John Thomas Keating Ma

Finding My Mammy! John Thomas Keating Ma

Finding My Mammy is the life story of a middle-aged white male who had a seed planted deep within his heart when he was only six years of age. The "gardener" was a semi-literate common law wife of a black sharecropper in Southwestern Georgia. The author traveled half way around the world and back again. He went to almost every state in the Union. He lived in several different cultures. He suffered misfortunes that would have killed most people, and yet he kept on "sucking air." He encountered another white male that sparked a desire to find that ray of hope he had experienced when he was so very young in a segregated South. After forty-two years of separation, he began his search to find his "mammy." Miracle upon miracle, he found her and did what he had set out to do - thank her for what she had given him. Deep within his heart lay dormant a seed that blossomed into a desire to see justice and peace between people that have been hurting each other far too long. He experienced what he calls "the blackness" as he lived in "the ghetto." He passed on what she had taught him in a drug and alcohol treatment center to primarily African American males - love others regardless of what they may look like. That philosophy isn't new! It has been the driving force in many religions, cultures and ethnicities. If only people would just learn to "get along" and get real. The healing is in facing the pain and moving up to what a Dreamer taught when the author was growing into manhood back in the fifties and sixties. The book is about how one short four-eyed white boy chose to live out that dream in spite of adversities and certain death.