Mary, An Autobiography

Was not sure I read Mary, An Autobiography by Mary E. Mebane, so checked it out of the library. I was quite sure that I had, remember rock piles and such from first chapter. Seems I would have reported it on my Mary website. Maybe I reported it on my now defunct Mary Blogger blog and it got lost in transition.

Not knowing what to read, back then, I started on a quest to read books by authors named Mary due to having a website devoted to the name. Yes, I did read it; worth reading a second time. Mary grew up in an era when she had two strikes against her ~ a black female. Yet she bucked the odds, went to college, rather than settle for the expected role wife, mother, domestic ~ cleaning houses for white people, returning home to do the same.

She had one person early in life who told her the equivalent of Yes You Can; the rest of the world around her told her over and over again in many ways: no you can not. In her words:

I am going to do great things in life, I secretly vowed.
No, you aren't the said the world around me. You're going to accept your lot just like the rest of us. Black women have always had it hard. Who are you to be so different?


The constrictions, the restraints, the hidden threats that we lived under, that were the conditions of our lives, inevitably prodcued mutations in the natrual human flowerng. To me we were like plants that were meant to grow upright but became bent and twisted, stunted, sometimes stretching out and running along the ground, because the conditions of our environment forbade our deverloping upward naturally.



Protest is the most effective way of stoping unfair treatment. People who treat you unfairly don't want others to know.

This reminded me of a Richard Bach quote about our "true family":

Some people find themselves in the wrong grouping of human relationships.
...sometimes the wrong grouping is not the result of a conscious choice--of marriage with a stranger. Sometimes one is part of the wrong grouping because he or she was born into it....



Protest is the most effective way of stoping unfair treatment. People who treat you unfairly don't want others to know.

Some people never grow up.


They were grown, and grown people weren't supposed to do things like that. When you got grown you did the right things just like you had been taught in Sunday school.