A Mother's Death and Life

We all experience profound personal loss. The death of a loved one certainly qualifies as a hard cross to bear.  Rob recently lost his mother after a brief illness and a long life.  Here, he takes a moment to reflect on broader meanings of that life--JWW

Not long ago my mother died.  She was 99 years old.  My brother and I began preparing for the end sometime ago, so I’m not torn up about it.  Our family received lots of support from friends in the wake of her death.  I’ve felt embraced during a difficult time.  I’ve also been encouraged to express my feelings about larger issues I think my mother’s life raised, so this piece finds its rationale in sociology and politics.  Though she was mostly unknown, my mother’s life represented a loss for America.  I believe her time here illustrated part of the cost of race discrimination.  My view has little to do with the money she didn’t make or the fame she never had.

Electa Wiley was a teacher, scholar, and writer.  From the late 1940s to the early 1960s she taught her college major - home economics-  and she also taught English in rural, all-black schools in Arkansas.  She was good at that.  Really good.  My brother marveled at how, in retirement, former students so often stopped by our house in Hope, Arkansas or her cottage home on our family property near Nashville, Arkansas to say how she’d positively influenced their lives.  But teaching home economics and high school English, however valuable, wasn’t the highest and best use of Electa Wiley’s talents.

In the early 60s, she went to graduate school and earned a doctoral degree from the University of Arkansas, allowing her at least to ply her trade in historically black colleges.  She did that for 14 years in Arkansas and Louisiana.  However important that was, it still wasn’t the highest and best use of Electa Wiley’s talents. 

She retired to our house in Hope in 1978.  In the following years, I saw what Electa Wiley really could do.  She dedicated herself to writing, publishing volumes of poetry, appearing at literary conferences, and contributing newspaper columns on social and political issues.  I saw her passion, insight, and astounding ability to write in a way that touched hearts and stimulated minds.  But, I also saw the cost of the time she lost during those years toiling in little rural high schools, underfunded colleges, and, finally, her backyard.  I saw that, but for the timing of her birth, she would have had a chance to perform her craft in literary meccas like New York, Los Angeles, and London. 

What kept my mother from having the chance to write poems that became classics, novels that became best sellers, and screen plays that became film and television hits was, pure and simple, American race discrimination.  Born in 1919 in rural Hempstead County, Arkansas, she never dreamed of anything except teaching in a local school.  When she finished graduate school in 1964, the idea of a black woman landing on the faculty of one of America’s top public or private universities wasn’t, as she once told me, “a real possibility.”

I could look at this situation and regret missing out on the riches she might have earned in a lucrative literary career.  I could lament the fact my mother died in obscurity – appreciated by those who knew and loved her, but uncelebrated for talent exceeding many we worship.  I could complain that my mother never received the adulation of critics and audiences that venerated much lesser lights.  I do none of this because what happened isn’t about me, her, or our family.  I see the biggest loser in my mother’s fate as America itself.

This country missed out on what my mother had to offer.  I am convinced that had she not faced the racially imposed limits in place in the United States during her formative years, she would have had an opportunity to hone her craft with America’s best novelists, literary scholars, poets, and playwrights.  Her horizons wouldn’t have been constricted by considerations of what little black girls from rural Hempstead County, Arkansas can make of themselves. She could have dreamed big and shown the world what she had.

I understand my mother performed a valuable service.  The high school and college students she taught so well needed people like her.  Because she met their needs, she felt fulfilled and never regretted that fate didn’t deal her different cards.  As I’ve said in other contexts, being happy with what you have and not worrying about what you don’t have leads to really good outcomes in life.  My mother looked at things that way and, therefore, by the time of her death, she could say to herself, “Well done!”

But I wanted more for her.  I wanted her name in lights.  I wanted to see her on TV talk shows musing about books she authored and poems she composed.  I wanted her recognized on our greatest stages for people whose talent resides in using words.  I didn’t get to see that but, as I said, the fact I didn’t is as much America’s loss as mine.