The Japanese Way of Tea & My Global Education

Global Education Is Global Understanding

Blue Willow China 

When I was six, my mother bought me a miniature China Tea Set--cups, saucers and teapot--made of matching imported China, unlike the unmatched China sets we used at our mealtime. When I opened the China tea set, I loved the look and feel of the cool smooth surface, but as my fingers glided over it, I had no idea of its significance to my life and the value it would be to my mother's homeschooling plans--my global education, a college scholarship and professional success.

Rosa Parks Booking Photo
Montgomery Bus Boycott

The year I received the China  tea set was 1955, the year Rosa Parks went to jail for starting the Montgomery Bus Boycott. 

At the age of six, I was vaguely aware of Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I did not hear of the civil rights activists or the Civil Rights Movement from teachers in my segregated school. My teachers seemed wary of such discussions. I later learned from my parents that the teachers may have been warned not to talk about the Civil Rights Movement for fear that they may start trouble among the student body.

Thurgood Marshall (center)
Brown v Board of Education

I learned about Jim Crow laws, the Civil Rights Movement and the names of civil rights activists like Rosa Parks from hearing their names in conversations between my mother, father and Bigmama when they talked about current events like the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Brown v the Board of Education. 

Rosa Parks
Anti-Rape Activist

At the time, though, they probably had no idea of Rosa Parks' involvement in the protection of black women from rape and lynching from the ills of Jim Crow laws and tradition in the South. I didn't fully understand what Jim Crow laws were until much later in my life. I just knew they were bad for black people and people who were not white. This was confusing to me at times because none of the relatives I knew personally were white, though there was talk in the family about them. And many relatives I knew did not look black. I was too young to know the difference.

When I was six, I knew Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King had something to do with fighting Jim Crow laws during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Jim Crow laws affected everything about our lives and the schools I attended until I graduated from high school; and later getting into a college of my choice. But Jim Crow laws did not affect the global education my mother presented to me with my toy China tea set and other tools, such as an erector set for building structures I imagined. She also discovered meditation, which she adapted to her global education. 

My mother would use that China tea set to teach me about a world outside of Jim Crow, under which my ancestors had lived for nearly a century at that time and my family would live for years to come.

When I saw my mother sitting on the porch staring into the distance, almost trance-like, I knew she was in meditation upon something beautiful or strange or realizable. I learned later that the something she was in meditation upon was me. Living within the circumstances of Jim Crow laws did not give a person an excuse to do less than the best they could offer, my mother always told me. 

"Even the house you live in," she said. "Make it a home. Make your home the best home you can. Organize it. Keep it immaculate. Decorate it. It's where you live. Respect where you live. Take care of your home and it will take care of you; shelter you, nurture you, be standing when you need it!" 

My mother understood what I needed to hear and gave freely and loudly. From primary school through college education with a lot of homeschooling in between, my mother yelled her demands and threatened me if I did not do the work. And she never complimented me unless I had shown extraordinary skill at something. There were no gold stars for mere participation.

"We will find a way of paying for college," she said. "But you have to try to get a college scholarship to help out. If you don't study in high school with college in mine, I don't know if we should strain to pay for college. Maybe you won't study in college and our money will be wasted. Maybe you're not college material. But I won't hold that against you, even though I was smart enough to go to college and would have gone if I had had the chance when I graduated from high school."

Learning to accept and appreciate differences in people is global education.

My mother accepted the way other people lived, even if she didn't approve of their lifestyle. "I do not expect others to let me tell them what to think or how to live," my mother said. "Listen but make your own decision based on what you know. And do not follow or be bullied into going into a certain direction just because others do. Do not be afraid of thinking for yourself. And, likewise, do not bully others into thinking like you." Like you're doing me now, I thought, but had sense enough not to say it out loud.

My mother encouraged me to learn another language. She had learned Spanish when she began her supervisory career in food services and wanted to teach me Spanish so that she could practice her language skills before going off to work and giving orders. 

Image: Early 17th century Japan Stoneware
Momoyama period (1573–1615),
 Metropolitan Museum, New York

In one of our many reference books my mother had purchased over the years, she found items about the Japanese event, The Way of Tea. Sasaki Sanmiis, born in 1893 in Kyoto, wrote the original Japanese classic, Sado-saijiki, which was translated into English in 1960. My mother found translations, which cover Japanese tea tradition throughout the calendar year with descriptions, poetry and The Way of Tea: Reflections. She was fascinated by all of this tradition and ceremony, perhaps because so much of her African and Native American traditions were a mystery to her.

Admitting to me that she was probably not saying the words correctly, my mother still enjoyed trying to pronounce of the names and words describing the ceremonies. "I would love to learn to speak Japanese," she said. "That way, I would have a better understanding of these rules of the tea. "Eastern languages are very different from English and Spanish," she said. "It wouldn't hurt, though, if you learned Spanish."

Using my little toy tea set, my mother taught me about the world's fascination with tea, tea traditions, world economies built around tea and legitimate historical political movements named for the beverage, including the Boston Tea Party, one event leading to the American Revolution. From 1775 to 1783, the Founding Fathers, delegates to the Constitutional Convention, along with the other of their kind, had witnessed America's victory in the American Revolutionary War against Great Britain. Jim Crow laws were not far behind.

My mother especially loved the Japanese ceremonies, but she taught me about all tea traditions and the people who created them. Traditionally, powdered green tea is used in the Chanoyu, Japanese Tea Ceremony. Matcha ceremonial-grade tea is different from other green and black teas brewed from dried flakes of loose tea leaves or tea leaves manufactured into tea bags. Loose tea leaves or those in tea bags are steeped in hot water and then discarded. The ceremonial tea is ground to a fine power that is made to dissolve in water, which preserves its essence, making its consumption more potent and effective than tea leaves. Although we didn't have the real Japanese tea, we used the tea my mother could afford and the tea she could find. Then, we substituted what we had and pretended. It is said that using the powdered green tea within the rules of the ceremony makes the five human senses most acute, encouraging high mental concentration, emotional calm and mental composure. 

My mother and I did not have the powdered green tea for our tea celebrations, but we read about the power of the tea when certain rituals were performed in conjunction with its consumption. This thinking was certainly parallel to my mother's thinking, in that, it led to control of one's behavior through control of one's own mind. 

"Thinking about something is good," my mother told me. "But thinking deeply about something is better." She explained that thinking deeply means rolling it over again and again in my brain and examining thoroughly what was being thought about, not to come up with a better answer, but to come up with a better understanding of the answer. That was meditation, the same thing I had seen her doing so many times.

Of course, my mother and I did not have Japanese, Chinese, English or any other exotic tea. We used Lipton Tea because it was cheap and available at the corner store. We emptied the tea leaves into the little tea pot of my China tea set. My mother said the loose leaves made a stronger brew. I didn't really like the taste of hot tea, but I sipped it with my mother--our pinkies pointed toward the sky--because she said I should know about such things. Then, I hosted pretend tea parties for my young cousins and friends. But I didn't bore them with what my mother and I had read about tea, since my friends and I were only drinking pretend tea, not even Lipton, just tap water.

"You can find meaning where there seems to be none," my mother said. "People have been doing that throughout time. Whatever you're doing, do it the best you can. Give it your full concentration. Challenge yourself with every little thing that comes your way; think of them as opportunities. Do all you can with whatever it is that you have or that you are doing." 

My mother made ordinary things, like sipping a cup of tea, into something special. Finding meaning in the simplest of things, she taught me how to make my life rich without reference to money.

"What does all of this tea talk have to do with me," I asked, watching my mother prepare my lesson. "Japanese tea ceremonies have nothing to do with us."

My mother saw differently, though. "You're wrong," she said. "We are everybody. To learn about us, you must learn about all people. If you leave someone out of your study, you leave out part of your."

~~~~~~~~ My Mother ~~~~~~~~

Littie Nash

Littie Nash was one of the great global thinkers. She did not waste compliments on me. She reserved accolades to celebrate real accomplishments, not just because I dragged myself out of bed before noon on Saturday or because I made an 'A' on my report card. 

"Some things you have to do," my mother said. "And those things pass, not without notice, but without an all-day hullabaloo."

To support me, my mother sponsored my piano, ballet, tennis and swimming lessons, dance performances, recitals, literary and classical music club memberships, summer camps, out-of-state vacations, school trips and science fair exhibits, still managing to squeeze out of our tight budget money for the dentist to install braces on my teeth.

It took a great deal of courage and imagination during the era of Jim Crow laws for my mother to give me what she thought I needed. Jobs for African Americans were scarce and good jobs were mostly nonexistent for them. Black men were economically and politically marginalized and black women were publicly disrespected on a routine basis.

    

Bigmama Didn’t Shop 

At Woolworth’s 

Sunny Nash

Hard Cover

Bigmama Didn't Shop 

at Woolworth's

Amazon Kindle

Bigmama Didn't Shop 

at Woolworth's

In the 1990s, I wrote columns for Hearst and Knight-Ridder newspapers--stories from my childhood with my part-Comanche grandmother during the Civil Rights Movement. Texas A&M University published a collection of the stories about which Robin Fruble of Southern California said:

"Every white person in America should read this book! Sunny Nash writes the story of her childhood without preaching or ranting but she made me realize for the first time just how much skin color changes how one experiences the world. But if your skin color is brown, it matters a great deal to a great number of people. I needed to learn that. Sunny Nash is a great teacher," Fruble said.

Sunny Nash is an author, producer, photographer and leading writer on U.S. race relations. She writes books, blogs, articles and reviews, and produces media and images on U.S. history and contemporary American topics, ranging from Jim Crow laws to social media networking. Sunny Nash is the author of Bigmama Didn't Shop At Woolworth's (Texas A&M University Press), about life with her part-Comanche grandmother during the Civil Rights Movement.

Sunny Nash’s book is recognized by the Association of American University Presses as essential for understanding U.S. race relations. Nash's book is also listed in the Bibliographic Guide for black studies at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York; and recommended for Native American collections by the Miami-Dade Public Library System in Florida. Nash uses her book to write articles and blogs on race relations in America through topics relating to her life--from music, film, early radio and television, entertainment, social media, Internet technology, publishing, journalism, sports, education, employment, the military, fashion, performing arts, literature, women's issues, adolescence and childhood, equal rights, social and political movements--past and present—to today's post-racism.

© 2019 Sunny Nash. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

 www.sunnynash.com 

~Thank You~

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College Education & My Mother's Homeschooling Plan

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School, book collection, music and reading history guided my mother when I was growing up. She wanted me to get into a good college. 

Sunny Nash, Age 16
Reading Nancy Wilson Album Liner Notes

My mother made learning part of my life and, even though I attended public school, I was home schooled on top of it. She used history, music, art, media and anything she could turn into a lesson to bring education into our home. If she and my father could have managed for her not to have jobs outside the home, I believe she would have home schooled me, if there had been such a thing when I was growing up.

I had to read everything before I could use a product, eat a food or listen to  music.

My mother taught me extra and above what my school offered because, when I was in elementary and high school, Jim Crow laws still determined where American children would receive an education under separate but equal laws, which were put into place by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896 when Plessy v Ferguson legalized Jim Crow laws. I grew up watching civil rights activists, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King fighting to destroy Jim Crow and my mother wanted me to be ready when the Jim Crow education system fell and I would be eligible for good jobs. 

Education was not just about good jobs to my mother. She believed in using all of the mind, whether it led to good jobs or not.

I May Not Get There with You: 
The True Martin Luther King Jr 
by Dyson, (Google Affiliate Ad)

Martin Luther King came into national prominence when Rosa Parks ignited the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted for more than a year. The bus boycott became a few months after I started school and last until half way through my second year. My mother was all over that news. So much for  Jim Crow "Dick and Jane" hand-me-down reading books. My mother started me out reading newspapers and magazine articles about civil rights. She asked me if my teachers at school were talking about that subject. 

When I told my mother we were not talking about civil rights, she gathered up every Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King article she could find and she taught me to read them. From that time on, I kept up with every news item and all the media coverage our local television station carried, which wasn't much. My mother bought a tall antenna for our television and turned in to the stations in Houston for better media coverage. When I hear excerpts from King speeches, I May Not Get There With You, it still or I Have a Dream (full speech video), they still brings tears to my eyes.

My mother was not critical of my school for not teaching us about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks. She simply told me they probably had their reasons. But I overheard her saying to Bigmama and my father, teachers were cautious about bringing up civil rights, for fear they may lose their jobs. She also realized my teachers were limited in textbooks, media subscription, art programs and teacher training in history, languages, science and math. And the teaching profession in Jim Crow schools did not pay top salaries even though those jobs required a college education.

In fact, books issued to us at our Jim Crow school had always been used by white students before we got them because budgets for my school were far less than money laid out for our white counterparts. My mother supplemented at home what I got in school and did her best to support my schools in terms of extracurricular programs, academic activity development and volunteering without interfering with the established curriculum or taking away my independence.

Some people think that volunteering, as noble as it sounds, is only for wealthy people who may not have enough activity to fill their empty days or others who have days off from good jobs and want to fill their lives by volunteering some community service. However, my mother and others like her volunteered to lend support in our Jim Crow schools that were deficient in funding.

Preparing for college meant doing well in school, but not to the exclusion of my music lessons and entertainment such as movies and travel.

Dissecting the ACT 2.0: ACT Test Preparation Advice of a Perfect Score (Google Affiliate Ad)

Certain I would be offered scholarships to Jim Crow black colleges, my mother wanted my education to be college preparatory so I could attend a white college, offered scholarships or not. She wanted me to SAT preparatory, especially math, and ACT preparatory instruction. When she asked at school how to prepare me, the teachers were not sure. So, my mother went out and asked people she worked for who had children in good colleges how they studied for those tests. 

"Times are changing," she said. "You must be ready to get in there and make it. You have to find something you do well and do it alongside the best of them. You have to decide what that will be and go to school for it." My mother let me make some decisions, but she made the important and immediate decisions that affected every day life and my education.

Before letting me listen to music at home, my mother made me read album liner notes. "Liner notes teach you history," she said. "Someone researched and wrote the biographies of those musicians. Take a minute to learn what you don't know." At first, I didn't care to read about the music or the artists who played and sang the music. I just wanted to listen to the music. But if reading the album liner notes was the only way I could listen, I read them. I was careful about how I answered my mother's questions, remembering that she had read about Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King and the Woolworth Sit-ins before handing the article or book to me.

My mother was right, of course. I learned artist history and music data, such as origin, instrumentation, studio, performance, radio information, lyrics, industry trends and label announcements. Knowing this information was like having the inside track into the music business. I got so hooked that I read the music notes on my own with my mother's prompting. "See," my mother said. "I told you music notes  made interesting reading."

My mother's lesson plan, different from that of my school, took every day items and turned them into problems for me to solve or a book for me to read and understand.

Stirring Prose: Cooking 
with Texas Authors

Herbal teas, homeopathic medicine and organic beauty potions were all within my mother's interests. She developed these interests from her part-Comanche mother, Bigmama, whom I wrote about in my book, Bigmama Didn't Shop At Woolworth's. From my book, an essay about a family beauty secret was included in Stirring Prose: Cooking with Texas Authors, a collection of stories by 39 of Texas' best writers, including Kinky Friedman, Liz Carpenter and Molly Ivins.

Sunny Nash Biography on Amazon

 Bigmama Didn't Shop At Woolworth's

My mother's vast knowledge of history, art, math, science, astronomy, geography and literature constantly surprised me. How could she know so much? I thought. Now, I remember. She was curious and read a book from cover to cover on a variety of subjects and passed this reading habit to me, especially in art and history.

Because my mother augmented the education I received under Jim Crow laws, I went on to graduate from a major, predominantly white university. Upon arriving to some classes, I was advised by professors that my early education probably had not prepared me for such high academic aspirations. What the professors were saying was my Jim Crow education was inadequate and they knew it. But my professors had not factored in my mother. I am not saying that my elementary and high school did a bad job. Many of my teachers were dedicated educators. Further, I am not saying other kids who went to my Jim Crow schools or schools like mine could not compete academically at a major university. What I am saying is: I do not think I could have done it without my mother. Those among my professors who had underestimated my college preparation, had to reassess their opinion when I made "A" grades, earned scholarships and was placed on the dean's list several semesters.

1908 Oat Cakes Recipe
Quaker Oats Cereal Box
Company Founded 1850

And my mother did not stop my education at reading about the health benefits of certain diets and budget comparisons when shopping. Oh, I wanted to stop her when she started about the history of oatmeal. Before we made oatmeal cookies, she lectured me on the food having been around since before the Civil War, 100 years before Cocoa Puffs. I really loved Cocoa Puffs. "No one wants to know the history of Cocoa Puffs!" She said, nearly ruining my appetite for oatmeal cookies, too.

My mother was saving all kinds of recipes for a cookbook she was writing. She collected old-fashion recipes and cookbooks.

My mother, Bigmama and I ate one oatmeal cookie each, holding me responsible for what and how much I ate, one of the best lessons they ever taught me. "Eating properly takes discipline," my mother said. "Like studying in school and making good grades, you can't hide overeating or not turning in your homework," she said. "It will show."

Alpha Omega Publications LAN 0409
The Written Report (Google Affiliate Ad)

If I complained about reading a book, an article, a recipe or other assignments, my mother made me write a report on a country in South America or the history of the telephone or a current world event or some other seemingly random topic that she pulled out of the air. I realize now that her topics were not randomly selected. Like everything else she did, subjects for writing reports were chosen carefully and were part of her education plan. 

Because my mother was such a good writer herself, she had the skills to evaluate my writing and would not accept sloppy reporting. Needless to say, my mother taught me to stop complaining, speak intelligently on many subjects and write convincingly, without a clue that, one day, I would be a published author and public speaker. 

Education was a priority in my mother's life and she made school a priority in my life, as well.

Littie Nash, 1947

My mother, Littie Nash, had taken my hand when I was six years old and walked me to first grade on the first day of school. That was just three and a half months before Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Littie was angry that the Supreme Court decision, Brown v the Board of Education, just one year before, had not integrated or changed the Jim Crow school I would be attending. However, she was determined to squeeze as much from that school as they could offer me. 

"I thought things would be different for you than they were for me," she said to me. "But having a school is better than not having a school." And from that point on in my education, she made the best of the schools available to us and was convinced she could make up the difference on her own. And she did without complaining about it again. As far as my mother was concerned, there were excuses. "You see what you have to work with," she said. "And you work with it the best you can." That's what she did with me and my young relatives and friends, many of whom practically lived with us on occasion.

In 1947, when my mother graduated from high school, black students were less than half as likely to graduate than white students. An "A" student, my mother had ambitions, although she had attended Jim Crow schools and was acutely aware that Jim Crow laws would throw barriers into her path. Littie's mother, my Bigmama, who was born in 1890, lived through violent racial times in American history, managed to become literate and understood how to prepare her children for life under Jim Crow laws, preparation Bigmama's children passed on to their children.

To my mother, travel was as important a part of my education as reading books and going to school.

Colored Waiting Room - Public Bus Station 1940s

My mother's first ambition after graduating from high school was to travel, which she did. Visiting family and friends all over the country, she saw siblings in California and Colorado, who had gone West to get good jobs. She also had relatives and friends who had gone East for that purpose.

My mother made the rounds riding on Jim Crow buses and trains; eating, using facilities and waiting for departing connections in colored areas throughout Texas and the nation. Jim Crow laws and accommodations were disappointing to her but did not stop her from moving freely about the country. According to my mother, "Traveling is part of your education. If you never go anywhere but where you were born and raised, your understanding of people in other places is limited."

My mother was very demanding of herself and me. This was the example she gave me to grow by. She said good grades were my job. To make my job easier, my mother created a reading corner in the living room, more for herself than for me, and bought newspapers, magazines and books--history, science, art, biography, encyclopedia and other reference materials--and made me read them after she'd finished. She made me a study corner in my bedroom with a table and bookshelves. In that little reading corner, I learned what education was all about--reading and, later, it would be all of the reading that would earn me scholarships in college.

Somewhere along the way, my mother got off her original course to attend college, got married and had a family instead and became a great mother, my mother. Later in her life, she did get back on the college track, but in the meanwhile, she had me to nag about grades. When my mother enrolled in college to broaden her own professional possibilities, she brought home 'A' grades, using those credentials to build a profession in nutrition.

Because my mother loved to cook and was so good, she turned her talent into a marketable skill in health and medical support, for which she won regional and state cooking honors and corporate grants to develop recipes in coordination with physicians and other medical professionals. In these competitions, Littie put her cooking, as well as writing skills, into action against hundreds of contestants around the state and nation, and published recipes and methodologies in food journals, newsletters and instructional manuals.

"You have to read," my mother said. "How else will you know anything useful to say? Or be able to answer questions on tests and scholarship examinations? You have to write, too. How else can you ask for and get what you want?

"Do you write white?" I asked my mother, sarcastically."

No." she said. "I present correctly written English. I don't always win, but I am always a finalist. There is no color in the process, as long as the judges don't know I'm black, and I only enter competitions that do not require an appearance," she said, smiling. "That way, the judges do not know my color and cannot use my color to dismiss me before they get their team of chefs busy making my dishes."

My mother knew the limitations Jim Crow laws placed on her ambitions. She also knew, when I was growing up, Jim Crow laws were on their way out. Flickering black-and-white images on the television news broadcasts confirmed her belief that, one day, my color would not be an issue like hers had been. Rosa Parks, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the violence in Birmingham, Alabama, against school children came into America's living rooms nightly during media broadcasts showing me the future. "You have to be ready when the time comes," she said. "It won't matter what you will be allowed to do, if you are not prepared and cannot do it.

Although my mother always had time to hear my ideas, her word was the last word in the conversation. She reminded me that I was a child, and had not been in the world long enough to know what was best for me. I did not get an allowance for chores or money for good grades. "Those things are the least you can do to contribute around here," my mother said. "You are responsible to yourself for those things. Besides, we're poor. Now, go in your room and turn off the light. Lights don't grow on trees around here." Every day is Mothers' Day to me.

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Bigmama Didn't Shop at Woolworth's

 by Sunny Nash

African American
 National Biography
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Bigmama Didn't Shop
At Woolworth's
by Sunny Nash

Bigmama Didn't Shop At Woolworth's (Texas A&M University Press) by Sunny Nash was chosen by the  Association of American University Presses as one of its essential books for understanding race relations in the United States, and also listed in the Bibliographic Guide to Black Studies by the Schomburg Center in New York and recommended for Native American collections by the Miami-Dade Public Library System in Florida.

Sunny Nash has work in the African American National Biography, a joint project by Harvard and Oxford, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham; African American West, a Century of Short Stories; Reflections in Black, a History of Black Photographers 1840 - Present; Ancestry; Companion to Southern Literature; Texas Through Women’s Eyes; Black Genesis: A Resource Book for African-American Genealogy; African American Foodways L; Southwestern American Literature Journal and other anthologies. Nash is listed in references: The Source: guidebook to American genealogy; Bibliographic Guide to Black Studies; Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics; Ebony Magazine; Southern Exposure; Hidden Sources: Family History in Unlikely Places; and others.

© 2012 Sunny Nash

All Rights Reserved Worldwide.