Pamela's Blog 17

Published on Thursday, June 4, 2009 by Nas2EndWork.org

“You Got To Sucker The Corn Or The Ears Won't Be Worth Nothin'”

by Pamela Satterwhite

Mrs. Trotter’s forgotten more than I’ll ever know about growing things.

She’s a mystery to me, is Mrs. Trotter. Sorta like Barack Obama – pardon me, President Barack Obama.

Do you know when I first began to consider the possibility that he was something...extra...? Don’t laugh. It was when, early ’08, I heard a sistah on the radio say, “When he goes to bed at night, I know there’s a black woman lying next to him…”

I sat up…“What?”

You would’ve had to grow up black in America to appreciate the significance of that. Seriously.

After that, I heard someone I trust say on the radio that Barack Obama's memoir was “astonishing.”

OK, I best to check him out, is what I thought.

And with Dreams in hand, each page my jaw was droppin’ more than the page before.

“Huh?”

I couldn’t figure it out…a black man in America who’d survived intact – undistorted by those racism-hits, that you have to take, over and over and over…

How’d that happen?

It was like lightning striking, or…I don’t know what…pigs flying, cats crying…you just don’t see it very often.

Well, Mrs. Trotter was born in Louisiana in 1924, moved to Arkansas, moved back to Louisiana, sharecropped most of her life.

In black communities we all know that the sick system of “slavery” worked us out. I mean, a whole lot of us didn’t want to hear the word “farmin’” no more, after that. We'd been worked ’til we dropped and knew deep in our souls the whole thing is a con. Yet we never articulated our “knowing” in such a way that we could free ourselves from the ‘Doubt,’ imposed by the system, that maybe we were “lazy,” “no-’count”…

But somehow none of that touched Mrs. Trotter. She loves to grow things. She likes to work with her hands. It makes her feel good.

There’s something a little wild about Mrs. Trotter, something pre-dream and reliable. It speaks to me.

It does.

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Nas2EndWork "Pamela's Blogs":

Pamela's Blog 17

Published on Thursday, June 4, 2009 by Nas2EndWork.org

“You Got To Sucker The Corn Or The Ears Won't Be Worth Nothin'”