Passionate for Justice. Catherine Meeks
some of those times.
Wells models what it means to have an authentic self. I have always longed to be an authentic person. Though I did not begin to articulate the “Who am I?” query until I was in college, the question was being asked at some level in my heart many years before. In the early years of her life, Wells seemed to ponder that question quite vigorously as she worked her way through the challenges of relationships with men and other women. She struggled with money in those early years as well. While it is tempting when reading her to simply resist her lament about all her struggles, especially those around money and buying things, my sense of honesty leads me to look at my own struggles and to take her seriously. She is described as “sometimes sick or cold, paying bills, mounting debts, fighting slander and fighting internal demons—a quick temper and sharp tongue—that bring on occasional bouts of loneliness and feelings of alienation from others.” She describes herself at those times as “just drifting along.”1 She is wounded by some of the things that are said about her by a few young men who accuse her of high-handedness in her courtships, and she says of them, “[They] have formed themselves in a league against a defenseless girl.” She goes on to speak about her financial hardship again, “[M]y system is not in good order and I cannot consult a physician till I get some money. If I once get out of debt I hope that this lesson will be remembered and profited by: to think I am in debt more than one month’s salary and if anything should happen I have not enough money coming to me to cancel my expenses.”2 This struggle with finances and the attitudes of some men resonates with my experience as well.
I believe that there is great value in being able to learn from the struggles of a giant warrior woman such as Wells and to spend time reflecting upon the ways in which one’s life can intersect with such a person. This type of reflection can be helpful in terms of providing encouragement for staying faithful to the call to resist oppression and to help relieve the projection of perfection that often blinds us to the reality of the heroine’s humanity.
Thus, reading Wells’s Memphis Diary and hearing of some of the conflicts that she had with men who did not seem to understand the type of person that she was and who did not seem to be worthy of her true affection is affirming. I share this life experience with her.
Boys did not like me because I was usually excelling in school, running for an office that no girl had stood for before or staying to myself so that I did not have to talk to them. While this was true in high school, it did not change much in college. There were a handful of men that I found attractive at a distance, but scrutiny always left me wondering what I saw in them in the first place. In addition to that, most of them were never interested in the things that I found to be crucial.
Wells’s shopping habits were not exactly like mine, though I never had enough money, I tended simply to do without things because there was no way to obtain them and I did not have any sources of credit. Survival was always uppermost in my mind, though that same kind of energy that pushed me to resist the segregated waiting room and to rise before sunrise pushed me forward.
When I think about that era in my life and read about a similar time for Wells, I am reminded of this comment from Nobel Prize–winning author Toni Morrison. She said, “[The black woman] had nothing to fall back on; not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality, she may very well have invented herself.”3 In the circle of psychology, this process of self-invention would mostly likely be described as individuation. It is the process of separating oneself from others and becoming who you are going to be in the world. Wells did this by forging a path that was different than most other young women in her age group. She was independent, working, taking care of siblings, moving into activism, speaking up about things such as lynching and women’s rights when others were choosing silence.
My effort at self-invention began as I boarded a Greyhound bus for California at age eighteen to go to college. I had a solid internal core that was pointed toward self-invention and liberation even though I did not know it. I was not sure what I was going to do and how I was going to become the person that I was put on the earth to become. But it is only in rare cases where anyone sees the bigger picture of their life. Generally, it is in the process of reflection that the path begins to become clarified. So, in Wells’s case, she simply kept putting one foot in front of the other. She kept standing up for what was right. She kept speaking out and she kept writing. She was honest about her longings for stability and an easier life, but she stayed faithful to her life as it unfolded.
It was her faithfulness that made her someone that history cannot erase. Of course, she had no clues about what her legacy would be in those early years when she was in the process of becoming the authentic person that she was put on the earth to become. She simply kept moving forward. This path is so familiar to me because I did not know that I would answer justice’s call and stand up to oppressors as I moved through my life as a student and later as a more mature adult. I had no idea that each time I resisted that I would be called to resist again and that I would do it. I did not know that getting deeper into my faith journey would be a call to more resistance. No one told me what I was getting into and I did not really have any markers to show me the way that the path would unfold.
Clearly the resisting was not as dangerous for me as it was for Wells when our lives are reflected upon, but when one is living out their call, there is no way to make such comparisons and they are not always helpful. This is true simply because when the unchartered path is being followed, it does not seem safe and it is never clear what the outcome might be. While Wells knew that the white folks who put a bounty on her head would be happy to see her dead, she had no way to know whether she would be kept safe.
I remember when that child was killed on our campus, an army of police were called out to handle us, the student protestors. We knew that they could kill us, but we had no way to know whether they would. For some reason we were not killed, just as Wells was not killed. All of us had some reason to be left on this earth and we had no clue what it was on the days that our lives were spared. But it did not matter because we had said yes at the deep core of ourselves and there was no turning back.
Wells did not return to Memphis after learning that her office had been burned. I left Los Angeles after being confronted by police in the last place I had ever expected to see a police officer: on my college campus while marching for justice for a fifteenyear-old boy who was murdered. I moved to Georgia of all places. It surprised me that I wanted to go back to the South, the place that I had left eight years earlier vowing never to return.
It is easy to understand that Wells needed to move away from the South after having her newspaper office burned down and having large bounties placed on her head. It is harder to understand why she would ever come back, and as I reflect upon that question, I must think about why I came back myself.
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