by Mia Bay
Ida’s response to the conductor was marked by the defiant and fearless sense of duty that she had learned from her parents and would display for her entire life. She turned the question around, asking him why he continued to run the train when he was equally likely to contract the fever himself. And when he replied that he did it because “somebody had to do it,” Wells said, “That’s exactly why I am going home. I am the oldest of seven living children. There’s nobody to look after them now. Don’t you think I should do my duty, too?”29
Wells’s decision marked the end of her childhood. She arrived home to find her baby brother, Stanley, dead, and all her other siblings, save her crippled sister Eugenia, who had never contracted the disease, recovering from mild cases of yellow fever. Both in the Wellses’ household and elsewhere in Holly Springs, the epidemic was over. But Ida’s “Hard Beginnings,” as she would later term them, had only just begun.30
Hard Beginnings
Although sixteen when her parents died, Wells would always remember herself as only fourteen when she became the head of her family. Her slip may reflect simply how very young she felt in the face of the enormous adult responsibilities she assumed after the death of parents. Indeed, none of the adults who gathered to consider what was to be done expected Ida to take care of her family. Jim Wells had been a Mason, and after his death, his brother Masons rallied around his family. Members of a fraternal organization that provided many African Americans with a social safety net, black Masons often took responsibility for the welfare of its members during times of distress. Accordingly, a meeting at the Wellses’ house was called to decide who would take the children. Though Ida attended, she was not consulted; she could only listen with growing dismay as Jim Wells’s Masonic brothers discussed a plan to divide up the six children. Ida’s two younger sisters would go with two Masons whose wives wanted little girls, and her brothers would be apprenticed out to learn their father’s trade. Eugenia could not be placed and would have to go to the poorhouse, while Ida was deemed old enough to fend for herself.
The meeting was abruptly interrupted by young Ida, who announced that “they were not going to put any of the children anywhere.” Invoking the memory of her parents, she insisted “it would make my parents turn in their graves to know their children had been scattered like that.” The Wellses owned their house and “if the Masons would help me find work, I would take care of them.” Initially dubious, the Masons questioned whether Ida, who had never even had to care for herself, was old enough to look after her family. But they eventually let the “butterfly fourteen-year-old school girl,” as Wells remembered herself, have her way. Confronted with Ida’s adamant resistance to their plans, Jim Wells’s friends ultimately “seemed relieved that they no longer had to worry about the problem.”31
“I suddenly found myself head of a family,” Ida wrote without exaggeration. The Masons appointed two of their members to stand as legal guardians for the Wells children, but Ida took over the family finances, and went from being a schoolgirl to being a schoolteacher. On the Masons’ advice, she applied to teach at a country school, and once she passed the corresponding teacher’s exam, she had her “dresses lengthened…and got a school six miles out in the country.”32 Adult pressures on Ida only grew as she waited for the school term to begin. Financial issues were not the problem. Jim Wells had owned his house free and clear and the family had no debts. Moreover, Jim Wells had left at least three hundred dollars in cash, a sum that Ida’s sister Eugenia had given to the family’s doctor, Dr. Gray, to put in the town safe. The money would be more than enough to tide the family over until school began. When Ida set out to recover it, however, she found herself catapulted into the treacheries of adult life.
At sixteen, Ida “had never had a beau” or “been out in company except at children’s parties,” but when she went into town inquiring after Dr. Gray, who was white, rumors began to swirl around her. Townspeople who overheard them jumped to the wrong conclusion when Dr. Gray said he would bring Ida the money that night. “As young as I was,” Ida recollected, “it was easy for a certain type of mind” to conclude that “I had been heard asking white men for money and that was the reason I wanted to live there by myself with the children.” Looking back as she wrote her autobiography, Wells remembered “this misconstruction” as one of the greatest shocks of her life, and its emotional impact is in fact hard to fully imagine.33 Young, naive, and traumatized by the recent deaths of her parents and baby brother, Wells had her first encounter with what would be an enduring problem and preoccupation: the sexual slander that she and other black women could so easily become subject to in the racially and sexually polarized world in which they lived.
Victorian mores made Ida appear suspicious to gossiping minds in Holly Springs simply by virtue of the fact that she lived alone, with no other adult in the household. Moreover, as a black woman, Wells was especially vulnerable to allegations of sexual impropriety. In a racist America black women and black men were traditionally seen as especially lascivious and morally “loose.” These notions of black sexuality developed hand in hand with racial slavery. Enslaved African Americans were not allowed to have legitimate sexual liaisons or granted the power to control their own sexuality—deprivations that white Americans justified by choosing to view blacks as naturally wanton beings who had no desire to confine their sexual relations within the restrictions of marriage or monogamy. Moreover, in the years that followed emancipation, racial contests over political power and social status only heightened such distortions of black sexuality. The Southern Democrats who retook the South in the 1880s and 1890s were led by men such as the South Carolina politician Benjamin “Pitchfork” Tillman, who, as part of a white supremacist campaign to eliminate black voters from Southern politics, branded black men as rapists who lusted after white women. “We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will,” Tillman told the U.S. Senate in a 1900 speech explaining why black voting rights had all but disappeared in the South. “We have never believed him to be equal to the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.”34 Meanwhile, black women never figured in such expressions of white Southern chivalry, which protected the virtue of white women but assumed that black women did not require similar protection.
This double standard could not be further from the truth, as Ida would later learn and emphasize in her writings: black Southern women were often exploited and victimized by white men. What she learned at sixteen was that African American women were often suspected of sexual improprieties—so much so that black as well as white mores dictated that respectable black women be hypervigilant in protecting their reputations. Chastened, Ida sought out a chaperone, writing to her grandmother in the country asking her to come and stay with them. In her seventies, Peggy joined Ida, taking care of the children and helping with the household chores, but soon further tragedy struck. After one long day’s work, Peggy had a paralyzing stroke from which she never fully recovered. An invalid for the remaining years of her life, she returned to the country to live with her daughter. Left alone again, Ida still needed an adult in the household, especially as she had begun teaching at the country school. She was able to find an old friend of her mother’s, who came and looked after the children during the week, when she was away at the school.
Ida’s late teens found her teaching at Marshall and Tate County schools in rural Mississippi, as well as taking a six-month assignment across the border in Cleveland County, Arkansas. Throughout, she traveled back to Holly Springs on weekends, coming home every Friday “on the back of a big mule.” Her short weekend was spent “washing and ironing and cooking for the children” before getting back on the mule on Sunday afternoon to return for Monday’s classes. Ida says relatively little about her three and a half years of teaching in rural schools, making no comment on the grueling schedule or what must have been a hard and lonely life for a young gi
rl. But it is clear that those years made an enduring impression on her.35
For one thing, these years gave Wells a broad and intimate familiarity with uneducated rural black Southerners, a familiarity many middle-class black leaders of her generation never acquired. Other black leaders, such as Massachusetts-born W.E.B. Du Bois, also taught in the rural South in the 1880s, but usually far more briefly than Wells. During his college days at Fisk University, Du Bois taught for two summers in Alexandria, Tennessee, where he was regarded as a “biggety nigger.”36 Moreover, he clearly never interacted with the country people on the same terms that Wells did. Far from appearing “biggety,” Wells traveled to her country schools by mule. A teenager with a high school education and the descendant of rural Southerners herself, Wells was only a few steps removed from the people she taught. Indeed, her daughter Alfreda Duster, recalling her mother’s life during those years, suggested that the country people took as much care of their young teacher as she took of them. In particular, Duster described the country people rallying around their young teacher after “the news of Miss Ida’s family spread around the countryside.” “Friday afternoon was a hilarious time at school. Each student vied with the other to bring something [for Miss Ida] to take home. Fresh butter, sorghum, home grown things she could carry would be piled up ready for her trip.”37
The bounty that Ida brought home each week no doubt provided a much-needed supplement to the twenty-five-dollar monthly salary she earned. It also may have pressed her to think about how she could best help the rural black folks she taught. In her autobiography she reflected that “as a green girl in my teens I was of no help to people outside the classroom, and at first, I fear, I was very little aid in it, since I had no normal training. The only work I did outside my schoolroom, besides hard study to keep up with the work, was to teach Sunday school.” Writing a half century later, Wells still sounded a little overwhelmed as she recalled the challenge of meeting the needs of rural black Mississippians as a teenager. She “found out in the country that the people needed the guidance of everyday life and that the leaders, the preachers were not giving them this help. They would come to me with their problems because I, as their teacher, should have been their leader. But I knew nothing of life but what I had read.”38
But if Wells could not meet this challenge right away, it was one that she continued to wrestle with. In “A Story of 1900,” one of Wells’s early journalistic pieces, which appeared in the Fisk Herald in 1886, Wells looks back as if writing in 1900 to tell the story of a Southern-born black woman who taught “among her people” twenty years earlier. Teaching in the country in 1880, as Wells had in fact done, this young woman “perform[s] her duty conscientiously with a desire to carry the light of education to those who dwelt in the darkness, by faithfully instructing her charge[s] in their textbooks and grounding them firmly in its rudiments.” But she neglects their religious education. “She never thought of the opportunities she possessed to mould high moral character by—as the Episcopalians do in their religion—instilling elevated thoughts, race pride, and ambition, in their daily lessons.”39
These were lessons that Ida had learned from her parents and also from the teachers at Rust College, and the woman in the story learns them when a visitor to the school critically observes that the boys are getting “enough education to send them to the penitentiary and the girls do worse.” Thereafter, the young teacher understands that blacks lacked “proper home and moral training, combined with mental,” and that the duty of black teachers is to supply this lack. Fired with this new mission, the young teacher begins to teach lessons that go beyond schoolwork, exhorting her students “to cultivate honest, noble habits, and lay the foundation for a noble character that would convince the world that worth and not color made the man.” She also teaches their parents, visiting homes and “talking earnestly” with them about “laboring to be self-respecting so they might be respected; of a practical Christianity; of setting a pure example of cleanliness and morals before their children.”40
On the one hand, Ida’s message in “A Story of 1900” might seem merely conventional. During the late nineteenth century, middle-class black and white leaders alike often bemoaned the lack of cleanliness and moral education among black Southerners and called upon teachers to teach this recently emancipated population morals and middle-class habits. On the other hand, Ida was no stranger to black life in the rural South even before she started teaching, and seems to have spent her years in the country reflecting on what she could actually do for people. Teaching would not ultimately be Ida’s contribution to the betterment of rural black Southerners. As we shall see, she never enjoyed teaching and abandoned it as soon as she could. But when in her early twenties Ida first began to write, she did so with the country people who were her first pupils and their parents in mind. “I had observed much and thought much of the conditions as I had seen them in the country schools and churches,” she wrote. “I had an instinctive feeling that people who had little or no schooling should have something coming in their homes weekly, which dealt with their problems in a simple, helpful way.”41
But before Ida could realize this goal she first had to leave rural Mississippi and, remarkably, she managed to do so. Here, too, Wells drew on lessons learned early in life, most notably the legacy of her parents’ Reconstruction dreams. Like the mother she admired so much, Ida did not let her family obligations stand in the way of her education. Indeed, throughout her teens Ida pursued the higher education that both parents had envisioned for their eldest daughter. While teaching in the country school, Ida educated herself by reading at night. With “no oil for lamps” and “no candles to spare,” during winter nights she would “sit before the blazing wood fire” with a book in her lap.42 Moreover, during the summers she continued to attend Rust College until she was expelled in 1881 or 1882. The reasons are elusive, but Wells recalled the incident in a diary written some years later as one of the most “painful memories of my life.” The headstrong young woman evidently lost her temper with some of the teachers at Rust, giving voice to “hateful words” that she later regretted. Remembering the incident three years later, Ida was still moved to self-recriminatory prayer: “O My Father forgive me,” she wrote in her diary, “forgive me & take away the remembrance of those hateful words, uttered for the satisfaction of self. Humble the pride exhibited and make me Thy child.”43
Ida B. Wells as a young woman
Wells would struggle to control her temper later in life as well, but rarely at such a high cost: she long regretted not finishing her degree, which would have made it easier for her to advance as a teacher. According to Wells’s daughter Alfreda Duster, Wells tried to complete her studies after she moved to Memphis, attending Fisk University during at least one summer session. But little other evidence exists to show that she even studied there. She attended Fisk commencement exercises one spring, and confessed her “craving” to study there to a reporter for the Fisk Herald, which may in fact be the sum of her contact with Fisk’s Nashville campus.44 Still, it remains clear that Ida B. Wells continued her intellectual education long after she left Rust. Rather than being defeated by the educational limitations imposed on her by her precipitate path to early adulthood, Wells seems to have been determined to honor her parents’ legacy by retaining all her ambitions. Her first opportunity came in 1881, when her father’s sister Fannie Wells invited Ida and her younger siblings to come and live with her in Memphis. Ida’s aunt was a widow with three small children of her own, so she could not relieve Ida of all her caregiving responsibilities. But her invitation did offer Ida a way to escape her poorly paid and unsatisfying work in the country schools. In Memphis, she would be able to take the city schoolteachers’ exam, which would qualify her to earn a higher salary teaching in better schools.
Urban Tennessee also offered Wells a world beyond rural Mississippi. Memphis was home to a dynamic black middle class with a lively intellectual milieu that would foster her talents, helpin
g her transform herself from a teacher to a journalist, editor, and activist. And during her years there, the schoolgirl-turned-schoolteacher would also become a woman. Leaving Holly Springs three years after her parents died, Wells moved to Memphis less encumbered by family obligations than at any time since her parents’ deaths. Her two brothers, James and George, had both left home to become carpenters’ apprentices, while Ida’s disabled sister Eugenia went to live with another aunt in the country. Now nineteen, Wells moved to Memphis, with only her two youngest sisters, Lily and Annie, in tow. Moreover, with her aunt Fannie on hand to help her raise the girls, Ida finally became free to do some growing up herself. In Memphis she would socialize and date for the first time, discovering a both frustrating and liberating world of love and romance in which her ambitions were often in conflict with social norms. In the end, however, Wells’s career in Memphis would be more notable for its successes than its frustrations. She would spend a little over a decade there, rising from her humble origins to become a well-known journalist and activist, and acquiring a much more minor reputation as a “heartless flirt.”45