That Was Home For Me

This article was contributed by Sheba, Mississippi Queen of Blues in response to "Influence of The Slave Dwelling Project leads to Sotterley Plantation and Beyond," by Joseph McGill, Jr.

I am so glad to see what you are doing. I am a person that came up in 1950, and this type place is what I called home. I was born in Sunflower, Mississippi and this type of house was home for a lot of us.

I remember seen rows of them along the Mississippi River. They had one room and some did not have a floor. For heat, some people would make a fire in the middle of the floor.

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We lived in one house that was a little bigger, but we only lived in half of it because the other half was torn down. This house was billed off the ground and had a big hole in the floor where you could see the snake underneath.

Later, I remember we moved in a house that they called a shotgun house which means that you could

take a shot gun and shot straight through it. These house had two rooms, and a family of nine or ten and

sometimes more lived in them. After leaving Mississippi and moving to South Florida, they had the same type of houses for the migrant worker consisting of one room for couples and two rooms for families.

Just last week, I took a photograph (on right) of houses currently inhabited by residents of Homestead, Florida. This is an old migrant worker community. See Looking Back.

Tags: Queen Sheba Sunflower Mississippi

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Freedom Maverick Awards

The awards below were inspired by a photograph that I took at The State House in downtown Columbia, South Carolina. There is so much said about the Confederate flag that hangs there, but I never have seen much about the African American Monument that depicts the history of African Americans. Taking down a flag alone does not change a people's vision. Those we acknowledge as being a Freedom Maverick (a word coined by Angela Y.Walton-Raji in podcast #91) will help us have the right perspective.