by Wyomia Tyus
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Wyomia Tyus’s memoir represents an important interruption of this trend, not only filling a gap in the record but also providing inspiration for the athletes of today. Olympic medalist and International Olympic Committee member Anita DeFrantz has noted the vital role that just knowing about athletes like Tyus played in her development as a competitor: “The Tigerbelles helped me believe that African American women could be athletes; what they went through, the good, the bad, and the ugly, was amazing. It’s a very important part of our history.”[10]
Tyus’s story, in her own words, also expands the historical record by providing the kind of nonstereotypical representation of Black women that, according to Black feminist Frances Beale, is most easily constructed through oral history.[11] Her account of her experiences includes her firsthand impressions of everything from Ed Temple’s dress code, to the reason her team’s plane wasn’t allowed to land in Moscow at the height of the Cold War, to village life in eastern Africa during her stint as a Goodwill Ambassador. Her distinctive strength of mind and will—as noted above by Dwight Stones—is palpable in her thoughts about how to psych out a competitor, what it takes to get down the track, and the importance of losing. But the power of her thinking goes way beyond the boundaries of sport. Her explanation of her reasons for bringing her children “back South” is yet another testament to the inclusive way she sees the world; her method of coping with the loss of a loved one whose life was never celebrated as it should have been offers solace to anyone willing and able to take it in. Providing her perspective on American life from the Jim Crow South to sunny Southern California, Tyus tells a story not just about athletic greatness and political courage but about intellectual and emotional growth, gathering wisdom, and the evolving impact of race and gender in America.
Tyus’s presentation of her past and her reflections on recent developments in organizing for gender and racial justice represent both significant additions to the history of the struggles for Black and women’s liberation and important contributions to the movements of today. A new generation of politically conscious athletes is helping to shift the dialogue on race from false claims about “color blindness” to a horrifying but more honest account of the continuing discrimination, dehumanization, and terrorization faced by Black people in the United States, as well as highlighting the ongoing and systematic denial of the accomplishments of women in general and Black women in particular. Tyus’s story, though long in coming—a full half-century after her groundbreaking achievement—strikes a chord that will reverberate for many years to come.
—Elizabeth Terzakis
Chapter 1.
Suster: Walking the Farm
My parents, Willie and Marie Tyus, early 1950s. (Photo by Gray’s Photography, Griffin, GA.)
Up until my fourteenth birthday, my life was pretty much perfect. My parents were very different people—my father was a quiet man who believed in keeping to himself, while my mother would say anything to anyone at any time, no filter, none at all—but they both agreed on what they wanted for their children: a safe haven, a place where we could be children. They did everything they could to make it so, and they succeeded for quite some time.
My mother always told the story of how they met like this: Her family lived in a little town in Georgia called Pomona, near the railroad tracks, and along the tracks asparagus grew wild. “Mr. Will”—that’s what my mom called my dad—would pick asparagus and bring it by the house to give to my mom. “One day,” she told her mother, “I’m going to marry that man.”
Not long after, she became Mrs. Marie Tyus, and she and my dad, Willie Tyus, moved from Pomona to Griffin, Georgia. I was born in Griffin on August 29, 1945, and lived there with my parents and three older brothers until I went away to school. My oldest brother’s name was Jackie, the brother next to him was Jimmy Lee, and the youngest one was Willie, after my dad, but we all called him Junior. Junior is fifteen months older than me, Jimmy Lee was six years older, and Jackie was seven, which made me the baby girl—and the baby. “I’m the baby too!” Junior would say, but I would tell him, “Not so much. You’re a baby boy. I’m a baby girl. And the baby of the family.” Everyone called me Suster.
My mom worked in a dry cleaner’s, and my father worked on a dairy farm, where we lived. The person who owned the farm was Ben Brown, and it was set up kind of like a movie, with the big house at the top of the hill and our house at the bottom. Our house was just as large as Ben Brown’s, but it was not as nice. The lights would go out, off and on, because the wiring wasn’t that great, and there was a well with running water in the backyard, but the plumbing didn’t go into the house, so we didn’t have indoor toilets. We did have three bedrooms, though, a long, long hallway, a living room, a kitchen, a big back porch, and a huge front porch.
Inside the farmhouse, there was a fireplace in every room: my mom and dad’s room and my room had adjoining fireplaces, my brothers’ bedroom and the living room had back-to-back fireplaces, and in the kitchen we had a wood-burning stove. We would always eat all our meals in the kitchen. It was that big, big enough to hold the dining table and another table where we had our water buckets—what we had instead of a kitchen sink. We would go out to the well to get water, fill up the buckets, and scoop out the water when we needed it with something that looked like a ladle but was called a dipper. When I was very young, I remember using a hollowed-out gourd to scoop the water. At the end of the table was a pan where we would all wash our hands.
There was a big pantry in the kitchen, where my mom kept the food from the garden that she’d canned and preserved. We also had a china cabinet where we kept all of our dishes, and then we had the wood stove, with the wood stacked behind it, which took up a lot of room. In the winter months, we took baths by the fireplace in my brothers’ room or in front of the stove in the kitchen, but in the summer we’d be out on the back porch, taking baths in a big No. 2 tin tub, and if someone came to visit, we’d have to jump out and run inside. We had such a long driveway that we could usually make it into the house before anybody saw us.
When we were very little, my brothers and I slept in dresser drawers, but after that I had a baby bed in my brothers’ room and then a regular bed in my parents’ room. Whenever I couldn’t sleep in my parents’ room, I’d crawl into the crib in my brothers’ room, even at ten or twelve. I almost never slept in “my” bedroom because my mom’s mom and her youngest daughter would stay there when they didn’t have money for rent. My grandma, my aunt Nell, and my aunt’s two kids would all stay in that one room until they could get back on their feet, and if someone else was having a hard time, they’d just come and stay with us too. We made it work because that’s what family did—we took care of each other.
My mom’s mom was named Pearl, and we called her Mama. She was a strong woman, a great woman, and we loved her dearly and always. She had rheumatoid arthritis, and in her later years she started to decline, but when she lived with us, she sewed all the time. We had an old Singer machine where you pushed the pedal to make it run, and when she couldn’t do it because of her arthritis, we would do it for her. She would sit facing the machine, and we would be on the other side, pushing the pedal up and down with our hands.
She taught us how to sew, and when the machine eventually broke—we couldn’t use it, couldn’t fix it—we had to stitch everything by hand, so I learned to sew just like a machine, with straight little stitches; otherwise, I would have to yank them out and start all over. We made piecework quilts, and Mama made blouses for me and my girl cousins and shirts for my brothers and boy cousins out of the feed and flour sacks we got from the dairy. She was that type of person, always busy making something good out of what seemed like nothing much.
Outside the house, it was only seventy-five yards to the dairy, but the farm as a whole was huge. I can’t say how much land the Browns had because when we were growing up we didn’t think that way; for us kids, it was just open space, and we were always running
through the fields and in the woods that made up the farm. Next to the dairy there was a big barn, and we used to jump in the hay or play hide-and-seek—nobody could ever find us; matter of fact, if there was enough hay, you could lose yourself. We would also play tag and try to get to base first, ride our bikes, climb all the trees, and play basketball and baseball. When we didn’t have a baseball, we made our own. We would cut open a golf ball, take out the rubber from the middle, wrap it around a rock, cover it with a sock, add more rubber, and then cut up the cover of the golf ball and bind it up with whatever tough thing we could find: cowhide from the fields or another sock if that was all we had.
Playing those games and keeping up with my brothers kept me busy, kept me moving, kept me fast and strong. At least they did when it wasn’t too hot; by late morning in the summers, we’d have to retreat to the house and play inside. We played so many games of checkers, Monopoly, Sorry!, and cards that you would think I wouldn’t like them anymore, though I do. Cool or hot, outside or inside, we had to figure out how to amuse ourselves; there were no camps for us to go to, and no money to send us even if there had been. But it wasn’t something we thought about; we could always find something we wanted to do.
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All along his property, Ben Brown or someone who had the farm before him had planted pecan trees, like a fence—like in California, where they have the palm trees lining the streets. Once you came in from the highway, there was the road where his farm was and where we and the other people in the community lived, and on his side of the road, the east side, there were lines of pecan trees that went all the way to the end of the property.
As kids, we would shake the trees and pick up the pecans for my mom to put into cakes, or we would bag up the nuts and she would take them to the dry cleaner’s to sell. That was how we got our Christmas money or extra money for whatever the family needed. In the evenings of the winter months, we would sit around the fireplace, put two nuts in the palms of our hands, and crack them open, and my mom would put them on a pan with a little butter and salt and bake them in the oven just until the smell came out—we called it parching—and then we would sit and eat them.
My brothers’ room was right off the kitchen, and that was where we sat. We had a big wide radio with a phonograph in it, and we would listen to whatever came on—rhythm and blues, mostly, or the boxing matches if they were being broadcast. My dad was into boxing and baseball too, so we had to listen to a lot of that even though I hated baseball to death. Too slow! And when there was nothing on the radio that we wanted to hear, we had the phonograph, and we would play old records—45s—and do whatever dance was popular at the time.
There was always a fire in the fireplace, a big roaring fire, and if my mom wasn’t roasting pecans in the oven we would put sweet potatoes in the ashes of the fire to bake, and that would be our dessert. We’d sit around with the music on, and play checkers and what we called checkers pool. Those times were just heaven to me—cozy kind of times when I was home with my parents and my brothers, listening to music and eating pecans or sweet potatoes.
All year round, we lived off the land. In the summer months, we’d pick blackberries and wild grapes—muscadines and scuppernongs—and we had a garden with fruit trees: pears and apples and figs. If we wanted fruit, all we had to do was go out and get it off the trees. Ben Brown had dug a pond on the property and stocked it with fish, and we raised worms and went fishing all the time. We ate a lot of catfish, bass, and brim, and when we weren’t fishing, we would go hunting. My brother Junior got a rifle when he was about twelve or so, and we all knew how to use it to kill animals for food. We ate a lot of rabbit and squirrel, and sometimes, if there was nothing else to shoot, we had quail. We also raised our own meat: every year my dad’s side of the family would get a pig together, and each family would take a turn at raising it.
We had other chores as well: we had to keep the house clean and the fires going. That meant we had to dust all the time; on Saturdays we had to scrub floors, and in the summer months we spent all day every Monday doing laundry. We did it in the winter too, but not as often. There was also sometimes work in the garden; we had to pull weeds and turn the soil, and when stuff was ripe, we would pick it. We didn’t do any work for the dairy farm itself even though we wanted to—for one thing, we all wanted to milk the cows, but my dad wouldn’t let us. He didn’t want his children doing any kind of grown-up, paid work, and he especially didn’t want us working a farm. Our job was to go to school so that, when we got older, we would not have to work as hard as he had to work. “This is not your job,” he would say. “This is my job. You get your lessons and get out of school.” So that was our work.
During the week when school was in session, we would come home, do our homework, chop wood, and stack it—both out in the yard and inside the house by the stove. I liked chopping wood because it meant being outdoors and being active; we would make it a contest: who could cut the most and stack the most and get it in the house the quickest. We had games for almost everything, and most of them were races, but that didn’t necessarily mean that the work got done efficiently. At the end of the day, my dad would look at what we had done and shake his head. “You need to chop enough wood,” he would say, “so you don’t have to come home every day and chop wood.”
My mom would get back from work at about five thirty, six o’clock in the evening, and we had to have the fire going in the stove so that when she got there it was hot enough for her to cook. She started supper as soon as she came home because my dad usually finished milking the cows right after she arrived. Ben Brown would help him, and they milked the cows by hand until I was about thirteen or so, and then they got electric milkers—just two for the twenty cows, but I guess that was enough. Fortunately, before that happened, my dad did break down and teach us how to milk. Pulling on the udders was an eerie feeling at first, but then it was kind of fun. We learned to squirt each other with the milk, of course, and there were a few other things he would let us do. When I was four or five, before I started school, my dad would go to work, and if my grandmother wasn’t with us at the time, I would join him at the dairy when the school bus picked up my brothers. He would let me hose down the floors after they had finished milking—that was something fun to me then, hosing cow poo—and sometimes he would let me wash the troughs as well. I couldn’t scrub them down; I was too small, and that would be too much like work, but I could put the water in, and he would do the rest.
My mom would already be at her job; her workday started at seven in the morning. My uncle John Henry, who had a car that was like a taxi but really wasn’t a taxi, would pick up my mom and her sister Nell, who also worked at the laundry sometimes, and take them and about four or five other people to work and bring them home again in the evening. On some Saturdays we would go visit her at the cleaner’s even though kids weren’t allowed. It was just hot in there all the time, and my mom pressed clothes all the time. That’s how I remember her: standing there pressing clothes. She worked in two dry cleaner’s, one for fifty years and the other for twenty or twenty-five years after that.
My mom worked hard, but she was a real girly girl. She never liked the outdoors at all. We never ate outside, not even on a table in the yard in summer. She didn’t like picnics, she didn’t like animals, and she especially didn’t like worms. I remember my older brother Jackie scaring her with a worm once. She ran, screamed, everything. But when he put that worm down, my goodness, did she beat on him. Even when she was a girl, she would always stay in the house; her sisters took care of the outside. She would do all of the cooking, but when you brought in greens from the fields, collard greens and things like that, you had to wash them for her because she couldn’t do it herself, thinking there might be a worm in there. She would never husk corn either, or clean fish—none of that.
My mom was also a talker; she talked to everybody about everything. We used to call her “The Griffin Daily News” because she knew everything and everyone. She
was nosey, only she didn’t call it nosey. She called it “finding out things.” And everything she would find out, she would say. In fact, there were not too many things that she would not say. Because I grew up with it, it just seemed normal to me. It kind of prepared me for Mr. Temple—but I wouldn’t know that until later. You would come into her house—I would bring friends over, or my brothers’ friends would come over—and she would say, “Where you been? Did you take a bath this morning? Do you know you smell? You know you don’t be coming into people’s houses smelling like that. And don’t you sit on my couch. I don’t want my couch stinking.” To anybody. Their friends, my friends—anybody.
But even with all that, she was always smiling; my mom always had a smile for everyone. She was not a tall woman—five five, five six at the most—but she had big feet; even being that short, she wore size ten shoes. She would always point out that her big feet were flat feet too, and they were—completely flat from standing on the concrete at the dry cleaner’s for all those years.
Different as they were, my parents were good at keeping up what you might call a united front. If they ever did argue with each other, we were not in the room—although I would know when something had transpired between them if it happened on a Sunday because my mom would make me go to church. Usually, she didn’t care if I went to church, but when she was mad at him, I had to go to church and sit up front with her. I would sit there and pout and think, She’s mad at my daddy and taking it out on me! And my dad would sit in the back of the church or just wait outside.
My dad wore overalls all the time when he was on the farm, though he would put a suit on to go to church, and he would always have something in his pocket to rub on. Sometimes it was a worry stick—that’s what he called it—and sometimes we would whittle him little things or he would carry his pocket watch, but he always had something. He seemed tall to me, but he was not big, more of a wiry type of man, and he had very thick eyebrows that grew together—a Tyus trait. Junior has thick eyebrows, just like our dad, and my son Tyus has those thick eyebrows too.