In 1954, when Maybelle Lee was eleven years old and told everybody she knew to call her “Belle” now, the principal of Red Mound Church School had walked into the second room of the church—the middle and high school room—and announced the Supreme Court verdict in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case. Miss Rosalie McLendon was wreathed in triumph. She was a plump, brown-skinned spinster with short, neatly pressed hair. During the days of the week and on Sunday, her flesh was stuffed into an unforgiving girdle underneath the fashionable dresses a Negro seamstress in Macon made for her.
That day, Miss McLendon’s second in command, Mr. Lonny Maxwell, stood beside her. His future ruin as an alcoholic was years away. That afternoon, Mr. Maxwell continuously nodded, while Miss McLendon explained what the Brown case meant: school segregation was over now, and Negro children could sit alongside white children in the same schools. No longer would the white children spit out of their bus windows at Negro children who had to walk through the countryside to school. And no cast-off textbooks with torn or missing covers and pages, either. One day, there would even be Negroes who taught white children—everything was going to change!
As W. E. B. Du Bois had prophesied, though, everything did not change in the aftermath of the Brown case. The Chicasetta School Board allotted money for one bus to take the Negro children in town out to Red Mound, but the schools in Chicasetta would remain segregated. The textbooks were still cast-off and filled with racist abuse, and it was beyond comprehension that Negro teachers would ever instruct white children.
Six years later, the newspapers would report about Ruby Bridges, the little girl who was the first Negro child to integrate an all-white elementary school in New Orleans, Louisiana. One would think that a six-year-old in pigtails wouldn’t be so frightening to a bunch of adults; after all, what could she do, a child only recently liberated from infancy? Would she throw up or pee on somebody? Stick her tongue out and let it dance? Yet the segregationists in New Orleans acted as if Ruby was a dangerous animal. They gathered their defenses to resist her. Until they became used to seeing Ruby’s small body encased in her fancy church dresses, Monday through Friday, climbing those endless-to-a-six-year-old steps, the whites in New Orleans who didn’t want their children sitting next to a Negro girl broke fool in front of that learning place. Taunting Ruby. Threatening to charge through the phalanx of U.S. Marshals who surrounded her. One white woman promised to poison Ruby, and so Ruby’s food always had to be carried from home, packed in a brown paper bag by her mother. Another white woman put a chocolate-colored baby doll into a coffin and shook it as the little girl walked along.
But even with these local and national disappointments, there was a sustained hopefulness in Miss McLendon. During monthly convocations, the fifty-nine students and Mr. Maxwell would crowd into one room, and Miss McLendon would talk about her responsibility to the race. She’d remind the students that though she’d attended Spelman College, a renowned school for the education of Negro women, there had been only three professions open to her: nurse, social worker, or teacher. Of course, Miss McLendon could have set her sights on lawyer or doctor, but those professions were difficult enough to pursue for Negro men, and Miss McLendon knew she didn’t have the strength to chase those dreams. (Here, Miss McLendon would smile in a modest fashion.) That was how she settled on becoming a schoolteacher, and God had continued to bless her, elevating her to the level of principal. She didn’t seem disappointed that her educational kingdom was a two-room church with a potbellied stove for warmth in the winter.
Miss McLendon’s prize student was Belle Driskell, and she focused her attention on the girl, telling her how smart she was. That Belle had the intelligence to become a schoolteacher as well—even a principal. And Miss McLendon threw broad hints that she needed someone to teach in her place, once she retired. As a girl who’d grown up in Chicasetta, Belle knew the people and they knew her. Surely, Mr. Lonny Maxwell would take over as principal at Red Mound School, but Belle could be his second in command. They could do great things together, and Belle shined under Miss McLendon’s attention. Belle was not only flattered, she was relieved that her life’s work was decided for her, and that this work would not be like her mother’s, the country wife of a farmer.
In her junior year of high school, Belle informed her mother that she intended to apply to Miss McLendon’s alma mater, Spelman College, which was eighty-five miles away in Atlanta. Belle had not thought this choice would be a problem, as Miss Rose had known her daughter wanted to be a teacher for five years. Miss McLendon had discussed Belle’s future with the lady. The principal had been to dinner at the Driskell household several times; always Miss Rose would send her off with a big plate of leftovers at the end of the evening.
Belle named her choice of college as she and her mother were sitting on the porch, snapping field peas. Her mother kept her eyes on her bowl of peas, as she told Belle, wasn’t no way she was gone let her only girl go to Atlanta. It was over a three-hour drive from Chicasetta in Hosea Driskell’s pickup.
“But Miss Rose—”
“—and why you gotta go to college anyway? You gone be done with high school next year. That’s more than enough. Back in the day, all my teachers needed was eighth grade.”
Belle would have been ready to fight somebody if they had called her mother ignorant, but that’s exactly how she sounded right now. “Things are different these days.”
“Well, I need you here.”
“Why?”
“’Cause I said so. Unless you the mama now.”
“But Miss Rose—”
“What I say? Go on and snap them peas. Supper in two hours.”
The mother’s fingers kept working, and it would be many years before she told her daughter that her heart had been thumping fast. Belle was her last child, and her second favorite. Her first favorite, Roscoe, had a birthday coming up, but he was serving twenty years on the chain gang for murdering another Negro man. All Miss Rose could thank God for is that Roscoe hadn’t killed anybody white. Otherwise, he would have been smoke and meat in the state’s electric chair. But that sentence might as well have been a lifetime, because Roscoe wouldn’t let anyone in his family visit. He was too ashamed, and he’d sent Miss Rose away the seven times she’d tried to see him.
That year had been strange, unsettling. The season of peace that Chicasetta had experienced had broken: Tommy Pinchard Jr. had died. He’d been the last legitimate male heir of Wood Place, and the only stopgap to the Franklins’ troublemaking. Since his death, they had grown bolder. Cordelia, Tommy’s daughter, had neither the backbone nor the inclination to rein in the Franklin clan, and violence had erupted. Though the Franklins hadn’t claimed credit for the incident, a young Negro man in town had been found dead, hanging from a tree on the land that the Franklins rented on Wood Place. The Franklins weren’t afraid of Cordelia. She had a husband, though, and after the dead Negro’s funeral, he drove out to Wood Place and informed the Franklins, that was it. They needed to find another place to live, and though the Franklins stayed in Chicasetta, the clan scattered, renting pieces of land in the possession of other rich landowners who weren’t bothered by their violence toward Negroes. And so another Negro who lived in Crow’s Roost had been beaten to within an inch of his life after failing to step off the sidewalk for Jinx Franklin, who was almost an old man. But instead of his benevolence emerging, Jinx’s brutality had ripened with the years. His sons and younger brothers were equally mean. They had been known to corner Negro girls and women on country roads, gang-rape them, strip them naked, and leave them to be discovered.
Roscoe’s crime hadn’t been directed at the Franklins, however. It had come as an odd cloudburst, a crackling of the rage he’d carried since the day he was born. Miss Rose said that he’d come out of her with a temper churching in his arms and legs, though he’d been a pretty child, the first in a line of similarly beautiful children: dark-dark with red underneath his skin, so that when the sun touched hi
m, he seemed to glow.
In the year since Roscoe had been sentenced, Miss Rose had begun to keep her daughter close. After her pronouncement against Spelman, she walked the house at night and checked on Belle when she hoped the girl was asleep. She began to say Belle had a gift for fixing hair. Belle could start her own business, right in Chicasetta. No need to leave, for there were plenty colored women who’d let her touch their hair.
Miss Rose hadn’t considered that, while she didn’t allow Belle out of her sight anymore unless her child was climbing in the truck with Hosea to be dropped off at the new colored high school in town, there was church on Sundays and at church, there was Uncle Root. Her daughter’s great-uncle had been saving money for Belle’s college tuition since she had turned three years old and had recited her ABCs in front of the church congregation, before turning to recite from the first Chapter of Genesis, to the amazement of everyone there. Looking at that tiny girl talking about, in the beginning was the Word.
Throughout Belle’s seventeenth summer, Uncle Root methodically plied his charm. On Saturday mornings, he drove to Chicasetta from the campus of Routledge College, steeling himself against the possible danger on the country roads. Twice, he had passed white men, but he did not show his fear. To his shame, he pretended to be a fellow white man, giving them friendly waves as he passed them by, instead of the frightened respect that a Negro man would. His great-niece needed him to listen to her mother’s harangues, so he took the chance. He sat beside Miss Rose in the glider as she informed him she wasn’t gone lose another child.
“I understand,” he said. “I see what you mean, niece. Folks don’t understand a mother’s love.”
“Naw, they don’t!” Miss Rose said. “I carried that girl! Not nobody else!”
In the rocking chair on his other side, his sister watched him. Dear Pearl would snap her bowl of field peas. Or she’d peel tomatoes. Or she’d peel peaches. Or, in the sparse light of the evenings, sew scraps of cloth together to make quilt squares.
In the fall, before the weather broke into a chill, Uncle Root suggested to Miss Rose that if Spelman College was too far away for Belle to attend, maybe she could let Belle travel a short piece up the road to Routledge College, where he taught history, instead. It was only twenty-five miles away. And Dear Pearl rocked in her chair and gave her brother a sideway smile but kept her hands busy on her task. She was the big sister, had held that baby boy in her arms the day he was born, and after their mother had died in the 1918 influenza epidemic, Dear Pearl had raised him. It had been she who had given him the nickname “Root,” because of that almost supernatural charm of his.
That next fall, in 1962, Miss Rose, Hosea Driskell, and Belle drove in the pickup truck toward Milledgeville, then took the turn off toward Thatcher, where Routledge College was. For the journey in the truck, Belle and her parents donned church clothes. Though he wore brogans for his corns, Hosea was in a suit with a white shirt and string tie. Miss Rose wore heels, stockings, an all-in-one girdle, and a light-blue dress over that. In the truck, they squeezed their daughter against the passenger window. Pine, wisteria, and cedars passed by, nodding to Belle, Hey, girl, you finally got out your mama’s house! She didn’t know what to expect, but the campus was covered in the same trees as her parents’ farm.
A gravel road leading to the gates and beyond, until a grand structure appeared. A steeple reaching many feet: De Saussure Chapel, and the mother touched her daughter’s arm. Since Belle had received her letter of admission, Miss Rose was grateful for bragging rights. Negroes in town had expressed their public sympathy about Roscoe’s stint in prison, but word had come back to Miss Rose that folks were saying she thought herself above people, what with Uncle Root being a professor and Hosea and Miss Rose making such a good living on the Pinchards’ land. Her son’s crime was the Lord’s judgment against pride. But now Belle would be a schoolteacher, the highest rank for a Negro woman, and that shadowed her brother’s fall. Don’t tell Miss Rose that God won’t able.
They climbed out of the truck and Belle’s daddy unloaded her boxes and walked them up the stairs of the dormitory. After the boxes were settled on the floor of Belle’s room, he kissed the top of her head, but when the mother put her arms around her daughter, Miss Rose didn’t want to let the girl go.
“I’m all right,” Belle said. “Come on. Don’t be like that.”
When her parents left, she looked around. She wasn’t used to sharing sleeping quarters, and the two beds in the room alarmed her. Belle’s parents were country, but their house was big, with four bedrooms. She’d always had her own room, but when her large-eyed, brown roommate opened the door, Belle smiled brightly at her.
* * *
During Belle’s first week on campus, she wondered if she had made the right choice of a college. Maybe she should have found some spunk and applied to Spelman anyway. The campus was in the country, but the students acted as if they were walking around their own private metropolis. The girls dressed in church frocks, heels, and stockings every day, along with wearing lipstick and powder. The boys wore starched pants and collared shirts with ties. And Belle never had seen so many light-skinned folks congregated in one place. In particular, the sororities were filled with the fairest girls, whose curly, waved, or stick-straight hair definitely could pass a fine-tooth-comb test. Each of the sororities seemed to have a strict quota for members who were darker than brown paper bags, too, for there were no more than two girls per organization who could be characterized as “high brown.” Belle felt like a fly in the proverbial buttermilk, though she was dressed beautifully. Dear Pearl had a fine seamstress hand; she had sewn all of Belle’s clothes growing up, but her taste was old-fashioned. So Uncle Root had picked out a huge, modern wardrobe at Rich’s in Atlanta, after driving there, passing for a white man, and befriending a widowed saleslady to whom he gave Belle’s measurements.
Yet besides her great-uncle and her roommate, Marie Giles, Belle was very lonely. On Sundays, Belle walked with Marie to the chapel’s “refectory,” a fancy word for cafeteria. They passed by many light-skinned girls who threw haughty, unfriendly glances. After Sunday breakfast, a staid service in De Saussure Chapel. An uninspiring, quiet pastor who didn’t shout to glory or even raise his voice, as he droned on about Sarah and Hagar.
Then, too, there were the distinctions made between the male and female students. There were strict curfews for the students, but only the females were punished for walking into the dorm lobby after ten at night. The males could roam the campus at will. Leaving through the gates of campus was an even bigger challenge for a young woman, for she was expected to be attired in a dress that was four inches below her knee, and she was required to wear a hat and gloves and carry a pocketbook—no matter the outside temperature. A young woman was not allowed to bring a car on campus or to leave through the campus gates without either two other female students or one of her parents, but male students didn’t need a chaperone and were free to drive.
But there were a few respites that first year. Marie made friends easily, and wherever she went, she dragged Belle along. There were so few men to serve as romantic partners, Routledge seemed like a single-gender college, and the young women in Routledge Hall acted accordingly. They dressed up in cocktail gowns, put on music, and danced with each other. Those who didn’t want to dance cheek to cheek with another female sat at card tables and played many hands of bid whist. Belle discovered she was good at the game. She had a competitive side.
And on Friday afternoons, her uncle Root—whom everyone called Dr. Hargrace—taught Freshman Orientation in De Saussure Chapel. He strode down to where the pews were located, instead of staying up on the stage. In his patrician drawl, he got in subtle digs at the unequal rules between men and women on campus, snorting that women had been allowed to drive since Mr. Ford had designed the nation’s first automobile. In between his slight protests, he drilled the freshman class on the institutional history of the college, such as, the school had been fo
unded during Reconstruction, when droves of white northerners had rushed south with their missionary zeal. They considered themselves friends to the Negro and worked as teachers at grammar schools built to educate former slaves, and colleges were started, too. But the Bostonian who had founded the college had not been a white woman. She had been a free Negro.
Before the Civil War, Adeline Ruth Hutchinson Routledge had lived with her husband, Coffee; their child, Violet; and her spinster sister, Judith Naomi Hutchinson. Then the husband died, and after the war, the sister died, too, and Mrs. Routledge and Violet traveled down to Georgia to help their newly emancipated people. Teachers were greatly needed to aid the masses of ex-slaves who didn’t even know their ABCs, let alone how to read; it had been against the law, before the Civil War.
When Uncle Root sensed his charges’ boredom, when they began to fidget and rustle on the chapel pews, he would spin them a tale or two. His favorite subject was the great scholar Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, the first Negro to earn a doctorate from Harvard University. After he made history, Dr. Du Bois had come south to teach at Atlanta University. The color prejudice had been terrible, and the violence as well. Every year, there were tales of lynchings from the countryside, but the worst loss that he’d experienced was the death of his toddler son to diphtheria. Uncle Root didn’t linger on the great scholar’s feelings, though. He talked about what the man’s wife, Nina, must have felt, watching her child die.
“I know some of you young men in the room think the Negro man makes the money for his family. If he dresses in suits, he leaves the house to go to work. If he’s a farmer, he puts on overalls to work the fields. If the Ku Klux Klan shows up to the house, he stands in the doorway to protect his family, and, if need be, he’s the one who swings at the end of a rope. And you think because of all that, the Negro man should get the glory.”
Uncle Root raised a finger as the young men in the room shifted their seats. A few rolled their eyes.
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois Page 26