By Guy Trammell
Why does the concept of “The Best” reveal deep-seated, uninformed and harmful racial assumptions? Studies of implicit stereotypes have shown that when a person is described as “the best” in certain categories, respondents reflexively assume it describes a white male. Learning the person is Black takes the concept of “the best” down a few notches, as if there is a parallel dimension where Blacks can be good, but not if compared to anyone else. When they are female, the concept of “the best” goes out the window.
What about service? When a white person is serving their all white community, it is very commendable and worthy of accolades and awards. When a Black person does the same thing in an all Black community, it is looked upon as missionary work and less than noteworthy.
Sallie married Lewis Adams and, as he trained Black men in his trades at his business in downtown Tuskegee, she conducted similar training with Black women at their home. No other county training program in trades for women existed. Sallie had the only one, and led to creating Tuskegee University. A Black woman who saw a need and addressed it.
In 1881, Hampton Institute valedictorian Olivia America Davidson was summoned to Tuskegee by Booker T. Washington a couple of months after his arrival. She immediately started paying off the $500 cost of the former plantation where the school was being built. She became vice principal and taught classes, along with conducting speaking tours raising school funds. Booker named her the school’s “co-founder.”
In 1883, Atlanta University’s Adelle Hunt became Tuskegee University’s first librarian and taught classes. By 1900, Tuskegee’s library was the largest of any Alabama school. She supported suffrage and women’s rights, speaking and writing on national platforms.
Halle Tanner Dillon completed medical school in three years with high honors. In 1891, she became Tuskegee University’s first physician, Alabama’s first female physician, and the first resident physician at any school in the Southeast. She established Alabama’s first hospital for Blacks, a nurse training program and a pharmacy. Her medical team treated Blacks around the county near their homes, sparing them the up to nine-mile journey to campus via foot, mule or wagon.
These formed my community. They were the best during Reconstruction in the Jim Crow south. They, nor any woman, should apologize for being the best. Let’s drop the nonsense of labels and accept people as people!
By Amy Miller
In a house down the street from mine sits an old desk where Sarah Orne Jewett once penned stories about her beloved rural community. She was born and lived most of her life in that house in the village, until she died in 1909. Her desk overlooked the town center where she spent hours observing the people who appear in her books.
In my own living room sits a small black rolltop desk that belonged to Gladys Hasty Carroll, another South Berwick writer. Born in 1905, you could say she took over where Jewett left off. Her stories too told of the rural community she loved. Sometimes I imagine a young Gladys sitting at her desk writing stories from her room overlooking her farm down the road in the hamlet Dunnybrook. No doubt, she took a horse and carriage the four miles into the village on her way to classes at Berwick Academy, perhaps passing by my house, where her black rolltop desk would land the year after she died in 1999.
Both Jewett and Carroll were known in literary circles as “regionalists,” storytellers whose focus was local. They were storytellers who proudly told the story of their people, their land, their lifestyle.
“I determined to teach the world that country people were not the awkward, ignorant set those people seemed to think. I wished the world to know their grand, simple lives,” Jewett once wrote.
And when critics suggested that Carroll gave a falsely positive view of life in Maine, she responded, “They said Maine life isn’t like that and never was. But I know it is true.”
At times “regionalism” in literature was the fashion, as after the Civil War when people wanted to know about the rest of the country. At other times it was considered too provincial, not worldly enough.
Jewett’s work drew the praise of such literary giants as Willa Cather, who called “Country of the Pointed Firs” one of the “three American books which have the possibility of a long, long, life,” alongside “The Scarlet Letter” and “Huckleberry Finn.” Meanwhile, Jewett – whose house is now a museum run by Historic New England is attracting new intrigue for the feminist themes in her works.
In “Tom’s Husband,” a husband and wife switch roles, leading Tom to wonder if women are as dissatisfied with their roles as he became. In “A Country Doctor,” a woman pursues a medical career, and refuses to give it up for marriage.
Carroll’s books are no longer in print, but “As the Earth Turns” was a bestseller in 1933 and she went on to write more than two dozen other books.
I picked up Gladys Hasty Carroll’s desk at an estate sale after she died. It holds my notebooks and some photos. It is too small for even my laptop and too low for my knees to fit under. But it sits a few feet from my workspace, reminding me that women have quietly and persistently been telling the tale of our town for a good long time.
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