Taken Home (2015)

Taken Home Nancy Revelle Johnson (bio) Primary Lessons: A Memoir by Sarah Bracey White (CavanKerry Press, 2013. 238 pages. $21 pb) Much has been written about the migration of African Americans from the South to the promised land, the North; but Sarah Bracey White, in her memoir Primary Lessons, traces her reverse migration, at the age of five, from Philadelphia to Sumter, South Carolina, describing the struggles she experienced growing up in the segregated South of the 1950s and 60s. Snatched unexpectedly from her beloved Aunt Susie and Uncle Whitey by her mother, the young Sarah did not view Sumter as the promised land. White’s memoir of growing up in the segregated South in that era serves as a painful reminder of the impact, of poverty and the practice of segregation on the lives of young African Americans. The intersection of race and class made for an inauspicious beginning for Sarah. Her father, the son of a well-respected landowning family, had become a school principal, and her mother, who had grown up in poverty, had achieved her goal of becoming a teacher. The status the parents had gained vanished abruptly when the father lost his position because of his refusal to name the teachers who had attended an naacp meeting. Unable to find a respectable job, the father left his family, becoming a drifter and alcoholic. Roberta White, suddenly a single mother, struggled to support her family. [End Page lxix] Patterns of behavior found in families mired in poverty do not conform to middle-class conceptions of proper family structure. Economic necessity forced the mother to “farm out” Sarah to her sister Susie and her husband Whitey in Philadelphia. Happily the childless couple considered Sarah’s presence in their lives a gift, not a burden, and Sarah basked in the affection they gave. That experience was disrupted when her mother decided she wanted Sarah back with the family in Sumter. Thus began a series of transitions in Sarah’s life that required difficult and painful adjustments. To the young transplant, Sumter was an alien world, and her account, written as an adult, reflects the remembered pain she suffered in adjusting to her new environment. An absent father, unwelcoming sisters and a harried, overworked, hypercritical mother made for less than the idyllic family life five-year-old Sarah desired. Sarah’s vocalized unhappiness with her situation did little to allay the ever-present tensions in the family. The focus of White’s memoir is the evolution of her relationship with her mother, from the turbulence of her early childhood to the reconciliation that took place in her senior year in high school. Roberta White, in Sarah’s account, emerges as a tragic and embittered figure trapped by forces beyond her control. Although as a teacher she had a certain status in her community, as a single mother she could barely support her large family. In spite of her circumstances, she was determined to provide a better future for her children. That determination manifested itself in seeing that they study and achieve in school, that they learn proper deportment, and that they associate with the right kind of people. At the same time, she, like other African-American parents, accepted the fact that her children had to understand and conform with the practice of segregation. There were African Americans who did not participate in the civil-rights actions of that era, and Roberta White was one of them. She understood from bitter experience the cost of challenging the system. Additionally she brooked no challenge to her own authority. It was beyond the capacity of a small child to understand her mother’s point of view, to understand the lessons her mother was trying to teach her. Conflict between the strong-willed mother and the determined daughter was inevitable. In White’s account of her early childhood, she recalls terrible loneliness in the struggles with her mother and sisters. Escape came in the form of correspondence with a pen pal in South Dakota and reading and writing; participation in Sunday school provided an opportunity for socialization; and excitement came into her life with the appearance of Butch, who periodically visited his...