Female Forrest Gump

The other day, on my flight up to New York, I met a woman who I can’t stop thinking about. She was a bit cross at first, but slowly opened up to me, and her life story guided me through history, opened my eyes to a life I could never imagine, and brought the hairs on my arms to a rise.

Her name was Mabel.

Mabel grew up in rural, eastern North Carolina as an African American girl in the 1940s. Her family sharecropped in harvesting months, cultivating tobacco. She had four siblings.

Throughout her childhood, her and her mother would run the stringing machines (strung tobacco stalks on sticks), and they were known around town to work two times faster than anyone else. Mabel noted that they worked beside the white folk at the farm everyday like they were a big family. They would even eat inside with the white family at times. She said it was at school or around town where “her kind” were treated differently.

She called her dad “mean as a rattlesnake.” He hit them growing up, taking his anger out on his wife and kids. He would use his money to go drink at the “cantina” nearby. The cantina was a wooden shack where both whites and blacks went to drink and play music.

Mabel said her dad would talk to the tobacco farmer her and her mother worked for to steal their earnings. He would take the money and use it on booze at the cantina.

One day, Mabel was at the cantina with her brother, spying from the outside on her dad. She said he was “running around with women” and it made her mad. Her bright hazel eyes lit up with a fiery passion as she was talking about it. That night, he was passed out drunk back at the house and Mabel took about $100 out of his overalls. Mabel said she wasn’t scared to do it because she knew her dad would think it was one of the women he was running around with who took his money.

Mabel’s dad made his own “sour mash,” or moonshine, and one night her and her brother stole some and got so drunk, they laid by the river all night. She said she didn’t know how her little brother didn’t die.

Mabel had a fierce side to her. She remembered growing up with the KKK around town. One night, “the clan” (as she called it) threw bottles at her and her brother, calling them “unkind words.” She didn’t go into detail. But, Mabel went back home, got her dad’s gun, and found the car the clan was driving around in, and shot the car up.

When Mabel was 16, there was a boy she had a crush on working in the tobacco fields with her. She told her dad she wasn’t working the field tomorrow because the boy would be out there, and her dad slapped her, saying “when you’re big enough to tell me what to do, you’re big enough to move out!”

They got into a huge argument, and he ran out the door go get a switch, while she ran to get a gun. Her mom made her leave the house, and that was it. Mabel never came back home.

She eventually moved to Washington D.C. and became a cocktail waitress. She boasted about how she poured drinks for Ted Kennedy - she said he would take half of the bottles and say “throw them out” because he knew the wait staff would drink them.

Mabel worked hard and ended up in nursing school at Notre Dame. She said she wanted to help people. At her apartment in Indiana, she made cheese toast for the kids in the complex without food, who would line up every morning, calling her “mom.”

She found her way back to North Carolina, working with the elderly at an assisted living home in Tarboro. She mentioned how the white patients would always complain about a “n*****” touching them. She said she got over it, and decided to take care of people the rest of her life.

Mabel’s story admittedly broke my heart in a lot of ways. She is a strong woman, radiating independence but also emanating warmth. She spent her whole life taking care of other people, and now, in her old age, she has no family to take care of her.

Mabel sat beside me, telling me about her life, now in her late 70s. She still had a sparkle in her eye, but her body has betrayed her from years of work. A female Forrest Gump- starting with nothing and making her way through a very colorful life.

Her experiences with racism in the south cannot be overlooked- her voice is one that needs to be heard, as it reminds us of a time being slowly forgotten by society. I wish I had the chance to sit down and ask her more questions to try and understand what it's like to be a black woman growing up from the time of the Civil Rights Movement to the election of Barack Obama.

I thanked Mabel for telling me all of this. I told her that I grew up on what used to be a working tobacco farm out in Rolesville, North Carolina, and I now had a better idea of the history of the land I lived on.

The last words Mabel said to me were “baby girl, you can’t let people walk all over that heart. You need to put ‘em up (as she raised a fist) if anyone tries to. You’ve got your whole life ahead of ya.” She left a huge impact on me, a stranger beside her on a plane, and I can only imagine what she would do if her voice was heard by more.

#EasternNC #Ruralsouth #Tobaccofarming #Racerelations