In this week's reading we learn that practically anything and everyone is capable of teaching you something new. Although writer, Lille Gayle Smith, does not like to look back in her past and into her childhood, because of the constant reminders of how and where she worked, in the cotton field, she writes, and expresses how those exact times have shaped and molded her, and about her new found appreciation for them, in "Unearthing Hidden Literacy: Seven Lessons I learned in a Cotton Field." Smith tells us of the "memories of [the] repetitive, back-breaking work" that was her summer job, and how before she had taken a "Black Women's Literacy" class, she had only referred to it to inform others on how far she had come and what she overcame (Smith 38). She tells us of how this class brings her to the realization that it was indeed that same "drudgery," she had despised, formed something unique in not only her, but in Black women as a whole.
"[D]ue to interrelationships of race, gender
and identity, Black women have not been
expected to adhere to the dominant culture's
stereotype of femininity, and... because slave
women were exploited, they [have] developed
greater independence and self-reliance than
their nonslave counterparts." (Smith 41).
As Smith continues to reflect on a past that she once condemned, she comes to realize that, that experience has "had a positive and profound impact" on her life, the lives of others, and they way she sees the world.
~ A. Foster
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