Mary Anne Adams, Champion for Change 

Interview by Lorraine Fontana on December 22, 2015

I was a very introverted child. Very shy, with very poor social skills. I was the middle child, between my brother, who was the athlete and pretty extroverted, and my sister who was beautiful, and a dancer. And then there was me, a bookworm who really didn’t go outside and play with the kids. I couldn’t jump rope, I couldn’t play marbles, I couldn’t play jacks, I couldn’t play ball. I was left-handed, which back in those days… I was just one of those kids who had a lot of angst early on, who sat around with the adults and listened to their conversations. I always had a book in my hand. Didn’t have many friends. Well, maybe when I was eight, I was kind of in a little clique, but it was very limited – there were probably three of us

LF: Say something more about how you got involved in community activities, and the social justice kind of folks that you got to know.

MAA: When I was nine, I met Ms. Savanah, who was an elderly woman who lived across the street from me. I didn’t have a lot of friends, and I would spend my summers at Ms. Savannah’s house all day. She would regale me with stories of the neighborhood – who lived there ten years ago, who had died, and the kinds of relationships they had. She was one of the first Black women in the community who actually had property, who owned her own home. 

The preacher lived next to the teacher, who lived next to the janitor, who lived next to the mechanic. I think for the children of the community, it was really “it takes a community to raise a child.”

 I lived in a community called Freedmen Town, where freed Blacks first settled, in Oxford and north Mississippi. It was probably a mile from Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi. You could actually walk there from my neighborhood. It was a neighborhood because African Americans, albeit folks who had achieved middle class status at that time, were not able to buy homes in any other communities in Oxford, so we all lived in the same community. The preacher lived next to the teacher, who lived next to the janitor, who lived next to the mechanic. I think for the children of the community, it was really a godsend because we were indeed a community. My sixth-grade teacher lived up the street. I could stop by her house. Or if I was doing something I shouldn’t have been doing, she would call me on it. In that regard, it was very much “it takes a community to raise a child.” 

Ms. Savannah took a liking to me. She was considered a mean old woman in the neighborhood. If you walked across her yard she’d come out with a gun. I remember one day, I was with my brothers and sister, and she came out with a gun. I said, “It’s me Mrs. S!” [laughter]. She really liked me. She taught me how to make biscuits. I’d go to the store for her, and she’d tell me all the stories. She had grown, adult children at the time, who were school teachers, and she was really considered a success in terms of buying property, rearing children, educating them, and all that. 

I started to help her, and I think that was what developed my love for elderly people. I was always struck by how she’d been so successful, and she had done all this, and at the end, she was very isolated – she was by herself. Her children would come maybe every other week to check on her. But I was essentially her only company, and I started to really assist her. I would hear these stories about the civil rights movement, which really ignited a fire in me. It ignited a fire in me to try to participate in it, if not relive that, whenever I got the chance to do that. The fact is that she was really a big help to my mother at that time when we were so poor. She spent a lot of time with me, gave me things, and fed me.

Introduction to the Civil Rights Movement

Fast forward to the time I’m twelve. This is around 1966, when I am hearing about this movement across the country in terms of urban renewal, revitalization. There were young civil rights activists who would come into these communities to start to mobilize, and to build and train and educate. It was also the time when there was the establishment of Legal Services offices across the country to help Black folks with keeping their land, and particularly with trying to help them buy houses in these neighborhoods. They were doing things that you can’t do this day, but you did back then. So, there were lots of young, vibrant activists, civil rights attorneys, social workers, and teachers who moved into the community. 

A young, Black minister, Rev. Wayne Johnson, who had grown up in Oxford, and who had gone away to Indiana, come back home, and started the Black House. The Black House was a house that he rented. It was literally next door to our school, which, at the time, was called Central High School. Before that, it was the Oxford Training School. All the Black students went to that school from the first grade to the twelfth grade. 

We got hand-me-down books from Oxford High School and from Bramlett Elementary, which was way across town, about two miles away from where we were. I remember looking at books that had “white” marked out, with “colored” written in. I remember thinking, even early on, that there was something not right about this. We still had to buy those books, even though they were hand-me-down. We still had to pay for those textbooks. We had two white teachers at the time, an algebra teacher, who was male; and then, we had a woman who was the English teacher. 

Let me just go back a bit. When I was eight years old, James Meredith was trying to desegregate the University of Mississippi. I remember that Sunday night asking my step father, because we could hear gunshots, “what’s going on, why is somebody shooting?” He said “Oh, those peckerwoods,” (that’s what he called white people) “those peckerwoods are trying to keep this Black man from going to school.” From that, I associated school with peckerwoods and gunshots – I wasn’t quite sure what was happening. The next day I walked to school. We didn’t have a school bus, and we walked to school. My brother was going to skip school that day – he was 10, I was 8 – and he was walking me to school. 

He walked me half way, not all the way because he didn’t want to be seen. I remember coming up by myself and thinking, what are all these soldiers? To my eight-year-old eye, it seemed like there were millions of soldiers. They were all white, they had guns, and they were barricading around my school. I remember one of them said to me, “Little girl, there is not going to be any school today.” I remember turning and running back. My brother had stopped to throw rocks at squirrels in the trees or whatever, and I was able to catch up with him. We went home. We didn’t have school for at least a week. Our school had been shut down because there were threats that they were going to bomb the school, bomb Freeman Town. 

We were the target because everyone knew Freedman Town. I remember at that time being really struck by that, and later finding out that somebody had been killed. There was a lot going on. We also had folks who worked at the University of Mississippi in the cafeteria. They would talk about not feeling safe to go to work, and not going to work, and all of that. 

I was growing up against a backdrop of that kind of unrest, that kind of civil rights movement work, where folks were trying to assist in going to school. Fast forward to my being twelve, then the Black House starting, and all these folks coming into town. I was kind of ripe for that kind of thing. I was always a reader. I would read anything I could get my hands on; and at this point I started reading Baldwin. James Baldwin was probably the earliest Black writer I read, and Langston Hughes. 

The Larger Education

My grandmother lived in Water Valley, which was 30 minutes away, and we’d spend every single summer with her. My aunt taught school, and she lived with my grandmother. She was considered an “old maid” back then – that’s what they called her. She really provided a rich education for me. In her house was the first time I listened to classical music. She’d play that for me. She had Ebony and Jet magazines, and I’d read them. I remember even writing a letter to Ebony magazine. My aunt would bring a lot of books for me. She was a librarian at the high school and also the French teacher; and we both spent time reading and going to the library. I was introduced to all these authors at the time. I couldn’t take the books home with me, and she would put them up on the shelf. Whenever I could come, a lot of weekends and every summer, she would get the books down for me, and I would read the same books over and over. Not just Black books – I read Little Women, Gulliver’s Travels, all of that. I had a pretty well-rounded reading education at that time.

LF: Stuff that you weren’t getting in school.

MAA: Stuff that I wasn’t getting in school or at home because we couldn’t afford that. My mother read, but she read True Romance magazine, novels in search of love, in search of a man. I read those, too, because I would read anything. I was the kid who would go to bed with a flashlight to read. I read simply everything. 

When I was growing up in Oxford, we would go to the Health Department for our medical care. They still had “colored” and “white,” and we’d have to sit on the colored side. The water fountain still had “colored” on there, so I was a witness to all of this. I’m 61 years old now. At the movie theater, the Ritz, we’d sit up in the back. I remember being in the ninth grade, courting, and we’d sit up in the back, and white folks would sit down below – this was still going on. I remember we’d pay a quarter to go to the movies. So, there was a lot of segregation in Oxford: colored/white, colored/white. I can still see all of that happening.

There was not a lot of conversation about race in my home, nor in my extended family or in my grandmother’s house when I would go there. My grandmother was very religious, Black Southern Baptist. We had to go to Sunday school, BTU (Baptist Training Union) Bible Training meetings, and Bible school in the summer. We had to go back to church in the evening. I never felt comfortable in church – ever! I always just felt very uncomfortable in my skin even though it was a part of my upbringing, certainly. Not so much at my home – my mother didn’t go to church, and she didn’t make us go to church. We would go to church with my Aunt Sarah, who’s now 91, and still living. But my mother? Nah, we didn’t have to. I had so much church from the community making me go and my grandmother making me go that I felt like I was going all the time.

With the Black House, my town was the hub of civil rights activity.

Fast forward. All these folks are coming into my community and into another Black community called Rivers Hill. It becomes obvious to me that Freedman Town was ripe, and very close to downtown, very close to the school, very close to Legal Services. They were able to find a place right next to the Oxford Eagle, which was the only newspaper in town. They were three stores down from that. They were on the square at Oxford. With the Black House, my town was the hub of civil rights activity. 

Rev. Wayne Johnson was one of those preachers like Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. with that kind of voice that was mesmerizing, that would just galvanize and mobilize people. You would want to follow him, and you’d want to listen to him. He was also disabled; he had polio as a kid. He would always walk with a limp, and he was frail, very frail. And the kind of guy that people listened to because he had a lot of integrity. His mother and father still lived in Oxford, not too far from me. He came back home and brought his wife and two boys, and he was scratching out a living. He was very big in Indiana in the cooperative movement. They came to Oxford and started the Black House. He also started Soul Force, and all the kids participated in that.

LF: Soul Force?

MAA: The Soul Force newspaper. Back then, they had the stencil machine and the mimeograph machine. They would teach us how do that, and we helped to write articles. During this time, we were reading H. Rap Brown and Look Out Whitey, Black Power’s Gonna Get Your Mama, and all this kind of stuff. 

After school, we would all come to the Black House to be taught Black literature and Black history. They would announce it in school over the loudspeaker: “For all those students who participate in the Black House after school, please don’t forget to bring Black Boy by Richard Wright.” I remember my white teachers saying, “The next thing you know, they’ll want you to bring black paper and pencil.” I will never forget that. [laughter]

We were taught poetry. Joe Delaney was really spearheading the classes for the students. He was a social worker, a native of Mississippi, who had been a student at Mississippi Valley State. [He was] kicked out because of his activism, and was working at Legal Services. I became very close with him. The NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) would be there, and we were allowed to just sit there and listen. It was a way for us to be educated. We were allowed to speak up, to give voice; we were encouraged to do that. The students at Ole Miss were trying to start a Black Student Union, and they would come to the Black House to strategize with Rev. [Wayne] Johnson and all of the other community leaders, and we were there. We would take the Soul Force paper out and deliver it to people’s homes; and we talked about it. So that was the beginning of my activism, my organizing, my mobilization, education. Wayne started a co-op store, and the kids were allowed to work in it. He also started a co-op daycare center where I later worked.

LF: Was any of that part of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives?

MAA: Not then. Later, yes, but not early on. It became part of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives when I was 18 or 19, something like that, but initially it was not. He [Rev. Johnson] started this because he believed in cooperative economics. It was part of the work that he had done up north, and he wanted to bring that back to us. He felt there was more that we could do as a collective, as a community, in Oxford, to empower ourselves financially because there was a huge need for that. That was the beginning – that was the seed that was implanted in me.

Reading My Way to Feminism and Radicalism

LF: Did you stay involved through high school?

MAA: I was certainly involved in high school. I’m not really sure when I started reading Ms. Magazine. We desegregated Oxford High School when I was in the eleventh grade, and I know I was reading it before then. I don’t recall any role models that I necessarily considered to be feminist. I think just by reading everything, and in my life, I saw women who were leading…who were in charge of things. They didn’t necessarily give voice to it in a feminist way.

We didn’t want to be where we were. We would read to take ourselves to New York City,
read so we could take ourselves to San Francisco. We would read to take ourselves to Paris.
That’s really how we transferred the unrest we felt. We were really limited in Mississippi. We felt
that we should be someplace else doing these revolutionary, worldly things.

LF: What about the books? What about women writers?

MAA: I can remember reading Angela Davis in high school and listening to Nikki Giovanni’s LPs (record albums). I was able to connect with the women I saw in my community, Black women who were in charge of things – and by things, I mean institutions. Ms. Nancy Humphrey ran the Black library because we couldn’t go to the white library at that time. Ms. Nancy bought the house right next door to her and turned it into a library. 

If you read so many books, she would give you a prize. I went to my grandmother’s in the summer. When I came back I probably had two weeks left before school started, but I would still read more books than anyone else and get a prize. It was just a part of me to do that. My aunt was a librarian; I saw a lot of women in Water Valley leading. I saw the women in church really running things. 

Ms. Nancy would tell me their stories, and I knew she was one of the first Black women to have a house, to own property. I was able to somehow make these connections although it was not articulated. Then, when I started reading Black women like Davis, Giovanni, Hansberry, and these folks, I was able to put that together. I started reading Ms. Magazine as soon as it came out. When I was in the eleventh grade, I had a white woman friend, a senior at Oxford High, whose father sent her the Village Voice every week. There were three or four of us who couldn’t wait to get the Village Voice. We would read it. We were like a rag-tag motley crew of revolutionaries.

LF: Yes, radical.

MAA: Exactly. We didn’t want to be where we were. We would read to take ourselves to New York City, read so we could take ourselves to San Francisco. We would read to take ourselves to Paris. That’s really how we transferred the unrest we felt. We were really limited in Mississippi. We felt that we should be someplace else doing these revolutionary, worldly things.

LF: How did you find out about Ms. Magazine?

MAA: I think I found out about it from my friend Catherine. I think she brought the first Ms. Magazine to school. Surely after that, I think around 1970-71, Essence Magazine came out. It was just natural for me to start reading that, too. I was very politicized. 

I was 10 in 1964 when Rev. King was killed, and shortly after that, Robert Kennedy. I’ll never forget, ever. When President John Kennedy was killed, we were at school when they announced that the President had been killed. We were all instructed to drop to the floor and hide under the desks because there were rumors that folks were going to come to school and bomb us. Everyone was just so afraid. We didn’t know what was happening with our parents or our relatives. I’ll never forget that fear. 

Mind you, we’d been through this situation where we’d had troops guarding our school a few years before, and it was a very real possibility [to happen again]. I didn’t know it was like this across the country, but in Oxford, we were taught to believe that President Kennedy was our savior, you know? And when he was killed, it was, like, oh! We were led to believe that we were targeted for extinction – that all the Black folks would be killed. Of course, we were literally shaking in our boots. 

When Dr. King was killed, I remember being home, and it was the evening. We went to school the next day. Well, some kids stayed home. But some of us went. I don’t remember that kind of fear when Dr. King was killed, as I had when the President was killed. It was a different kind of emotional situation.

LF: Do you think it was because there was more anger when King was shot?

MAA: I’m remembering this through the eyes of a child, revisiting it with that voice of a child, and with the emotions of a child, not with the intellect to be able to do an analysis. What I can say is that based on that sense of doom, and that sense that we were going to be killed, I believe at the time, that people saw change happening in the country under President Kennedy, in terms of voting rights. And in terms of what we saw, there was some movement in the country. We thought he was going to be the person that would allow us to have some freedom to be able to live where we wanted to live, and to be able to go to school where we wanted to go to school. President Kennedy was interfering with the old narrative and making that happen, and we saw him as being kind of a savior in that regard. When he died, it was like things were going to stop – any kind of rights for Black people, any kind of civil rights, any kind of liberation movement. 

LF: What was the feeling in your family? Do you remember that?

MAA: Oh, they were very sad, they were hurt – they were not angry. I went to school the next day, and, in my neighborhood, there was more anger that this had happened. But in my household, no. My mother did not feel that she had any agency around Black and white relations. She was taught that “you go along to get along,” you know, you didn’t ruffle any feathers. She didn’t talk against white folks because her livelihood depended upon white folks. She worked as a domestic. When she wasn’t at their houses cleaning, she’d be home taking in ironing on the side. I think that her personal agency was so squashed that it was very difficult for her to see beyond that. And remember, she also had all those kids to feed. 

My mother did not try to stop me from doing whatever I did. I spent most of my time at the Black House. She would have preferred that I spend more time at home to help clean, cook, and take care of my brothers and sisters. But she never stood in front of the door and said, “Don’t you go do that.” She would carry on, you know, she would fuss about things, and yet, I had a lot of freedom. My brothers and sisters all had a lot of freedom. I can’t remember my mother saying to us, “be home by 10 o’clock,” or whatever. That didn’t happen.

A Lifelong Feminist

LF: That allowed you to be who you were at the time. You were talking about being near the end of high school, reading the Village Voice and Ms. Magazine. Did you ever have a sense of being a feminist or a womanist? Or was your identity tied to the Black community and issues of civil rights? Was tha something you weren’t ready to look at?

MAA: That’s a great question. I absolutely had the sense of being a feminist. I always questioned why boys could do certain things and girls couldn’t. I questioned that early on because I just couldn’t understand it. I didn’t understand why every night, I would pray for a bicycle. And at Christmas, I never got one. But my brother had two or three bicycles. I didn’t understand why. If my brother was not home, my mother would put his food in the oven. But if my sister or I were not home, oh, too bad. We had to fend for ourselves. I never understood why I had to wash dishes and my brother didn’t. I didn’t understand why I had to sweep the floor and he didn’t because he was a boy. I questioned that always. 

Nobody ever explained it to me sufficiently for me to understand it. I never got an answer. I started to believe that okay, Black mothers love their sons and raise their daughters. What I heard from the civil rights movement was, you know, that Black men had it tough, that they had it worse, that they were the head of the household, and you know, they had to go out to do certain things. But I didn’t see them going out and earning the living. I saw women go out and earn a living, too. It just didn’t make sense to me. I very much started identifying as a feminist by the tenth grade. So much so, that when I was in twelfth grade, I didn’t go to prom. I just wanted to get away. 

I didn’t have any role models, really. No Black women talking to me about feminism in my community. They [feminists] were talking to me through news, through magazines, through TV, through books. But not face to face.

I was still very much Black identified. I didn’t have any role models really, no Black women talking to me about feminism in my community. They were talking to me through news, through magazines, through TV, through books. But not face to face. If I had to rank it, it would be Black and then feminist because I was enmeshed in this African-American culture with all these Black men who were certainly sexist, and who were chauvinist, no doubt of that. But because I was smart, that was the ticket for me. They appreciated that, and that gave me a little opening. 

When I was in high school, I wrote a play at the Black House, after Dr. King died; and Joe Delaney produced it. All the kids came, and we put it on at the Black Community Center. We marched after the play that night from the Community Center, past the Black House, downtown, almost to Ole Miss [University of Mississippi]. It was a very exhilarating, very empowering, very affirming time for me. I fancied myself a playwright. I should write a lot of plays, right?

LF: I didn’t know you did that. What was the name of that play?

MAA: Probably “The King is Dead.” [laughter] I don’t know.

LF: Do you still have your writing?

MAA: No, I lost a lot of that stuff because we moved so much. By the time I was 16 years old, we had moved eighteen different times.

LF: Oh, that’s so sad. I’m thinking what great archiving material that would have been.

MAA: I know, but we just lost a lot of stuff. I’ve just reconciled, kind of gotten over it, and moved on.

LF: When did you leave Mississippi, and how did you get to Atlanta? Is that the first place you went after you left Mississippi?

MAA: No. As I mentioned earlier, the Black students would come to the Black House and strategize about how they were going to start a Black Student Union and all that. That was just a very small group of students from Ole Miss [University of Mississippi] at the time. We’re talking 1966, ’67. I graduated high school at 16 in ’71. I was told that I had to go to the University of Mississippi. I was told that by my community, by the Black House, by those folks. I wanted to go to elsewhere to major in Journalism because I wrote for Soul Force. When I went to the white high school, I wrote for the white newspaper at Oxford High, The Oxford Charger. I was the Sports Editor, actually. 

The University Years

The thing about Oxford High at the time is that you had a lot of professors coming in from different parts of the country teaching at the University of Mississippi. And some of their wives who came to my high school to teach were very progressive.  You had a mix of a lot of teachers who were steadfast in that community, and you also had the influx as well. I had that influence. I was told that I could go to Ole Miss, period. I was immersed in my community, and they said, “You go, and it will be better for students coming after you.” I didn’t question that. I went to the University of Mississippi at 16. I knew enough to know I couldn’t major in Journalism, and write what I wanted to write because at that time I was very, very radical. 

By the time I left high school, we could go to the white library. I knew the head librarian, Dixie, by her first name. It was a respite for me because I didn’t want to go home. I would go to the library after school, and I would sit there and read. They all remember me because I would order books from other libraries, all these radical, Black books. It was an all-white staff, but they humored me because I read, and they appreciated that.  They would order whatever I wanted. They would look at each other with a kinda twinkle in their eye, and they ordered stuff for me. They used to have the little card in the jacket that you could pull out and see who ordered what. I’m sure my name is on a lot of stuff – it was a great place for me, that library.

I knew enough to know I couldn’t major in Journalism, and write what I wanted to write because at that time I was very, very radical.

I thought that I couldn’t major in journalism because couldn’t write what I wanted to write. I went to registration, There was one Black professor there, a social worker who had gotten her MSW at Tulane University [New Orleans, Louisiana], after her bachelor’s degree at Jackson State, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. She was probably 26 at the time. I’m 16, and to me, she’s much older. She was the only Black one in that huge crowd of departments and people, She’s why I decided I would be a social worker. We called her JJ, and she lived on campus in faculty housing. She would leave her door open for all the students, and she really became the go-to person for us. There were 200 Black students on campus within a student body of 12,000. We all knew each other, we hung out together.

LF: Better than if you had been there five years earlier, there would have been only a handful….

MAA: I’m sure. But even then, these were rich kids, plantation owner’s children, who would be helicoptered to the dance. There were a lot of plantations in Greenwood and Greenville.

LF: I thought the University of Mississippi was a state school? Did the rich kids go there?

MAA: Absolutely. I mean, “Ole Miss” was THE University, kind of like the University of Georgia. If you went to school in Mississippi, you wanted to go to Ole Miss because it was considered a really good state school. The other state schools were considered cow country. But if you were white and rich, you went to Ole Miss.

I was there when the first Black football player was enrolled, Ben Williams, who came the year after me. I was there during the time the first two Black basketball players, Dean Hudson and Coolidge Ball came to Ole Miss. 

We had a Black Student Union by then, run by [Reverend] Wayne Johnson. He was the person we reported to. I spent a lot of my time volunteering – l was a Cub Scout leader for 3rd grade boys; I volunteered at the senior center; I volunteered at the Center for the Developmentally Disabled. If I wasn’t volunteering, I was in the stacks in the library reading. It was the first time I had the opportunity to just read anything I wanted to, you know, reading about Black folks and what they did in 1500, 17, 18, 1900. I didn’t go to class too much [laughter].

I fell in love with philosophy. If I could have made a living in philosophy, that’s what I’d do.

LF: What about being a professor or a teacher?

MAA: It never even occurred to me.

LF:  There was a Black Student Union, and you already had a feminist consciousness. Were there any women’s groups on the University campus that you joined?

MAA: No, no, not at all. What I remember on that campus was the Black Student Union; all the sororities and fraternities; and the Campus Crusade for Christ. My roommate, Lindia Robinson, for example, was a middle-class, Black kid from Starkville, Mississippi, whose father was head of the NAACP. He owned a Black funeral home. Her mother was a teacher. This kid knew she wanted to be a lawyer early on. She came to Ole Miss to prepare for that. She was very religious, and a member of Campus Crusade for Christ. On my side of the room, I had a big, colorful poster of Popeye fucking Olive Oyl [laughter], and she had the Bible on her side. You know how they have those wooden carvings, giving people the finger? I had one of those in my room, too.

LF: Wow. How did you get along with her?

MAA: Actually, when the campus crusade would come and pray with her, and witness with her, she would say “don’t mind that part of the room”. Every year we would say “I’m not going to room with you again,” but we roomed with each other every single year Actually, when Angela [Mary Anne’s current partner] and I went to Mississippi for Thanksgiving, we hung out with her.

I remember we took Sociology and Poverty together. I majored in Sociology and Social Work and she would take my papers to class because I wouldn’t go to class. I would just write the paper and send it by her [laughter]. I would go sometimes. Mostly, I would send the paper by her. She would be upset when I got a good grade without even attending [more laughter]. You know, she was studying all the time, she never got involved in anything, whereas I was on campus because we were trying to run the first Black student for Miss University of Mississippi. I was an activist, and she was just trying to get into law school.

LF: You didn’t have a clear path to what you wanted to do?

MAA: The only thing I knew that I wanted to do was to go to San Francisco. Since high school, I knew I should be in San Francisco. That didn’t change. With my best friend, Thomas Redmond, we knew that was our path – to go to San Francisco.

LF: You were politically motivated, and not looking for a job?

MAA: We didn’t know – we didn’t care. We just needed to be in San Francisco. 

That’s how I ended up in Jackson, working for the Mississippi Association of Cooperatives, working with Melbah McAfee. She taught me everything I know in terms of running an organization.

LF: What happened after graduating? Where did you go?

MAA: Immediately after graduating, I ended up on a military base in Kentucky, with my uncle and my aunt, the one they called an old maid. Subsequent to that, she got married and moved to Kentucky. I went there because I couldn’t decide what was I going to do after college. I had no direction, no money, nothing. I wasn’t even thinking of going to graduate school at the time. I just needed a break. I went to live with them, and worked in a nursery. Then, I came back to Oxford and started working with Wayne [Johnson] at the cooperative day care center. 

At this point, he aligned with the Mississippi Association of Cooperatives. I wanted to leave Oxford. I just could not be there. The association director was a woman. I just wanted to get to Jackson. When she came for a site visit, I said to her, “I want a job in Jackson.” She looked at me, and said, “I’m sorry. I don’t have any openings.” I said that was okay, that I’d call her next week. Then, she said, “Actually, I do have an opening for you.” That’s how I ended up in Jackson working for the Mississippi Association of Cooperatives, working with Melbah McAfee. She taught me everything I know in terms of running an organization. 

LF: What was your position at that time?

MAA: Like her assistant, an assistant director. It’s interesting because just after I started working for her, my mother died of ovarian cancer. I became legal guardian of my brothers and sisters. My mother had been in the hospital in Jackson, at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, and I was there with her. I remember one day saying to Melbah, “I’m going to have to quit because I’m not working. I can’t maintain this job and take care of my mother. I feel really bad. I can’t take a paycheck.” Do you know what she said to me? She said, “As long as I have a job, you have a job.” I’ll never forget that. I’ll never forget that, Lorraine. “You just come in when you can.” And that’s what I did. 

Guardian Mother

After my mother died, I brought the kids to Jackson. I didn’t have any other relatives there. I went to work and found a place to live.

LF: How old was the youngest kid?

MAA: Nine years old. They were 9, 11, 13, and 16. The younger ones stayed with my sister and my grandmother. 

I worked with Melbah probably two more years. It was becoming very difficult for Melbah to keep paying me. The CETA funding we had was drying up, and I was going without paychecks. That was very difficult because I had the kids. I was torn. I felt this allegiance to her because of how she had helped me, and I didn’t know what to do. 

Remember Lindia, my roommate in college? She had graduated from Rutgers Law School. She was working as an attorney at Legal Services in Jackson. We always remained friends. She stayed with me and the kids when she was studying for the bar exam in Mississippi. She came by and she said, “Adams, there’s an opening for a paralegal,” because she knew that I was struggling. I went to work as a paralegal for four years.

I was the benefits paralegal. I represented people with SSI [Supplemental Security Income], Social Security benefits, food stamps, unemployment benefits, etc. The paralegals did all of that. We represented people before the ALJs. We wrote the briefs, and we did all of that. We researched the Mississippi Code. I absolutely loved that job. 

I was raising my brother and sisters. I was working as a paralegal at Legal Services. I also worked as a newsletter editor there. And I worked as a librarian. I had three jobs there to support the kids because my folks didn’t have any money. 

That was when I bought my first house. You see, I was part of the whole artsy, Black folks scene, the poets and writers, who were also in real estate. They took me and the kids under their wings, and they said I needed a house. They all had houses. I’m like, I’m thinking that I don’t need a house. I didn’t even have a concept of having a house, do you know what I mean? 

And they said, “No, you need a house. You have to get a house.” One friend would come on Saturday to take me to look for a house, and we found one on Presidential Hill, where every street was named after a president. We lived on Abraham Lincoln Drive. That mortgage note was like $248 a month [laughter].

On to Atlanta

I worked at Legal Services. I quit to moved when my youngest sibling graduated. I moved to Atlanta, on Sept. 25, 1988.

LF: Why Atlanta? What made you decide to move here?

MAA: Chasing a woman.

LF: Now let’s talk about knowing who you were in terms of your sexual orientation, when you came out, and all that.

MAA: I had boyfriends all through school but I never had any emotional connection with them. I developed physically very early, and I got the attention of men and boys early. It was really unwanted attention. I walked around with my arms folded across my breasts all the time. I would get all these cat calls and all this disrespectful stuff. I was also sexually molested by my uncle when I was five and he was sixteen. I always felt under siege. My cousin’s husband and my auntie’s husband… most of us girls were under siege. I had boyfriends, but I never felt what they said they were feeling. I had a really close girl friend, and we would write each other letters on the weekend; but I couldn’t name that anything. When I was in seventh and eighth grade, everyone was saying, “You and so-and-so act like you all are dating each other!” But we never had any name for any of that stuff. 

When I was coming up there was a gay guy, a hairdresser in the neighborhood, named Fisher. All the kids would go to Fisher for him to babysit. I never heard anything negative about Fisher. He was just part of the community. “Oh, Fisher, take the kids. We’re going downtown.” We had another gay boy, and we called him a sissy. We had those guys in the community, but I don’t ever remember any lesbians. I’m sure there were, in retrospect.

LF: Did you have any names for girls or women who were thought to be gay?

MAA: Nah. My mother talked about this woman, a “hermaphrodite”— that’s what she called her at the time. My mother was the first person that I heard talk about that. We’d ask “what’s that?” because my mother was pretty open. She didn’t say it in any way that was negative. She said “I had this friend …” In my community, no one talked about sexuality. They didn’t talk about sexual orientation. They didn’t talk about any of that. Even in college. There were a lot of gay guys in college, but nobody ever talked about it. 

LF: Was it like “don’t ask, don’t tell?”

MAA: I guess so. Nobody even talked about it. When I was 19, at the Army base, it was the first time I had the opportunity to just stop. Since I was 12, I had been just going, going, going. That was the first time I really had an opportunity to spend some time with myself. I’m on an Army base, I’m working in a daycare center, and it’s not really engaging me intellectually. I’m going to the library on the base and reading. I was able to read and write and think. I remember writing this, this realization that I was a lesbian. 

LF: That was before you fell in love with another woman?

MAA: Oh, yeah. I remember writing this letter that was twenty pages long to my best friend telling her not that I was a lesbian, telling her that I believed I was bisexual. She wrote me back, and she said, “We could have told you that.” I never had anything connected to men. When I moved to Jackson, when I got the kids, I was starting to try to explore my sexuality. I didn’t know any other lesbians. Remember JJ, the professor who became my friend and mentor, the first Black professor at Ole Miss? She was the first person that I confided in. I would go to Knoxville where she was there, and she had a lesbian friend who had written a book about LGBTQ. She gave me that book. She would stop by to see me and the kids, and spend the night when she was on the way to see her mother in Hattiesburg. One year, I told her I had something to tell her. I said, “I think I’m a lesbian.” She said, “Well, I’m not!” [laughter]

We kind of laughed about it. Then she called me back, and she said, “Listen, I have a friend, a white friend, who used to be at Jackson State, who had started dating this Black woman from D.C., who was now going to Tougaloo College.” JJ said, “Her name is Frederica Sands, and you two have to be friends.”

…then she came back to my house, and we became lovers. When I told JJ, she said,
“I told you to be friends with her, not to go to bed with her.”

I’d be driving around, lonely to the bone. I can’t explain it. I started asking my artist friends, “Do you know this woman?” Nobody knew her. Then Maya called about two weeks later, and she said, “You know the woman you were asking about? She’s my intern.” I said, “What?” [laughter] She didn’t know why I was asking about her, I told her that my friend mentioned that she was here, and that I should meet her. We arranged to meet. We went out to a play and then she came back to my house, and we became lovers. When I told JJ, and she said, “I told you to be friends with her, not to go to bed with her.” When I told my Black activist friends, who were much older than I was, the artists and all, they were very homophobic. They did not like it.

LF: I would think in the arts community that you’d have lots more LGBT folks?

MAA: This was in the late 1970s, early ’80s. They had all these children. They were Black nationalists. Think about it.

LF: It was a Black nationalist kind of setting in the arts community?

MAA: Absolutely. There were a lot of Muslims, they had all come out of the Muslim community together. That’s how a lot of them had met each other. Both the men and the women had lots of children.

LF: That’s a hard place to even be a feminist, I think.

MAA: Yes. I think the one that was very accepting was Virgia Brocks-Shedd, the head librarian at Tougaloo College. She also lived on Presidential Hill. She would tell everyone, “She’s a strong sister. She’s raising her sisters and brother.” I rejected that label, saying “No, I’m not.” There was something in me even then. I felt like I was being set up. She would invite me down when she had all these folks at her home, these artists who would come in from out-of-town. Alexis De Veaux came into town with her biography on Lady Day. Virgia wanted me to meet her, and invited me down. I later spoke with Alexis about the first time that she met Dr. Margaret Walker Alexander, and I was privy to that. I really appreciated Virgia for that. She was very open. I think she had messed around with men and women, and that she was just open, period.

LF: Frederica was your first lover. Did she have connections with other parts of the lesbian community?

MAA: Oh, absolutely. She was a big part of Sisterfire that used to take place in D.C. every year. She turned me on to a lot of writers. Before I met her, I found out about the Gay Community News, and I would order that. It would come to my house with 50 million staples in it, and I couldn’t wait to get those staples out. I learned about a lot.

LF: Was that Gay Community News from Boston?

MAA: No, that was out of New York City. That’s how I learned about a lot of activist LGBT folks, like Joseph Beam, through the Gay Community News. I would say to all my friends, “Bring me back…(specific books),” and they didn’t know what they were bringing back for me. 

Then Frederica started living with me. She didn’t really want to be on campus. She was an older student, five years younger than me, but she was worldly, and she had been around. Through her, I really became immersed in lesbian culture. I was also part of the Southern Rural Women’s Network, in Jackson, that Billie Jean Young was heading up. Pam Hall, who lives here now, I met her (and Pat started dating Billie Jean). Her mother was a lesbian. I didn’t know anybody. Then, all of a sudden, I meet Frederica, I meet Pam…

LF: And her mother….

MAA: Her mother was a lesbian at Jackson State, very closeted. Her lover was a principal at a rural school in Mississippi. She would come on the weekends, and it was an interesting time. 

LF: I’m trying to figure out the connection with Atlanta. Why Atlanta?

MAA: That’s what I’m saying. I met a woman who was in graduate school at Emory, and that’s how I came to Atlanta. I always pictured myself as a kind of nomad. If I hadn’t taken the guardianship of the kids I would have moved sooner. Absolutely. I was going to move someplace. I had never considered Atlanta. It just happened that Atlanta was in my destiny, and that’s how I moved here in ’88. Before I moved here, I met Eddie Sandifer, who was this white gay male activist.

In the meantime, those old Black women–who vote–came to the city council. They said that they didn’t care what Eddie was, and that they would support Eddie Sandifer because he was the only person who stood up for them.
That’s how it got passed.

When I was working for Legal Services, Eddie was probably the most courageous person that I knew. He was trying to get an AIDS House established on the same street with the Eudora Welty House, and folks were not having that.

Eddie Sandifer was like the pied piper to old Black women when the first of the month came. He would take them to buy groceries, he would take them to pay bills, he would take them to pick up their food stamps. The folks at Legal Services where I was working tolerated Eddie even though they were homophobic, too.

Eddie was smart, and he knew his rights. When he went before city council to try to get that house zoned, he was denied. He came to Legal Services asking them to represent him, and they didn’t want to. In the meantime, those old Black women–who vote–came to the city council. They said that they didn’t care what Eddie was, and that they would support Eddie Sandifer because he was the only person who stood up for them. That’s how it got passed. That story needs to be told more often.

You talk about intersectionality today; and you talk about the power of people connecting, and how that superseded race, and gender, and class. It was amazing. Those old, church-going Black women came in there, to that city council meeting, and they stood up for Eddie Sandifer. Eddie brought the first AIDS Quilt to Jackson. He also took me to my first Southeastern Gay Conference in Birmingham. That was the first time that I saw Meg Christian and Kate Clinton.

Connecting with Lesbians

LF: Talk more about how you got to Atlanta, and how you connected with the community here. What did you know about what already existed here, not only in the Black LGBT community? Did you know about ALFA (Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance), about AALGA [African American Lesbian Gay Alliance], and any other organizations that existed then?

MAA: When I came to Atlanta, I didn’t know about much that was going on. I knew I wanted to find out where the Black lesbians were because I had never been a part of a Black lesbian community. I really hadn’t been part of any lesbian community. 

I’d never really seen a whole bunch of Black lesbians. I did come to Atlanta when Spelman had a national women’s conference. Marlene Johnson was doing a workshop on the Black lesbian movement, and I remember I could not wait to go to that workshop because that was my first opportunity to be in a room full of black lesbians, period.

LF: What year was that?

MAA: Let’s see, I moved here in 1988, and it was around that time. I remember being so emotionally full, feeling just this palpable connection, feeling something I never quite felt before. That day, in that room, it was as though the melding of everything I had read about and listened to, on radio and on tape, came together. I really can’t explain it besides to say that it felt like coming home, to be in that room. For the first time, I felt able to be myself. I don’t think I gave voice to anything that day. But I felt as though I could be safe.

LF: That’s wonderful. 

MAA: Yes, it was huge, really huge. We had all come on the bus together. There was nobody else on that bus that had come from Mississippi. No one who came with me that day. I was acutely aware of that, and not exactly knowing what that meant. I still felt alone at the conference. But I think I was able to take that energy, and that feeling, and that affirmation with me to the next step on my journey. 

When I moved here, I was really very steeped in Black culture and Black nationalism. Really, since early on, all those activists at the Black House taught us every single day that Black is beautiful, we’re inferior to no one, and we believed that. It never occurred to me that I would be involved in an interracial relationship. When I came to Atlanta, I was already involved with a white woman. That was very difficult for me to reconcile. 

We had been together for four years, and I felt like, if I get involved with these Black lesbians, they are going to question why I’m with a white woman. Maybe they won’t fully accept me. I just couldn’t get a handle on this whole, you know, race thing. I couldn’t reconcile what I had been taught, what I felt emotionally, and how I wanted to go forward in the world. And the history, too, of how white folks had oppressed Black folks. It was all kind of mish-mashed for me. I didn’t have anybody that I could talk to about this stuff. I kept it bottled inside me.

ZAMI

I finally started hearing about ZAMI. I would call the number, and I could never get anybody [laughter]. No one would call you back, nobody would answer the phone. Then I met Gareth Finley, and she knew all the Black women in ZAMI. Gareth invited them to her house for brunch. She was living right off Moreland in East Atlanta. Gareth introduced me that day.

LF: ZAMI had already existed? I thought you were one of the founding members of ZAMI?

MAA: No. I mean, there was a second iteration. The first iteration was started by Iris Rafi, who lived here in East Point [neighborhood in central Atlanta]. It was my understanding that they had AALGA (African American Lesbian Gay Alliance). It started to be overrun by testosterone, that is, the men were trying to take over. The women decided that they would form their own organization. They were still a part of AALGA, and they had their own organization. Then, they had some dissension. There were Black lesbians who wanted to bring in their white partners and other partners of color, and there were women that said, “No, we want this to remain a Black lesbian organization.” They could not come to any reconciliation on that. Everybody just took their toys and went home. 

Iris Rafi, the founder, went to Germany while she was a student at Spelman College, where she met Audre Lorde, who had published ZAMI, A New Spelling of My Name. Iris came back, and she called up those lesbians, telling them to come over to her house to start a new organization. They called it “ZAMI.” That’s how ZAMI was started. She was in the camp where she wanted it to be exclusively Black lesbians.

LF: Were you trying to connect with Iris Rafi at that point?  

MAA: She had already left. When I came, somebody else was running it. I was trying to connect with them. The group was not as political as I wanted them to be. They were very closeted. They were meeting periodically at Charis Books and More, the feminist bookstore. I was on the fringes. I had parties at my house in Grant Park [a neighborhood in central Atlanta], where bunch of us would get together and do the newsletter for ZAMI. Lisa Moore, who wrote “Does Your Mama Know” and who was the publisher of RedBone Press; Anjail Rashad, now a professor at North Carolina State, and now, legally blind. That’s what was new: that newsletter was our contribution. 

LF: Do you still have newsletters? And can you archive them? 

MA: I have some, but Lisa Moore probably has all of them. Auburn Avenue Research Library has the ones that we had. We did that. Then, something happened, and Iris and I decided to go on a hiatus.

LF: Was this in the early 1990s?

MAA: Yeah, I would say around 1991 or 1992, something like that. We were meeting in people’s homes. Then Iris and I decided that we were going to reinvigorate the organization. We would be very out, very visible, and very political. We had a truce with some of the women that we would be the face of the organization, and they would be behind us, supporting us. They feared for their safety, their employment, their family relationships, and all of that – and we did not. Once we became involved, it never went back into hiatus again. We continued to be involved, helping to grow the organization. 

LF: Do you remember what year that was?

MAA: I do. In 1995, I started the Audre Lorde Scholarship Fund. It was the early 90s. Iris decided that she was going to step down again, and Carla Rabb became very active in ZAMI with me, recruiting a lot of the younger women and helping with the newsletter. We were very vibrant, very active, because it was very important for us to continue to create visibility of Black lesbians, for us to be political and to push our way to the table. 

Meanwhile, I was no longer seeing the white woman I had been seeing. I was seeing a Black lesbian activist in Chicago, very political, who had been a member of Chicago Black Lesbians and Gays since its inception. I was traveling back and forth to Chicago, which further politicized me because I was able to see how they did things. They considered it was a right to be involved in city government and in all facets of their lives. They were citizens; they paid taxes. That was very informative, very educational for me to be able to see that. I did a comparative analysis of how we were really not claiming our rightful place in city government, in county government, in state politics. 

I understand that the Chicago lesbians and gays were politicized from being part of the Daley camp. They were politicized early on – that’s who they were –they demanded everything. It was really very eye-opening for me, to be part of that. When I went up to Chicago, I was part of the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame event that the city paid for. They had a big banquet every year, inducting ten people every year. The city backed them with thousands and thousands of dollars. It was a big to-do. It was amazing, just amazing.

LF: Could that could ever happen here?

MAA: When I came back, I would talk about it; but I could never get any traction. It was as though folks here were just not interested in it. I couldn’t do it by myself, but I would try.

LF: Was ZAMI mainly just a social-cultural organization at that point?

MAA: Yes, but we also had a support group and a series of workshops. We decided to get our own office in Decatur [Atlanta area] with some therapists. Marlene Johnson was in that building. There were two other white therapists, and we were there. We were the only organization in there. It was close to Decatur High School, which was great. We all had to move at some point because of the landlord. We were there for probably two years. We also had an office with Youth Pride. We had an office in the Baptist Church on Virginia Avenue in the basement. We had a series of offices, and folks would come to volunteer. We just really wanted to be visible and political. We were able to do a number of things that way.

In the Atlanta media, we saw that it was white, gay men, primarily, who were speaking for us. We wanted to say, “This is who we are. We have a voice. We’re part of this community.”

LF: Would you say ZAMI ever had a particular cultural influence, whether it be literary or arts or music? 

MAA: It’s interesting that you would ask me that question. Reflecting on it brings up some kind of distress. Among some lesbians in this community, we had a reputation of being too literary, which I think was unfair. We read books – of course we did – and we were unapologetic about that. We had the monthly newsletter. We were the first group to bring Michelle Parkerson and Ada Gay Griffin to town for the screening of Audre Lorde’s film, Litany for Survival. We were the first ones to bring Sharon Bridgforth here. For the first fundraiser we ever had, Jocelyn Taylor, a filmmaker in New York City at the time, came and brought a series of her short films, which we screened at Emory University. 

I guess we were, absolutely. We did a lot of things around the arts because we were trying to create community. We knew that it would be strategic for us to bring people together around art, music, and song that was non-threatening. It was a way for people to learn. The folks we would bring were very political, and they were Black lesbians. We brought Nikky Finney here, and she was amazing. In the Atlanta media, we saw that it was white, gay men, primarily, who were speaking for us. We wanted to say, “This is who we are. We have a voice. We’re part of this community.” One way to do that, in terms of visibility, was to put on those cultural events. 

LF: Did you get support from the LGBT news media to send that information out to people? Were you able, or did you even want to put announcements in other media like Southern Voice and all these other little free papers?

MAA: We were able to get articles in Southern Voice. In fact, they absolutely wanted to cover us, and they did cover us. We were also able to have Charis make announcements for us. We would utilize their space a lot, and we certainly utilized the First Existentialist Congregation of Atlanta [now part of the Unitarian Universalist Association], which we felt was our home. Rev. Lanier Clance, the founding minister, was just absolutely supportive, not only by saying, “You’ll have this space for free” when we would try to pay for it. He’d say, “No, this is my contribution.” He would also always donate with his dollars to the scholarship fund every year. He told me, “Mary Anne, I look forward to this scholarship program being here every single year.” We pretty much had it there every year. That was his contribution, and he broadly embraced us. We always felt welcome there. 

I think one of the other things we were able to do, as an organization, was a lot of coalition work, more than any other organization. We were able to get a grant from Astraea to bring in students from Atlanta University Center. We brought them into Atlanta two Saturdays a month. We were able to get a van, and we hired a program manager. They told us that they felt unsafe on campus–a lot of people don’t know that. They were able to talk with each other and connect with each other around issues that were impacting them.

[The Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice is an international, charitable foundation based in the United States, focused on issues related to LGBT and intersex rights for people of color. The organization provide grants to individuals and organizations; promotes philanthropy; and provides assistance to make transformational impact over time.]

Lillie Huddleston and Kathy Williams were partners at the time, and they had a little jazz joint that they let us use. We were also able to get a grant for a program called “Building Bridges” with other lesbians of color, a program that we held once a month. We had big dinners catered by Lus Pepper Heusner-Wilkinson and Michelle Heusner-Wilkinson of A Time to Dine Chefs and Caterers. Each time, the dinner would feature somebody’s culture. If it was a lesbian from India, it would be her food. It could be Jamaican food, or soul food, etc. We shared a meal and told our stories to each other.

We also reached out to Second Sunday, the Black gay men’s organization, to invite them to meet with us. They were really not interested, but we kept after them until they met with us. We met at AID Atlanta twice. We also had a big gathering with them where we broke bread together. It’s also important to mention that ZAMI reached out to Fourth Tuesday [an organization of women and lesbian professionals] and to the Atlanta Health Initiative in order to help us raise money with a basketball tournament held at a gym in Decatur. We were very intentional in using their gym in downtown Decatur since we pay our taxes. We were going to be there. We held a tournament two years in a row, and it was wonderful. People looked forward to it.

LF: Do you remember when that was?

MAA: Gee, I think the last one we had was in 1999 or 2000. We had two, and they were gracious. All of the money went to the scholarship fund. It was four teams: Fourth Tuesday, ZAMI, the Health Initiative, and, I think, the Women’s Outdoor Sports Network. We had cheerleaders, we sold food, and it was wonderful. Also at the First Existentialist Congregation of Atlanta, we sponsored–and Charis Books and More facilitated–all the organizations getting together for a lesbian trivia night where we competed against each other. 

LF: Was ALFA (Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance) ever involved in any of those coalitions or events?

MAA: ALFA may have been involved in that trivia thing at the First Existentialist Congregation.

I remember going over to ALFA once, and I think it was at the end of their time here, when we were doing all of this stuff, you know? We did something with Black & White Men Together. We’ve done a lot of work with many different organizations in the city, very intentionally.

LF: Was there a continuous ZAMI presence through the present time? 

MAA: Absolutely. From the time I took over with Iris, we never stopped. We continued to grow and evolve. We also put on the first drag king show in the city during Black Gay Pride. It was our big event of the year, and we were able to bring people together, paid prizes, and all of that. People really looked forward to it. It was huge. It was also an opportunity for us to educate, if you will, and to reinforce the fact that we were a feminist organization. 

Some folks wanted to come into the drag king show and lip-sync songs that were disrespectful to women. We had some parameters, and a lot of people were disgruntled with us. But we didn’t relent. All kinds of folks wanted to join, and a lot of people didn’t like it that we had standards. We got a reputation for censorship, like, “you can’t say this, you can’t say that.” No matter. We were able to have some really successful drag king shows that people really looked forward to during Black Gay Pride.

LF: Did ZAMI always see itself as a feminist organization, a womanist organization?

MAA: Oh, yes. Absolutely.

LF: Then it should have been obvious to them that those kinds of songs might have been problematic.

MAA: That’s assuming that they read the publicity. If you looked, every single thing you read said: “ZAMI, Atlanta’s premier organization for lesbians of African descent, is a feminist organization.” Iris and I were very clear from the onset that we were feminist, and that it would be a feminist organization. Absolutely. We wrote that in black and white. Because we took over. I try to correct people and say that I didn’t start ZAMI. But people say that I was instrumental in the second creation of ZAMI, and that’s true. I was instrumental in taking it in a different direction.

LF: You talk about being personally in arts community involved in Mississippi, and continuing to have the literary connection with the arts. Are there any other aspects of your life that connected with the arts? Did ZAMI have direct connection with the overall arts community, with the coalitions of many arts groups and individuals here in Atlanta?

MAA: I would say no. The reason I would say no is that it was very important for us to support Black lesbian artists, and there were not that many Black lesbian artists.

ZAMI NOBLA [National Organization of Black Lesbians on Aging]

LF: Let’s talk about the second reinvigoration of ZAMI, making it ZAMI NOBLA.

MAA: As I mentioned earlier, I’ve always been involved with old women, elderly women, aging women. I’ve always been drawn to trying to advocate for a better quality of life for old people generally. I’ve always been around them, and gained so much wisdom and love to hear their stories. I envisioned myself as an old woman at 100 years old still being vibrant. I think that’s because my grandmother died 10 days from her 100^th birthday. My aunt Sara, her youngest sister, is 91 now. She’s still lucid, and my grandmother was very lucid to the end. So there’s longevity in my family, certainly. I don’t see “old” and aging as something that’s negative. I don’t see it as a derogatory word, or term, or way of living or being. 

I’ve always wanted to have an organization that grew with me as I grew older. In 2010, I was really tired. I was talking to some folks about continuing with ZAMI, which was not happening. I decided that I was going to start it myself. I was looking around to start the next chapter, the next organization that had to do with aging. I had been trying to get people to adopt the concept of comentoring, as opposed to just saying that so-and-so was my mentor. I want people to look at the idea that whether someone’s older or someone’s younger, we all have knowledge to share; we’re all growing; we’re all evolving. 

Paris Hatcher^,[Executive Director, Black Feminist Future] asked me about mentoring at a community function put on by Unity Fellowship one year. They had named an annual scholarship after me that I gave to people every year. Paris came up and said that she’d like for me to mentor her, and I said, “On one condition: that you will mentor me, and we’ll be comentors to each other.”

When I was thinking about this new chapter in my life, and what new organization I would start–I had to start something, that’s just who I am and how I move in the world–around aging, and I was thinking about a name, Paris said, “I think that you should continue to call it “ZAMI-something” because ZAMI is well-established in the community, it’s well respected, it has integrity, and people know it. You won’t have to start new with funders because they know it. I think it’s something you should do.” I respected her brilliance, her activism, and her wisdom. 

I want people to look at the idea that whether someone’s older or someone’s younger,
we all have knowledge to share; we’re all growing; we’re all evolving.

I convened a group of Black lesbians here, probably about 40 of them, and told them what I wanted to do. I asked them if they were interested in being part of this organization, and most said they were. At the time, I talked about being open to all lesbians in the community because I was not welded to it being a Black lesbian organization, quite frankly. I was really open to it being an organization for every lesbian. I had grown from that racial dynamic in terms of that identity. I was more open to it being Black, white, of color, whatever. But the consensus was that they wanted it to be a Black organization. I said OK. I came up with the name, “National Organization of Black Lesbians on Aging,” or ZAMI NOBLA. Everybody liked that. 

When you looked around one day and all the women who had been involved with ZAMI for 20 years were aging, then you should have the foresight to meet people where they are, and to organize around that part of life, intentionally. We had to figure out how to create a space for ourselves proactively, and to build a life that we give us some agency around aging. I think it’s important to develop conscious aging, to develop a new paradigm of aging. It’s important to me personally, and to us as an organization, that we understand that we can build a community together as we age. We don’t have to isolate ourselves. We can be as much a part of this community today as we were twenty years ago. We are necessary and vital to continuing to build this community.

I think the missing piece is that we don’t know our value because society has taught us to believe that when you get older, you are no longer productive, you are no longer a valuable member, and that you can no longer contribute.  You are not in the dawning of your life, but not at the point of disintegrating. People equate “old” with “decrepit,” with sickness, and with illness. We are trying to dismantle that paradigm. I think it’s important, first of all, to start telling people our age – you know, “This is what 61 looks like,” or “This is what 70 looks like,” or “This is what 80 looks like.” We have to create these models ourselves; we have to be the ones to do this. We can’t stand idly by when people say, “Oh, you don’t look 50,” and counter with “Well, thank you, but no, I do look 50. This is what 50 looks like.” Or, “This is what 80 looks like, and I’m proud that I’m 80, that I’m here talking with you, that I’m out marching.” 

There are all kinds of ways to be active, and that’s important for people to understand. If you are no longer able or willing to march, that does not mean that you are not an active, contributing part of this community. Active could be writing a check, it could be teaching little Sally at the community center how to read – that’s activism. I think we have gotten into this situation in our community by defining activism as one thing, and making people feel bad if they’re not standing downtown in front of the courthouse at a protest. I think it’s something that we really need to reexamine. 

It’s dangerous, because we’re driving a lot of people indoors and inside. When I was on the intergeneration panel a couple of weeks ago, I talked about this very thing. I think it’s arrogant, first of all, to define what activism looks like. I think it’s also very dangerous when you intentionally or unconsciously shut out a whole population of folks because they’ve gotten old. I’ve heard some young activists say on Facebook “This is not your grandfather’s movement!” Ah, hello?  That’s dangerous. But what’s even sadder is that we don’t have the benefit of being in each other’s space in a very meaningful way. That’s one of the planks in ZAMI NOBLA’s platform: we’re doing intergenerational mobilizing and activism. 

LF: Is there an age group that can be a member of ZAMI? Will younger people relate to a program you have, or can younger people be members of ZAMI NOBLA?

MAA: We start at age 40, which is very intentional. Most organizations for old folks and seniors, like Old Lesbians Organizing for Change [OLOC], for instance, start at 60. You can’t be a member unless you’re 60. That’s a whole 20 years between ZAMI NOBLA and OLOC’s membership. And Atlanta OLOC starts at 50. I think that’s important. I’ve been talking to some sisters in this community and elsewhere who are very interested in starting ZAMI again, and I’m working with them on that. They start ZAMI, under age 40, and then we have ZAMI NOBLA starting at age 40.

Also, we’re doing programming together. You can’t be a member of ZAMI NOBLA unless you’re 40, but you can work with ZAMI NOBLA even if you’re under 40. We have students working with us all the time. There is a student group from Georgia State University, five undergraduates who did a project called “health happens here.” They chose us as the organization to work with, and they did a video of us. This was a young Indian brother and two white women, one heterosexual, one bisexual, as well as one Black lesbian sister and one straight sister. They chose us, you know? They were saying that they never even knew that there were lesbians who had health disparities. They never knew that there were older lesbians. It was really very educational for them. 

These are folks who are going to be making policy, and it’s important that we start to work with young people, and not just young, queer people. I think it’s important that we widen that net because again, I am concerned about the policies and regulations that people are going to make who know nothing, who have no idea, or who have no intergenerational connections.

LF: Talk about your academic and work life at Georgia State University, and include how that relates to your activism and your lesbian-feminist community actions.

MAA: I work at Georgia State University in the School of Public Health as the Director of the Community Engagement Core in the Center of Excellence on Health Disparities Research. I know that’s a mouthful. I also direct HIV street-based research, and I have been doing this since 2004. When I was at Emory, the School of Public Health recruited my boss, Richard Rothenberg, MD, and I ended up at Georgia State University. I am a social worker sitting at the table of public health, and I see things through a different lens. That means that I manage research very differently than it’s been managed before. The reason I know this is because my staff tell me so. 

My feminism, my background being poor, my social justice lens, all of this comes into play in my work at Georgia State University. We work with marginalized populations in five zip codes in metro Atlanta where the prevalence and the incidence of HIV-AIDS is the highest. We work with sex workers, drug dealers, and drug users, by and large. We go out to crack houses, we go under bridges, we go to abandoned houses, we go out to parks. We go places where nobody goes, not even AID Atlanta, not even the Fulton County Health Dept. This is where we recruit our participants. The reason that we go to these places is because we have immediate entrée because my staff are folks who have been on the street, who’ve been in prison. My field supervisor has spent some twenty-one years in prison, has been an addict, has been on the street…all of that.

LF: It sounds like you purposefully try to find ex-offenders and homeless people to work on the project?

MAA: Absolutely, because they’re the experts, not me. You know, they are authentic, not me. But even then, I’ve had to do a lot of training with them on working with the LGBT population. Because they’re homophobic, they have not had these experiences before. I’ve done a lot of training, and it’s really paid off. For example, we do a survey, going out under bridges. We test people for HIV and sexually transmitted infections. If we go out in the community and encounter a homeless person, we spend six months doing ethnography, just kicking it in the community before we talk to anybody about any research. That’s built into our grant application. We are trying to develop a rapport, to develop trust, to let them know we are not the police. By the time we start doing research, they know who we are.

If somebody, for example, hasn’t eaten in three days, we’re not going to interview him. Do not put a survey in someone’s face when they’ve told you they haven’t eaten. We don’t do that. We feed them. Our NIH grant only allows us to buy condoms and water, and that’s all. You can’t eat a condom, you know? People are hungry. We also go and get coats and blankets and stuff. It’s not part of our grant, but we do that. We lead people to treatment. We’re not supposed to do that, but we do. 

My assistant is a chef Last Thanksgiving, everybody sat down to a turkey dinner. We partnered with Unity Fellowship, and we came out the day after Thanksgiving. We knew everybody would be there, ZAMI NOBLA folks, Georgia State University folks, and Unity folks, all three of us. We brought hot food, and blankets, and quilts, and socks, all things that people need. We do that every day. My staff knows that they don’t have to call me to say, “Mary Anne, I’ve just encountered Johnny, and he has asked me to take him to a treatment facility.” They can just do that because that’s the culture of the work that we do.

I have two jobs: the HIV AIDS work, and then I manage the Community Engagement Core where my job is to work with the community-based organizations to help them build capacity and then to help them sustain those programs.

LF: All related to health?

MAA: To health disparities. Everything is related to health disparities. I work on environmental health. I work with HIV/AIDS organizations. I work with the Black churches to get them to develop HIV/AIDS ministries, which I have done. I’ve gotten money from Georgia State. I’ve begged for money to give to these organizations. For example, we paid English Avenue Neighborhood Association for their staff member for two years to give them capacity to work in their organization. 

With Eco-Action, which is a state-wide, environmental action organization, they’ve wanted to work with the youth, and they didn’t have the money. I asked the Georgia State School of Public Health to give me $30,000, which they gave me. We went out to the New Schools at Carver, and we developed a curriculum. We paid those students $300 in cash and incentivized them. And we taught there, and we also took them on field trips to see the field. It was wonderful. Then, we worked with Upward Bound students at Georgia State. These are just examples of the kind of work that we do.

LF: They still have Upward Bound?

MAA: Yes. I had been asking the School of Public Health to give me some money to do some Black lesbian research. For years, they would never do it until, finally, this last April, they said “Okay, Mary Anne, we have some money.” I wrote the grant, and they gave me $50,000. That’s how I was able to do the Black Lesbians and Aging: Understanding Health Care Needs. I could do whatever I wanted to do with the money, and I decided to incentivize the participants: $50 in cash and I paid for their parking. We had a hundred women from age 40 to 91. I partnered with Dr. Tonia Poteat at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health to do the analysis and write the reports. I hired a transcriptionist and a coder, all Black lesbians.

LF: Working where you do, and having that expertise and background, really does help the community and community organizations, as well as contributing research and helping people in academia. People tend to think of academia as something that never really affects us or anybody we know. This is an example of how that’s not necessarily true. It depends on who you are, and how you use the resources you have.

MAA: That’s right, and I was just about to say that. I mentor a lot of graduate students, undergraduate and master’s students. One of the common things they ask me is, “Mary Anne, what do you think I should do?” I tell them that I think they should go into policy. “You should sit at the table. And it’s not enough just to sit at the table. You have to make that count and get engaged in it.” I found that early on, when I was first getting out of graduate school at Georgia State University in the Social Work Program. When the Hope VI project was revitalizing public housing, I started working with the Dean of the School of Social Work and one of the professors. They called me in there because I was interested in housing, and because they had Hope VI money from the Atlanta Housing Authority. 

We were working with Grady Hospital and with certain housing developments, with the folks who were being relocated. They were paying the people approximately $25, and I said, “Why are you all paying them? To come to the focus groups, right? Why don’t we pay them $100?” and they said “Okay.” That was very instructive for me. We don’t, oftentimes, exercise the agency and power that we have sitting at those tables. They didn’t fight me on it. Next, I said,”Well, we need to feed them.” And they said “Okay.” I got Pepper and Michelle. They would come in the evening, and I would meet them at the loading dock of the University, and that’s who we got. They had nice, thick, big breads; and nice meats; all this food. I wanted the people to have quality food after they were coming from work every evening. That was very instructive for me. They just said “Okay.”

LF: It takes someone with consciousness to think of these details.

MAA: Exactly. I’m amazed that they don’t even know. I would say to myself, “I’m gonna get these folks as much money as I can get them.” That’s another thing, and I won’t name them, but there are some Black people and some queer people in this community that don’t believe in incentivizing people for the researchers who do the work. That’s one thing I like about working with Tonia. We believe in giving people as much money as we can. 

When I came to work at Georgia State University as the Director, they were paying the staff just what everybody else was getting paid. I pushed, and I was able to get them at least $10,000 more in salary. I’m always pushing for that. To me, I don’t believe in this top-heavy thing, not at all. My staff will tell you what I say to them: “Listen, while you’re at Georgia State University, you need to take advantage of these workshops.” We go to as a group, as a team, because they don’t feel they are entitled. They don’t have the benefit of college. I’m reminding them, “You’re here!” I make sure they get as much as they can.

I’ll always be that poor, little Black girl from Mississippi who didn’t have anything. I’m very clear about that. I don’t have a back-up. I’ve been on my own since I was 16 years old. And if I don’t get it for myself, it’s not gotten.

They said, “We’ve got to go out in the field today.” I said, “No, we are going to this workshop.” I’m fortunate that I work with somebody who lets me run my research the way I want. I never see him, but if I need him, I can email him or call him on the phone, and he’s there. He told me the day he hired me, “Mary Anne, my job is to keep people employed. Your job is to run the day-to-day operations.” And he meant that. He trusts me. I’ve been with him for ten years. He’s a medical doctor who worked in the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention]. The way I do research is not how he would do it; but he’s not interfering with how I do it. 

LF: That’s wonderful. He trusts you enough with good reason.

MAA: Yes, he does. I have to give it to him. He really does not interfere. And, you know, I’m very honest. I’m not going to do anything that is going to compromise us. I told the staff from day one, “I don’t want anybody saying anything to me about something we’ve done that’s not ethical.” We’re not doing anything unethical. I’ll fire people if they do. Because I’m clear about who I am, Lorraine. I’ll always be that poor, little Black girl from Mississippi who didn’t have anything. I’m very clear about that. I don’t have a back-up. I’ve been on my own since I was 16 years old. And if I don’t get it for myself, it’s not gotten. I’ve never done things that were unethical because I had no safety net, I had nobody to bail me out of anything. I’m not one to take those kinds of risks. Other kind of risks maybe, but when it comes to ethics, no.

LF: That’s good for the program, and good for everyone who’s been helped over the years. You’re still doing it, and you’re there.

MAA: I’d like to be able to have one job, and not two… but you know.

LF: Do you work a lot more than you’d like to?

MAA: I always had the one job; but when we got the center in 2010, they made me the Deputy Director. This was my boss’s way of giving me more money. I hadn’t asked him for more money because I don’t have a PhD. Unbeknownst to me, he had set it up so that they would come over and ask me to be the Deputy Director. I was completely taken by surprise. I said okay, but it was not good for me, Lorraine. It was just a job in title only – no power. It was a way to give me more money. It was just a figurehead job. 

I finally decided I couldn’t do it. I went to the Dean to tell him that this is not a good fit for me. You know what he told me? “Well, you’re going to have to raise your own salary.” The job that I had with Rich Rothenberg at Community Engagement Core before? I went to him, and Isaid, “I really appreciate the opportunity. I appreciate what you’ve done for me. But this is not a good fit for me. I want my old job back.” He had given it to someone else, but he gave it back to me. That’s why I’m working two jobs. It’s a lot because of how I work. It could be less, but… here I am.

LF: Do you want to add to this story of your life in the context of lesbian-feminist herstory?

MAA: Absolutely. One thing we haven’t talked about is that fact that I have a very supportive partner. It’s important to put a focus on and to centralize in this discussion about my life. I think that when you find somebody–and you’re equally committed–it really rounds out your life in a way that’s very mutually satisfying. It allows me to do what I do in a way that makes me a better person.

I am fortunate enough to be with someone who is brilliant, who is a scholar, who is a humanitarian, who is an activist, and somebody who is smarter than me. That’s important to me to be able to say, “Hey, babe, can you help me with this? Let’s talk about this concept, let’s talk about this action, what do you think about this?” And I have that. It’s important for me at this point in my life to be with someone who has more commonality than differences. I don’t want somebody who’s a clone of Mary Anne. But I do want somebody who I’m not struggling with about my beliefs and my values, my morals, and community.

LF: And this woman, can you name her?

MAA: Of course. Angela Denise Davis. Angela is a theologian, she’s an ordained minister. I never in my wildest dreams ever imagined myself settling down, or being in relationship with a minister. That was simply something I was not even remotely considering because I’m a heathen.

But Angela is not a stereotypical ordained minister, if you will. She’s more of a Christian with Buddhist leanings, I would say. She’s somebody that creates space for anybody to sit at the table. I appreciate that about her. As she says, she welcomes heathens, and holy rollers, and heretics, and hell-raisers. There’s a seat for anybody, everybody.

LF: Sister Harriet?…

MAA: Yes, her spiritual collective, Sister Harriet, named after her patron Saint, Harriet Tubman, is a reflection of her beliefs, and her values, and her theology. Angela is absolutely a woman who is ever expansive: in our home, in her work, in our community, in our family, in our friends. She is that woman who I’ve been waiting for all of my life. Absolutely.

LF: I’m glad that you two met, for sure.

MAA: I want to say something, too, about disability. I think that I’ve come to really understand, in a way that I didn’t before, since I’ve been with Angela, who’s legally blind, that we have so much work to do in this LGBT community. Not just in Atlanta, but nationally and globally. We need to have more training around disability issues, more sensitivity around it. Just basic things like when you post something on Facebook, if it’s a poster, for the visually impaired, all they see is a blur. It’s important that if you post a poster with words on it, that you also write those words out, so that the screen-reader can read those words to the person, so that they can be a part of the experience. You know, just basic things. It’s something that you have to repeat over and over and over. 

ZAMI NOBLA has a private Facebook group, and we have about 3 or 4 visually impaired women in that group. But it’s something you have to keep saying over and over and over. Even the colors that you use on fliers or on the website, all of those things are very important to describe. Also, in my job at Georgia State University, I’m always trying to push that, because they don’t even think about disability, period. It just doesn’t cross their minds. 

LF: You would think that a public university would have that.

MAA: No, they do not.

LF: And even organizations who are conscious about those issues will sometimes do unconscious things. We forgot the basic idea that you hold a meeting at a place that people in a wheelchair can access, period.

MAA: You know, that’s really interesting that just before we close, you bring up a couple of points. We are a Black lesbian organization in a Southern Christian atmosphere. A lot of sisters are very conservative, and they thought we were pushing an agenda that they were not altogether comfortable with. For example, one of the things that was very important to me early on, was that we not pray at ZAMI NOBLA events. Everybody is not a Christian. I’m not one. And that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. I don’t think it’s necessary to pray in a public venue. If you want to pray silently, do that. 

And some people didn’t like the fact that we were feminist, and we identified as such. There was certain language that we’d say, and you can’t use that language if you write something for our newsletter. Again, we’re trying to educate in a way that would meet people where they were, and even in doing that it caused some division. But we were able to continue to move in our beliefs, and in the way that we practiced social justice, in a way that we thought would benefit everybody, and not just a few.

LF: Thank you. Did you want to say anything more about your connection to and interest in Old Lesbians Organizing for Change (OLOC), and what’s happening here around Older Lesbians Organizing for Change?

MAA: I am very grateful that Atlanta OLOC, ZAMI NOBLA, and national OLOC will get together to have this gathering together in October 2016. I have appreciated OLOC for a long time. First of all, I appreciate the bad-ass name they have [laughter], Old Lesbians Organizing for Change says it all: it’s is in your face and unapologetic. I appreciate that. I appreciate the fact that they’ve been doing some great advocacy work around ageism, which is what ZAMI NOBLA is trying to do as well. And I like the fact that at every gathering, they are having some kind of protest. At Oakland, California, two years ago, they were protesting in front of the Bank of America against all of the foreclosures on women and poor people of color. We will be doing something here in Atlanta. We haven’t decided what yet. I think it’s an opportunity to bring more people together, particularly more lesbians of color. 

We are expanding the net because now you can be age 40. And for all the other gatherings, you had to be 60. Since they are partnering with us, and we start at 40, there will be women here who are interacting in a space with women who are 70 and 80 and 90 years old. That can’t be anything but positive, to hear each other’s stories. Just connecting, period, just being in the same space. I’m excited about that. I’m excited that we’ll have workshops. We really want to have a southern, lesbian organizing focus. We’ll be hearing from many more southern lesbians at the gathering in 2016.

LF: They are making sure Womonwrites women know about what’s going on, since they are a southern, lesbian writers group. I’m sure they’ll want to participate in some way.

MAA: Absolutely. In fact, we did not come up with a date until we found out what date the autumn Womonwrites was going to be in 2016. We were waiting and intentionally asking because we want those women at this conference, and we did not want to have a conflict with the dates of Womonwrites. I’m hoping that we will have a huge Womonwrites contingent at the 2016 gathering. 

We’re becoming invisible as women as we age, and we must continue to tout ourselves.

What’s more important is that it’s an opportunity beyond the gathering for us to start doing some work together and consciously connecting around issues, the whole racial identity, the whole class, and the whole age divisions. All of those intersections are important, and this gives us an opportunity to do that. I think that while we have a lot of differences in our organizations, there are some commonalities as women, as lesbians. And I do think it’s important for us to continue to evoke the term “lesbian” because we are becoming invisible. 

We’re becoming invisible as women as we age, and we must continue to tout that ourselves. I’ve been involved in a lot of movements, I’ve done a lot of things. Yet, as I get older, I’m very clear that I’m going to focus the next half of my life on old lesbian issues. I can’t do everything and take care of myself well. Nor take care of my partner, or even my dog. I want to make sure that we have a voice. 

One of the things that we’ve done with the help of a graduate student in the School of Public Health is to develop a 1-800, too-free phone line. We’re going to be rolling out a toolkit for any lesbian, anywhere in this country, to call and be connected with resources. Also available is an AIDS community resource manual. It’s for caregivers because of a lot of us are finding ourselves being caregivers for our partners, and our aging relatives. We also have developed a needs assessment that we’re editing right now. We’re going to put out to actually see what the needs are.

LF: When you say “we,” is it ZAMI NOBLA?

MAA: Yes, ZAMI NOBLA, but Atlanta OLOC is also sharing a space with ZAMI NOBLA now. We think this is a natural synergy for us to do this work together on the gathering, and then to continue to share space together.

We’re getting ready to have a separate phone line for OLOC in the office. Maybe we can keep that line after the gathering. Then, Atlanta OLOC will have their own line, and we’ll have our line. We’re hoping that we can continue to share space and continue to work together. I think that’s a great way for us to get to know each other. We are fighting the same issues, the same causes. We talked about when people called that 800 hot-line. If they’re asking questions about Atlanta OLOC, we can answer those. If they’re asking questions about ZAMI NOBLA, we can all do this work with each other, and for each other. That’s our goal, and that’s what we’re working on.

LF: I love hearing your story.  Anything more you want to say?

MAA: One of the things that I’m certainly proud of is starting the Audre Lorde Scholarship Fund. There’s a chapter about me in the book, African Americans Doing Feminism: Putting Theory into Everyday Practice, edited by Aaronette M. White. I talk about the Scholarship Fund there.

Also the author E. Patrick Johnson is doing a book now called, Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women. He interviewed me for that, amd I will have a chapter in that book as well.

LF: Wonderful! Thank you so much.

MAA: You’re welcome. 

This interview has been edited for archiving by the interviewer and interviewee, close to the time of the interview. More recently, it has been edited and updated for posting on this website. Original interviews are archived at the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. 

See also: 

African Americans Doing Feminism: Putting Theory into Everyday Practice, ed. Aaronette M. White (Suny Press 2010).

“From Oxford, Mississippi, to Atlanta, Georgia: A Black Lesbian’s Journey to Community,” Sinister Wisdom 124 (Spring 2022): 156-63.

Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women by E. Patrick Johnson (Duke University Press, 2019) 

ZAMI NOBLA