The circle of life: From slavery to freedom with love

    For Teryl Mitchell, a single mother in her mid-30s, the pipe dream of one day entering the nursing field had come down to this.
    Mitchell had failed in her first attempt to pass English 101, the course required of every nontraditional student at Delgado Community College in order to keep hope alive.
    Mitchell’s second crack at English 101 didn’t start out much better. As Gayle Nolan, her teacher of last resort, began reviewing Mitchell’s first writing assignment, the English teacher in her saw the fractured syntax, spelling and grammar. But the reader in her saw a riveting story.
    “Your mechanics are bad, but you can write,” Nolan told Mitchell.
    “I get that from my father,” Mitchell replied. “He’s always writing.”
    In the 1980s, Arthur Mitchell, who was born in 1915, was an electrician and a plumber at the Cabildo. During his two 15-minute breaks every workday, Mitchell climbed the stairs to the third floor of the Cabildo. Sitting at a small table, he took out legal-size, loose-leaf pages, which he had meticulously ruled himself, and wrote down the oral history he had heard from his grandparents and other relatives who had been born into slavery.
    Teryl Mitchell returned to class one day with her father’s 150-page manuscript, and Nolan became transfixed. The man with a fourth-grade education had compiled much more than a slave narrative – it was a story of how love could conquer hate.
    The manuscript was rare and compelling. It was one of the few slave narratives Nolan had read whose opening scenes pre-dated slavery, when the indigenous people of East Central Africa were Christianized by the British. It told the story of Henry Goody Jons, born of a French immigrant farmer and a young slave girl he had bought at auction in New Orleans.
    Jons was so light-skinned that his master-father had given him the opportunity to pass for white, but by doing so, Jons said he would have had to deny his own darker-skinned relatives. Jons refused the offer, and after the Civil War became a pastor who preached love as an antidote to hate.
    One of the younger relatives in his family asked Jons if he was bitter over the experience of being held in bondage. He immediately advised against the futility of “wearing bitterness as a garment.”
    “Hatred and bitterness are a greater form of bondage than slavery ever was,” Pastor Jons preached.
    The copy of Arthur Mitchell’s manuscript sat inside Nolan’s file cabinet for years as she wrestled with getting it published. She attempted at first to edit the story so that it might flow better, but everything she did seemed to sap the material of its raw power.
    Then, in 2000, Arthur Mitchell, who like Pastor Jons also had served as a minister, died. In 2005, Katrina hit, and even though Nolan lost homes in Metairie and Mississippi, her copy of the manuscript survived in a second-floor file cabinet. Mitchell’s original pages were washed away by the Industrial Canal breach.
    Then, on Jan. 15, 2008, Nolan pulled out the dusty manuscript. When she called to inquire about her former student, Nolan was told Teryl had died of complications of Alzheimer’s disease exactly one year earlier – Jan. 15, 2007.
    Nolan herself had battled lung cancer two years earlier.
    “I thought to myself, ‘If I die, no one will ever see this,’” Nolan said. “That manuscript was given to me for a reason. I trusted that everything would be OK.”
    The result is “What Love Can Do,” the recollected stories of slavery and freedom in New Orleans. The symmetry of the story is that Arthur Mitchell became the embodiment of his ancestor, Pastor Jons, by shepherding his own small church – Holy Bible Baptist Church – in the 9th Ward.
    “His main idea was people helping people,” said Josephine Mitchell, Arthur’s 81-year-old widow. “He would always tell people to pay whatever they could – but to make sure they paid their light bill first. He wasn’t running a big-shot church with big hats and all that. He said, ‘Come as you are – hungry, tired, broke.’”
    The lessons of love and treating people with respect have endured. Michelle Myers, 36, Arthur Mitchell’s granddaughter, is about the age that her mother was when she first went to Delgado back in the early 1990s. Myers has two master’s degrees and is working on her doctorate in education. In September, she will become an Army major.
    As a girl, she remembers sitting in her grandfather’s upstairs room, watching him unfurl the loose-leaf pages and listening as he read his manuscript about East Central Africa while sitting in his easy chair.
    What would Arthur Mitchell think of “What Love Can Do”?
    “He would be proud,” Myers said. And, especially, proud of his granddaughter.
    “What Love Can Do” is available through www.amazon.com. Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at pfinney@clarionherald.org.