Pip
Today I saw The Help....the movie from the best selling book by the same name. I laughed, cried, laughed, then cried some more. It was an emotional rollercoaster to say the least.
You see, I was also raised by a strong Black woman. Everyone in our little town called her Pip. Mamie Louise Blount came to care for me and my brothers before I can remember, and stayed on until the last of us started to drive. She would sometimes go back to the farm and work during the summers, and we would have Queenie or some other housekeeper. I can still smell the pail of Pine-Sol and suds she carried from room to room, sometimes with one of my brothers riding on her feet holding onto her leg.
When the race riots of the 60's came along and the KKK marched thru town, Pip still came to work everyday. When my mother decided to be "liberated" my father taught Pip to drive and bought her a car...so she could pick us up from school and drive herself to work. It was not the KKK that she had problems with, but the Southern Leadership Conference and the NAACP. They told her not to work for a white family or she would have trouble. Trouble came in the form of a 5 pound bag of sugar poured into her gas tank one night. My father towed the car in and repaired it.
She was with us when we moved from the 50's ranch into the 70's colonial with the huge yard and everyone had their own bathroom. By this time Pip was getting a bit too old to keep up, and decided it was time to start sitting with the elderly for a living.
So when folks from other places call us racist, they have not walked in our shoes. They have no idea the love we shared for one another, regardless of the color of our skin. It is up to you...are you a Hilly or a Skeeter?
xx/DT
You see, I was also raised by a strong Black woman. Everyone in our little town called her Pip. Mamie Louise Blount came to care for me and my brothers before I can remember, and stayed on until the last of us started to drive. She would sometimes go back to the farm and work during the summers, and we would have Queenie or some other housekeeper. I can still smell the pail of Pine-Sol and suds she carried from room to room, sometimes with one of my brothers riding on her feet holding onto her leg.
When the race riots of the 60's came along and the KKK marched thru town, Pip still came to work everyday. When my mother decided to be "liberated" my father taught Pip to drive and bought her a car...so she could pick us up from school and drive herself to work. It was not the KKK that she had problems with, but the Southern Leadership Conference and the NAACP. They told her not to work for a white family or she would have trouble. Trouble came in the form of a 5 pound bag of sugar poured into her gas tank one night. My father towed the car in and repaired it.
She was with us when we moved from the 50's ranch into the 70's colonial with the huge yard and everyone had their own bathroom. By this time Pip was getting a bit too old to keep up, and decided it was time to start sitting with the elderly for a living.
So when folks from other places call us racist, they have not walked in our shoes. They have no idea the love we shared for one another, regardless of the color of our skin. It is up to you...are you a Hilly or a Skeeter?
xx/DT
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