“I woke up this morning thinking about Fannie Lou Hamer and Margaret Walker Alexander”

Actually, I woke up this morning thinking about Fannie Lou Hamer and Margaret Walker Alexander. I don’t know why, but thinking about them, and your relationship to them, and the lives they lived in Mississippi, just made me so sad. Usually, thinking about them is a way of hugging myself, like you say. But today, I just feel the worst part of the weight they experienced as black women activists and artists living in Mississippi.

I learned about Mrs. Hamer from Leslie. Leslie had been a young student activist and had worked with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and Mrs. Hamer. I learned how she embraced young people and the SNCC folk who recruited her in Indianola, and how she joined the movement realizing that she would be kicked off the plantation and left homeless. I hurt for her all over again when I read and reread how she was sterilized and beaten in Winona, and how she did not have good healthcare during her bout with cancer. Even after all she did for our state, she died painfully, poor and penniless. She matters to me even now because she fought to help the nation and our state get closer to its creed. You love Mrs. Hamer as well. Why is that?

Kiese Laymon speaks with his mother in a long, lovely and sometimes heartbreaking interview for Guernica’s American South issue this month. Go read it. [Guernica]