 | | Black Mountain, North Carolina.Mike Belleme for The New York Times |
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‘I Am the Only One Left to Tell You’ |
Mary Othella Burnette was born and raised in western North Carolina, in a small community in the mountains where a number of Black families settled after the end of the Civil War. Enslaved people, newly freed from local plantations, put down roots there, and Ms. Burnette is related to many of the earliest settlers of what is known as Southern Appalachia. |
Now 89, and worried the oral histories passed down from the first residents and from her own family would be forever lost, she self-published a memoir in August. She began writing it in 2008, after attending a writing workshop for first-time authors. There, a facilitator introduced the idea of writing a letter to someone important in her life, someone who was no longer alive. |
Ms. Burnette leapt at the idea. She could use it to explain why her cousin Elijah, known in her family as “Lige,” was honored in the title of her memoir, “Lige of the Black Walnut Tree.” He had died before Ms. Burnette was born, but she could tell by the way her father spoke of him that he had been one of his favorite first cousins. |
“Only Papa had talked about Lige, and Papa had been dead 54 years before I began writing,” she said, “therefore, the letter would serve a second purpose: I grew up listening to oral history, and preserving memories of older members of the family was important to us. I did not want Elijah’s name to be forgotten.” |
In the letter, she wrote, “If only I had realized that I was living in the last days of the old Black community and had kept a diary of what I experienced. If only you or my father could have written a book for us. What a marvelous history we would have inherited.” |
Her memoir, she said, is a desperate effort to preserve that history and capture the typical Black Appalachian experience of the early 20th century. |
“Little has been written about Black communities living in Southern Appalachia for the past 300 years,” Ms. Burnette said. And, she added, referencing Job 1:15 in the Bible, “I am the only one left to tell you.” |
In a wide-ranging interview, Ms. Brunette talked about the fading South Appalachia, the racism she and her family endured and how her story fits into the current Black Lives Matter movement. Our conversation has been lightly edited. |
 | | Mary Othella Burnette at home in St. Clair Shores, Mich.Brian Palmer for The New York Times |
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PL: Why did you want to write this book? |
MB: I’m 89 years old, I’ll be 90 years old in March, and I am the last of my nuclear family and one of the oldest members of our community still living. I wanted to write something about that old community, because it was vanishing. I wanted to get something in writing. There were others who could have written something but they didn’t, and I felt I was the last one who could. |
PL: Little has been written about the Black communities living in South Appalachia. Talk to me about what that community was like and what it looks like now. |
MB: For me, it’s a ghost town now. There’s a lot of houses there but the people, I don’t know. What happened is that the last two generations of freed slaves settled there right after 1865. They started to acquire little plots of land and build houses because there was no such thing as rental property, and if there had been, they didn’t have the money anyway. They were out there on their own with the clothes on their back, right off the plantations. So a few of these people were still living when I was born. My grandmother was one of them; she delivered me. These people worked together to help each other survive. |
I had a neighbor who would wait for our screen door to slam in the morning after my mother went to work, and she would be outside watching to see that my parents had gone, but she was going to keep an eye on us during the day. My mother never thought of giving her $1. She didn’t have $1 to give her. They were making like $5 and $7 a week. Can you believe that? But it was a village where the people looked after one another. |
Today, I think I can count on one hand the number of Black people who live on the main road. At onetime, there may have been 20 families on that road. Today, there may be five. |
PL: Why do you think that we haven’t heard much about the Black communities in South Appalachia? |
MB: Because of what I call prohibited literacy. A lot of our people were not writing anything because of slavery. After slavery, they were struggling so hard to survive and they hadn’t had a chance to learn to read or write very well. They didn’t have time to write anything. |
And then my father’s generation comes along with a little bit of education. They would go to about the third grade, and they would have to spend most of the year helping with the crops and gathering the crops and preserving what they could. Now we could have begun to write, but we didn’t. |
We’ve been there for nearly 300 years. When I say “we,” I mean the Black people who came into that area as slaves in the 1700s. |
PL: You’ve seen so much. How do you feel about the moment we’re in right now, with the uprisings and Black Lives Matter movement? |
MB: When I look back on my life, I saw white people who looked at what was happening to us as if this was normal. I’m glad to see people of all races with the courage to stand up and say, “This is wrong.” I think this is important, because this wasn’t happening when I was a child. |
PL: What advice would you have for the young people who are out there fighting for justice? |
MB: I would say, I’m proud of them and to keep going. But we really need to delve into history because what has happened has an effect on what is happening today, and you need to be informed when we want to do anything. |
You need to have some background information. I would certainly applaud their efforts because this has not happened before in such great numbers, where people are speaking out against what is wrong and what has been wrong for a very long time. |
PL: Who do you hope your book reaches? |
MB: I hope that it will go into the colleges. I think it’s badly needed there. For the enlightenment of what racism does and how we need to examine ourselves. In one of my very first stories, I wrote about being 3 years old and how the town had built this lake in the park. My father helped to build it. But because I was Black, I could not play in the water. My family wouldn’t dare let me put my hands in the water. Can you imagine how ridiculous that is? |
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