A Tribute to the Woman Who 'Was Not'
As we celebrate the life and impact of Dr. Martin Luther King, and remember the horror and glory of Selma, I wish to pay tribute to a person whose existence was unheralded in those dark times, but whose influence upon me was mighty.
This may be the first time her name appears in a widely read journal. When she passed, there was no death notice in the newspaper in the big city where she lived. In those days it rarely carried the obituaries of black people. It was as if they and their lives did not count.
But Eloise Powell counted hugely for me. She was a definitive person in my life.
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In 1951, through a tragedy, my mother suddenly became a single mom faced with the hefty challenge of raising her two children – my sister, then three, and me, ten. Because of our mother's six-day, ten-hour work schedule, Sis and I were left alone in the afternoons. Mom heard about Eloise Powell's good reputation as a caregiver, and employed her three days a week for $15.
Eloise had lost her own baby in childbirth, and poured out her love on us. We all lay on the floor and napped on hot afternoons, nestling in Eloise's arms. She played games with us, kissed our bruises, and cooked buttered spaghetti, along with sweet potato pies and other treats making up what people now call "soul food".
Mother and daddy both grew up in poverty, and had African-American children as playmates. The equality on scrubby Alabama farms in the early twentieth century was a shared participation in impoverishment. It was the great leveler in backwoods Alabama. Thus, neither of our parents, to their credit, had taught Sis and me to think racially. We did not understand the nature of segregationist Birmingham. We even came to regard Eloise as our "black mama" with joyful innocence, completely unaware that some people around us were infuriated by the idea.
Our whimsical mother did all possible to bring happiness to my sister and me. She dressed us in the best she could afford, ignoring her own need for new clothes. At one point mom decided that every Friday night Eloise would bring us downtown to meet her at her workplace, eat at Britling's cafeteria, and go to a movie – often at the Alabama Theater, one of those ornate temples of cinema built in the 1920s.
I began to note that Eloise could neither eat nor go to the movies with us.
One Friday afternoon when we boarded the bus the cold reality of segregation slapped me hard. Perhaps it came as I was now able to contemplate things I read. All I saw that day was a moveable sign I had no doubt looked at all my young life. It delineated "Whites Only" and "Colored Only" seating sections on the bus. Eloise would always seat Sis and me in the white section toward the front, and she would compliantly go to the rear.
On that particular "coming of age" day I became indignant. Eloise was a surrogate mother to Linda and me. She was not a white person, black person, yellow or brown individual. She was a human being who loved us, and whom we loved. She laughed with us, cried with us, and gave us the mothering passion she had not been able to give her own offspring.
How dare anyone make Eloise sit in the back of the bus! Sometimes Sister and I would sit in the rear with Eloise. Had she sat up front with us she would have been thrown off – and maybe under – the bus. All my sister and I got was scowls.
So, somewhere between eleven and twelve, through reflection on Eloise Powell's experience, I became, by Deep South standards, a "liberal" – though ideological labels were unknown to me. As my worldview matured, I realized I was not a leftist progressivist liberal, or a secular liberal, or a populist liberal, or a socialist liberal.
But what kind of liberal was I? I wondered.
I also recognized that I was a biblical conservative. Eloise Powell had dined on the unwavering faith of black preachers for whom the Bible was the lamp to their feet and light to their path on the dark, bloody trail they had to walk. Simultaneously I was being nurtured by a white pastor who shared that high view of biblical revelation.
The confluence of simple Bible faith and the observation of the daily life routine and loving strength of Eloise Powell helped solidify my understanding of myself as a classic liberal. I wanted to be "liberal" in the sense of Old Testament prophets like Isaiah, Amos, and Hosea, and especially Jesus', as He described in His inaugural address, recorded in Luke 4:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He has anointed Me to preach the Gospel to the poor.
He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives,
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set free those who are downtrodden,
To proclaim the favorable Year of the Lord.
Paul writes that the truly big people are those the world thinks are nothing – folks who may as well have not even existed, whose lives add up to zero. However, "God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise... the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong... the base things of the world and the despised, God has chosen the things that are not, that He might nullify the things that are." (1 Corinthians 1:27-28)
In the eyes of the Big World of her day, Eloise Powell was a "was not". But hers
was the face of the people for whom Dr. King marched, the four children at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church died, and the blood flowed at Selma. Far from being a "was not" Eloise's face is still fresh in my mind, and her voice yet resonates in my soul more than sixty years later.
