Freedom in the Family Read online

  I was the middle child. My older sister, Priscilla, is fourteen months older than I am, and I have a brother—named Horace Walter for my father (although we call him Walter)—who is two years and nine months younger than I. My parents were married as teenagers and could not handle the responsibilities of marriage, especially my father. They divorced when I was about four, and as a teenager I saw him from time to time when we visited him in Miami, where he had moved when I was older.

  My mother adored her own father, a successful carpenter and farmer named Richard Allen Powell. (He was named for Richard Allen, the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Although Mother was raised as an only child by her father, she had three half siblings: a sister, Corrie Jackson, and two brothers, Guy Lee Barnes and Leland Barnes, who were raised by her mother.) Mother was a real “Daddy’s girl,” and I think she wanted us to feel the same way about our father, so she made a fuss about reminding us to call him and give him cards at holiday time. But I thought that was hypocritical, even when I was young. He seldom came to see about us, so why should I care about him? The bottom line is, even though I always called him “Daddy,” I never had a real relationship with my biological father.

  We lived outside of Quincy, Florida, in an area called St. Hebron, which was a very small rural farming community. Today, some long-standing black families there own land tracts and have streets named for them. A lot of Negro residents back then were in tobacco, priming it for the big growers, pulling the leaves from the tall stalks. The leaves were about twelve inches wide, eighteen to twenty inches long. You’d use cord to string eighteen or twenty leaves together to hang in the large tobacco barns. Even the schedule of the black schools was set around the time the tobacco was to be picked; they closed a month earlier and opened a month earlier than any other schools in the state so students would be available for harvest. Once, when we were about twelve or thirteen, my sister and I came to visit Quincy and tried to get a job in the tobacco fields so we could renew friendships with children we had known before we moved away, but the supervisor sent us home. “Those jobs are for people who really need them, and we don’t need you here socializing and distracting the workers,” he said. My sister and I never had a knack for farm work, as my grandfather also discovered when we visited him. He tried to put us to work in his cotton fields in the early-morning hours, but I enjoyed riding horses and playing in the huge, dizzying tobacco barns.

  Of course, Florida being in the South, all of the schools and facilities were segregated. But when my sister and I attended the so-called “colored” or “Negro” school each day, my mind didn’t flood with questions about why there were no white children there. I didn’t even wonder where the white children went to school. Come to think of it, I’m not sure I knew any whites. My mother had white relatives in her family who had occasionally visited her childhood home, so she’d grown up with more familiarity with whites than I did. I just accepted segregation for what it was, just as my mother had a generation earlier.

  I had lighthearted moments as a child, especially when I was very young. My favorite pastime was fishing, and every day after school I walked down a hill from my house to Mr. Jerry Brown’s creek. I caught pails full of catfish and brim. I guess I was too young to be afraid of the snakes hanging from the trees overhead. Priscilla and I once dragged a dead snake a long way down the red clay road near my house—a snake that was five feet long, according to shocked onlookers. Children aren’t as aware of the world around them, and those were my years of blissful ignorance.

  When my mother left her husband, she decided to find work in Miami. She was caring for her own mother then, as she had been since 1942, because Grandmother had lost her hearing as a young woman and was completely deaf. Mother took us all on a segregated train when we moved—but again, because I was so young, I didn’t pay special attention to the “White Only” and “Colored” signs on the trains. All I noticed were the uniformed Negro soldiers who were riding the train with us. My mother found a job in Miami Beach as a customer attendant and window trimmer in a very exclusive dress shop for whites only. There were no other Negro women working in the shop, and she probably only got that job because she was so fair-skinned. I started school in Miami, at Anderson’s Kindergarten in Overtown, then I went to Phillis Wheatley Elementary School. After a time, Mother found it too difficult to take care of all of us in a city atmosphere, so she rented a house back in St. Hebron and asked Grandmother to care for us while she returned to Miami to get herself in a better position to bring us all back together again. We spent several years with Grandmother.

  Of course, being children, we found ways to take advantage of my grandmother’s inability to hear. After bedtime, when Grandmother thought we were sleeping, Priscilla and I used to climb out of the bedroom window to engage in our little card-playing games. We’d set up a table and chairs, the neighbors’ children would come over, and we’d sit outside in the moonlit backyard playing bid whist and other card games, laughing and carrying on because we knew Grandmother would never hear a sound. Thinking back on that, it seems like a lost era, because it would not be safe for young children to do that now.

  Mother came back to retrieve us when I was about nine, and that was probably a good thing. It was time for us to have more supervision. But Mother didn’t come for us alone; she had remarried a very tall, refined man named Marion M. Hamilton, of the Atlanta Hamiltons (who, it was said, were direct descendants of statesman Alexander Hamilton, one of the framers of the U.S. Constitution, which might be one reason my stepfather was so fair-skinned, even more so than my mother). All of the Hamilton offspring were highly educated. Marion Hamilton had a master’s degree, and his brother, Henry Cooke Hamilton, whom we later learned to call “Uncle Cookie,” would later become the registrar and head of the psychology and education departments at Morehouse College in Atlanta. Uncle Cookie was married to Grace Towns Hamilton, who, in 1965, would herself be the first Negro woman elected to the Georgia House of Representatives.1

  This new man in Mother’s life had an impressive pedigree, but he did not impress me. Not at first. I know now that my mother remarried because she wanted to provide a father for us—but to me, he was just a stranger who’d driven up to our house in a shiny black car I later learned was a Cadillac. His shoes were as shiny as his car, so shiny you could see your face reflected back when you stared at them. And I don’t think I had ever seen a man so tall! He must have been at least six-foot-six. The more he tried to reach out to me and encourage me to call him “Daddy Marion,” the more I retreated from him. I have never opened up to people immediately. It took me six or eight months just to call him “Daddy Marion.” As for building up my trust, that would take years.

  Whether I liked it or not, we were a family now, and we moved to a South Florida town called Belle Glade. Belle Glade was in Palm Beach County, but it was nothing like the affluent areas of Palm Beach most people think of. Ours was a community of migrant workers and struggling people who lived in tin shelters that looked like barracks, but there were also professionals with their own homes. Housing was provided for teachers who, for the most part, came from West Palm Beach. Belle Glade was situated on dark black soil everyone called “The Muck.” The soil was called “Black Gold” because it was so fertile, but I had asthma and very sensitive skin as a child and was highly allergic to it. My stepfather taught in the local colored high school, Everglades Vocational High School, so this became our new home. He was also a minister, and he preached in the local AME church with a style that I enjoyed.

  The thing I grew to appreciate most about Daddy Marion, however, was that he was a very talented musician, and he shared his love of music with all of us. He had played with jazz great Lionel Hampton. Every Christmas Eve we sat around the piano as he played Christmas carols, and my entire family would join in; my brother and mother shaking maracas, my sister playing the flute, and me playing my trumpet. We played until midnight, then went to bed eager to open our gifts later
in the morning.

  In Belle Glade, I became aware of the racial differences around us.

  On the one hand, many of my new observations of whites had led me to have positive feelings about them. My mother was a Democratic committeewoman, and Belle Glade had an interracial council even in the 1950s, so my mother brought me around whites who addressed her respectfully as “Mrs. Hamilton,” which was rare in those days even though I didn’t realize it.

  But there were also things I didn’t like, and I learned to rebel early.

  The Dairy Queen, for example. When I was in junior high school and probably twelve or thirteen, my sister Priscilla and I liked to walk up to the Dairy Queen window to order ice cream, but there were two windows: one marked WHITE in front and one marked COLORED in the rear. Well, most of the customers were standing at the WHITE window, and Priscilla and I saw no reason that we shouldn’t stand there to be served, too. We sensed that the COLORED window would not receive the same care and attention as the window for whites, and we figured we were as good as any other paying customers. We went to the WHITE window every time. And the man would say, “The colored side is back there,” pointing it out to us as if he thought we were too stupid to know how to read. When he realized we did know the difference and we were there just flashing our sweetest smiles with no intention of moving, he got irritated. But he served us. If we had been adults, it probably would have been a different story. Someone might have called the police.

  In my brother’s case, he had an incident where someone did call the police. I only found out very recently from Walter that when he was fifteen, after I’d already left home for college, he and some of his friends went to that same Dairy Queen and were told to go to the COLORED side. They were shocked, he told me later. “We didn’t know about it, because we were sheltered in a black neighborhood,” he said. He and his friends left in a rage.

  They were so angry, in fact, that when they were driving in his friend’s car and encountered a lone white boy walking by the side of the road, they all shouted “Cracker!” at him as they passed. Walter had never done anything like that before.

  “We took out our frustrations on him,” Walter says. “When we got home, the sheriff came to the house and told Daddy Marion we had done this. We tried to act like we didn’t do it. The sheriff reprimanded us, and Daddy Marion acted very Uncle Tomish and said, ‘Yes, sir’ and ‘No, sir’ and ‘It won’t happen again.’ At that point, I didn’t understand it—but that was part of survival. The sheriff was the one in charge.”2

  An incident in high school really left an imprint on me, too.

  When I was about fifteen, I was on the student council. As student council members, we were assigned to welcome guests to the high school during our free periods. I remember very vividly that I was wearing my favorite red corduroy suit as I sat in the breezeway one day, and suddenly I heard a man’s voice say behind me, “How ’bout a little bit?” There was a white postman standing there smirking, and I was absolutely shocked. You have to remember—this was the 1950s, and for an adult to say something like that to a child was outlandish. I challenged him, to make sure I hadn’t heard wrong. I said, “What did you say?”

  He had the nerve to repeat it. “How ’bout a little bit?” Then he walked away laughing, without a care in the world. And why not? I was just a Negro girl. During those days, white men could rape Negro girls and never see justice in the South, so why should he expect any kind of penalty? When my mother was growing up, she routinely heard about Negro girls who were forced to climb into white men’s cars so the men could have their way with them, and that sort of practice had been going on in the South since the days of slavery.

  Oh, but I was mad! I marched right into that school and went to find Daddy Marion, who by that time was the dean of students. This was when I first began to notice the volatility of the white versus Negro question, because Daddy Marion hesitated. I know that if a Negro man had made a comment like that to me, Daddy Marion would have reacted with the same kind of outrage I felt. But we were discussing the actions of a white postal worker, a government employee, and I could see the doubt and nervousness pass across his face like a shadow. By then, I’d developed a lot of respect for Daddy Marion. After all, he had been my civics teacher, and had taught me about my rights and responsibilities as a citizen. But I lost some of my respect that day. I didn’t want to wait for him to make up his mind about what to do. Instead, I went straight home and told my mother about it.

  Let me tell you a little bit more about Mother. As a young woman, Lottie Mae Powell had no stomach for the indignities she watched Negroes subjected to. When my sister, brother, and I were very young, according to my mother, a controversial trial involving a Negro defendant took place in Quincy. Negroes were told to shut their businesses for the day and keep clear of the streets, but my mother was expecting a money order from her brother, and no racist decree was going to prevent her from marching downtown to Western Union to take care of her business. My mother was a very small-boned woman, with delicate features, and she remembered how the whites sat chewing tobacco and watching her from shaded porches downtown. There she was, a lone Negro woman, walking forbidden streets. No one said a word to her.

  To her, however, what was even worse than the attitudes of the whites was the compliance of the Negroes. She was disgusted to see men she had admired and respected cowering in hidden corners “like rats,” she recalled. She went home and packed a bag to leave town that same night. She later learned there was nowhere to run, really, but since she had ended her relationship with her husband, she fled to Miami with us in tow.

  Years later, after we moved to Belle Glade, my mother took us out with her at night as she taught Negroes to register to vote. As a Democratic committeewoman, she brought new voters to churches to demonstrate how to fill out the ballots, and we helped her. I grew up with a very strong sense of civic duty.

  So when my mother heard about the sexual advance a white postman had made toward me, she was just as shocked and angry as I’d been. She didn’t hesitate to pick up the telephone and begin making the necessary calls to report the man’s actions and to file a formal report. She hoped the complaint would make it all the way to Washington, D.C., but I don’t think either of us expected it would. Looking back on it now, I think Daddy Marion was afraid we would be visited by misfortune if we stirred up trouble—and men, of course, usually had to bear the brunt of retribution in the South, so I understand why he hesitated. But for my mother, fear of repercussions was the last thing on her mind.

  It was a year before anything at all happened. But the report did make its way to Washington. Apparently, this postman had made similar comments to white females, too, so our complaint was lumped in with the others. When the white investigator showed up on our front porch, though, he made it clear he was trying to blame me for what had happened. First, he seemed skeptical because I was sixteen by then, and he pointed out that I’d claimed to be fifteen when we filed the report, as if that made all the difference in the world. Patiently, we explained that I had been fifteen when it happened. Then he used a different tactic: “Well, how do you know what he meant when he said, ‘How ’bout a little bit?’ ” I think he wanted to intimidate us, since so many Negroes could be very easily intimidated by white men of authority. My mother and I were very angry, but we answered his questions as patiently as we could. My mother didn’t scratch her head foolishly or let herself get confused. She said curtly, “Well, she knew what he meant and he knew what he meant.” And that was that.

  Eventually, that postman disappeared, and we heard he was fired. I never fooled myself into thinking he lost his job because I spoke out—it was because whites had spoken out, too—but I was proud that I had stood my ground. It was a lesson I would draw upon again and again as I became a young woman. I didn’t know it then, but refusing to back down would become a trademark in my life.

  Unfortunately, however, sometimes racial discrimination was much closer to home.
Of Mother’s three children, Priscilla and Walter were both brown-skinned, and I was lighter, closer to Mother’s complexion. Priscilla always called me “dirty yellow” or “dingy yellow,” which I found very hurtful. When I was about eleven years old, an incident took place that left a strong impression on Priscilla: Daddy Marion’s mother died, and I was the only one of my siblings allowed to accompany Mother and Daddy Marion to the funeral in Atlanta. At the time, I had no idea why I was the one who went while Priscilla and Walter stayed at home. When we got there, all of Daddy Marion’s relatives were hugging me, and I found myself wondering, “Who are all these white people?” Although everyone there was considered Negro, the church pianist and I were the two darkest people at the funeral! Mother had arranged for me to spend time with another girl who was my age, but some of those present objected right away, and I felt my face burning as I realized they didn’t like her because of her color. Mother was very angry about it. That was how I slowly came to realize that Priscilla and Walter had been left at home because Mother didn’t want to subject them to rejection by these fair-skinned Negroes. Years later, I learned that Priscilla had been very hurt and resentful about being left behind. The issue seemed to fester between us. I was nominated to serve at the prom in the tenth grade, and when Priscilla heard my name called, she raised her hand and asked the teacher, “Why just the yellow girls?” Priscilla hadn’t objected to any of the other girls. The teacher called Mother to tell her about it, because she thought it indicated sibling rivalry at home. Obviously, Priscilla believed color separated us. Society had created the barrier.