Confessions of a Civil Rights Daughter

If Aint Baby is listening, then she surely has heard her story told again and again, on stages in London, New York and Los Angeles. Her life is art; her death is a loss registered in history.

Now they are applauding her, lavishing praise on the memory of an illiterate midwife, a field hand, a black woman born in the Mississippi Delta, killed by other children of the Delta. Now they are applauding her baby girl who, faced with years of silent mourning, eventually found a place on the stage. Aint Baby's daughter, who laid everything out like it was a fine Sunday meal: rape, murder, hate, joy, pride, resistance. Laid it out, then invited London, New York and Los Angeles to sit and bear witness. The daughter who left the Mississippi Delta in 1965 as Ida Mae Holland, a 20-year-old with her GED scores pinned to her brassiere, too devastated to cry, too poor to buy a tombstone, a final tribute for her mother's grave.

"I promised I would give her a tombstone that the world could see," the daughter says, "and I did with my play. They know [her name] all over the world."

The daughter is now Endesha Ida Mae Holland, PhD, prize-winning playwright ("From the Mississippi Delta"), author, USC professor and former foot soldier in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The daughter is now a griot, a storyteller using her plays and book to testify about a place, a moment in history that is impossible to fully understand unless you were there.

You had to be there.

The grainy black-and-white footage of Mississippi during the civil rights movement can never capture the long-playing nature of certain memories. Those scenes of protest

stir sadness, anger, pride, then victory, but they do not show the rest: the hurting years that followed when there were no cameras. When the losses were tallied in individual lives, Aint Baby was dead. Her daughter, deeply wounded, was left to build tombstones, left to live and always return. Her daughter, for whom a trip home is never just that.

Especially now.

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"If South is a perspective as well as a direction, then the Mississippi

Delta may well be the most Southern place on earth."

--"From the Mississippi Delta, a Memoir."

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ONE DAY THIS SPRING, ENDESHA IDA MAE HOLLAND TRAVELS BACK TO that most Southern place at the invitation of the University of Mississippi at Oxford.

The request to speak at the Seventh Oxford Conference for the Book carries centuries of significance. Oxford is the hometown of William Faulkner. Ole Miss is where students rioted when James Meredith tried to enroll in 1962. Four hundred U.S. troops clashed with 2,500 students and others opposed to integration. Two people were killed.

In those years, Ole Miss was something black folks could only dream about--a gleam in someone's eye. Holland sees the offer to speak through those eyes, the eyes of her elders, that solid generation who taught their children to revere teachers and ministers, who embraced God as the answer and education as a way out and up.

"By virtue of inviting me," she says, "they've invited Mama."

For Mama and the others, she accepts, the way she has done so often in the past. But these are not ordinary times for Aint Baby's daughter.

Holland, 55, is in a wheelchair, placed there by ataxia, a genetic disorder in which the cerebellum, that part of the brain that controls muscular movement, slowly degenerates. Things that were once simple--speaking, bathing, teaching, traveling--are now grueling. The illness devastates the body but leaves the processes of the mind untouched. So the trip to Oxford is a time of reflection and planning, all the while racing against an oversized opponent. "This illness has taken hold," Holland says, "but I don't want to give in."

Holland has been fighting and resisting for a long time. If she had stopped every time things got hard, she never would have made it out of the Delta and the raggedy life it had planned for her.

To make this journey back, she will need the help of two women: Joy Shani A'Che and Ronda Racha Penrice. A'Che is her live-in personal assistant and creative partner. She is working with Trina Davis Cundieff on a feature film and documentary about Holland, which Charles Burnett ("To Sleep With Anger") has agreed to direct. "There's such a need to do films that aren't always comedy or violent, or big-budget explosions and effects," A'Che says. "There's a need to show human drama, drama that rejuvenates the human spirit from a black perspective."

On this trip, A'Che is the coordinator, making hotel and meal arrangements, pushing Holland's wheelchair. Penrice is an Ole Miss master's candidate whose thesis is on regional identity in African American literature. She will be their driver and will read Holland's work at the conference.