Speaking Truth to Power (3 page)

At that moment when I hugged my mother, I felt the gravity of the situation most intensely. For the first time during the ordeal I wanted to cry, but my desire to show her my strength moved me beyond the tears. As difficult as it was for me to have my family there in the midst of the turmoil, their presence gave me courage. I could read the determination on their faces.

W
hat I know of my family story goes back two generations on my father’s side and one on my mother’s. They came from Arkansas, North Carolina, and Texas, traveling to Indian Territory and Oklahoma to escape the racial hostility of those states. But what they and even their descendants found was merely a different, sometimes less violent, brand of inequality.

Like my parents, my grandparents and great-grandparents were farmers. The latter group all began as slaves on farms in the South. My mother’s father, Henery Elliott, was born a slave in Arkansas in 1864. His parents, Sam and Mollie Elliott, were separated by sale, before he was born. Henery’s mother and a stepfather, Charley Taylor, were brought together by the circumstances of their status. At the end of slavery, they married and raised my grandfather. Sam Elliott remarried as well, to a woman named Alice. Alice Elliott was known to her step-grandchildren and the generation that followed as “Granny.”

My maternal grandmother, Ida Crook Elliott, was born in Texas in 1872. Over a span of twenty-five years, she and my maternal grandfather had fourteen children—a large family even by farm standards. Amazingly, given the times and the family’s economic conditions, all but three of their children survived. I have the impression from them that my grandparents were much like my mother, their youngest daughter, quiet and determined. From the one photograph of my grandparents that exists, and a few stories my mother and her brother, my Uncle George, tell, I learned almost all I know about them. Ida Elliott was one of two children, born and raised in Texas. Her only brother, Danny, was killed when he resisted whites who were trying to drive him from his farm. My mother and her brother, my Uncle George, tell the story in a way reminiscent of the stories of loved ones killed at war.

The story that stands out the most is the one about how my mother’s family came to Oklahoma. It begins in the fall of 1913. Henery and Ida Elliott were living and raising their children on a farm in eastern Arkansas. About that time, as a small boy “in shirttails,” my mother’s brother George recalls being “visited” by a white neighbor on horseback. Consistent with the times, the call was work-related, social interaction between the races at that time being virtually unheard-of. Approaching the Elliott home, the neighbor cut a trail through my grandparents’ field, leaving to waste all of the cotton in his newly carved path. “My wife needs some help with her cleaning and cooking,” the neighbor said. He “asked” my grandfather if my grandmother was available to work for him. “She’s pretty busy just taking care of these children,” my grandfather responded on her behalf. But whatever care Henery Elliott took not to offend, his explanation that my grandmother was far too busy to work outside her home fell on deaf ears. “Have you forgotten who you’re talking to?” the rider demanded. Even at the turn of the century, his status as a “freeborn white man” left neither my grandfather, a former slave, nor my grandmother, a descendant of slaves, the option to say no. “I’ll be around to see you tonight,” he threatened as he rode away, cutting another path of wasted cotton through my grandfather’s field.

During the early twentieth century in much of the United States,
even a polite, reasoned rejection by a black person of a white person’s request could be viewed as “uppitiness.” My grandfather knew through tales passed along from his father and through his own experience in Arkansas that the lessons for “uppitiness” were harsh and arbitrary, ranging from threats to burned crops to lynching. And those lessons were often doled out at the hands of night riders.

Between 1882 and 1968, Arkansas was the site of 284 reported lynchings. The incidents of lynching in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee, states with higher black populations, were fewer than in Arkansas. Higher incidents of lynching occurred only in the states of Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama, and Texas. The grimly illustrative statistics on lynching do not begin to take into account the night rides and other tactics employed by organizations and individuals. A black family’s attempts at self-preservation and protection included the telling and retelling of these stories as warnings to young blacks that the informal “system of justice” born of racism was neither just nor systematic. Racial violence and the threat of such were ever present in the collective black psyche of that time.

Though the night visit the neighbor promised my grandfather never occurred, Henery and Ida Elliott decided that for the sake of their children they would no longer live under such threats. That night my grandfather began preparations to move his family. After the season’s crops were harvested and the Elliotts had collected their pay, they would leave. Throughout the black communities in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee rumors spread that Oklahoma provided escape from the racial tension prevalent in these more southern states. “Mama and Papa were told that things were so much better in Oklahoma,” my mother recalls with a chuckle. Like thousands of other southern rural blacks, my maternal grandparents packed their wagons and moved to farmland in Oklahoma where a number of all-black or predominantly black communities were developing.

Farming was all my grandfather and grandmother knew. Immediately following slavery, 60 percent of the blacks in the country were employed in some type of farm labor. But between 1915 and 1940 many blacks had
been encouraged by economic and social opportunities to migrate to northern urban areas, trading in the farm and farm labor for more modern living conditions and factory jobs. And for those who stayed, farmwork rarely led to farm ownership. As late as 1930, 80 percent of black farmers were working land owned by someone else. My grandparents never owned any of the land that they worked in Arkansas or in Oklahoma. But unlike many southern blacks, my grandfather with his large family chose to remain a farmer.

In January of 1914 Ida and Henery Elliott and ten of their eleven children moved to Wewoka, Oklahoma. Their departure was tearful as they left behind family members including my Aunt Zodia and my great-grandparents, Sam and Alice, as well as Charley and Mollie Taylor. Uncle George remembers the day they left for Oklahoma as “the first time I ever saw my papa cry.” They all cried as they said good-bye to Zodia, my mother’s oldest sister. Though my grandparents wanted the promise of Oklahoma for all of their children, Zodia was a new bride whose husband wanted to remain in Arkansas. She stayed with him as much of the rest of the family made their way to Wewoka, a town with a relatively large black population, many of whom were members of the Seminole Nation or their descendants. When Henery Elliott’s father, Sam, died a few years later, he brought his stepmother, Alice Elliott, the woman my mother knew as Granny, to live with him and his family. Later, when my mother was thirteen, the family moved to a small rural community called Lone Tree in Okmulgee County.

The only photograph of my mother’s parents, a snapshot, pictures them in an open, flat landscape that looks like it could be almost anywhere in Oklahoma. The only thing that separates Henery and Ida Elliott from this austerity created by the background and the black-and-white photography is a patch of flowers and a young boy who seems to be running to escape the camera. They are dressed in simple clothing—the clothing of farmers. Yet the clothing gives some hint that it is Sunday or some other special occasion—my grandfather wears a jacket, and my grandmother a long full dress and cotton stockings but no apron. I try to place the picture among all of the stories. To me my grandfather looks
like a man who would have been a deacon in the church. A serious man who would have been approached by neighbors in the Lone Tree community about rebuilding the membership in the Lone Tree Baptist Church. A man who would have succeeded in such a challenge. The season appears to be fall, and though my grandparents appear to be in the winter of their short lives, they stand tall and straight, looking soberly into the camera. Unsmiling, they both appear to be gazing beyond the camera. I like to think that they are looking into the future—into the faces of grandchildren they would never know.

My grandmother’s posture is stiff-backed, almost to the point of appearing uncomfortable. Her very demeanor, her serious expression, and her deliberately erect carriage remind me of my mother. In their shared demeanor, my grandmother and mother are alike in a way that my mother and I will never be. Ida Elliott did the impossible, giving birth to thirteen children and raising fourteen with none of the benefits of the modern conveniences we take for granted today. Amazingly, she lived until 1937 to the age of sixty-four, surviving my grandfather by one year, if not the Great Depression.

Alice Elliott lived with her stepson and his wife, Henery and Ida, until the three could no longer care for each other. By that time, my mother and her siblings were adults with homes of their own. In 1932 Henery, Ida, and Alice Elliott moved to my Uncle Tutulus and Aunt Fanny Elliott’s home. There were no pension programs for aging farmers and the family chose home care rather than nursing home care partly because of cost, partly because of tradition, and partly because of love. Their step-granddaughter- and daughter-in-law, my Aunt Fanny, cooked and cared for them. My mother and her siblings helped to look after her parents and step-grandmother as first Henery, then Ida, and finally in 1939 Alice Elliott died. She was the last member of the generation that had experienced slavery firsthand. Sadly her thoughts on it and life after it are unrecorded.

My paternal grandparents were Allen and Ollie Hill. Allen Hill was the youngest of four children. According to my father, his grandparents had come to Oklahoma “as hoboes” before the turn of the century,
before Oklahoma became a state. Along with two other families of freed slaves and their children, my paternal great-grandparents, Ed and Sally Hill, hopped freight trains from North Carolina to Oklahoma when my grandfather was just a small boy. This, too, was a blended family. My great-grandfather had two children by a previous “slave” marriage. My great-grandmother had one under similar circumstances. Together they then had two children including my grandfather. In Oklahoma Ed Hill farmed and ran a junk business, scrapping spare parts from the junked equipment of the many oil fields that sprang up throughout Oklahoma Territory.

Ollie Nelson Hill, my paternal grandmother, was born in Texas and lived there until, when she was twelve, her mother, Nellie Nelson, died. Gus Nelson was her father. He was born Gus Simms but he’d been given the name Nelson as a slave when purchased by a man with that name and retained it throughout his life. Upon his wife’s death, Gus Nelson, a minister, brought my grandmother, Ollie, a brother, and two sisters, along with a younger sister of Nellie’s, to Oklahoma, where he raised them alone. Late in his life, after his children were adults, he remarried.

Allen Hill and Ollie Nelson were married when they were in their late teens and served as proof to the theory that opposites attract. Though married for over thirty years, they appear to have lived separate lives. Mama Ollie, a religious woman, was a member of the fundamentalist Church of God in Christ. Musically gifted, she was quiet and reserved. She happily shared her talent with her children but allowed them to play only the music of the church. Daddy Allen, on the other hand, loved to go to dance halls and baseball games. Always outgoing and gregarious, he joined church only late in life. According to my mother, Allen Hill’s confession of his sins came when he was well past committing most of them—as he stood at death’s door.

For a time, Allen Hill ran a taxi service with a surrey between Muskogee and Okmulgee, Oklahoma. It was the first of its kind in the area. But mostly, Allen and Ollie Hill were farmers. Unlike my maternal grandfather, Allen Hill did not work the land he leased. He had sharecroppers, his two sons, and hired help do his farming. Late in life, at my
father’s suggestion, he bought land, the first in his family to do so. That, along with an adjacent parcel that my father purchased at the same time, was the beginning of the family holdings.

The professionally taken photographs of Allen and Ollie Hill tell a different story from the snapshot of my maternal grandparents. The professional studio settings of the one show prosperity, whereas the bleak farm background of the other shows only austerity. Allen and Ollie Hill are photographed separately, speaking to me of their very different personalities. The one photograph of my grandmother shows her serious nature. In her time her square-jawed, well-defined features might have been described as handsome. The lines and wrinkles on her face show the stresses of her middle-aged years, but her eyes indicate a sense of peace. Photographs of my grandfather are more numerous than of any other grandparent. In each his dress is complete with jacket, tie, and overcoat and hat tilted to the side. The photograph of Allen Hill as a young man shows not only his style but his soft good looks. As he aged, he retained the style but his looks became hardened—perhaps by years of “good living,” perhaps by illness. That he enjoyed his life is not apparent from his expression.

I never knew any of my grandparents’ generation. I do not even have familiar names to refer to them. I study their photographs searching for some clue of the stories that time, personality, and the circumstances of birth have robbed me of. These photographs, along with a few vignettes that my Uncle George and parents tell, are for me the only tangible pieces of evidence of my past. They make up an incomplete portrait of my American heritage. Though Ida and Henery Elliott and Allen and Ollie Hill never knew me, I often wonder what they, having lived so close to slavery and through racial hostility, might have thought of their granddaughter’s life—a life with so few barriers as to be incomparable.