Fire in My Soul by Joan Steinau Lester

Author:Joan Steinau Lester
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2003-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

In the midst of her tumultuous life, Eleanor maintained connections to Movement colleagues. Whenever Ms. Hamer, for instance, came to New York, Eleanor saw her.

“We talked about what she was doing, and what I could do to help. Ms. Hamer had started a pig farm because people were hungry; she gave food away to white and black folks alike. Her instincts were always away from separatism. And she lived to see those poor white folks in Sunflower County celebrate a Fannie Lou Hamer Day,” says Eleanor, shaking her head.

After Ms. Hamer had cancer and a mastectomy she told Eleanor, “I’m fine, but them socks I got here in my breasts, got to do something about that.”

“Ms. Hamer, you don’t have a prosthesis?”

“Not unless you call these socks a prosthesis.” When she perspired, she said, the rags, soaking up moisture, were an added weight.

Horrified, Eleanor took her shopping. “We made great fun of the socks that she was carrying around.”

When Eleanor waxes about this mentor, her face takes on a youthful glow. “I saw what she could do before audiences. She could make people understand what they needed to know in order to move on. It’s a great gift to summon up what needs to be said to rally people at a time when they need leadership, when they’re confused or depressed, or going off in the wrong direction.

“You look at a Fannie Lou Hamer and say, ‘How much talent like that is dust in the grave, never discovered. At least hers was. Late in life, but discovered by somebody. Because America heard her.”

When Ms. Hamer died in March 1977, Eleanor published a tribute in Ms. magazine. Ms. Hamer would be remembered “for some of the very best moments of public speaking anyone has heard in this century…She will be remembered for her sober and principled ideology that was never waylaid by the faddish and sometimes parochial philosophies that inevitably attach themselves to great movements.”

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