Miss Sopa: A Great Woman

Note: This background goes with my poem, The Fall of Miss Sopa, Eater of Clay, in the preceding post.  Thanks to everyone who requested it.

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I met Miss Sopa when I was a kid. When she walked into the room, it felt like God had just thudded up to me in a pair of muddy men’s workboots. She took my face in her warm hands and said, “Girl, there’s some stories going on in them big eyes.” I only saw her a few times after that, because my family moved. But I have loved this woman for many years. She appears in my work in different forms, sometimes in different races or genders.

Of course, Sopa’s not her real name. I barely knew her, and I only knew she was Katrina’s grandma. Even in a relatively modern era, kids in our neck of the woods didn’t run up to adults and address them. The Sopa stories I know are from Katrina and from sneaking around the edges of that adult world and listening. I can’t swear to the accuracy, but the stories fascinate me.

Miss Sopa ate clay. According to Katrina, Miss Sopa made all of the girls in her family go to the shore every week for worship and clay eating. Growing up in the American South, I have heard many stories of people, both African American and Caucasian, who eat clay. I’m certainly not an expert on geophagy, but as far as I know, the origins in the U.S. come from slavery. Many people worldwide still eat clay from hunger. Some people just like it or say it has nutritional value, though I have read articles that warn against it due to toxins in the soil. Some get “hooked” on the taste and crave it. The ones who are hungry haunt my sleep.

Miss Sopa’s family came from slavery in Georgia. In brutal conditions, some slaves ate clay in order to survive. There are accounts of bastards who would actually put masks or wire cages on the faces of the slaves to keep them from eating clay. They were afraid they’d lose their “possessions” to sickness from eating dirt. In reality, the people were eating clay out of hunger and malnutrition!

Miss Sopa’s family was eventually freed and moved to Carolina to be closer to other family members. Needless to say, even after they were free, they still had an extremely rough life. Miss Sopa didn’t live through legal slavery, but she lived through the effects of it, which I am told were just as bad. She lived through the Depression as an African American. She lived through Jim Crow. Even after laws were changed on the books, she lived through attitudes. And on top of all that, she was a woman. She worked the fields with babies strapped to her back. Her lot was not an easy one.

By the time I met her, Miss Sopa wasn’t hungry and her child bearing years were long over. But her clay eating had turned into a ritual combined with Christianity and elements of worship from her African homeland. Miss Sopa shaped this into her own form of Christian worship by the shore.

White clay is often the choice of clay eaters in the South. But the clay I recall was either red in the piedmont or bluish gray on the coast, hence the blue in the poem. Miss Sopa’s “fall” in the poem is her fall from grace, but in a good way. It was a fall from the role white society gave her to play as as a black woman. Once I heard her say that when she got old, she stopped caring what white people thought of her or did to her. She said that freed her to do as she damn well pleased.

I used to give Miss Sopa birth and death dates, but now I just keep her at around 100. Now I’m old enough to realize that Miss Sopa will never die. I’ve hesitated to post the poem, because I want it to be perfect, and it’s not. I’ve been working on it for a long time, and it’s still not finished. I could do a thousand more revisions, and it will never be half as good as she is. My poems aren’t worthy enough to tie Miss Sopa’s shoes.

In this quick bloggy world of ours, if you have actually paused long enough to read all of this, I thank you. And I hope you love Miss Sopa as much as I do.