I am almost finished with Jimmy Carter’s memoir of his childhood in Plains, Georgia, called An Hour Before Daylight. He gives a detailed view of a way of life in our country that is disappearing: small town communities. I am a little bothered by his somewhat cavalier attitude towards the lives of minorities and women, though. He grew up in a segregated world and that’s the way it was. He admits several times that he just didn’t really think about what it must have been like to be a disenfranchised Black in the South during the Depression.
Right now, I’m stumbling over a paragraph where he describes his grandmother’s life:
“On Sundays, everyone went to Sunday school and church, so Grandma had to prepare most of the large dinner in advance, perhaps cooking just the biscuits and fried chicken after the services were over. For one afternoon a wekk, she joined some of the other ladies of the community in a quilting bee, all of them sewing while they discusssed affairs of their families and the community. I can see now that hers was a complete life, not much different from that of most Southern women of her time. She was proud and grateful to serve the other members of her family, who more or less took her for granted” (p. 244).
This description should certainly apply to my own grandmothers. Women had a place, they had a job to do, but was it a complete life? If she had had any choice at all, would she have chosen this life? I keep stumbling over the word “grateful” because she was serving some very ungrateful people, evidently. How does he know she was grateful? Or even proud? Were there days when she would have preferred to sit and read a book or just look out the window without doing anything? Did she feel her life was complete? And did she have anything to compare it with if, as Carter suggests, she led a very typical life.
It has taken me awhile to finish this book and I didn’t really expect much from it at the beginning other than a lot of fond reminisences about life in Georgia (all biscuits and peaches). But I’ve found myself really mulling over some of Carter’s comments. I really respect the man, more than any of our other presidents both living and dead, and I guess I ultimately admire his honesty in this book when he admits that he did not fight against racism or segregation but accepted it as the natural order of the world.
