twenty minutes by the way, how much longer? It is the question we have to ask ourselves every moment of our lives and live them as if we don’t have the answer. Now try that with your four-year-old.
Great thinkers have said for centuries that time is the most precious commodity. Time to make money, have kids, be happy, learn a language, get an MBA, find a wife or husband, train a dog, learn to fly. Given enough time, we would solve all our problems, never run out of gas, and make a lot of jokes because we have all eternity to find a gas station or work on the punchline. The reality is by the time we have it memorized, the party’s over.
Fame is a currency that gets spent the moment you make it.
Your Life In Numbers
Did you know that recent research in the UK showed that in an 80-year life or 700,000 hours we spend them as follows:
- Sleep: 26 years or 228,000 hours.
- Watching TV, vacations, eating, working out, romance, socializing, and education: 21 years.
- Work: 13 years or 5,000 days or 25% of our 50–60 year career. Covid probably increased this by 20%.
- Laughing 115 days. Less time than women take to get dressed. Men need 46 days (it shows) unless they work in IT. Then a few hours.
- Commuting, cleaning, dropping kids off at school, and reading trashy novels: 8 years.
Where does that leave time for decisions and indecision? We reflexively check if there is time before we take a road trip or bake muffins. But when we stumble into the realm of big things like what to do with our life there’s no tomorrow. The reason a battle rages between dream and reality is that we spend more time minding our makeup than making up our mind. The need to appear successful, or wealthy, good looking, fashionable, overrides all. I liken it to a construction project that never came in on time or budget. It was hopeless. But I stayed with the contractor because I loved telling people how good it was going to look.
Eliot was on the money when he said we need to make time for indecision. It is perhaps the most overlooked of the nine great habits. I have a better word, however than Thomas Stearns, “reflection,” a virtue that ensures we have fewer ‘oops’ moments than we would otherwise. Oops, I took the wrong job. Oops, I married the wrong guy. Oops, I should have taken that stock tip that Warren Buffett gave me (I’ve had a few of those). Reflect, revise, and resolve sounds better than oops.
When we live with bad decisions it means we relied on flawed analysis. The job sucked, the stock tip was juicy but ego got in the way, the date was a jerk. We have a host of excuses, personal mismanagement or maybe we just felt lonely. These are signs that we need to step back to allow more time for reflection. When we do a proper job of analyzing the data it points out inhospitable terrain, we have a much better chance of finding a “genial habitat,” the great habit #2. If we live in unhappy spaces, whether work, marriage, a relationship, or a community, time is wasted fixing the unfixable. As my friend Armando, whom you will hear more about, likes to say, “I have no time for bad times.” Every day is spent in a state of joy. His secret — knowing what not to do with his time.
We love to see a caterpillar turn into a butterfly. By a similar process, it is equally amazing to watch ordinary people become more extraordinary versions of themselves, although sadly instead of wings our species racks up frequently flyer miles. As a consolation, extraordinary people fly as high and far as dreams will take them.
The process isn’t that different from the metamorphosis by which ungainly legs and fluffy body of a caterpillar are reconstituted into a lovely winged thing, The people version isn’t a miracle any more than the butterfly. There is a science that underlies success in life just as science governs our ability to live and breathe. The vital elements, as always, are habits, intelligence, and fully developed life stages. This book will aim to help you understand the ways you can develop these principles in your life, career, and relationships. Like the butterfly, everything extraordinary was at one time ordinary.
Where does that leave for decisions and indecision? We reflexively check if there is time before we take a road trip or bake muffins. But when we stumble into the realm of big things like what to do with our life there’s no tomorrow. The reason a battle rages between dream and reality is that we spend more time minding our makeup than making up our mind. The need to appear successful, or wealthy, good looking, fashionable, overrides all. I liken it to a construction project that never came in on time or budget. It was hopeless. But I stayed with the contractor because I loved telling people how good it was going to look.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
And indeed there will be time
There will be time to murder and create,
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions
T.S. Eliot was on the money when he said we need to make time for a hundred indecisions. It is perhaps the most overlooked of the great habits. I have a better word, however, “reflection,” a virtue that ensures we have fewer ‘oops’ moments than we would otherwise. Oops, I took the wrong job. Oops, I married the wrong guy. Oops, I should have taken that stock tip that Warren Buffett gave me (I’ve had a few of those). Reflect, revise, and resolve sounds better than oops.
When we live with bad decisions it means we relied on flawed analysis. The job sucked, the stock tip was juicy but ego got in the way, the date was a jerk. We have a host of excuses, personal mismanagement or maybe we just felt lonely. These are signs that we need to step back to allow more time for reflection. When we do a proper job of analyzing the data it points out inhospitable terrain, we have a much better chance of finding a “genial habitat,” the great habit #2. If we live in unhappy spaces, whether work, marriage, a relationship, or a community, time is wasted fixing the unfixable. As my friend Armando, whom you will hear more about, likes to say, “I have no time for bad times.” Every day is spent in a state of joy. His secret — knowing what not to do with his time.
“Life is being on the wire. Everything else is just waiting.” — — Karl Wallenda
Annie Robertson “Grandma” Moses
“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are stronger in the broken places.” — Ernest Hemingway
Seven years after the Civil War ended, many small farms fell on hard times, forcing young girls like Annie Robertson to leave home and family to earn a living. A neighboring farmer’s wife asked if she would come to work for them. As a nasty wind wrapped itself around her, Annie set out on the 10-mile walk to the Whiteside home. She was used to the cold, but heavy snow had dropped the night before and her bootprints made tiny holes resembling a cribbage board, a game of chance with few certainties. She continued steadily onwards as her intelligent, mischievous gray eyes gazed down the less-traveled path.
When Annie arrived at Ralph and Alice Whiteside’s home, she discovered a scene of warmth and merriment to her unexpected delight. A dreamy calm settled over her, a memory she would hold close in later years. As the jovial couple sat in their easy chairs side by side, smiling at her and each other, warmly wrapped in patchwork blankets and enjoying a cup of hot tea, the Whitesides asked, “how do you take yours,” before she could even sit down.
Her first words, as her mother had rehearsed, were, “May I please be your housekeeper? Annie Robertson was 12 years old.
The new family took to the hardworking young pixie as if she was their daughter. The handsome rugs and fine furniture in the home gave Annie a feeling of living in a dollhouse. When they saw her marveling at a Currier and Ives print on the wall, the Whitesides gave her a set of chalks and crayons at Christmastime. She added lemon and grape juice to the palette to draw more vibrant landscapes. The Whitesides proclaimed it was a sign.
When Annie turned 27, she fell in love and married Thomas Moses, a strapping young “hired man” on the farm, and they moved to the Mount Airy Farm in Virginia. He handled the heavy chores while she baked potato chips and churned butter to supplement their wages, and over time they were able to afford a farm of their own. The Moses’s and their five children moved to Eagle Bridge, a small town in upstate New York. It was a working-class life, but Annie stayed busy doing housework and, in her spare time, tended to ‘hobbies,’ as she called them, like quilting, knitting, and embroidery. They were not easy times but she found life rewarding in small and large ways, and she taught herself no matter the circumstance to greet every day with a sense of joy and anticipation.
Annie Moses never read Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina or she might have been familiar with the first line, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” It was all too prophetic for the Moses family. Challenges mounted like a late November storm that comes without warning. It seemed Annie was being led to some uncertain destiny as periods of deep anguish became commonplace. Her husband died of a sudden heart attack at age 67. The farmhouse where they raised their family burned down just as the Great Depression began. Moses moved in with her daughter when her health suffered from the burden of giving birth to ten children, although only five survived infancy. She developed severe arthritis and could no longer hold an embroidery or quilting needle.
Most of us would or wallow in despair or feel completely lost. Annie Moses never thought about it that way. In her world, there were no anti-depression drugs or therapy, no health spas or, alternatively, days of rage or blame the system protests or any of the quick fixes we look to nowadays. She resisted self-pity or the delusion that her burden was too great to bear. For Annie, this was a moment of reckoning, and she didn’t need Tolstoy to remind her that the happiest moments in life were those when we choose victory over victimhood. There was no question her life had veered off course, but the job facing her was how to take back the wheel. Her cure was found in work and creativity, turning time into something useful and valuable, and concentrating on things that brought her joy. Her sister Celestia helped by urging her to try painting as it would be easier on sore hands. Then, after it became too painful to hold the brush in the right, she switched to her left hand.
Although she would never call it art, only ‘her hobby,’ painting quickly turned into more than a pastime. She wrote, “I pick up my brushes so people will know how we once lived.” When she told people she hoped to become an artist one day, some rolled their eyes, “of course you do,” and the skepticism was understandable. Annie Moses was 78 years old.
But the dream had been in the recesses of her mind since childhood. As she looked back more than seventy years, “I was quite small, and I remember my father would get me white unlined paper. He liked to see me draw pictures. The paper cost a penny a sheet and lasted longer than candy.” A parent’s encouragement turned into a dream that inspired a child, not for the first time.
Moses never had any formal art training. She chose simple childhood memories of New England, verdant landscapes and outdoorsy scenes of countryfolk at work and play, referring to them as “old-timey.” She would paint when the mood struck, which was often, and said, “I get an inspiration and start painting, and then I’ll forget everything else.” Collectors of Grandma Moses aren’t looking for elements of modern life like telephones and televisions. Her painting is called ‘primitive’ because it lacks the perspective of traditional art, but a more appropriate term is ‘naive’ as she portrays life as we believe it once was and as many wish we still lived today.
Moses was known only locally until an art collector, Louis J. Caldor, saw her paintings in a drug store window in 1938 and bought everything he could get his hands on, including ten more from her Eagle Bridge house for $5 each. By 1939, her fame grew, and three of her paintings were included in New York’s Museum of Modern Art exhibition entitled “Contemporary Unknown American Painters.” She wouldn’t be unknown for long. Moses caught the media’s attention later that year, and because of her age of 77, they called her Grandma Moses, and it stuck. Although she would not have her first solo exhibit until 1940 called “What a Farm Wife Painted,” at Otto Kallir’s Galerie St. Etienne, it was wildly popular, and the surprise was a table laden with samples of her baked goods and preserves.
Grandma Moses painted 1,500 canvasses over three decades, all of them numbered in her small, delicate handwriting on the reverse side, and priced to sell by size at $5 or $10 per painting, the way one buys a 2x4 plank. The math reveals she painted roughly one canvass per week for thirty years. It matches the herculean labors of Egypt’s pyramid masons, although they most certainly didn’t start at age 78. In the end, her art passion paid off. By 2006, Sugaring Off sold for $1.2 million. Grandma Moses would have calculated the price at $5,000 per square inch.
In a moment of pure candor that reflected an old school cash register mentality, and the grit that brought her fame and fortune, a TV news anchor asked Moses if she felt any misgivings about selling her artwork. Grandma Moses corrected him, referring to her painting as “a hobby” and never “art.” Then she replied, “I think I’d rather have the money.”
Her work would be exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, with name recognition this time, and grace the cover of Hallmark greeting cards and national magazines. When she reached 88, Mademoiselle magazine named her a “Young Woman of the Year.” Norman Rockwell honored her by painting Grandma Moses into the far left edge of Christmas Homecoming for the December cover of The Saturday Evening Post. After her death, Grandma Moses‘s popularity led to “Granny” in the 1960s comedy television series The Beverly Hillbillies. The character was given the stage name of Daisy Moses.
In 1961, Annie Robertson Moses died at age 101. President John F. Kennedy memorialized her: “Grandma Moses’s paintings restored a primitive freshness to our perception of America. Both her work and her life helped our nation renew its pioneer heritage and recall its roots in the countryside and on the frontier.” The New York Times said, “Grandma Moses was a tiny, lively woman with a mischievous wit, sharp-tongued with a sycophant and stern with an errant grandchild.” But perhaps a German fan said it best, “There emanates from her a light-hearted optimism. You feel at home in these pictures, and you know their meaning.”
After transforming a hardscrabble life into a three-part Shakespearean drama complete with scenes of tragedy and comedy, and a heroine for the ages, Grandma Moses revealed the secret to her extraordinary life: “I look back on my life like a good day’s work, and I feel happy and contented. I knew nothing better and made the best out of what life offered. Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be.”
Grandma Moses art can be seen, according to Wikipedia:
- Bennington Museum in Bennington, Vermont, holds the largest public collection of Moses’s paintings
- Brooklyn Museum, New York City
- Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa
- Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
- Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, Laurel, Mississippi
- Maier Museum of Art at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, Virginia
- Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, New York
- Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
- National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.
- The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
- Smithsonian American Art Museum
- University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City
Be Somebody: Dr. Reatha Clark King
“Most of the older people were illiterate, but they would say to us, “Develop your mind. Have a character that people will respect. Be somebody.” Those two words were special.
Tired and Poor
In the summer of 1950, a young African American girl woke at 4 a.m. in Moultrie, Georgia. On nights when it rained, twelve-year-old Reatha Belle Clark would smile because she made $6 for picking 200 pounds of cotton, “The more it rained, the heavier the cotton and the more money I made.”
As Reatha Belle climbed into the back of a pickup, other girls fell asleep on their neighbor’s shoulder, who shoved them back up. Reatha looked at the horizon, waiting for the sun. Something told her there was a higher purpose to all of this.
Hotter days were the worst, Reatha recalled. “It would get hottest around 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon, and my body would get so sore.” She picked cotton until the sun was overhead and then take a lunch break under a large shade tree before heading back until evening. Dark sweat stains streaked the back of her jumpsuit. The weather could be your friend one day and an enemy without warning.
International Harvester came out with the mechanical combine in 1948, but it was too expensive for small farms. Hand-picked cotton was the method used by Reatha’s people in Georgia, and it had to be picked three or four times a season because the rounded seed capsules called bolls matured at different times. A cotton picker could pick 20 plants in a quarter of an hour. A mechanical picker would do 1,200 plants in 30 seconds. It was hard, tedious work.
The way cotton is picked, it is first removed by hand from a boll so prickly you had to wear gloves. If the gloves were left home, it slowed you down. The cotton is twisted by turning the boll clockwise until it breaks. Then it is bagged in a 10’ sack as you go along. At the end of the day, you sort through the bag and make sure there are no small branches, place it onto a sheet and hoist it up to the scale. Then you get paid.
When we think about $6 per day in the 40s and 50s, the average wage for a family in the United States was $3500 per year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Reatha made $30 per week, a sum that exceeded 6 million families across the United States.
Huddled Masses
As the poem by Emma Lazarus suggests (imprinted on the plaque of the Statue of Liberty), “give me your tired, your poor, you huddled masses.” The words do not fully convey the comfort people give to one another in desperate times — and the importance of what I call “genial habitats.”
Reatha’s earliest memories are of a close-knit family inspiring everyone to achieve, although at first, it was to make money. What makes the story of King’s childhood so fascinating is the irony. Rather than refuse manual labor that was not so different from slavery, her grandmother would say, “ if anything is worth doing, it’s worth doing well.” Reatha says, “I sure could pick that cotton.” Willie Clark was a sharecropper, and her mother, Ola Mae, had a third-grade education. Yet, Reatha would earn a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Chicago, the first of many broad jumps.
What she recalls most vividly was the importance of family support. “The love part was vital because that helped keep us going. My mother came from a large family. She had four sisters and seven brothers. Myu father, too — 11 sisters and 1 brother. They were always visiting. We heard about Aunt Dora, Aunt Danna, Uncle Chap, and Uncle Buster all of the time. When they came to visit, it was hugs and hugs and hugs. That was the love part. It kept us going. It came from a family.
Clark grew up during the post-WWII years and talked about her life without victimhood or anger. She worked because the Clark’s needed money, and picking cotton was a chore like making your bed. Status wasn’t the goal of the black families of rural Georgia. Steak was. But her parents were still watchful. Reatha says, “my mother was working as a maid during this time. She only let us work on farms for families that she trusted.” When she thinks back, she says, “it was a harsh life,” then laughs, “I don’t want to go back, but my gosh, I learned how to work.”
Reatha’s family didn’t mention slavery days. There were no family records because slaves were kept illiterate, and parents and children, husbands and wives, separated. She believes her great grandmother, Lucy Benson, “must have been either born into a slave home or the first generation outside of slavery.”
Perhaps in some way, the slavery experience influenced the African Americans of rural Georgia to support the concept of a loving family. I could feel the bond as she spoke about growing up with close relatives and siblings. Reatha says, “Slavery put people on their own, which was not a good thing, but at the same time, it made them dependent on one another. It created a greater need for a family than ever before. You couldn’t make it without family.”
Even as her family moved north as Reatha did, “We never lost that bond. Going north, that was the ambition to go north and send money home. That expression, “‘Send money home’ was what drove you to move and leave your homeland. It was a signal that you were going to go away and do better, and then send money back to help your family members.”
Her family had a close-knit feel. I asked her if they had occasions at holiday time for the family to gather together. “That was where we would have a fried chicken.” She laughs at this thought. “It was exceptional for the children. Because the preacher would come to our home to join us and have dinner with us. We children got to eat the seconds on those occasions.” Then the first Sunday of the month, we would serve a big meal on the church’s grounds. The first Sunday was special. All the women wore white. All the women wore big fancy hats. I still wear a hat to church. I inherited that habit from my grandmother. Yes, that was a special day.”
There was no lack of love or affection in the Clark family. She says, “love was vital because it kept us going. My mother came from a large family. There were always visitors of aunts and uncles: her four sisters and seven brothers. Then my father came from another large family — 11 sisters and 1 brother. They were always visiting. We heard about Aunt Dora, Aunt Danna, Uncle Buster, Uncle Chap all of the time. When they came to visit, it was hugs and hugs and hugs. They adored my mom and dad. That was the love part. Then there was my grandmother. There was some love in there, but it was to keep us going, and it came from family.
Yearning To Breathe
She is Dr. Reatha Clark King because she graduated from Clark College in Atlanta, where she was a home economics major until her chemistry department head encouraged her to earn a B.S. in chemistry. She received a Woodrow Wilson fellowship which helped pay her way to the University of Chicago, from which she obtained her Ph.D. degree in thermochemistry in 1963. She later went on to get her Master’s in business administration from Columbia University.
But those aren’t the main reasons for her educational success. That goes back much further.
Religion played a major part in her life. What did it mean to you, and what kind of a difference did it make in your life, I asked? “It carried that symbol of hope. You felt safe in the church. It represented safety, a safe place to assemble, to go to. It was a nurturing place where the older people came together to encourage the younger people. It was a nurturing environment.
Reatha said, yes, it was a one-room schoolhouse but also a place the community came together. “it was the center of the structure along with the family for our community. Early on, as you know, Negro spirituals grew out of that faith in God that God would deliver us from the hardships we suffered. Even slaves had their favorite songs. They would send messages to each other. My grandmother insisted that everybody goes to church. You became a churchgoer, whether you desired to one or not. I still go to church to reflect on the week and express gratitude, an extraordinary emotion.
Reatha Clark started elementary school in that one-room schoolhouse and was taught by Florence Frazier, a teacher who mentioned to her parents that she was very bright. By the time she graduated from Moultrie High School for Negro Youth, the Supreme Court had passed Brown v. Board of Education, and segregation was not legal anymore.
Mentors
I wondered when she realized she had intellectual gifts? Was there a single moment, or did it occur over time? Reatha remembered, “Keep in mind the grades were not organized like they are today. By the time I got to high school, which would be seventh grade today, I started believing myself. Here Reatha laughs. “That was a transition moment for me because I became introduced to a wider range of teachers.”
The teachers began sending messages home to Reatha’s mother. Her girls were good, maybe even special. She said it encouraged her mother because she had no education. Reatha recalls her mother was shy because she felt her clothes were not good enough to be around educated people. To learn her daughter might become educated sounded like a miracle.
Reatha’s teacher was Florence Frasier, a black teacher who moved about the neighborhood, teaching different children of all ages. “Mrs. Frasier roomed in the community during the week. She was a big talker. She would tell everyone how smart those Clark girls are. When people heard her, they encouraged us to do even more. She taught all subjects and all ages. Reath began getting high scores, even perfect scores on her tests. It made her want to excel even more.
Ironically, while Reatha grew up in a segregated South, her schooling inspired her to achieve the success levels she managed to find. When I asked her what made her pay attention to her studies, she said, “During black history month, which at the time was called Negro history week, we would take one week to celebrate the lives of blacks who had succeeded and become famous. We mainly emphasized those who had succeeded. I learned about George Washington Carver, a chemist, who did many different things with a peanut, a simple peanut. I could relate to peanuts, as we found them in the fields. But it taught me. It taught us young blacks the notion that we were capable of anything. If we applied ourselves, we could do great things. We could make discoveries. We could be singers, like Leontyne Price. Marianne Anderson. We saw blacks who had succeeded, and that motivated us to strive to be somebody. Those were special words for us. Be somebody.
Two Word Mantras
The question has to be asked, how did people whose culture (in America) didn’t equate to being educated? They understood hard work, surely. But a Ph.D. in Chemistry as Reatha Clark King went on to achieve? Where did that drive to be educated come from, I asked her? “Most of the older people were illiterate, but they would say to us, “Develop yourself. Develop your mind. Be somebody. Have a character that people will respect. Be somebody.” We saw blacks who had succeeded, and that motivated us to strive to be somebody. Those were special words for us. Be somebody.
“Be somebody. Those words meant a lot to me.”
For Reatha, the concept of going out on your own to help your family sounds reminiscent of the millions of immigrants: “ Send money home is a special language to me. When World War II started, that was the reason so many young black men joined the Army. They wanted to go to the Army, so they could get that monthly stipend to help mom and dad. If they were not married, it went to mom and dad. They could put it down. Send money home was the theme and the goal.”
Genial Habitats
Did you have other work experiences that left an impression on you? Reatha recalls, “ One that completely wonderfully changed my life. “When I was a freshman in college — I went to college in 1954. I learned from the dean of women about these maid opportunities in Greater New York, in New York, and asked some of us, young students, to take advantage of these opportunities. Go away and, during the summertime, live in a home, work as a maid. Then save our money, and then we can return to college for our next year of college. My mother permitted me to come north during the summertime and work as a maid. We call it the Thursday maid. I worked — lived with a family in Pauling, New York, near Poughkeepsie. The Dan family.
My first assignment my first summer, the summer after my freshman year, I was about 17 years old. I was to babysit their little son, Harvey. Then after my sophomore year — well, I would go back during the summertime on the train. My mother — I would travel from Atlanta, Georgia. Travel up to Penn Station, New York City. Would be picked up, taken to Pauling. Then eventually, I advanced to be — to help as a cook. I gave up on babysitting little Harvey, and I became — help with him as standing in the kitchen. I had that maid job for each of my four summers in college. Even after I graduated and in ’58, the summer between going to the University of Chicago and graduating from Clark College in Atlanta, I worked as a maid in Pauling, New York, and saved my money.
The educational part of the experience, there were many educational parts. The main one was my Thursday off when Mrs. Dan would write out a site seeing list for me, a list of places to go to site see. I would then — she would put me on the train, and I would come into, I think, Grand Central Station then. Then I would get off the train and follow the list that she had given me exactly, and go back to the train station at the appointed time. I would — I saw the New York Opera place. I saw the Empire State Building. I just saw all of the beautiful sites of New York, the landmark sites.
Then she would tell me — and this was a touching part and caused me to really believe in her. She said, “If you see anything you wanna buy” — she gave me her charge cards. I can go to Saks Fifth Avenue. The beautiful stores along Fifth Avenue and I would buy something if I wanted to. She trusted me. You cannot imagine what that meant to me. I didn’t buy anything because she would always send me a nice gift back to college. At Christmastime, she would remember me.
I became introduced to the big city — a big city beyond Georgia, New York City. I became more aware of the world back in — through that maid experience. My maid experience was very different from my mom’s maid experience. You know what? When I went back home for my break between — in September, between New York and going to Clark, know what my mom wanted me to do? Make meatloaf! I learned how to make meatloaf with Mrs. Dan. That was fancy food. She wanted — she loved that. She said, “I want you to make me some meatloaf,” every time I go home.
Did the experience with Mrs. Dan change you or how you felt about things? “Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. We had heard that whites were helping blacks through the emancipation movement — the abolitionists helping to fight discrimination — that changed the laws so blacks would be treated better. We had not seen them openly. You see, in the South, you didn’t see those people openly because they would have been called ugly names. I saw that. I experienced that first hand with Mrs. Dan. She provided opportunities for us that we didn’t have elsewhere. She and her friends around the Quaker Hill community — provided opportunities for us young black college women. I wondered if that was their motive. They could have hired maids elsewhere, but why did they reach out to us in the South?
It was a time of personal, not institutional charity, when people did things for each other, not take tables at social galas: My mother often brought things home from — that was given to her by the people she worked for. She was a maid often, while my father was working in the field. To Reatha, these were gifts: “Hand me down clothes and good tasting food. Extra food. She would bring to us, so our family would have some food in addition to what we had gotten out of the field.”
Takeaway
During our interview, I asked Reatha, “if Hollywood made a movie about your life, would it be a drama, a comedy, or a romance?” She answered, “it would certainly be a drama.” She describes her days as filled with a blend of emotions, including fear, love, close family connections, and warmth. Like everyone she knew, her thinking was also about her race and hoping for a better life for “colored people,” as she says African Americans called themselves then.
I would say a drama. When I think about my neighborhood — my church, my country church from my ages two forward, it remains in my memory. I would say lots of work. Work was our theme. Sharecropping, living on the farm, and doing the fieldwork. That dominated my father’s life, for sure, and my mom’s life because they needed to make ends meet. They also needed to please the boss, the people we worked for because we could be thrown off the farm. That probably wouldn’t happen because the owners were dependent on us for the work that we did. Reatha says, “it was a better drama than the movies that do not really depict the kind of drama we experienced growing up. There were so many dimensions of it. I said so many stories had been told, yet many more stories are yet to be told.
Some aspects are painful, Reatha recalls, particularly the fear of getting in trouble. “What was so sad, Jeff, was the fear. The fear that we blacks would do something wrong, and then the police would descend on our neighborhood. Then we were bolted up in our houses, particularly on the weekend at night, fearing that the police would knock.
Hope
But there was hope, too. “There was hope that we children, as we went to grade school and showed our abilities in this one-room schoolhouse, which was also our church — were told that if we studied hard, we could go away. We had to go away and educate ourselves to get better jobs than maid work or work in the field. Those were our options at the time. We were told that there are other options for us. Get out of this hot sun and get an education, and we listened.
I asked whether it occurred to her that she had come a long way on this journey? Reatha replied, “Much longer than just the distance between Minneapolis and Malaysia, the location of my first Exxon board meeting. My grandmother used to say, “You’ve come a mighty long way.”
Inspiring Generations
We conclude by talking about how to inspire your black children to achieve as much as she did. Her answer was, “Never give up. Never give up. Never give up. Now that’s easier said than done. Believe in themselves. Keep on developing skills and abilities. I wouldn’t tell them to be patient. I would say it will take time. For you — even you to realize your potential to do good, to solve that problem. I had picked up chemistry books when I was a kid, for example, not knowing exactly how to solve that tough problem. I keep lookin’ at it and lookin’ at it and tinkering with a pencil. The solution won’t come overnight-overnight. Believe in yourself. Believe you deserve that opportunity. That doubt is not written in law for you. It was for us — what we couldn’t do, what we shouldn’t do. We defied the barriers. We didn’t believe in discouragement.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr
Thomas Carlyle — Just Start Over
The Scottish historian lost his life’s work. Then he discovered the power of resilience.
In 1859, Charles Dickens wrote the best-selling novel of all times, A Tale of Two Cities, with the opening line: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”
Dickens may have been writing about 2021 when you read the next lines: “It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…”
We may hope Dickens was right, and this is the spring of hope. The book is set in London and Paris in the 1790s. The two cities are the setting for the period after the French Revolution during the Reign of Terror. Dickens was not exaggerating about the worst times. In September of 1793, Maximilien de Robespierre, a noble statesman and one of the Revolution’s founders, declared:
“It is time to horrify the conspirators. So legislators, place Terror on the order of the day! The blade of the law should hover over all the guilty.”
In the name of liberty, equality, and fraternity, Robespierre sentenced 40,000 people to death by guillotine. Although he was a nationally known lawyer who led the revolution and helped obtain women’s voting rights and abolition of slavery in the French colonies, he feared insurrection more than he loved freedom.
The public grew tired of his ways. In a moment of inspired poetic justice, Robespierre went to trial and was sentenced to be guillotined. As chaos resumed, a Parisian general named Bonaparte came to the scene. He restored order, which was the beginning of Napoleon I’s story, the emperor of France.
There is an irony in why we know all of us this. Dickens was moved to write his best-selling novel, which brought the Fench Revolution’s unfortunate aspects into the public domain after reading Thomas Carlyle’s three-volume history. But if fate had its way, Carlyle’s book would never have been published.
Conveniently, Carlyle was the first serious thinker to make the study of leadership his life’s work. In his treatise, On Heroes, Hero-Worship (available for free on Amazon), he laid the groundwork for what became known as the “Great Man theory.”
Carlyle’s theory was based in part on Napoleon’s rescue of the French Revolutionary goals. The French emperor was not a perfect human being, but he rescued people from lawlessness and mayhem. Carlyle recognized great leaders were complicated and believed they should be judged less on minor mistakes than major outcomes.
Carlyle worried that later generations would focus on the small failings. “Atlas may have held the world on his shoulders, but he said some derogatory things,” that sort of thing. That is how history gets rewritten by focusing on sensational anecdotes and ignoring genuine acts of heroism. Carlyle’s term for this was “valetism,” from the expression “no man is a hero to his valet.” Today we would call them “micro transgressions,” the kind we should not repeat but nor should be used as a standard by which to judge someone’s life.
Carlyle was encouraged to write the history by a well-known economist and close friend, John Stuart Mill. His publisher gave him the idea of writing a history of the revolution, but he felt Carlyle was the better man for the job.
Then, in 1834, on a wet and gray London afternoon, Carlyle experienced a random act of fate that turned into a crisis. He had slaved for months on the manuscript, working from copious notes and writing in longhand (typewriters were for the very rich until 1874), and sent the first volume to Mill to review on the night before.
After reading it, Mill brought the manuscript to a close acquaintance’s house and left it. The servant was illiterate. She thought the heap was scrap and promptly used it to light a fire. As they say, stuff happens.
Quickly, silently, with only the leaves of burnt embers under his arm, Mill arrived at Carlyle’s the next day. He was carrying a satchel that held the charred remains. He could barely speak.
Carlyle took Mill aside and said not to worry. Mill offered to pay. Carlyle refused. After he departed, Carlyle’s only words were, “Mill, poor fellow, is terribly cut up.” Then he added,” We must endeavor to hide from him how very serious this is.”
It was more than serious. Carlyle’s notes were destroyed. He could never rewrite the book without them and gave up any hope of completing The French Revolution. To make matters worse, he was broke.
That night Carlyle had a dream. Not an imaginary thing, but a real one. His father and brother spoke to him from their graves and begged him not to abandon the work. The next morning Carlyle pondered the dream and set off to tell Mill he would accept the money — but only so he could afford writing paper.
Instead of wringing his hands, Carlyle began work on volume two and volume three before painstakingly re-creating the first volume from memory. By 1847, about the time he originally planned to complete the work, the three-volume history was published. It was more than a triumph over adversity. It became the best-selling history of the century.
Dickens read Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution with its powerful depiction of the Reign of Terror, and he was so inspired he wrote A Tale of Two Cities. If Carlyle had not gone finished his best-selling history, Dickens might never have written the best-selling novel of all times, and we would never recall the excesses of the French Revolution.
Coda
Carlyle’s The French Revolution is still published 200 years later. By the way, Carlyle took the charred leaves of his burned manuscript and placed them on the fireplace mantel where they remained for the rest of his life.
