These pieces are not directly about my stepping over the threshold, but they are about my hero, Laurine Craig Sheppard, who was a touchstone in my growth toward some semblance of awareness and my social justice responses. –Mary Johnson-Butterworth

Laurine

Blonde ringlets, startling eyes azure–
Will her people ever embrace her Black?

Envied and yet catcalled, “Impure,”
They stare and they attack

Will her people ever embrace her Black?
Her Granny was mounted by the master.

They stare and they attack.
How can her White face her disaster?

Her Granny was mounted by the master.
Envied and yet catcalled, “Impure,”

How can her White face her disaster?
Blonde ringlets, startling eyes azure.

                                                                                             Em Arjohn

Laurine Craig Sheppard’s rock hands rolled out the almond/flour/sugar/butter/vanilla dough.  I sat on the rickety kitchen stool–too young to measure what she was doing.  Mrs. Sheppard seemed to love me, and I adored her.  She was one of thirteen children.  Her grandmother had been impregnated by her slavemaster, Elijah Craig.  My friend had been born with blonde hair and blue eyes, and her parents had dyed her hair with tea and coffee to help her fit in with her darker siblings and cousins.  True to her African American heritage, she never chose to pass as white, although she looked the part.

When I would get nosey, she would gaze at me sternly and quip, with her fist in the air, “Lie low catch a meddler!”  We all knew she would never hurt us. After she rolled the dough out, she would use a cutter for small circles which she would then roll into almond worms and shape into letter Cs—puppy dog tails.

After their aromatic stint in the outdated oven, the tails wagged around in powdered sugar.  I can taste the power of that confection to this day. 

Mrs. Sheppard washed and steam ironed the purificators, square linens embossed with a cross, for The Church of the Ascension, Mombie’s home away from home.  I relished hearing my caregiver rant about my grandparents and their foibles.  She would put us on her knees and recite, “This Is the Way the Lady Rides,” bouncing us furiously at the concluding, “Here goes the old countryman.”  I remember seeing her outside hanging sheets and shirts on the makeshift clothesline.  She could never really escape because she lived on my grandparents’ property.   

Once, she was almost freed from domestic servitude when she and her husband John moved to Cleveland, but John died, and she lost the baby she was carrying.  Adrift, she returned to Selma and the Russell household and later to the Gunters of Montgomery, where she raised my mama and Aunt Mary. 

Mrs. Sheppard lived to be 102.  Carolyn tried to duplicate the infamous puppy dog tails on several occasions.  Definitely not the same.  Consciously or pre-dementia, this battered-since-birth and proud Black woman withheld her secret to puppy dog tails and who knows what other secrets that she might have told, had someone cared to ask.

I never treated Mrs. Sheppard with the respect I should have accorded this nurturing grown-up in my life, always referring to her as “Laurine” and never utilizing the customary Southern “ma’am.”   Perhaps the missing ingredient–the deference we lacked as we watched her rock hands work.