Young, Gifted, and Black Farm Laborer

Dreamer in the Fields: My Life as a Child Migrant Farm Worker By John Hill (Vision Publishing, ISBN: 978-0-9762730-7-3, $12.99).

Langston Hughes in his poem Dream Deferred asks this question: “What happens to a dream deferred?”

Perhaps he should have consulted the parents of John Hill, who once had dreams of succeeding as entertainers -- the father, Thomas, as a singer; the mother, Alberta, as a dancer. Instead, they wound up as dirt-poor farm laborers in California’s Central Valley.

What happens to a dream deferred? It slowly turns into a nightmare. The dreamers turn to alcohol, and potentially good parents become bad parents.

In Hill’s case, his parents went a step further. They became combatants. So fierce were some of their drunken battles that both would seek medical attention. As might be expected, these fights took their toll on the nine surviving Hill children. (One had drowned at seven.)

“My parents’ battles were thoroughly upsetting to me,” writes Hill. “My siblings and I would take bets on who was going to win, but when it was all over we’d go outside to sit and cry. We were all losers, and I think that thought alone may have been the most devastating part of my young life.”


But young Hill was a dreamer himself, and his dreams did not include slave-like work in the hot California sun or the fall chill, picking fruit, vegetables and cotton. He dreamed of a stable home with regular meals, a chance to get an education, and parents who loved each other enough not to try to kill one another. In fact, he often daydreamed in the fields instead of working. “almost always envisioning a more normal existence far away from the labor camps.”

“We moved around,” Hill writes, “following the crops and traveling as far north as Washington. But most of our time was spent in California. We worked in small towns between Bakersfield to the south and Marysville and Yuba City to the north …and other places such as Oxnard, Santa Barbara, Paso Robles, Salinas, Gilroy, San Jose, and Santa Rosa."

The family lived in horrid camp shacks, sometimes bathed in rivers and streams, slept on filthy mattresses strewn around on dirt floors and used outside toilets that were both unsanitary and dangerous.

“We never allowed our sisters to go to the restroom alone,” he writes. “The boys would always accompany them and stand by the door and walk them back to the cabin or tent, but it was also dangerous for young boys who were unaccompanied. We learned as kids how to survive.”

Hill recalls that he began working in cotton fields around age five or six, with the unreachable quota of picking 100 pounds a day. Rising around 4:30 a.m., the family was in the field well before daybreak. Work didn’t end until dusk, and there were often seven-day work weeks. In spite of their dire poverty, Hill’s dad would frequently take all the family’s earning and drown his sorrows in a night of hard drinking while the children went hungry.

There were some good times, especially when the parents weren’t drinking. During such times, the parents would be lovey-dovey, and all seemed right in the world. When Thomas took a regular job in the town of Paso Robles, the family had a period of stability. Hill’s mother was able to see that children went to church. Young Hill, a gifted reader, loved the Old Testament stories, and he developed a love of church. But one day he was impressed to rise above the normal Sunday school fare that made up the children’s church service.

“After Sunday school the younger children would usually be sent into another room until the main service was over. However, on this particular Sunday I felt I needed something more. A voice kept telling me to go inside and listen to the minister. … The minister spoke of the goodness of God and how He would do anything for us, if we only believed in Him. He said, ‘Just ask and you will receive; seek and you shall find; knock and the door will be opened.’ ...Those words struck a chord in me, and the minister seemed to be speaking exclusively to me.”

By age eight, Alberta had abandoned both the abusive and philandering Thomas and her nine children. By age nine, Hill was so miserable that he determined to run away. That’s when a divine visitor intervened to counsel and console him. Hill explained his longings and asked the visitor for help. A short time later, Thomas was sentenced to a lengthy jail term and the children made wards of Fresno County and put in a foster home.

Hill delighted in his new home and foster parents, the Rev. James Seals and his wife, Velma. It is what he prayed for, although all the children regretted somewhat the loss of contact with their biological parents. But Hill reveled in the normalcy of his new life, and found comfort in the strict requirements to attend church and school, and to help with chores around the big foster home. At last, he was able to embark on the educational journey he had always desired.

Today, in comfortable retirement with his wife Mattie, Hill does book tours and holds speaking engagements.

Just what he prayed for: heaven on earth.

How to Get Going: Journal Your Way

“I want to write a book. How do I get started?”

My answer rarely varies: “Start writing.”

It’s impossible to get a book written simply by saying you want to write one.

“But, Stanley, I’m not a writer!”

Guess what? None of the books we’ve published at Vision Publishing other than my own were done by writers. All were amateurs who had never written anything approaching a book before.

Several, however, were by women who were wise enough to keep a journal during an important episode in their lives. (Men generally are much less likely to journal.)

Alice C. Hamilton was sixty-six years old when she began a mission to pray in every state capitol in the nation. The idea came to her while taking part in a monthly prayer session in the fall of 1995. Later, as she walked to her car, she heard a voice say, “You can do it. You can pray for one hour at each capitol in every state of the union and plead the blood over that state and its political leaders.”

She knew immediately who was speaking to her. It was the Holy Spirit.

Four months after she heard the voice she boarded a flight from Los Angeles to Houston, on her way to her first destination – Austin, Texas. She visited nine other capitols before returning home thirty days later.

Alice made four other treks, a second covering ten states, a third covering twelve, a fourth covering seventeen (including Washington D.C.), and the fifth covering two, Alaska and Hawaii. Six months after her first trip, she left Honolulu, having prayed in the last capitol.

Mission accomplished!

In most places she had recorded dates and times, memories of plane or taxi rides, lines of conversations, the weather, the scenery, descriptions of the capitols, what she did in each capitol, Bible verses that seemed relevant to the issues she faced at the time, meals, etc.

Sure, words were misspelled, the grammar was often incorrect, sentences were fragmented, and information was patchy in places. Still, though she didn’t know it, she was writing a book, and a good one at that.

Traveling Mercies: My Personal Prayer Journey to the 50 State Capitols was published in August, 2008. (Vision Publishing, ISBN 978-0-9762730-5-9, $8.99.)

It is an inspiring work that finally saw light of print eleven years after her journey – or journal – began. Alice is now seventy-seven years old. See her review under the month of September.

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Julie Landry took a much more melancholy road to publishing success. It clearly was not a road she would have chosen.

Her book concerned the death of her husband, Allen Landry. Allen was an assistant pastor at Crenshaw Christian Center, the mega-church founded in Los Angeles by Pastor Frederick K.C. Price.

During the final months of Allen’s life, with cancer brutally sapping every ounce of his strength, Julie began keeping a journal. She would cheerfully attend to her husband’s needs during the day, but at night she would cry herself to sleep. Her notes are a record of her desperate plight over the prospect of losing her husband of thirty-four years, information about his treatments, his faith, his strength, their son’s strength, and his last moments as life ebbed away.

Like Alice, Julie’s journal was crucial to the formation of her book. Although both journals were far from being publishable on their own, they formed an excellent basis on which to start.

And that’s where an editor comes in.

I did several interviews with both authors, restructured the material, and fleshed out the details. Without their notes the task of editing would have been almost too difficult.

Julie’s book, published in October, 2008, is titled In Sickness and in Health: How to Keep Going When Death Interrupts Life (Vision Publishing, ISBN 978-0-9762730-6-6, $9.99). See a review under the month of October.

It is a wonderful resource, and includes fifteen lessons for overcoming grief.
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To be continued.

The Short, Happy Life of a Beloved Pastor

Anyone who ever hung around Allen Landry knew he loved to have a good time. A fun guy, he could easily be the life of the party. He loved people, he loved dancing, and he loved to laugh.

There was something else he loved – the Word of God.

Allen Landry was an assistant pastor at Crenshaw Christian Center up until his death last October.

But, apparently, there was something lurking in Allen’s body that he wasn’t aware of. Right up until the time of his diagnosis in 2005 he didn’t know he was dying.

His wife, Julie Landry, recounts his life – and death – in her book, In Sickness and in Health: How to Keep Going When Death Interrupts Life (Vision Publishing, $9.99, EAN 978-0-9762730-6-6). The book can be ordered at your favorite bookstore.

Allen began experiencing intense back pain while on assignment as pastor at Crenshaw Christian Center East, the New York version of the huge Los Angeles church founded by Dr. Frederick K.C. Price.

Nothing seemed to give him relief.

Months later, having transferred back home to Los Angeles, he sought advice from his doctor. A blood test indicated the problem was his prostate. Then, a biopsy confirmed that a bigger problem was cancer.

Worse, the exam indicated the cancer was Stage 4, the highest level. Doctors gave Allen no hope that either chemotherapy or radiation would help. Instead, they projected that he had only six to eight months to live.

Julie writes:

“…When we were alone, we discussed the findings …. I told Allen he could not die on me. In fact, I made him promise that he was not going to die, and then I just ‘blew it.’ I broke down right there. Panic and fear began to take over, and Allen had to keep reassuring me that he was going to be all right. I spent the night in the hospital with him, but it was the worst night of my life. I got no sleep at all. I heard every breath Allen took, fearful that each one might be his last. I kept thinking he was going to die right there.”

Allen was determined to fight the condition, using the Word of God and natural remedies. He tried to continue his duties as pastor, but because of the pain he was forced to give up working after about two months.

Julie admits to having been thoroughly spoiled during their almost thirty-five years of marriage. “I was a kept woman, and I loved it,” she writes.

Allen was romantic, confident, thoughtful, giving, and a good provider. The couple proved to be an excellent complement to each other. He offered strong encouragement in whatever pursuits Julie undertook, even when she tried to learn belly-dancing.

He offered the same encouragement to their son, Aaron, an aspiring professional golfer. To further support Aaron, Allen had taken up the game himself. That way father and son could spend more time together.

No longer awash in Allen’s constant loving attention because of his illness, Julie instead became his caregiver. Eventually, Allen could do nothing for himself. Julie describes the transition she was forced to make, reminding herself often that no matter how hard the task of care-taking became, Allen would have done as much for her.

In Sickness and in Health is a touching tribute to a loving husband, but its core may be the fifteen lessons Julie shares with readers to help them through their own grief at the loss of a loved one. She also shares important information about the prostate, which will be helpful both to wives and their husbands.

Traveling Mercies: A Mission to Pray

Some people like the strong, silent types.

I confess that I do, too.

I love the Clint Eastwood movies, especially the old spaghetti westerns. But it’s as Harry Callahan in the Dirty Harry series that Eastwood garnered his most enduring early fame.

Remember the classic line from his movie Sudden Impact? “Go ahead, make my day.” Callahan said it while aiming his .44 Magnum at a robber’s head.

Alice Hamilton is also a strong, silent type.

But Alice wouldn’t harm a flea – unless, of course, it jumped on her. She doesn’t carry a .44 Magnum. She carries something much more explosive. She carries the Holy Bible.

Alice is also a prayer warrior, which means she’s armed and doubly dangerous.

Like Eastwood, she speaks in quiet, measured tones. She’s not demonstrative, and she wouldn’t stand out in any crowd, unless it was a crowd of young folk.

You see, Alice is 77 years old.

Alice has traveled far and wide, carrying the gospel. She’s been to Africa three times, once to Nigeria and twice to Namibia where she worked with Christine Benson, her friend who was a missionary there. During one trip to Namibia, she visited South Africa, and toured the cities of Capetown, Durban, East London, and Johannesburg.

Alice is not a pastor; nor is she an evangelist, teacher, apostle or prophet. She’s one of those often unnoticed people in the pews at Crenshaw Christian Center. Alice is a servant, out to do the will of God. Her role is to seek and save those who are lost.

In September 1995, while interceding at Carson Prayer, a small prayer group that meets once a month at the community center in Carson, California, an idea struck her: Why not visit every capital city in the United States and pray in the state capitol? Alice, a single lady who retired in 1992, never let her mind dwell on the difficulties of her new assignment. She gave little more than passing consideration to the weather, the logistics, or the financing of her mission. She would finance it from her life savings.

In fact, Alice was a little tickled that the Lord had entrusted her with such an important assignment. Where she could she would stay with friends, relatives or acquaintances and contacts. At least that was her intention.

But who would she stay with in Montana, or North and South Dakota? Who would put her up in Alaska or Hawaii? How about Wyoming, or Iowa, or New Jersey, or most of the other states?

Get the picture?

“I am totally relying on the Holy Spirit to give me contacts and directions,” Alice said at the time. Even on her Africa journeys, people asked her if she was afraid. “Why go?” they would ask.

“I told them if the Lord is sending me – and I know He is – then He is well able to take care of me,” Alice replied.

But fifty states?

What of the hours of travel? What of the cold and snow? What of night landings in nearly deserted airports, and flagging cabs with her heavy luggage? What of too many McDonald’s meals and not enough hours of sleep? What if she got sick, hurt, or lonely in some god-forsaken place? Who would she talk to, or how would she communicate in these days before the cell phone became a part of everyone’s dress code?

Alice only smiled.

She would pay from her life savings. She would travel with her three companions – the Father God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. What was the big deal?

On January 20, 1996, Alice, armed with $10,000 worth of Continental airline coupons, took off on the first leg of her journey. She hit Austin, Texas; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Jackson, Mississippi; Little Rock, Arkansas; Nashville, Tennessee; Atlanta, Georgia; Montgomery, Alabama; Tallahassee, Florida; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and Denver, Colorado, before heading back to Los Angeles on February 21 for a rest. She had been gone thirty-one days and had covered ten states!

Only forty more to go.

But before that first leg was over, she had been given two valuable pieces of advice that allowed her to cut the length of the next four legs by more than half. I’ll tease you by not revealing what they were. She had also begun keeping a journal, thinking that one day she would write a book of her experiences.

Some would have called the mission off right there. “I’ve done enough, Lord,” they would say. Not Alice. No halfway job for her. She would see the whole thing through – no matter what.

Her second leg began on March 17 with Phoenix, Arizona. From there she moved on to Santa Fe, New Mexico; Salt Lake City, Utah; Cheyenne, Wyoming; Boise, Idaho; Helena, Montana; Olympia, Washington; Salem, Oregon; Sacramento, California, and Carson City, Nevada. The trip ended on March 25, a mere eight days later! Thank God for advice she had gotten on the first leg!

Topeka, Kansas, was the first stop on her third leg, which began April 10. From there she went to Jefferson City, Missouri; Lincoln, Nebraska; Des Moines, Iowa; Pierre, South Dakota; Bismarck, North Dakota; Madison, Wisconsin; St. Paul, Minnesota; Springfield, Illinois; Lansing, Michigan; Indianapolis, Indiana, and Columbus, Ohio. She returned home on April 22, twelve days later.

In some of her earlier trips, Alice had, on occasion, visited two capitols in one day. On her East Coast swing during the fourth leg of her trip, she would visit four in one day! She began on May 10 with Frankfort, Kentucky, and then on to Columbia, South Carolina; Raleigh, North Carolina; Richmond, Virginia; Charleston, West Virginia; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Washington, D.C.; Albany, New York; Montpelier, Vermont; Concord, New Hampshire; Hartford, Connecticut; Boston Massachusetts, Providence, Rhode Island; Augusta, Maine; Dover, Delaware, Trenton, New Jersey, and Annapolis, Maryland. She ended on May 19, 1996, having covered 17 capitols, if you include Washington, D.C.!

Alice began her fifth leg by flying to Juneau, Alaska, on June 12, and back to Los Angeles on the thirteenth. However, rather than leave the airport, she immediately caught a flight to Honolulu, Hawaii, arriving there the next day. After praying in the last capitol, she was ready to return home.

Alice Hamilton completed her mission on June 14, 1996, flying back home from Honolulu, Hawaii, her last stop. She had prayed at all fifty state capitols, pled the blood of Jesus over them, and anointed them with oil. Along the way, she led many people to salvation in Christ, and the infilling with the Holy Spirit.

Don’t take my word for it. Read all about this remarkable woman in her wonderful book entitled Traveling Mercies: My Personal Prayer Journey to the 50 State Capitols (Vision Publishing, $8.99, ISBN: 978-0-9762730-5-5). It will soon be available online.

It is in the book that you will discover the two tips that allowed Alice to cut her travel time by more than half.

Traveling Mercies takes you from Alice’s early days in DeBerry, Texas, and through her search for the Holy Spirit. She recounts her three trips to Africa and, of course, you’ll meet the interesting people she met during her trek through the States.

Don’t ever underestimate the strong, silent type.

Their actions speak louder than they do.

Bradbury Lends Name to Library Battle

I cheated.

I never read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

Like most people, I saw the film, starring Oskar Werner and Julie Christie, when it was released in the mid-’60s.

But I did read The Martian Chronicles. I don’t remember being impressed with the collection of stories about man’s attempt to colonize Mars and Martians, though it was one of Bradbury’s most famous works.

But I admit I have never been that keen on science fiction.

Bradbury spoke to a group of Long Beach library supporters recently, one day after they had won a battle to keep the city’s main library from closing due to budget cuts. A day earlier the city had voted to halt a proposal to shutter the facility. Instead, it was considering a cost-cutting plan to close the library only on Sundays and Mondays.

The Los Angeles Times referred to the 133,000-square-foot downtown structure as the second largest civic library in Los Angeles County.

Big book facilities have been struggling recently in Long Beach. In August I wrote an article about the closing of the huge downtown bookstore, Acres of Books. (See Acres of Books: May It Rest in Peace) At one time Acres of Books housed more than a million volumes. But it had struggled in recent years against the tide of online booksellers and the big bookstore chains. And, of course, it offered none of the genteel amenities that the chain stores offer.

Bradbury was there to mourn its demise, too.

Some people believe that library closings and the concentration of bookstore ownership portend a future when government will control what we’re able to read. This is exactly the kind of social criticism that Fahrenheit 451 dealt with. The movie is centered around government censorship and the burning of books.

The 88-year-old Bradbury sat in a wheelchair on stage in the library’s main auditorium and offered his help in any future struggles to keep the library open. After Fahrenheit 451 was released in 1953, he has enjoyed a well-deserved reputation as a defender of books and libraries.

Tremendously prolific, Bradbury has written hundreds of novels, short stories, screenplays, radio dramas, plays, poems, essays, and lectures. He has been a consultant to such major events and productions as the United States Pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair and has contributed to Disney’s Spaceship Earth at EPCOT and the Orbitron at the Disneyland parks in Anaheim and Paris.

We're indebted to a real book lover.

Black Women Are Getting a Bad Rap

There are several things I wish someone – not me – would write a book about. I realize that you’d have to be part minister and part shrink to deal with such quirks in the American psyche, but it would be a fascinating study. From time to time I will be blogging about issues that irk me. Here’s the first one – rap music.

Why do so many young females support this music? Mainstream rap, more than any other musical genre I know, denigrates women? It is especially hard on black women, but many of them still revel in it. They make excuses for it like a female victim trying to justify a beating by her lover. “It was my fault,” she says in his defense. “I made him mad.” Women who suffer such physical brutality often wind up in hospitals, broken and beaten, one step closer to the death that may eventually prove to be inevitable. But how about the beating young female listeners are getting? How does it affect their self-esteem? Many of them still flock to rap music concerts as if they just can’t wait for their next round of abuse.

Still, it is unfair to generalize about rap, as if it were all the same. It’s not. Such singers as Common, Nas, Lupe Fiasco, and Talib Kweli, to name four, are so-called conscious rappers that support and uplift women, and are serious commentators on the social conditions they see in life daily. My son Brian, who has done a lot of studying of the rap phenomenon, believes the fact that we hear so much of the negative and offensive in rap is really a function of who controls the media. The most outrageous and sensational artists get the bulk of air play while the truly artistic are confined to off hours and listener-supported stations.
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I’d like to tack one other question on to the one about rap.

Why do so many women support horror films? I guarantee you that you’ll see far more women than men brutalized in these films. Most often they are white, young, and nubile. Often they are nude, or partially so. Always they wind up as a beautiful heap in a pool of blood. Isn’t this exactly the kind of film they should stay away from? Isn’t this exactly the kind of film that incites young men who prey on women sexually? I have always felt that a large body of women – not the majority, of course – are fascinated by the dark side of men. They like to dance with death as it were a handsome leading man.

But the truth is all too clear. Too many women in this society as well as others are treated like trash, disposable human beings. Many come from broken homes and bad families. Some times they are prostitutes, other times they are addicts, and many times they are just young innocents who made a horrible misstep and became easy victims. They are beaten, raped, brutalized, used up, killed, and cast off. Mainstream rap music is just one other instance of the brutalizing treatment they get. It celebrates their vulnerability and their gullibility. It weaves cheap rhymes about them as sex objects.

And all the while silly women dance suggestively in the background.


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Family History at Its Roots

I’m sure most of my blog readers will remember Alex Haley, the author of two outstanding books in black literature – The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Roots.

I met Haley in late 1981, not too long after the delirious success of Roots.

I, along with several other members of the family, was returning from visiting my grandmother in Little Rock, Arkansas. She had just turned 100, and we had been there to celebrate her birthday.

It was such a great time. The following are a couple of paragraphs from a piece I wrote for the Los Angeles Times in late 1981:

It was grandmother’s 100 birthday. We descended on her house in Little Rock, Ark., like swarms of bargain hunters at a post-Christmas sale, covering every inch of space and eating everything that resembled victuals. Several of us overflowed into a local motel, but we managed to get most of our meals at Grandmother’s.

We tramped in and out of the house like foreign tourists, each with his camera or tape recorder. When we weren’t snapping pictures, or rolling tape or film, we gathered around Grandmother to plumb her mind for information on the family and the old days, a la “Roots.” We found no long-lost ancestor; what we found was Mary Elizabeth Williford, our own delightful heroine.

Actually, I had visited Grandmother several times before to record her memories of the past. I had no idea what I would eventually do with the information, but I knew I didn’t want her to die without leaving a record of all the history she had lived through.

She was born in Oak Ridge, La., on November 18, 1881, the granddaughter of ex-slaves. When her grandparents were set free, they were given 40 acres and a mule by the government, she said. The family later acquired 180 acres, but finally abandoned the property due to frequent flooding.

After the birthday celebration, we were on our way back home to Los Angeles but had to lay over for about an hour at the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. While most of the family sat in waiting the area, my cousin Howard and I decided to browse the gift shop.

“Guess who just walked in?” Howard asked me.

I looked up as Alex Haley strode toward us. Who more than the author of Roots would appreciate the visit we’d just had with our 100-year-old grandmother, and the memories she had shared?

I told him about her and all the fun we’d had during the visit.

“That must have been a wonderful occasion,” he said

It was, Alex, and you capped it off perfectly.