Rosie Woodland
When Ms. Rosie was very young, she began pulling a cotton sack behind her to pick cotton on her family’s farm ten miles outside Memphis, Tennessee. She remembers that, “the cotton sacks were seven and a half and nine [feet] long, and I started pulling a cotton sack when I was six years old. And I did all the way to two and three hundred pounds of cotton a day.” Ms. Rosie’s mom and dad were sharecroppers, and her family lived in a house that was owned by a white man. They didn’t pay money to live in this house because, “we stayed there [their home] free if we did his crop and ours, and we had to do his first.” Ms. Rosie remembers laboring to harvest not just the crop that her family grew, but also the cotton that belonged to the landowner.
She remembers her childhood in the South with conflicting emotions: she recounts getting nickels from her grandfather to go to the store and buy cola and cakes, but also remembers witnessing the way that her parents were treated under Jim Crow. “Our parents didn’t have no rights. They [white people] would tell them what to do, and that’s what they had to do.” Ms. Rosie describes this part of her life as being during “slavery times.” What she is referring to isn’t the type of slavery that was made illegal in 1863, but rather the way those same conditions were perpetuated against Black folks. She recounts the way her mother pushed back against the discrimination they faced: “she wasn’t scared or nothing. She wasn’t scared of nobody.” She ties her mother’s strong spirit to her mom’s father – Ms. Rosie’s grandfather. "He didn’t back down off of nothing or nobody. And my grandfather, he used to have an old word. He used to tell us, 'My voice would scare a lion. I’ll let God take care of you.’” Ms. Rosie didn’t just get a strong spirit from her mother; she also got her love of cooking from her. She recounted, “I used to stand in the kitchen or sit in the kitchen with her every day when she cooked... Up until I was grown and moved out on my own, I watched my mom cook. And I still cook the way she taught me. I cook from what I learned in the South.” Ms. Rosie brought this love of cooking with her when she moved to Milwaukee in 1972. Life was very different in the new city with refrigeration. For Ms. Rosie, food is truly a love language. Cooking for others is the way she shows that she loves and cares for her daughters, her grandchildren, her neighbors, and her brothers and sisters at church. It’s also her way of remembering her mother, who did her fair share of making food for others. Ms. Rosie affectionately recounts the way her mother would use a hand crank ice cream maker to make ice cream during the summer and give it away for free to kids and adults outside her apartment building. “I love cooking. Because, I grew up with my mom. And she did, and I watched her do it. My mom was a giving person, too, up until she passed away.” Ms. Rosie is always cooking, for her family, for community events, or to put food out in her apartment building’s community room. Her relationship with food, born in the South, also contributes to how passionately she feels about having access to good, healthy food, and making sure that food doesn’t go to waste, “We don’t believe in just letting food go to waste... if everybody knew how hard it was to make they wouldn’t waste it.” She goes on to explain, “Nobody has no right to get hungry in this state, because there’s so much food that we’re throwing away. Every day.” She talks about how frustrated she felt while working at a large grocery store where she had to throw away pounds of food every day. “I couldn’t do that one. That bothers me. And it bothers me to see someone hungry.” Ms. Rosie makes sure that she instills these values in her own children, Sandra and Stephanie. Like her mother, Ms. Sandra now hosts community events with food for her neighbors and gives out food and lemonade to the kids who play outside her house during the summer. Ms. Rosie gardens with her granddaughter and grandson to continue passing down this family legacy of sharing and building community with food. |
Gardening with Santana
Harassed walking home
Going to the white school
Parent's work
Sharecropping
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Written By: Liam Farin
Interviewed By: Liam Farin & Hidayah Osman
Interviewed By: Liam Farin & Hidayah Osman