In his memoir, Plantations, Protests, Pulpits: Lessons from the Phases of My Life, Pastor Harry Blake recalls his childhood on plantations in Arkansas and Louisiana. He reminisces about his time as a young man serving on the Civil Rights battlefield as one of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.‘s lieutenants with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and he reflects upon the 60 years he has spent as a pastor. The book also includes a series of letters to activists, parishioners, pastors, and his family. It concludes with reflections on the sudden passing of his wife, Norma Blake.
Excerpt from The Early Years on the Plantation
Lying on a handmade mattress filled with white stuffing from the cotton patch, Miss Doll willed herself to bring me into the world. Though still a young woman, her conception must’ve seemed as miraculous as God’s blessing of Abraham to Sarah. Married at the fertile age of seventeen, Miss Doll had remained barren for seven years.
And what must my father have been feeling? He’d already lost his first wife and child during a birth and had likely resigned himself to not ever being a father. Whatever he was feeling – excitement or terror or both – no one would’ve known it. My father never showed emotion. I once saw an angry white man threaten to kill him (he could’ve done it too), and Daddy didn’t flinch.
My Daddy was born in Mississippi, but he moved to Portland, Arkansas after the death of his first wife. A white man there had leased about 100 acres of land to a black man whose children and children’s children worked on the land. Daddy joined them in toiling those fields then in 1927 joined one of the black overseer’s daughters in marriage. The young couple moved 19 miles away to Lake Village, Arkansas where Daddy worked as a tenant farmer on the Leland Plantation. I was born there in 1934.
