Joyce Griggs and Equations of Race and Class in Contemporary Dixie
“The Time Has Come to Take a Stand”
THE LIFE OF THE SOUTH ALIVE IN ONE WOMAN’S TALE
She was eight years old, forty five years ago, when she dropped the bag of cotton she was picking from her shoulder and declaimed to her mother, “Mama, when I grow up I’m gonna get me an education.” The coterie of her eleven brothers and sisters who were present paused to listen as their middle sister continued, “And I’m gonna learn to make money with my brain.” And as they all laughed in approval, she finished, also giggling wildly, “And I’m never gonna pick cotton again!”
Joyce Marie Griggis fulfilled that promise, succeeding at every pursuit she undertook, in spite of long odds, opposition, and oppression at every turn she took. The first obstacle, as is so often the case coming from the grassroots gigapathology of Dixie’s working clss, was her own kin, her Father’s bitter and self-loathing alcoholism fixated on putting down Mama’s plans for her brood to exceed the station he had managed to carve from the hideous conditions of coastal Carolina’s cotton plantation economy.
The climax of this tension occurred when Joyce was twelve. Her Dad came home in a dark mood to their four room shack, demanding that Mama produce money for him to buy some wine. When she demurred---her hording the basis of the extra books, necessary shoes and clothes, and other accoutrements of accomplishment in classrooms whose niggardly funding was that of colonial conditions at best---he struck her viciously and removed his belt to administer a beating that had become a routine as she had more and more stubbornly refused to pay for his habit.
Joyce picked up the empty wine bottle he had set down, however, and pounded the back of his skull with it, shattering the glass into hundreds of pieces and the last shreds of patriarchal power with it. When her father flipped open his buck knife and stabbed his fiery daughter in her forearm, a scar she still carries visible above her wrist, he killed all remaining authority he had in this cabin. His presence diminished apace from that moment, until he became a mere shadow of the man who had sired this crew and built the foundations of the life in spite of all his faults. He died less than a year later, in his sleep, of a massive coronary, no longer able to live with the broken heart that is the basis for much of the vaunted disparity of heart disease among African Americans in this country.
Joyce, a compact beauty who learned to fight from her brothers, had the brain of a field tutored Einstein in science and math, as well as a head hungry for words, especially words of logic and power, went on to graduate at the top of her college class and obtain a two year counselling masters in less than a year. Social Work, however, in the context of early 1970’s North Carolina, the spasms of a dying Jim Crow racism not yet yielding anything even vaguely kin to equity for Blacks, frustrated her as much as it set her free..
Having paid for her education in part with loans which a stint in the military would forgive, she joined the Army, nearby Fort Bragg a bizarre and twisted and routine and accepted part of local culture simultaneously. That she countenanced volunteering for AIRBORNE INFANTRY TRAINING, however, at the Fort that had ushered in her admiration for things martial and potent, was completely against the grain of that moment.
Nonetheless, over the opposition of NCO’s whose fierce condemnations of the “nigger cunt bitch” who showed the temerity to taunt them with her equality---obviously, as well, her superiority, as an officer candidate---and in spite of the half-hearted indifference of the officers who signed off on her course of study---in intelligence, airborne infantry---she graduated second in her cohort and received her Second Lieutenant’s bar. Thus began a storied career, including all sorts of steamy love affairs, with White officers as well as Black businessmen, training and deployment all over the world, and a marriage as tempestuous in some ways as her relationship with her father. She acquired property, served her country, and rose to the rank of major.
When the Army passed her over for a Bird Colonel promotion the second time, though, her restless energy and ambition sent her into the reserves to finish her twenty years in, and to law school. This is the path that took her to Savannah, where we encountered each other first, a year ago. She finished law school in two years, passed her bar exams, and developed a powerful civil rights and general practice in coastal Georgia, work that brought her prosperity, respect, and power, in spite of the continuing racism of judges and opposing attorneys.
Joyce’s life and work and continuing presence in Savannah are transformative for this region still mired, in many ways, in nineteenth century relationships that have shown up in other posts I’ve made here. She has encountered fiercer opposition, in some ways, and experienced more profound setbacks, in terms of health and career, than ever before in her provocative life. Hers is an iconic life, a life that demands attention and understanding.
Would that I owned the wherewithal to do so, and I could present her magnificence all at once. Alas, life has multiple demands. As with all the characters and threads and ideas and madness I have to offer, she will show up serially. Stay tuned!! She is an amazing example of all that is still exemplary of America’s place in the human family.