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THE BREAZEALE FAMILY Big Mama's Children in loving memory of Mother Sylvia Breazeale, 1904 – 1997 |
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Greetings, family and friends, and welcome.
My name is Rosemarie Chambliss. I'm forty-five years old, I dispatch city buses here in Chicago, and I am the oldest child of Doris Breazeale Chambliss, who is the sixth of the eleven children of Sylvia and James Breazeale of Leflore County, Mississippi. Somewhere along the way I became the one in this family who keeps the names. When somebody has a baby, they call me. When somebody needs to know which cousin married which, they call me. I have the family Bible's pages copied in a binder, eleven reunion programs, and a shoebox of funeral programs going back to 1958. Big Mama has been gone two years this November. I put this page together so that her great-grandchildren, scattered from Chicago to Memphis to Jackson to California, can know where they come from and who she was. If you are family and I have left you out or spelled you wrong, I already know I'll hear about it. Please e-mail me and I'll fix it.
Sylvia Breazeale was born in 1904 in the Mississippi Delta, outside Greenwood, the daughter of sharecroppers. She went to school through the sixth grade, in a one-room church school that met when the crops allowed, and she could read her Bible and figure in her head faster than any of us with a calculator. In 1921 she married James Breazeale, a tall, quiet young man from the next place over, and for the next thirty years they sharecropped cotton together on another man's land. I want the young people to understand what that meant. You worked the land all year, chopping cotton in the spring and picking it in the fall, and at settlement time at the end of the year the man who owned the land did the figuring, and most years he figured you owed him. Big Mama kept her own figures in a little notebook, in pencil, every year, and she never once let on that she had them. She kept a garden, a cow, hogs and chickens, so her children never went hungry, and she made their clothes out of feed sacks, and she sent every one of them to school when it was in session, no matter what anybody said about the crop. The forty acres. In 1951, with what she and Papa James had put by over thirty years and the money her children were sending home from Chicago, they bought forty acres of their own, with a pecan tree, a pond and an old cabin that Papa James and the boys pulled down and replaced with a four-room house. That's the home place. Big Mama said the first night she slept on her own land she didn't sleep at all, she just lay there listening. Uncle Wilford farms it still. The church. Big Mama was a church mother at Shiloh Grove Missionary Baptist Church for fifty years, from 1947 until she passed. If you didn't grow up in a Black Baptist church I should explain that the church mothers are the elder women who sit together on the front pews in white on first Sundays, who see to the sick and the bereaved, who pray over the young people whether the young people like it or not, and who are not, under any circumstances, to be crossed. She was all of that. Three pastors came and went in her time, and every one of them came to her kitchen table for advice. The vote. Big Mama registered to vote in 1966, the year after the Voting Rights Act, at the age of sixty-two. She put on her church hat to do it. She never missed an election after that, and she rode to the polls with Aunt Jeanette the last time in November 1996, at ninety-two, with her cane across her lap. Her going home. Papa James died in 1971. Big Mama lived on at the home place for twenty-six more years, the last few with Aunt Jeanette, who is a nurse, looking in every day. She went home to the Lord on Saturday, November 22, 1997, in her own bed, at ninety-three, with her Bible on the nightstand. More than four hundred people came to her homegoing at Shiloh Grove. The program had her full count printed on the back: 11 children, 40 grandchildren, 71 great-grandchildren and 9 great-great-grandchildren. Since then we've added six more babies, and she'd want them counted.
Six of Big Mama's children came north to Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s, part of the great movement of our people up out of the South that the history books call the Great Migration. For our family it wasn't history. It was one at a time, a train ticket and a shoebox lunch. Aunt Bernice went first, in 1943, at twenty-one, with a cardboard suitcase and a shoebox of fried chicken and pound cake for the ride. She got off the train at the Illinois Central station on Twelfth Street, stayed with a cousin on the South Side, and was working in a laundry within the week. She wrote home every Sunday. Big Mama kept every letter in a candy tin. Uncle Robert came after the Army, in 1946, and worked thirty-four years in a steel mill on the far South Side. Aunt Ruth came in 1947 and worked in a hospital kitchen until she ran it. Uncle Melvin came in 1949 and carried mail for the post office for thirty-five years. My mother, Doris, came in 1951, the spring she turned nineteen, and met my father, Edward Chambliss, at church her second Sunday in town. And Uncle Jack came in 1953 and drove a city bus for thirty years, which is how I came to be in this line of work: he brought me the application in 1976 and told me I'd be good at telling people where to go. They sent money home, every one of them, out of every check. They sent boxes of clothes and shoes at the end of every summer. The money for the forty acres was partly theirs. And every summer they put their children on the train south, or later piled them in cars on Interstate 55, to spend weeks at the home place, so that we Chicago children grew up knowing how to shell peas and wring out a dishrag and behave in church, and so we'd know that home was two places. The other five stayed closer. Uncle Wilford stayed on the land. Aunt Katherine lives in Greenwood, Aunt Sandra taught school in Jackson for thirty-one years, Uncle Leo made a career of the Army and settled in Memphis, and Aunt Jeanette, the baby, never went farther than the next county, and she's the one who was there for Big Mama at the end. We are grateful to all five, and especially to her.
Every Fourth of July since 1963, the family has gone home to the forty acres. This year, Saturday, July 3, 1999, 140 of us came, the most ever: carloads down I-55 from Chicago, up from Jackson, over from Memphis, and a plane full of cousins from California. The reunion committee (me, my cousin Earnestine, and my cousin Betty, who lives close and does the real work) had purple and gold T-shirts made, and you could see us from the road. Here's how it goes, and has gone for thirty-six years:
This is the family the way Big Mama called it at the Roll Call: each of her children with their husband or wife, and then their children, oldest first. The great-grandchildren and great-greats would take a page of their own, and someday they'll get one. A cross means that one has gone home.
That's forty grandchildren. If you're one of the seventy-seven great-grandchildren or the great-greats and you want to see your own name up here, send me your branch, your birthday and your mama's name, and I'll start that page this winter.
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