Quiet No More

Crafting Our Legacies with Passion and Pride

• Carmen Cauthen

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What if the simplest moments in our lives hold the key to true happiness? As I take you through a personal journey of discovering joy, you'll hear stories of my life, like the early days of mastering couponing to keep my family well-fed or the passion I have for unveiling the rich histories of families. Through these experiences, I invite you to explore how connections with loved ones and the pursuit of passions can illuminate our lives. From the enduring love story of my parents to my enthusiasm for pottery and travel, these tales remind us of the profound joy found in the everyday.

Join me, Carmen Cauthen, as we savor the nostalgia of family traditions with a slice of my Aunt Arnett's legendary German chocolate cake—so cherished that it would travel across states as a special gift. I will share my aspirations to help others document and share their family stories, ensuring these treasured legacies are celebrated and passed on. As we embrace the warmth of our past, we look forward to capturing and sharing these histories with pride, creating a vibrant connection between our ancestors and the future. Let's celebrate these shared stories and the joy they bring, ensuring they're never left quiet.

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Carmen Wimberley Cauthen is an author, speaker, and lover of history, Black history in particular. As a truth teller, she delights in finding the hidden truths about the lives of people who made a difference - whether they were unknown icons or regular everyday people.

To Learn more of Carmen:
www.carmencauthen.com
www.researchandresource.com

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unseen, unheard. We've lived like that far too long. I'm carmen coffin and this is quiet, no more. What gives you life? I mean, what makes you so happy that your face and yourself just lights up. It could be a people. It could be a people. Yeah right, it could be people. It could be places, it could be things, but what is it for you? It's whatever I'm into, whatever my passion is at the time.

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There was a time when talking to people about how to shop using coupons and saving 50% of your grocery bill used to just make me so excited, because I didn't know, I didn't grow up knowing I could do that my mama might clip a coupon here and there and she'd either forget to take it with her to the grocery store or whatever. But when I was struggling, while I was married, there would just be times when money was tight. But when money was good, if somebody needed some food other than us, I was happy to just go to the store and buy them groceries. But when I came home, or shortly before I came home, I realized I couldn't do that anymore. I just couldn't afford it. And so there was a lady at our newspaper who actually would send out an email every Wednesday and it had all of the grocery stores, what was on sale and what coupons were in the newspaper that when you combined with what was on sale you could get for really dirt cheap. And I started following her and realizing that I didn't have to pay full price for groceries. In fact I didn't have to pay full price for a lot of stuff. And so during uncertain times with money at our house we always had food. We never went without food. In fact I bought a huge freezer because I had, up to that point, never really thought about buying meat when it was being marked down. But what do I do with my meat anyway? I take it and put it in the freezer. I don't go to the store every day to buy whatever meat we're going to have for dinner.

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So I used to light up when I could teach people about using coupons and how to buy things on sale to make them cheaper months and how to buy things on sale to make them cheaper, because when you need to be eating things like vegetables and fruits, those are seasonal. Or you know, my mama used to buy the frozen vegetables in the little box and they would always be boxes of frozen vegetables in the freezer and I didn't realize that those were frozen without being processed. So they're flash frozen, so they're just like you get your vegetables out of the farm, you get them at the farm and you go home and you clean them and you freeze them. That's how they were frozen. I didn't realize that she was doing that from a point of view of making life easier for herself. She was cooking the same kind of food that she would normally cook, but because she worked all day, this would make it easier for her. So the first thing that used to light me up was couponing. So the first thing that used to light me up was couponing, talking to other people about it.

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But do you know what lights me up today? It's talking to people about the history, the history and legacy of their family, the history and the memories that come along with making life special for us. And even when we've had hard times in life lots of them there is still something special in someone's memory bank. It might have been something for 20, 30 years ago, or it might have been something from yesterday, but I've realized that I can attach so many of the things that I do to things that I grew up doing or learned how to do that were special, that were attached to people, that were attached to folks that I love in ways that I can honor them. So who are some of the people that you can make you light up? I know when I talk about my girls, I light up. When I talk about my grandkids, I light up. When I talk about my mom and my dad, because you know I'm a dad's girl, I light up. I love my daddy and even though he's been gone almost five years, he was just special for me.

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In fact, I'm recording this today, on November 29th, and on November 28th was my parents' wedding anniversary. They got married around Thanksgiving and the 28th when they got married was the Friday after Thanksgiving. So they always celebrated on the Friday after Thanksgiving, not necessarily the 28th, but I remember what the day was, so thinking about them and the love that they had for each other, even when they were old and frustrated and and angry with each other, when they were lovey-dovey and would hold hands when they would talk about things, when they would fuss about things. They are special and it makes me light up because I realized how fortunate I was to have the parents that I had. There were things that they might not have done the way I thought they should have done them, but a lot of those things were the way that they learned and the things that frightened them, that they didn't know that they could deal with. Because, you know, a lot of us go to therapy now we go to talk therapy and we talk about the things that upset us or that have caused issues for us. But that wasn't something people did in the 30s and the 40s and 50s so, and 60s and 70s actually. So they just went with what they knew to do, and sometimes we think that they didn't do their best, but sometimes I think they did their best. They did the best they knew how to do with what they knew to do. So those are things that light me up.

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Other things that light me up are pottery. I love some pottery. I love to travel. I love to go to new places and explore and see what's out there that I haven't already witnessed. And I love, when I think about traveling, to think about the rich life that I grew up with, because we traveled a lot.

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My mom made sure that we went somewhere on vacation every year and my dad would close the drugstore for a year Now, mind you, when I consider what he did had to do to close the store for a week to choose the right week to do it. His drugstore was a block away from a college, from Shaw University, and he was one of the few black pharmacists in town and he was an independent, so he had to choose carefully a time to close for a week. It had to be while the students were not in session and it needed to be when mama was not teaching. So that made it be the summer and generally it was the last week of July. Sometimes it was the first week of August and my birthday is that week. So sometimes it was a special birthday vacation for us. But we would go and we would do fun things. But we also learned things and we also went shopping when we went. So those were big parts of my life that still make me light up today.

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And the other things that make me light up are I like a good cookie, a good German chocolate cake, and most people cannot make one. That makes me happy. I do have my aunt's recipe and the secret that she put in it, so eating that makes me happy. It takes me back to college actually because she would make these German chocolate cakes and we would fight over them. So for her son and her nieces and nephews here in the area, we loved it and she would make if you wanted that for your birthday present, she would make it birthday present. She would make it, and I remember her making one here in North Carolina and boxing it up and shipping it to her son who was in school at Morehouse College, and I always wondered you put it on a bus and you expect it to get there safely. But she did, and we would literally fight at family reunions or at family events over making sure we got a piece of Aunt Arnett's German chocolate cake. And so that's something that makes me light up.

Speaker 1:

Learning and history make me light up. Learning the value of what my people did in America makes me light up and it makes me want to share it with everybody. And so the other piece of that is teaching other people how to write down what their families did, the important things that their families contributed to our society, and so I'll be talking more about that and sharing that in the new year, because I'll be teaching those lessons and I'm going to help you to not be quiet about the things that help you light up. Anymore. You've been listening to Quiet no More where I share my journey. So you can be quiet, let's connect at wwwcarmencawthoncom.