One of our guests will be retired educator, Ms. Edna Foster.  Ms. Foster received her Bachelor's in Education from Wilberforce University in Ohio and a Master's Degree in Education from Lewis University in Romeoville, Illinois.   She spent the majority of her time teaching in the Joliet Public School in Illinois, and experienced school integration there.  She has also taught extension courses for National College of Education in Illinois during her tenure in the public school system. 

Ms. Foster will share important advice with our listeners which will help them to understand how to supplement their children's education and help them get off to a good start.  If there is any question as to whether you will benefit from what she will share, then just take a look at me.  She is my mom!

Tomorrow night, we will also have as our guest, a contributor of Over Troubled Water, Queen Sheba who will identify the things we need to unlearn.  Sister Sheba has been very ambitious about helping our people unlearn the behaviors we developed during slavery.  Her life is a shining example of not letting the travesties of life overcome you.  She has overcome and wants to help others do the same so that we do not pass our negative influences on to the next generation.

Listen by calling in: (424) 675-8247

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Then you will be able to participate in our chat room which will be open during the show.

 We have an extra special surprise!  We expect an African storyteller to call in from Zimbabwe to share a story pertinent to our topic!  You will not want to miss this show!

What slavery did to us

By Queen Sheba

In the arms of the black man, I became a tool to be used and abused as I searched for love from the people that came in to my life to full the void left by not having a relationship with my father. Once I thought I had found it. I met a man who was very kind to me. I was about fifteen he was around twenty-five. I was crazy about this guy. He drove a black and white car with a fish tail on back. The things I took my mom through with this man I regret today and beg her forgiveness. 

Once she came and tried to get me to leave and go with her to the field to pick limes. She even had a talk with him. He told her that he had tried to get me to go home, but I would not. If anyone would bother with me, he would go to them and have a talk, and they would leave me alone. I felt protected by him. Life felt good to me. He was living in a trailer park and he would let me go down to the store and get what food I wanted to eat on credit. At the end of the week, he would pay for it. At home with mom there was never food to go around with her having so many kids.

One day things came to a halt, and he made me go home. He got very mean to me, and said he did not want me anymore because his wife was coming back. He had never said anything to me about a wife. She was in what they called the “crazy house” and she was coming home. My whole world fell apart for days. I did not know what to do. I did not want to leave this man. I was out of my head. I would go around and just hang around the trail park just to get a look at him.

One day I went off the deep end and went to talk to her. This lady could have killed me and not done a day in jail because of her condition. She said he was not worth it and that I was young and forgetting about him would be the best thing for me.

My life seemed as if it was over for me at that time, and everything started falling apart around me. Around this time, there was group of girls threatening to double team my sister. I was sitting on the stairs when my mom tried to get me up to help her. I could not move. My twin sister was a fighter. She would cut you in a minute and beat the mess out of you or whatever it took to get you off her. As for me, I hated fighting. I was a coward and very afraid.

That’s when they all started calling me crazy, but they had been calling me crazy all the time. I do believe that is when it seemed my whole family turned on me. That was the day I decided to end it all. I made plans for doing so, and I carried out my plan.

After I went into the kitchen where they all were sitting around being happy, I sat at the table not saying anything. The next thing I remember was waking up at the hospital with my head hurting and sore all over. I was taken home and never got any kind of therapy. Back then they just did not do that for black people. We escaped through drinking. While writing this, I called my mom to speak to her about it. She said she should have gotten some help for me. My mom did what she was taught. She kept on moving thinking, “this too will pass.”

Looking back on what I went through as a young girl, I realize that I wanted someone to love me, but I did not know what love was. What I have found out is that you first must learn to love yourself. This is something that I was not taught. When we come into this life, we must be taught by the way we are treated by our parents and the people that are around us. This is something that was taken from us during slavery. We were not allowed to care for each other and we were deprived of the opportunity and the memory of establishing a family.

                                                                  See Dear Daddy

We began to treat each other the way we were treated. This behavior was encouraged by those who held us in bondage, and generations later there are those who still are trapped in this cycle. Everyday a young girl matures and goes out searching to fill the emptiness in the same ways. In today's world, that could mean the loss her life. Like a wounded bird, she is lulled away by one promising false security, basic needs, and a substitute for love. When she comes to, she realizes too late she is in for more than she bargained for, and the cycle continues. 

For the last few weeks I have been working on my life story, a book I hope to finish before my birthday in February of 2012. During the week of July 18th, I went down to South Florida to touch on my past. Sometimes you need to face your past in order to make a better future. Homestead, Florida and Florida City, Florida hold lots of bad memories for me. For some reason I always come back looking for the part of me I that I left there. Homestead, Florida is where my mom came after leaving Mississippi. 

My first stop was on Fourth Street where the buses drop off most of the migrant workers. I was around 12 years old. While standing there, I remembered my mom telling me how our new daddy acted when he saw all of us coming off the bus. As number one child came off the bus, he was smiling all the way until number four. When number five came off, the man started to cry. At number eight, he walked away. She found him later at somebody's bar and brought him home. He stayed and helped my mom with all of us, and he put a number (my baby sister) in there for himself .

I have always wondered why people don’t talk about all the people that left Mississippi and came down to South Florida. They always talk about Chicago or other places. The way people were thrown on top of one each other back then was a shame. I do believe that’s why there was so much killing going on. I went to the first house that we lived in. I could not believe how small this place was. It was a two story building that had two apartments up stairs, and two downstairs. There was only two rooms, a living room, a bedroom, a very small kitchen, and a little bathroom with a shower. Seven of us kids slept in the bedroom, and the grown-ups had the living room.

After about a year, my mom moved us to a place called China Camp/Golden Nugget off of Fourth Street. This place was made up the same way just with more apartments; it had to be about forty of them. The new place still had just two rooms, but we had a bathroom that had a bathtub and a bigger kitchen where some of us slept. At this time, I was around thirteen or fourteen years old. A lot of things went on here: drinking, gambling, fighting, killing. You name it, and it was there. I found out from my mom that a white lady owned it at that time in 1965. This is where I went wild and this is the place we stayed until we moved to Miami three or four years later.  

The following is an excerpt from Sheba's childhood experience in Homestead and Florida City, Florida. A few years prior to her arrival, an article appeared in the March 2, 1961 edition of The Miami News entitled Migrants Back in Hovels. The article mentions the sanitation inspector, Samuel Fields who had inspected 11 different labor camps.

He called the plight of the migrant worker pathetic stemming from the over-crowding brought on by “A new racket worked by the crew leaders who led migrants around the country to various harvesting jobs.” See Migrants Back in Hovels. This article reveals the plight of generations descendants of former slaves. There labor was a commodity still, and still little thought was given to helping them overcome the effects of many years of being enslaved.

By Queen Sheba

We came to in 1965, South Florida on a migrant worker bus, the same bus that would take us to the field to pick tomatoes, beans, or limes in the grove for the next three to four years. When my mom took us from Mississippi to Florida, my life was in for a big change not only in the type of work we did but also in how I really got to see how black people hate each other.

Homestead and Florida City, Florida were cutthroat places where black people killed each other on a daily basis. On the weekend, the killing seem to double. When we would go to work, there were always some drunks on the bus and working the field. They would make just the money made to keep the wine flowing.

When I look back, I can see these men were carrying heavy burdens, and the only release they got was through drinking. Some of them had to leave their whole family knowing they would never see them again, and some had to do whatever they could to get away from Mississippi and other places. Lots of these men and some women I never got to know because they just would not talk. Most of them went to their graves with this pain never to let it go.

One time, a lady that lived in front of us had a man that used to come to her house when her husband was not at home. He had told this man to stay away from his house. One day he came home and this man was walking out of his house with a slice of bread in his mouth. He killed him right there with that bread in his mouth. I saw this and they let that man lay there all night.

They did not care that the little black kids were looking at or listening to this, and this has stayed with me all my life. This is something that came from slavery when the kids had to watch all kinds of hanging, burning, lynching designed to keep them in line. Black people in Homestead never thought about what this would do to a child's mind and did not care.

In order for you to sing the Blues, you must learn what the Blues is all about, and to do it right, you must live the Blues. At one point, I did not want anything to do with the Blues because I was ashamed of it. Blues did not want anything to do with me because I was not ready for it. My whole life was grooming me to sing the blues and I had to learn that. Now I can standup proudly and sing the Blues from my soul because I earned it.

As children, we would sing in the cotton field to make the day go by. The work was very hard, and singing was a way to keep our mind off how hard it ready was. During the wintertime when it was so cool, we would just sit around the strove or fireplace and sing. There was a lot of singing around me. Anytime I would feel sad about something, I would go and be by myself and sing until I felt better. This is something I picked from my grandmother. When she was down, she would do a lot of mourning. One place she would always go was in her back yard by the peach tree and mourn and cry.

I have had lots of heartaches in my life, and most of them came from men. Every song on "Butter on My Roll" tells a story of something going right or wrong in my life just like the songs I sang when I was a kid. When I put things to music, it keeps me away from drinking, drugs and the doctor.

“Dance Jump,” is what I called a happy Blues; lots of people think that all Blues are sad. This song reminds me of being worked all week and just want to blow off some steam. “Real Good Woman” is the song of my heart. It is what I have been looking for all my life, a real good man. Every man I have had has played me for a fool, cheated on me, or beat the hell out of me. 

This does not include my last husband. He showed me kindness, gentleness, and true love. He really helped me to heal. In “Big Man,” I am sing about a man that has a big heart and knows how to love. Some people might think that is old fashioned.

If you have ever been in love, “Can’t Help Loving My Man” is it. The man I was in love with help me to write this song. I was a fool in love, then I found out that I was not the only one in love with him. He had me and three others that were in love with him and the kids to go along with it. I left with my heart ripped out and eye about near hanging out because I spoke up.

“Oh So Good,” is another one of those happy blues songs about how the way my man made me feel at the moment. “Pouring Rain” is a song that someone wrote for me, and I was feeling like standing alone in the rain crying at the time. “Blues of My Soul” is all about my mom getting us out of that hell hole, Mississippi. It is kind of hard for me to believe that we lived like that.

Someone wrote “Butter on My Roll,” for me, and I just love the feeling of that song. “Tell Me Why,” is about me asking all the people in my life not only the men but everyone, “Why do you treat me so bad? What did I do to you for you to treat me so bad?” “Don’t Say Goodbye” is a song I wrote when I was around twenty-five years old. I was filled with fear and dependent on a man that was beating me and had me traveling down a bad road. I was saying goodbye to all my family and friends because he had taking me a long way from home. For eight years, my family did not know where I was.

I wrote “Hey Girlfriend” because I was mad at my man and the women he had. I was telling them that I was his biggest fool and wanted to keep it that way. He took everything from me. “Ms Good -n- Plenty” is a song I wrote for all the big ladies saying that we are very passionate and know how to please our man because we put a lot into it. In our heads we feel the same as anyone else. We are the same with just more of us to love, and if you don’t know how to love a big lady we will show you how. 

 “Good, Good Loving” really drives it home. This is why I love the blues you can really put your heart and soul into it. The Blues can be happy, sad, or full of passion. The Blues helps you express how you feel, but most of all, you must live it. The Blues picked me because it knew we would be good for each other.

If you really pay attention and study the lyrics of Blues songs, you will learn a great deal about the struggles on Southern plantations which gave birth to this form of music. Slavery, sharecropping, and oppression during the Jim Crow and Civil Rights Eras inspired African Americans to tell their story in song.  No one person invented the Blues.  It sprung out of gospel music.






Each song is a varied as the personal experiences of African Americans coming from slavery and involuntary servitude.  Music was the only of the only things they had to bring joy and to ease a troubled mind. This is the reason it may sound mournful to some who do not understand its origins.  The Blues has influenced Jazz, R&B, and  Rock 'n Roll.

People sang the Blues for themselves long before it was commercialized.  It started to become popular in the early 1900's.  The Mississippi Delta is recognized as the place that produced the greatest Blues artists.  Blues was also popular in the Carolinas and Texas.

Blues songs should become a major resource as we study African American history.  See this neglected art form as oral history put to song increases our appreciation for it.  From the Blues, we can gain great insights about the history of our ancestors in these rural areas.  Blues songs help to supplement the missing oral history in our own families.  Sheba, the Mississippi Queen, escaped with her mother and siblings from Sunflower Mississippi in 1965.  She grew up singing the Blues in the cotton fields.

The following video was shared by Sheba and Miami Dade College. Instructor, Robert Moore gathers a few of his friends to teach his students about the history of the Blues.  Listen especially to the words of the song Sheba dedicates to her mother and grandmother.  Sheba will share an article with us soon about the history of the songs included on her album, "Butter on My Roll."