Black History

`Sweetheart Gang’ Honors the Essential Black Mother

THE AFRO — There would be no Black Girl Magic without the Black Mommas who birthed them.

Published

5 years ago

January 24, 2019

By Sean Yoes

“Black Girl Magic” is a phrase that captures the undeniable power of Black women. But, there would be no Black Girl Magic without the Black Mommas who birthed them.

Tales from the Sweetheart Gang is a lovely series of love letters celebrating miraculous Black motherhood, from the hearts of daughters to their mothers.

“The book is simply a collection of chapters where each writer writes a story about her own mother; who she is, the kind of woman she was, how she helped them become the woman she is,” said the Rev. Dorothy Scott Boulware, the book’s author/editor and the managing editor of the AFRO.

[/media-credit] “Tales from the Sweetheart Gang” Book Cover.

“Some of it is funny stories, some of it makes you want to cry, some of it feels real familiar. They embrace the fact that often they find themselves saying some of the same stuff they use to hate to hear their mothers say,” added Boulware, who is the mother of four, grandmother of five and great-grandmother of two. The authors of the individual chapters are all personal friends of Boulware and three of them have also been AFRO editors.

“Talibah Chikwendu hired me at the AFRO as a novice general assignment editor,” Boulware stated. “Dorothy Rowley became the Washington, D.C. editor in 2007 and Tiffany Ginyard came as an intern around 2005 and also worked her way up to managing editor before she left to teach English.”

According to Boulware, each author was given only 30 days notice before they had to present the chapter with photos of their mothers and themselves.

“One of the writers and I have been friends for…55 years. So, these are friends I’ve gathered along the way, from school, from the neighborhood,” said Boulware who penned the ninth chapter about her mother Magruder Dorothy Scott.

Boulware said the name “Sweetheart Gang” is the manifestation of an enduring memory from her own childhood.

“This is real unique,” said Boulware with a laugh. “I was a foster child…when I was six my grandmother died and I was then raised by her best friend. The house that I went to was very different from the original house; there wasn’t a lot of touching and hugging and that kind of stuff there. (But), I was in a community with a lot of older people and the older ladies called me sweetheart and that always made me feel so much love,” Boulware added. “My thought as a child was that at some point when you got to a certain age you got so full of love…that you could spill it out on other people by calling them sweetheart…the older ladies at my church, in my neighborhood, they called me and all the other children sweetheart.”

Boulware is also the author of four other books: Keep Walking in Prayer…Until You Can’t Come Back; Mustard Seed Mondayz: Weekly Faithbytes For a Year; Have You Heard of the Holy Ghost and Mustard Seed Mondayz Too.

“This (Sweetheart Gang) is a total departure from everything else I’ve written,” Boulware admitted.

“I’m not even sure how I got the idea to do it. But, as it has evolved I began to understand how important it is, because people who always wanted to be published authors are now published authors.”

You can meet the Sweetheart Gang at a book signing event, 2-4 p.m., Feb. 13 at Nancy by SNAC, 131 W. North Ave. Tales From the Sweetheart Gang, can be purchased on Amazon, or on walkingworthynow.com

This article originally appeared in The Afro.

Oakland Post

Posts by Oakland Post

Up Next

Two Chicago-area students among 100 chosen for 2019 DDA

Don't Miss

Black children continue to be sent to adult courts, jails at alarmingly high rates

Oakland Post

Click to comment

Black History

Book Review: ‘The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America’

Your toes didn’t wait long before they started tapping. They knew what was coming, almost as soon as the band was seated. They knew before the first notes were played and the hep cats and jazz babies hit the floor to cut a rug. Daddy, it was the bee’s knees but in the new book “The Jazzmen” by Larry Tye, if you were the Sheik on the stage, makin’ cabbage wasn’t all that swank.

Published

1 day ago

May 17, 2024

Oakland Post

Courtesy of Lisa Frusztajer

By Terri Schlichenmeyer

Your toes didn’t wait long before they started tapping.

They knew what was coming, almost as soon as the band was seated. They knew before the first notes were played and the hep cats and jazz babies hit the floor to cut a rug. Daddy, it was the bee’s knees but in the new book “The Jazzmen” by Larry Tye, if you were the Sheik on the stage, makin’ cabbage wasn’t all that swank.

Louis Armstrong was born in 1900 or thereabouts in a “four-room frame house on an unpaved lane” in a section of New Orleans called “Back o’Town … the Blackest, swampiest, and most impoverished” area of the city. His mother was a “chippie,” and the boy grew up running barefoot and wild, the latter of which led to trouble. At age twelve, Armstrong was sent to the Colored Waif’s Home for recalcitrant Black boys, and that changed his life. At the “home,” he found mentors, father-figures and love, and he discovered music.

For years, Bill “Count” Basie insisted that he’d grown up with “no-drama, no-mystery, and nobody’s business but his,” but the truth was “sanitized.” He hated school and dropped out in junior high, hoping to join the circus. Instead, he landed a job working in a “moving-picture theater” as a general worker. When the theater’s piano player didn’t come to work one day, Basie volunteered to sit in. He ultimately realized that “I had to get out … of Red Bank [New Jersey], and music was my ticket.”

Even as a young teenager, Edward Ellington insisted that he be treated like a superstar. By then, his friends had nicknamed him “Duke,” for his insistence on dressing elegantly and acting like he was royalty. And he surely was — to his mother, and to millions of swooning female fans later in his life.

Three men, born at roughly the same time, had more in common than their ages. Two of them had mothers “who doted” on them. All three were perform-aholics. And, for all three, “Race … fell away as America listened.”

Feel up to a time-trip back a century or more? You won’t even have to leave your seat, just grab “The Jazzmen” and hang on.

In his introduction, author Larry Tye explains why he so badly wanted to tell the story of these three giants of music and how Basie’s, Ellington’s, and Armstrong’s lives intersected and diverged as all three were near-simultaneously performing for audiences world-wide. Their stories fascinated him, and his excitement runs strong in this book. Among other allures, readers used to today’s star-powered gossip will enjoy learning about an almost-forgotten time when performers took the country by storm by bootstrapping without a retinue of dozens.

And the racism the three performers encountered disappeared like magic sometimes, and that’s a good tale all by itself.

This is a musician’s dream book, but it’s also a must-read story if you’ve never heard of Basie, Ellington, or Armstrong. “The Jazzmen” may send you searching your music library, so make note.