Freedom's Children (3 page)

Growing up I knew the rules. It was clear. You went to the courthouse and there was the “colored” bathroom and “white.” You saw the signs. I don't think we had a public water fountain in Holly Springs except at the courthouse. But you see, Mr. Arm-stead who was black had his store, and so when we wanted water, we could just drink there.

I didn't experience it, but I heard my grandfather and my father say that generally if there was a white person on the sidewalk, you actually got off to let them pass. You also could not look at a white woman. I remember my mother telling us certain things. She never just came out and said, “Don't you all look at a white woman,” but it was kind of understood that you tried to avoid as much eye contact as possible.

Of course I heard about Emmett Till in 1955. Even at age seven it was shocking. We knew that a fourteen-year-old boy had been killed for allegedly whistling at a white woman. We knew that was one of those codes, and that he was killed because he had broken that code. We knew that was evil, and we knew the evil could happen again.

I think that was a watershed. Not only was Emmett Till killed, but there was almost an absolute cover-up. The system decided to completely close and say we're not going to see justice done here.

I first heard of the movement through mass meetings at the church. At the mass meeting they talked about all of the things that were going on around here. The church bombings had started at that time. I think sixteen black churches got bombed around here. They never tried anybody for it, but we knew the Klan was doing it. Later on they tried to bomb our church, but the gunpowder wouldn't go off. That's when the blacks got the neighborhood watch committee. Three or four of the church members would stay up with rifles, watching.

They burned crosses. I saw one. It was burned on this lady's yard one night. She was a black schoolteacher. She didn't have anything to do with the movement, but I guess they put it up there because it was high ground, and everybody could see it. White folks got some funny religion around here. They really do, when it comes to blacks. I guess they think ain't nobody going to heaven except white folks.

But the cross burning didn't make me afraid. I've never been afraid once I got involved. I didn't think about being afraid. A lot of people were afraid, I guess, that people would try to burn their houses down. I don't know why I wasn't afraid. Maybe I didn't have sense enough to be.

 

Blacks used to be slaves, and slavery was bad down in this part of the country. My grandparents were sharecroppers. They stayed on the white folks' place. So they had to do what they said to do. My grandmama used to tell me stories. Her and my grandfather were on wagons and horses then. They could be riding through Liberty or Amite County, and if a white man wanted her, she got on the back of that wagon with him, and my grandfather dared not turn around. When they got through with her, she just got back up there and sat beside him and kept going.

I had a white doll with blond hair. They probably didn't make a black doll. And then a lot of our people at that time were conditioned to think that maybe the lighter-skinned blacks were somehow superior to the darker. Black was not a popular word. It was a stigma if you were dark-skinned. Oh, you better not call anybody black! That was a fighting word amongst our own people until the sixties. Then it changed and got to be the thing. I felt real good about that change.

Whenever you would hear whites speak, all you ever heard them say was “nigras.” How could they go to church on Sunday and have these kind of feelings? We'd pass their churches. They would be full of cars everywhere. When I'd see them, I'd say, “What are they even talking about in there?” It looked like they were always out in droves at church. And yet they weren't any nicer to their fellow man.

My grandmother was very, very outspoken. She was a great inspiration because she was not afraid of white people. And I just loved that. We called her Big Chief White Cloud. She had a lot of Indian in her. I never will forget the day the insurance man came to the house and made the mistake of calling her “Auntie.” She said, “Do you have a black Auntie? I'm not your Auntie, so don't you call me Auntie no more.” I was in elementary school when that happened.

During the fifties freedom was something that we only read about. It was a fantasy, in a sense. We felt that being free was being able to go where you wanted to go, do what you wanted to do, without fear. When we traveled, we could not use the restrooms even at service stations. We had to stop on the side of the highway. Daddy would always let the doors stay open, and that would be like a cover to protect us from the oncoming cars.

We couldn't take advantage of things we saw other people doing. If we were in a store first and some white came in, they would stop waiting on us. We would have to wait, and we could not interrupt. I remember something that happened once in either Loveman's or Pitzitz, where they have drawers with hats. This salesperson was showing some white people hats. Another white lady began to open the drawers and look at hats. A black lady standing there thought that while she was waiting she could do the same thing. So she opened the drawers. The saleslady acted like she had committed a crime. She told her, “You don't go in those drawers. You wait until I get to you!” That stayed with me a long time. I was about ten or eleven when that happened, and I could not understand it.

When I was about the same age, I used to go to Silver's five-and-ten-cent store. I loved sugar wafers. They had strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla ones sitting in a glass case on the counter. I was showing the saleslady what I wanted, but I noticed she was not getting them out from the case where I could see them. I asked her where they were from. All she said was, “I'm getting these cookies for you. Do you want them?”

I found out they were the old cookies they had taken out and replaced with fresh ones. She was giving me these old ones from a box underneath. She truly was mean. I told her I did not want them. Whenever I would go in Silver's again, she would always recognize my face. She knew I was the one who refused to take those cookies. When I went back, I would not let her wait on me.

I remember getting out of high school early one day. I was about fourteen. Some of my girlfriends and I went downtown to go to the movies. We decided to get hot dogs, hamburgers, and pop before we got to the theater because in the theater we didn't get the same caliber of goods as white people got. There were about fifteen or twenty of us, and we went in this restaurant. Most of us ordered two hot dogs, or a hot dog and a hamburger, and the big 16-ounce pops. You know how you splurge your allowance when you're with your friends.

The man opened all the bottles. When he fixed everything, we asked him where we could sit to eat. He said, “Oh, you can't sit in here.”

I said, “We can't? After buying all this food, we can't sit in here and eat it? Well then, we don't need it.” He used a couple of choice words, saying that we had to buy it.

I said, “I don't have to buy anything. I'm hungry, but I can go where I can be accommodated the way I want to be accommodated.”

“What am I going to do with this food?” he said.

“Whatever you want to do with it. We don't want it.” And we turned around and left.

I thought a lot about ending segregation because Daddy was so involved, and we got so many threats and telephone calls. I remember I used to think that if I had one wish, it would be that everybody would be blind. Then nobody would know what color anything was.

When I was a real small kid, it was just the delight of your heart to go to town on Saturday. My mother used to take me to this store called J. J. Newberry. On the main floor was the snack bar. It was a “white only” snack bar. Down in the basement in the back of the store in a corner was where coloreds ate. It didn't have half the variety of what was upstairs. When you'd pass through the main floor, the aroma from the “white only” snack bar was just terrific.

When I was twelve or thirteen, I'd go to Newberry's with friends. They had one water fountain for whites, and one for us. I used to think, What's the difference between colored water and white water? What does white water taste like? I couldn't wait to catch the drop on somebody to find out. My friend Joe and I went in there many nights and waited and waited until it was time for the store to close. They were busy trying to get people out, and we'd get us a sip of “white” water. It tasted no different. Water was water. The only thing different was with the black one you practically had to put your mouth on the thing to drink out of it. On the white side, they hardly had to bend over. Their water came up so free. This was mystifying.

After my father's regular work shift, he would do odd jobs for white folks. There was this nurse that Daddy worked for. When her name came up in our house, everybody stopped. If she called and said she needed Daddy to come over and knock the roof off the house, he'd get up out of his sleep to do it.

She and her sister lived together. One Saturday she wanted somebody to help do some housework. I went to do mopping. She paid nicely. She was one of the head nurses at the hospital. I got there and started to work. They were going to eat, and they asked me if I wanted something. Naturally, first I said no. They insisted. “We cooked more than we can eat. Why don't you come on and eat with us?” They were eating hot dogs. I really wanted to get through and get home, but since they were insisting, and I'd always been taught by my folks to be polite, I said, “Well, in that case, I'd be happy to.”

They were both sitting at the table. They had the meal all prepared. She told me, “Wash your hands and come on in.” I thought that was a call to the table. But she took my plate to a little room off to the side. I had to sit in this dingy corner with just room enough for one person. Every now and then they'd holler back there and ask me, “Have you got enough?”

I remember being so irked, I just wanted to get up and walk off. Because of my dad, I didn't. But from that point forward, even though she paid nicely, I would never do any work for her alone. I would only go with my dad if I had to. I never told my dad what happened.

For a while I turned sour against some of the things I had been taught in school. Things like the preamble of the Constitution, or the Constitution itself. When I was little, my ambition was to be an attorney. I wanted to learn about the Constitution. I was taught it was one of the greatest things. Then I found out that when the Constitution was written, the black man was not considered a whole person. So this could not have been written with us in mind. I couldn't believe that on the one hand they're saying this is the greatest country in the world with all this freedom, and I can't even go to the movies here if I want to.

One of the things in school every morning was to say the preamble and to salute the flag. I got to the point where I got poisoned against that. I didn't care anything for the preamble. I didn't care about singing “America the Beautiful” because it wasn't beautiful to me. I had gotten to the point in elementary school that I wouldn't even hold my hand over my heart.

The movement made a difference because it made me realize that somebody else agreed that this was not right. And it wasn't just one other person. There were thousands of people who felt the same way, who felt we've got to turn this nation around. This is wrong.

One of my major excitements was going to a mass meeting and finding whites there, and from different geographic corners of the country. You'd sit on your porch over here and be told by one group of whites, “You're black, get back, this is not for you.” And then over there there's another group of whites saying, “We're all equal, but you've got to fight for it. And you got to fight for it by getting out there and being counted in numbers.”