The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (5 page)

This was the Great Depression, and jobs were scarce. Rosa bore her lot the best she could, working on the family farm and laboring as a domestic in white people’s homes. She made about four dollars a week as a domestic, working seven full days and often at night as well. Doing domestic work was not only physically and psychically demanding, but it exposed black women to sexual harassment and assault—perils she documented in a short story. In this first-person account, one evening she looked after the baby while her employers went out. Having just put the baby down, she welcomed a bit of relaxation before the family returned. “Sam,” a black man who also worked at the house, came to the back door and said he had lost his coat. Rosa let him in and went to look for the coat.
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She was then greeted by a white neighbor, “Mr. Charlie,” and realized that the purpose of Sam’s visit was to bring Mr. Charlie into the house to give him access to Rosa. Mr. Charlie poured himself a glass of whiskey and attempted to put his arm around her waist. Rosa recoiled in fear and disgust. Mr. Charlie said not to worry, that he liked her and had money to give her. The small Rosa was no match for the heavyset Mr. Charlie and was trapped. Sam had set her up, and she felt tricked and betrayed by him, “stripped naked of every shred of decency . . . a commodity from Negro to white man.”

Terrified, her mind turned to Psalm 27: “The lord is my light and my salvation—whom shall I fear?” Recalling her great-grandmother’s abuse at the hands of her white master, Rosa found her fear replaced by a “steel determination to stand completely alone against this formidable foe.” She resolved that she would never “yield to this white man’s bestiality.” He might kill her or rape her, but she vowed to put up a fight. As she kept moving around the living room, trying to stay an arm’s length from him, Parks coolly began haranguing Mr. Charlie about the “white man’s inhuman treatment of the Negro. How I hated all white people, especially him. I said I would never stoop so low as to have anything to do with him. . . . I asked him if the white women were not good enough for him, and it was too bad if something was wrong with them.”

On and on she went, determined to resist Mr. Charlie’s advances. “I taunted him about the supposed white supremacy. The white man’s law drawing the color line of segregation. I would stay within the law—on my side of the line.” Standing up for herself as a respectable young woman, she informed him she wouldn’t engage sexually with anyone she couldn’t marry, noting that interracial marriage was illegal in Alabama. When Mr. Charlie replied that color didn’t matter to him and that he had gotten permission from Sam to be with her, she informed him that Sam didn’t own her. She hated Sam as much as she hated Mr. Charlie. Mr. Charlie repeatedly offered her money and then volunteered to set her up with Sam. Rosa stated there was nothing he could do to get her consent—that “if he wanted to kill me and rape a dead body, he was welcome but he would have to kill me first.”
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The story finishes with Rosa sitting down and reading the paper, trying to ignore Mr. Charlie while he sits across from her. “I said he couldn’t pay me or fool me, or frighten me. At long last Mr. Charlie got the idea that I meant no, very definitely no.” With no clear-cut conclusion to the story, it is not evident what transpired.
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The only account of this incident is found in Parks’s own hand, written sometime in the late 1950s or 1960s. She did not include it in her autobiography, in any of the oral histories she gave in the 1960s or 1970s, or in the interviews for Douglas Brinkley’s biography of her. There are elements in the story that indisputably correspond to Parks’s life; her great-grandmother had been sexually abused by her slave master, Parks herself did domestic work, Psalm 27 was a favorite, and she was a longtime believer in self-defense (and “telling people what you would do to them”). Whether fully or partially true, the piece is a remarkable elucidation of Parks’s political philosophy.

Marking the danger of sexual violence that black women faced working in white homes, the story confirmed the importance of resistance and the narrator’s refusal to be cowed. “He need not think that because he was a low-down dirty dog of a white man and I was a poor defenseless, helpless colored girl, that he could run over me.” That Parks calls the man “Mr. Charlie” (a term used in this period by black people to put down white people and their arbitrary power) and the black man Sam (possibly for Sambo) suggests that Parks wrote this as an allegory to suggest larger themes of domination and resistance. It may be that, given that more than twenty-five years had passed before she wrote this down, she augmented what she said to Charlie that evening with all the points that she had wished to make as she resisted his advances. It may be that this incident was fictionalized or a composite of experiences, or that the incident happened but the ending turned out differently.

Right around the time of this incident, in the spring of 1931, a friend introduced her to the politically active Raymond Parks. Initially Rosa wasn’t romantically interested because Raymond was more light-skinned than Rosa preferred and because she had had “some unhappy romantic experiences.”
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Raymond could “pass for white except he didn’t have white people’s hair.”
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Born in Wedowee, a small town in Randolph County, Alabama, on February 12, 1903, Raymond hadn’t attended school. There were few other blacks where his family lived, and the school for blacks “was too far away for him to get there.”
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Raymond taught himself how to read with the help of his mother. And like Rosa, he took care of his ailing mother and grandparents. When he was about ten, his grandfather and grandmother became ill. According to Rosa, Raymond’s childhood was difficult, growing up in a town surrounded by hostile white people and bearing heavy family responsibilities: “He had to do what he could, try to work to help them, cook for them . . . he didn’t have shoes, didn’t have food much of the time.” After his mother died, he moved in with a cousin and at the age of twenty-one was finally able to go to school, attending Tuskegee and ultimately picking up the barber trade. An avid reader of the black press as well as writers such as Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson, Raymond Parks kept well abreast of the issues of the day. Many who met him assumed he had a college education, and his barber chair was often a space for wide-ranging political discussions.

After meeting Rosa for the first time, Raymond came looking for her house. The first person he asked for her whereabouts wouldn’t tell him, perhaps “because he was so fair . . . they might have thought he was a member of the opposite race.”
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Then he stopped at the McCauley residence to inquire if they knew where he might find this Rosa McCauley. Leona McCauley invited him in “and that’s when we got acquainted.”
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Raymond—whom she called “Parks”—was “the first real activist I ever met.”
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In all the iconography of Rosa Parks, there is little that pictures her romance with Raymond.
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Among the hundreds of media shots of her, there are very few public photos with him. But love it was. Raymond Parks came back to the McCauley house another time “and this time I wouldn’t go out to see him. I went to bed and covered up and wouldn’t go out.” And he came back again “and after that we started going on rides to different places” and talking about the world. It was the first time, outside of her family, that Rosa had discussed racial issues in depth with someone else.
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But she was impressed with his boldness. Raymond Parks had his own car, a red Nash with a rumble seat. To be a black man driving his own car in Alabama in the 1930s (not as a driver for a white family) was to be an audacious and proud man, and Raymond was “willing to defy the racists and stand up to the establishment.”
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What impressed her was “that he refused to be intimidated by white people—unlike many blacks, who figured they had no choice but to stay under ‘Mr. Charlie’s’ heel.”
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In light of Rosa’s experiences and feelings about white supremacy, these qualities of Raymond’s were especially precious.

Fifty years later, writer Cynthia Stokes Brown would recall her first meeting with Rosa Parks in 1980. They had gone into the restroom so Mrs. Parks could freshen up before meeting with reporters. Parks removed her hat and hairpin.

Alice Walker tells a similar story of attending an event with Parks in Mississippi. They went into the bathroom and Parks took down her hair. Walker was “stunned.” As she put back her bun, Parks explained “my hair was something that my husband dearly, dearly loved about me. . . . I never wear it down in public.”
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Aware of the racial politics of hair and appearance, Parks kept her hair long in an act of love and affection (even after Raymond died) but tucked away in a series of braids and buns—maintaining a clear division between her public presentation and her private person.

Raymond talked to Rosa about the Scottsboro case and other racial matters. “I just enjoyed listening to him. I didn’t talk a great deal . . . He was a very gentle person, very polite. I didn’t know exactly what to say, I guess because I hadn’t been [with many boys].”
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Rosa felt shy and inexperienced, but Raymond had taken an immediate liking to her, and she was attracted to his spirit and strength of character. Raymond, according to Rosa, “expected to be treated as a man”—to get along if possible “but whenever white people accosted him, he always wanted to let them know he could take care of business if he had to. They didn’t bother you so much back then if you just spoke right up. But as soon as you acted like you were afraid, they’d have fun with you.”
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Like Rosa’s grandfather, Raymond was not afraid to speak back to white people. Like many black people in Alabama, Raymond Parks had a gun and would carry it when necessary. The appreciation for race pride and activism that she had learned at home came to fruition in her relationship with Raymond Parks. He was the love of her life.

They married on December 18, 1932, at her mother’s house with a small gathering of family and close friends. Their wedding happened “right in the middle of the campaign to save the Scottsboro Boys.”
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Raymond was actively organizing on behalf of the nine young men aged twelve to nineteen who had wrongfully been convicted and sentenced to death in Scottsboro, Alabama in 1931. These young men had been riding the rails on a train in Alabama and gotten in a scuffle with several young white men also riding for free and forced them from the train. At the next stop, the police boarded the train and arrested the nine black boys. But when two young white women were also discovered stowed away on the train, the charge quickly changed to rape. Less than two weeks after their arrest, eight of them (all but twelve-year-old Roy Wright) had been found guilty and sentenced to death. The eight were scheduled to be executed July 10, 1931. While the NAACP initially stood at arm’s length from the case (and most cases in this period involving issues or allegations of sex), the American Communist Party took immediate interest in the case and began organizing to protest the verdicts. The International Legal Defense (ILD) took up the case, and a grassroots movement of Alabamians grew to save the young men.

Raymond Parks sprang into action. “Not many men were activists in those days either, because if it was known that they were meeting, they would be wiped right out. But it didn’t bother me being married to Parks. He was doing the same thing before we got married; and I knew how dangerous it was.” Every time Raymond went out to a Scottsboro meeting, Rosa wondered if he would come back alive.
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This organizing was clandestine: “I would stand in front of a certain street light,” explained Raymond, “and lean over and tie my shoe a certain way to give a signal as to where we would meet and the day and the time.”
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Raymond told Rosa that for security reasons, everyone in the group was simply known to the others as Larry.
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One person Raymond did tell Rosa about was “a lady he used to call Captola” [
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]—Capitola Tasker, an Alabama sharecropper, leader in the Share Croppers Union and active in the Communist Party (CP). Capitola and Charles Tasker produced leaflets from their home that CP organizer Al Jackson distributed from his Montgomery barbershop.
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For the first years of their partnership, Rosa did more of the worrying about Raymond’s safety, given his political activities. Later in their marriage, that would reverse. The committee would meet at odd hours—before daybreak and in the middle of the night. Raymond began holding secret meetings at the Parks’s home, which Rosa would sometimes attend. Raymond didn’t want her to be active “because it was hard enough if he had to run[;] he couldn’t leave me and I couldn’t run as fast.”
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She recalled their kitchen table “covered with guns,”
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further testament to the long history of armed self-defense in Southern black communities that historian Timothy Tyson has documented.
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Raymond brought food to the Scottsboro boys in jail and told Rosa that he would “never sleep well until they’re free.”
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They both attended meetings. As the Scottsboro organizing increased, the police looked for people to intimidate. Two of Raymond’s associates had been killed a few weeks earlier. One day, two cops on motorcycles drove back and forth in front of the Parks home. Rosa and a friend were sitting out on the porch swing. “I was so frightened, . . . I was shaking so much that I was making the swing tremble.” Raymond made it safely back home, coming in through the back door. She was enormously relieved. “At least they didn’t get him that time.”
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