Lost Voices
COMMUNITY
There was a sort of
a feeling of community that was engendered by 
being part of the church... and the people... we all
lived within probably a ten block radius of one another.
You walked back and forth to school and church and so you
were very respectful of your elders. I can remember, if I
was out of humor and didn't want to speak to people, I
went down the alley because I knew that if I walked down
the street and didn't speak, I would be in deep trouble.
The school also played a similar role in our lives. We
were very closely linked to the school in those days. You
went to graduation, not because you had a child who was
graduating necessarily. You went to graduation because
everybody went to graduation. That was part of what you
did in the community. When there was a play or any kind
of program at the school, they never had to worry about
an audience because the community was the audience.
There was that closeness and it was a different time. There was a different relationship to the word. See, I am just two generations away from slavery. My grandfather was a slave and I lived in the house with his wife and his son and daughter. So, I'm very much tuned into that my grandfather couldn't read. Well, they taught him enough so that he could spell out a few words from his Bible and from his lodge book. For those people the word, both the spoken word and the written word, was very important, I think, almost in a mystical sense. It was important and I believe we have lost that kind of connection now . That makes a difference in the way we responded to the church, the way we responded to our teachers.
I think there is a
loss of community. Part of it may be inevitable given
lifestyle, given transportation patterns which broke up
communities and took people at distances. Television... I
mean there are lots of diversions that are available to
people now that were not available at the time that I was
growing up that have interfered. ----
Dr. Ancella Bickley
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