Global education meant global understanding of people and their cultures.
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| Rosa Parks Booking Photo Montgomery Bus Boycott |
The year I received the China tea set, 1955, was the year Rosa Parks went to jail for starting the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
At the age of six, I was vaguely aware of Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.. I did not hear of the civil rights activists or the Civil Rights Movement from teachers in my segregated school. My teachers seemed wary of such discussions. I later learned from my parents that the teachers may have been warned not to talk about the Civil Rights Movement for fear that they may start trouble among the student body.
+Thurgood+Marshall.jpg "Thurgood Marshall (center) Brown v Board of Education") |
| Thurgood Marshall (center) Brown v Board of Education |
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| Rosa Parks Anti-Rape Activist |
Jim Crow laws affected everything about our lives and the schools I attended until I graduated from high school; and later getting in college. But Jim Crow laws did not affect the global education my mother presented to me with my China tea set and other tools, like meditation, which she discovered and adapted to her global education. My mother would use that China tea set to teach me about the world outside of Jim Crow Laws, under which my ancestors had lived for nearly a century and my family would live for years to come.
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"Even the house you live in," she said. "Make it a home. Make your home the best home you can. Organize it. Keep it immaculate. Decorate it. It's where you live. Respect where you live. Take care of your home and it will take care of you; shelter you, nurture you, be standing when you need it!"
My mother understood what I needed to hear and gave freely and loudly. From primary school through college education with a lot of home school in between, my mother yelled her demands and threatened me if I did not do the work. And she never complimented me unless I had shown extraordinary skill at something. There were no gold stars for mere participation.
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Paying for College Without Going Broke (Google Affiliate Ad) and receiving a college scholarship offer were priorities.
"We will find a way of paying for college," she said. "But you have to try to get a college scholarship offer to help out. If you don't study in high school with college in mine, I don't know if we should strain to pay for college. Maybe you won't study in college and our money will be wasted. Maybe you're not college material. But I won't hold that against you, even though I was smart enough to go to college and would have gone if I had had the change."
She accepted the way other people lived, even if she didn't approve of their lifestyle. "I do not expect others to let me tell them what to think," my mother said. "Listen but make your own decision based on what you know. And do not follow or be bullied into going into a certain direction just because others do. Do not be afraid of thinking for yourself. And, likewise, do not bully others into thinking like you." Like you're doing me now, I thought, but had sense enough not to say it out loud.
My mother encouraged me to learn a language. She had learned Spanish when she began her supervisory career in food services and wanted to teach me Spanish so that she could practice her language skills before going off to work and giving orders.
In one of our many reference books my mother had purchased over the years, she found items about the Japanese event, The Way of Tea. Sasaki Sanmiis, born in 1893 in Kyoto, wrote the original Japanese classic, Sado-saijiki, which was translated into English in 1960. My mother found translations, which cover Japanese tea tradition throughout the calendar year with descriptions, poetry and The Way of Tea: Reflections. She was fascinated by all of this tradition and ceremony, perhaps because so much of her African and Native American tradition was a mystery to her.
Admitting to me that she was probably not saying the words correctly, my mother still enjoyed trying to pronounce of the names and words describing the ceremonies. "I would love to learn to speak Japanese," she said. "That way, I would have a better understanding of these rules of the tea. "Eastern languages are very different from English and Spanish," she said. "It wouldn't hurt, though, if you learned Spanish."
Using my little toy tea set, my mother taught me about the world's fascination with tea, tea traditions, world economies built around tea and legitimate historical political movements named for the beverage, including the Boston Tea Party, one event leading to the American Revolution. My mother especially loved the Japanese ceremonies, but she taught me about all tea traditions and the people who created them.
Traditionally, powdered green tea is used in the Chanoyu, Japanese Tea Ceremony. Matcha ceremonial-grade tea is different from other green and black teas brewed from dried flakes of loose tea leaves or tea leaves manufactured into tea bags. Loose tea leaves or those in tea bags are steeped in hot water and then discarded.
The ceremonial tea is ground to a fine power that is made to dissolve in water, which preserves its essence, making its consumption more potent and effective than tea leaves. Although we didn't have the real Japanese tea, we used the tea my mother could afford and the tea she could find. Then, we substituted what we had and we pretended.
It is said that using the powdered green tea within the rules of the ceremony makes the five human senses most acute, encouraging high mental concentration, emotional calm and mental composure. In teaching me about tea, my mother substituted my little toy tea service for the traditional Japanese Ceremonial tea set like the Tea Set to the right.
My mother and I did not have the powdered green tea for our tea celebrations, but we read about the power of the tea when certain rituals were performed in conjunction with its consumption. This thinking was certainly parallel to my mother's thinking, in that, it led to control of one's behavior through control of one's own mind.
Of course, my mother and I did not have Japanese, Chinese, English or any other exotic tea. We used Lipton Tea because it was cheap and available at the corner store. We emptied the tea leaves into the little tea pot of my China tea set
. My mother said the loose leaves made a stronger brew. I didn't really like the taste of hot tea, but I sipped it with my mother--our pinkies pointed toward the sky--because she said I should know about such things. Then, I hosted pretend tea parties for my young cousins and friends. But I didn't bore them with what my mother and I had read about tea, since my friends and I were only drinking pretend tea, not even Lipton, just tap water.
Admitting to me that she was probably not saying the words correctly, my mother still enjoyed trying to pronounce of the names and words describing the ceremonies. "I would love to learn to speak Japanese," she said. "That way, I would have a better understanding of these rules of the tea. "Eastern languages are very different from English and Spanish," she said. "It wouldn't hurt, though, if you learned Spanish."
Custom Search: Curious about the Japanese Way of Tea or other customs?
Traditionally, powdered green tea is used in the Chanoyu, Japanese Tea Ceremony. Matcha ceremonial-grade tea is different from other green and black teas brewed from dried flakes of loose tea leaves or tea leaves manufactured into tea bags. Loose tea leaves or those in tea bags are steeped in hot water and then discarded.
The ceremonial tea is ground to a fine power that is made to dissolve in water, which preserves its essence, making its consumption more potent and effective than tea leaves. Although we didn't have the real Japanese tea, we used the tea my mother could afford and the tea she could find. Then, we substituted what we had and we pretended.
It is said that using the powdered green tea within the rules of the ceremony makes the five human senses most acute, encouraging high mental concentration, emotional calm and mental composure. In teaching me about tea, my mother substituted my little toy tea service for the traditional Japanese Ceremonial tea set like the Tea Set to the right.
My mother and I did not have the powdered green tea for our tea celebrations, but we read about the power of the tea when certain rituals were performed in conjunction with its consumption. This thinking was certainly parallel to my mother's thinking, in that, it led to control of one's behavior through control of one's own mind.
"Thinking about something is good," my mother told me. "But thinking deeply about something is better." She explained that thinking deeply means rolling it over again and again in my brain and examining thoroughly what I was thinking, not to come up with a better answer, but to come up with a better understanding of my answer. That was meditation, the same thing I had seen her doing so many times.
Of course, my mother and I did not have Japanese, Chinese, English or any other exotic tea. We used Lipton Tea because it was cheap and available at the corner store. We emptied the tea leaves into the little tea pot of my China tea set
. My mother said the loose leaves made a stronger brew. I didn't really like the taste of hot tea, but I sipped it with my mother--our pinkies pointed toward the sky--because she said I should know about such things. Then, I hosted pretend tea parties for my young cousins and friends. But I didn't bore them with what my mother and I had read about tea, since my friends and I were only drinking pretend tea, not even Lipton, just tap water.
The essay, The Dressing Table: "I stepped over the threshold into my mother's tiny bedroom, where everything had a place. Framed magazine landscapes hung on fading floral wallpaper. Pillows nestled under a shedding white chenille bedspread. Draped over open windows that formed a perpendicular angle of light in the room, sheer curtains were pulled apart with dime-store ribbons. On a bedside table, my mother conveniently had arranged a reading lamp, writing pad and pencil, old issues of National Geographic and McCall's Magazines, two paperback novels, a current calendar showing June 1959 and a dogged-eared copy of..." From my book, Bigmama Didn't Shop at Woolworth's
"Tea is good for the skin," my mother said. "Tea tightens the skin around the eyes." Of course, I didn't care about skin tightening when I was six years old, but I saw her put her feet up, place cold teabags over her eyes in the evening and relax while listening to jazz. My mother learned this technique and many other cheap homemade beauty secrets from her part-Comanche mother, my grandmother, Bigmama, who never looked her age; neither did my mother; and neither do I.
My mother's teas usually were not special herbal teas; but regular tea from the corner market. Sometimes she mixed the brewed tea with other ingredients like cucumber, making herself an eye cocktail of tea, cucumber and aloe gel, which she kept in the refrigerator. Literally, our kitchen was a lab on more than one occasion. Most people today, don't have time, patience or knowledge to make their own cosmetics, but the more I learn about the industry, the more I am relying on my mother's facial recipes.
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, and, unlike my mother's tea and cucumber eye treatment, this one comes ready to use from the manufacturer. To keep it ultra fresh, though, keep the eye gel in the refrigerator."You can find meaning where there seems to be none," my mother said. "People have been doing that throughout time. Whatever you're doing, do it the best you can. Give it your full concentration. Challenge yourself with every little thing that comes your way; think of them as opportunities. Do all you can with whatever it is that you have or that you are doing."
My mother made ordinary things, like sipping a cup of tea, into something special. Finding meaning in the simplest of things, she taught me how to make my life rich without reference to money.
"What does all of this tea talk have to do with me," I asked, watching my mother prepare my lesson. "Japanese tea ceremonies have nothing to do with us."
Littie saw differently, though. "You're wrong," my mother said. In spite of Jim Crow laws, segregated education and biased racial designations, my mother always said black people comprise all people, whether here in the United States or other parts of the world. "To learn about black people, you must learn about all people. If you leave someone out of your study, you leave out part of yourself."
It took a great deal of courage and imagination during the era of Jim Crow laws for my mother and other parents like her to give me what she thought I needed. Jobs for African Americans were scarce and good jobs were mostly nonexistent for them members of our community. Black men were economically and politically marginalized and black women were publicly disrespected on a routine basis.
~~~~~~~~ My Mother ~~~~~~~~
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| Littie Nash |
Littie Nash was one of the great thinkers. She did not waste compliments on me. She reserved accolades to celebrate real accomplishments, not just because I dragged myself out of bed before noon on Saturday or because I made an 'A' on my report card. "Some things you have to do," she said. "And those things pass, not without notice, but without an all-day hullabaloo."
To support me, Littie sponsored my piano, ballet, tennis and swimming lessons, dance performances, recitals, literary and classical music club memberships, summer camps, school trips and science fair exhibits, still managing to squeeze out of our tight budget money for the dentist to install braces on my teeth.
Read more about my mother in my blog post,: Great Mothering in Jim Crow's World. Also check out another of my blog posts about the significance my mother placed on a college education. She believed that ignorance was an illness that could only be cured by learning. "People can learn on their own if they know how to read," she said often. "You do not have to go to college to learn and be educated. But education may help you get a better job." Read: College Education Was my Mothers Plan.
I write about my mother in my book, Bigmama Didn't Shop at Woolworth's
, began in the 1990s when I was writing a column for Hearst and Knight-Ridder newspapers, stories from my childhood in the era of Jim Crow laws. Robin Fruble of Southern California said, "Every white person in America should read this book! Sunny Nash writes the story of her childhood without preaching or ranting but she made me realize for the first time just how much skin color changes how one experiences the world. But if your skin color is brown, it matters a great deal to a great number of people. I needed to learn that. Sunny Nash is a great teacher," Fruble said.
, began in the 1990s when I was writing a column for Hearst and Knight-Ridder newspapers, stories from my childhood in the era of Jim Crow laws. Robin Fruble of Southern California said, "Every white person in America should read this book! Sunny Nash writes the story of her childhood without preaching or ranting but she made me realize for the first time just how much skin color changes how one experiences the world. But if your skin color is brown, it matters a great deal to a great number of people. I needed to learn that. Sunny Nash is a great teacher," Fruble said.
A managing editor at Texas A&M University Press, Mary Lenn Dixon, saw the merit in compiling these stories into a book and approached me about creating a manuscript of selected articles for review and eventual publication. What a break! I agreed. And the book was born. I am now completing a second book for this Press.
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| Bigmama Didn't Shop At Woolworth's by Sunny Nash |
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| Sunny Nash Selected News Releases |
