Marvelous Mary of Mannsdale

The black and beautiful life of Mary Goins mattered to a multitude of my people. She lived every inch of her life with a gracious dignity that made it so easy for all of us to love and respect her. She was born a slave as the Civil War erupted in 1861 and died in what was purported to be freedom in 1961, when she was a hundred. She was a native of Mannsdale, Mississippi, and never left.

She lived on Granddaddy’s place up that short path past those haystacks on a pole. The house was both delightful and dilapidated with a small porch on the front where she would sit and wile away her countless days. From that vantage point she could see the Bennett house and remember when it was brand spanking new, when she was just thirty-nine at the turn of the 20th century. She was there when their first born, Dudley, died as a child. Mary was sixty-six when our grandmother died, and she would end up as the multi-tasking matriarch in charge of rearing my mother and her brood of siblings.

An old pot-bellied stove was the centerpiece of the two-roomed shanty.  The front room served as den and bedroom, and I remember that all the walls and ceilings were covered with the funny papers.  [I later learned that by pasting and layering newspaper to the wall, the house was more insulated against the fierce winds of winter.]  When Mary welcomed me and the other cousins, we felt in our bones we were almost kin — like stray grandchildren. She would let us jump on the single cot and give us a hot sweet potato from the stove.  The back room was somewhat of a kitchen, bordered by a small back porch leading to the outhouse.

Mary Goins seemed an enigma to me.  She was almost alien yet as close as family itself.  In spite of the content of her caring character, the color of her skin set her apart.  But not that far apart.  To hear our parents speak of Mary and her kind…including ol’ Frank Bennett and Joe…you’d think we all came from the same stock. If the truth be admitted, we did. Like Dilsey was to the Compson family in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Mary not only endured but she prevailed somehow by God’s grace.

Since the early 1800’s in Mississippi, the years and the place had created a tapestry full of all sorts of people doing their parts to survive and keep faith going from one generation to another. Our great grandfather would live through his days in the Confederacy. Our grandfather and his new bride would set up housekeeping in the new house in 1900, and Mary and her kind would be essential to whatever life would hold for them as they dared to have the children who would someday give birth to the likes of us.  She could look out from her porch and see the generations parading up and down the path till Kingdom come.  She knew in her bones the disparity of plantation capitalism that would build this nation’s economy, but she could prayerfully picture a new day dawning for the generations coming when her people could be full citizens.

My simple way of honoring this beautiful and saintly lady in my life is affirming that black lives mattered a great deal back then and continue to matter more than this world ever dreams of.