Doorways of Support and Inspiration:
Courage

Cora Lee Johnson: The Courage to Persevere  Katherine Martin, Excerpted from Women of Courage: Inspiring Stories from the Women Who Lived Them (New World Library, Novato, CA)

“I was sixty-two years old, a poor, uneducated, disabled,

black woman. I didn’t have much confidence, but I decided I

couldn’t just sit down and do nothin’.”

 

Cora Lee Johnson picked cotton in the fields of Georgia. She worked in a factory. She was uneducated, poor — but she had a dream.

 

It feels like starting a sewing center was a dream of mine since the day I first came into the world. I always wanted to sew. When I was young, I wanted to get a sewing machine but never could.

 

It took me a long time before I could start talking about my dream.

 

I worked real hard all my life, pickin’ cotton, beans, tomatoes, and fruit. I started to work in the cotton field when I was tall enough to reach the cotton, and all my life I wondered how I could work so hard, going from one field to another, and still be hungry. My family married me off when I was fourteen. I worked those fields so hard my womb wouldn’t hold a child, and I lost six babies. Eventually, I moved to Palm Beach, Florida, with my husband and cleaned houses. Then, one day, I came back home to Soperton, Georgia, ’cause my mamma was sick. Soperton is where my parents growed us up, raising ten children on sharecropping. I took care of my mamma until she died. That’s when I had to start my life completely over. ’Cause while I was takin’ care of my mamma, my husband was takin’ care of another woman. I didn’t have a home to go back to. I didn’t have a job. I didn’t have money. I didn’t have anything.

 

I finally got me a job and worked awhile. Then I was injured in an auto accident. It happened on a Saturday. The place where I worked called first thing Monday morning and terminated my job while I was still in the hospital. I was sixty-two years old, a poor, uneducated, disabled, black woman.

 

I didn’t have much confidence, but I decided I couldn’t just sit down and do nothin’. So, I started goin’ to workshops, lookin’ at things uneducated folks could do for their community if they really wanted. I didn’t realize I could do so much with so little until I started.

 

I was sewin’ some at my house. When somebody would come by, I’d say to them, “I want to get some more sewin’ machines so other people can come in and learn.” First thing folks said to me was, “You don’t have an education. How you gonna teach somebody to sew when you can’t read a pattern?” I told them I wasn’t plannin’ to teach nobody to read a pattern — I was gonna teach ’em to sew.

 

Soperton is a small town southeast of Macon, Georgia, with about three thousand people. Nobody ’round here encouraged me, not even my family, ’cause they thought I was crazy. They said, “How can you do this? You know you ain’t got no money.”

 

Well, I know’d that from jump street. But the Bible says, “You have not because you ask not.” And the only thing I could do was ask somebody. I thought maybe a sewin’ center don’t sound crazy to everybody and somebody’ll help me do it. So, I       started talkin’ about my dream to more people outside Soperton. By still believin’ in it and talkin’ about it to other people, I found help. Monica Robertson, one of the ladies who used to work at Georgia Legal Services, helped me get grant money. She wrote the words for me and put the grant applications together. First grant I got was from the Sapelo Foundation. It bought sewing machines and paid rent for the first year. That’s how I started my center.

 

My sewing center is called the Truetlen County Community Sewing Center. I have twelve machines in operation most of the time and a table for cutting. The girls come in, and I teach ’em how to cut. I don’t charge nothin’ in order to move by that excuse, “I’d learn how to sew, but I don’t have the money to pay.” I don’t want to turn down nobody that come in here.

 

Most times at the sewing center, I don’t know if I’m goin’ to have money for rent from one month to another. Grant money helps, but I get just a little bit. One grant had a small stipend for me in it, but I’m on disability now, ’cause of the car accident, and that’s how I makes it. Far as the center goes, I been able to keep it goin’ with the help of folks who see the results of the work I do. People are working here that never had a job and never would have had a job. I keep hearing this myth that welfare mothers are lazy and won’t work, but you look at the sign in front of the clothes factory and it says, “Experienced Operators Only.” Somethin’ wrong there. Some of the girls who been through the sewing center get experience and go get a job. Most of the people that learned to sew are still sewin’.

 

I teach sewin’, and I teach the value of life. I talk with welfare mothers about makin’ their lives better, so that they don’t have to keep goin’ through the same thing. And some’ll say, “Well, nobody told me.” So then, I try to be there to tell ’em, to love ’em whenever their parents put ’em out. I let ’em know somebody still loves ’em, ’cause I’d’ve never started the sewing center without some powerful women helping me grow and lovin’ me.

 

Veda McKnight from Georgia Legal Services was the person who saw in me what I didn’t see in myself. She wouldn’t talk for me, she made me talk for myself. She pushed me outta the nest. I probably woulda never got out otherwise. Now that I’m out, I out for good. I can fly now.

 

Then, there was Lillie Allen, who started Be Present, Inc., in Atlanta. She lectures and gives seminars for women and girls, especially black women on their particular issues. If you got a problem and you don’t know how to deal with it, she sees what you need to get to and help you deal with it. She tries to help women to be free. Lot of women are afraid to take the first step.

 

Lillie help talk me through the hurt places and the fear. When I was first talkin’ about things that hurt, I’d try to avoid certain painful areas ’cause I didn’t want it to hurt again. I was scared that if I said somethin’ or ’n’ other, it wasn’t gonna come out right or somebody was gonna think I shouldn’t say it. That’s because whenever I’d start outta my shell, somebody’d say, “You oughta had better sense” or “You know’d better” or “You shouldn’t do that.” Nobody never encouraged me on nothin’ that I did.

 

I didn’t talk much with Lillie at first. I cried a lot. But, Lillie knows how to take you right back there to the hurt. And she won’t let you pass it. She keeps you right there till you’re able to talk about it. She lets you see that you don’t have to be what people say you are.

 

I never felt that I belonged to my family, that I was loved. I’m the last of ten children, and other peoples said that I didn’t belong to my daddy, and that hurt me. I had to do without things, and I didn’t understand that maybe my daddy couldn’t have got the stuff that I wanted from his sharecropping money. I saw other girls with shoes, and I had to go to school barefeeted and in old clothes. I went to school a heap of times without a sack lunch because I didn’t have any food. Going to school, a big ole thirteen-year-old girl ain’t got no shoes and still in the fourth grade, I just sat down and felt sorry for myself. I thought my mamma and my daddy didn’t want me, and I was scared to speak up because I might get hurt. So, I had a lot of garbage that needed to be got rid of, startin’ all the way back in my childhood. Because I didn’t have a formal education, people would tell me I couldn’t do things, and I accepted it and didn’t even try.

 

Lillie wouldn’t let me use “they” or “them,” like, “They did it to me.” Lillie ask, “Okay, they did that, but how about you? How did you feel when people did this to you or when people said this to you?” She want me to feel whatever it is and talk about whatever it is and, if it hurts, she want me to cry. That’s the only way I could get to the next step.

 

We women, no matter what color we are, we go through a lot of struggles, and we think we the only one who’s going through it. Once we get bare naked and talkin’, when we feel safe to talk about things we can’t talk about otherwise, then we can work through all the pieces to get to where we want to be. That’s how it was for me. Talkin’ with Lillie helped me to get confidence in myself. It was really healing.

 

Veda and Lillie and others learnt me how to use the power that was in me. I have grown a lot in a few years. I know that ’cause I’m able to do things I never dreamed I could have. Like testifying about housing for the poor before a Housing Committee in Washington, D.C. You supposed to have written testimony with you. Everybody got to have it. But, after I said one or two things, I realized that what needed sayin’ wasn’t gonna get said if I said it from the paper. I was only gonna represent a few peoples on the paper, and I needed to represent all these peoples who wasn’t ever gonna have a chance to get heard. And that wasn’t on the paper. So, I put the paper down. And I spoke from what I knew, for all those peoples.

 

I still have a lot of folks come up — black and white — who try to discourage me, and it don’t even faze me anymore. I don’t let nobody tell me what I can’t do. Only time I say I can’t do somethin’ is after I try and it don’t work out. Even then, I try it so many ways, usually it works out somehow. I think that’s ‘cause I know who I am now.

         

The first thing I really had to do was to work on me, find out who I was, what I was about, what I could do. Then, when the people come up against me, I can let them know, “That’s just what you sayin’.” You have to realize who you are and be who you are.

 

I’m still trying to keep the sewin’ center goin’ in order to help somebody else that wants to work, ’cause I believe that there’s always somethin’ that somebody can do if they really want and they really try. To do anything that’s your dream, you’ve got to have faith. In the Bible, Paul said that faith is the substance of things that are hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. I was hopin’ that I could set up the sewin’ center, but I had no way of knowing that I could do it. By me just up ’n’ tryin’ anyway, it became a reality in more ways than I could’ve dreamt.

 

I’m not doin’ anything somebody else can’t do. Maybe somebody don’t want to do it because it calls for a lot of work. It calls for a lot of heartache. It causes a lot of criticism. It calls for a lot of negative stuff from every side. And if you can’t take it, you ain’t gonna make it. Once, when I was up in Detroit, a girl said, “I always wanted to do somethin’ and then when I look at what you doin’, I wonder why I’m not doin’ it.” I told her, “‘cause you don’t want to. If you want to do it, then you don’t let other people tell you what you can do and what you can’t do. You just get up and you do it.”

 

I get letters from women all over the country tellin’ me that I encouraged them to get up and do somethin’. I just love helping people, whoever need help. Someone asked me did I help the poor colored or the poor white. I told him I help the poor who need it, I didn’t know poor had a color. I talk to old peoples, to young peoples, to whoever it is that’s sittin’ down and ain’t doin’ nothing. I just can’t see people sittin’ down, feelin’ sorry for themselves, not tryin’ to do anything. I guess the work I do is meddling in other folks’ business and tryin’ to help everybody I can. When I go places, people still get encouraged by me talkin’ about my work, about settin’ up the sewin’ center. People come in from different areas of the country, come and look ’cause they heard about the center in the paper or on the television. They want to come in and sit down and interview me. They even wrote up the center in the social studies book they usin’ in Georgia schools up to the fourth grade. I been talkin’ to students in the fourth grade. That’s the grade I stopped school.

 

I’m still a poor, disabled, old black woman from south Georgia. I turned seventy-two the twelfth of December, 1998. The first story anybody wrote about me was in Mother Jones magazine, “Heroes for Hard Times,” ’bout how I was somebody to be reckoned with at sixty-two when I started workin’ on this dream. I guess somebody comin’ up, wantin’ to do somethin’ for somebody else, and not havin’ nothin’ for themselves was a hero to them. And now, twelve years later, I’m travelin’ to speak to people in other countries ’bout human rights for women and ’bout how I’m doin’ the work God’s been callin’ me to all my life.

 

From the book Women of Courage. Copyright © 1999 by Katherine Martin. Reprinted with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA. Toll-free 800/972-6657 ext. 52 or www.newworldlibrary.com.

 

At the UN World Summit on Social Development held in Copenhagen in March of 1995, Cora Lee spoke on the struggle to obtain better housing and health care for the poor. She served for several years as chairperson of the Macon Regional Clients Council, was a client member to the board of the National Health Law Program, sits on the board of the Georgia Citizen Coalition on Hunger, and is a Lifetime Member of the Southern Regional Council. She has lobbied and testified repeatedly before the Georgia state legislature and Congress on behalf of poor people. She also has traveled and spoken with an exhibition of photographs from the book I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America, in which she is featured.

 

Lilith Quinlan helped Cora Lee write this story. Together, they’re working on Cora Lee’s autobiography. Lilith founded Common Ground, an organization that educates for a less racist and violent society. An annual journal, Common Ground, is produced by poor women in the hope that their voices will become vehicles for justice.

 

An award-winning screenwriter and author, Katherine Martin created the People Who Dare™ franchise, which began with her bestselling book, Women of Courage: Inspiring Stories from the Women Who Lived Them (New World Library, 1999).  She has produced sold-out Women of Courage theater performances about which Allen Nause, artistic director of Artists Repertory Theatre says, "Women of Courage is one of the most riveting, emotional, and ultimately inspiring pieces of theatre you are ever likely to see…This is theatre at its most powerful.  It can change your life." Katherine's latest book is Women of Spirit: Stories of Courage from the Women Who Lived Them.  She's currently writing a guide to crafting a courageous life and is the Courage Counselor at iVillage.com, the largest women's site on the Internet. Ms. Martin travels and lectures nationally about courage.  Among others, Katherine has spoken with Deepak at The Chopra Center and as one of the featured speakers in the preeminent Voices lecture series in Portland, Oregon. Formerly senior editor of New Realities magazine, Ms. Martin has written for Esquire, Ms., Parents, Working Mother, Women's Sports & Fitness, San Francisco, and numerous other national magazines.  She won a coveted Blockbuster/McKnight Film Award for her script, The Cloverfields of Cannon Falls, which Demi Moore's company, Moving Pictures, optioned.  She wrote the original Showtime movie Last Exit to Earth with film director Katt Shea and the independent feature film A Time of Darkness starring George Segal.  She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband. For more information about Katherine or her book, go to www.peoplewhodare.com, and visit her iVillage.com board