Reimagining Equality

by Anita Hill

  Ida was no longer able to work the farm, but she could still cook her signature buttermilk cake, braid her granddaughters’ hair, and, according to my sister Elreatha, regale her grandsons with stories of how she could once “pick cotton all day and square-dance all night.” The Elliott family members still picked cotton. But Ida was no doubt oblivious to the likelihood that her grandsons were more interested in dancing to “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” than in their grandmother’s do-si-dos. Ida, Henry, and Alice looked after the children who were too young to join their parents in the fields. In time, Ida’s daughters and daughter-in-law took care of their elders. Ida and Henry had moved from the church called Paradise to worshiping at Lone Tree Missionary Baptist Church, where Henry was also a founding deacon. After services, Ida and Henry, their children, and their grandchildren ate Sunday meals together. If not a prosperous life, theirs was a good life; but as the Depression hit with full force, that life became increasingly unsustainable.

  Rural black enclaves and townships provided a sense of security and belonging for people like Henry and Ida, but ultimately, turning inward to avoid racism did not give them the freedom they desired. Too often, it succeeded only in increasing their distrust toward whites, which was what had led to the formation of the enclaves in the first place. The members of these communities were limited not only in their income, education, and social opportunities, but also in their political strength. The racism and sexism that marginalized blacks had legal and cultural manifestations. In the end, the idea that blacks and whites and Indians could live as separately as “fingers on the hand” proved untenable.6

  In her 1998 novel Paradise, the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison explores the extremes that can result when segregation by a dominant group pushes the self-isolation of a subordinate group to its geographical limits. The black families in Paradise are driven to the remotest edge of the country’s frontier, to Oklahoma, where they attempt to establish their own utopia. They call their town Ruby, and much like the plantations of the past, it soon develops a stifling structure because of its insularity. Ruby is its own community and nation, premised on both physical and intellectual isolation. In what they believe are efforts to cleanse Ruby of racism, the town leaders turn first on each other, then on a neighboring enclave of women who have taken refuge in a place they call the Convent.

  Paradise begins and ends as the Ruby men slay the Convent women, who were about to begin a ritual to purge themselves of the burdens of sexism and racism that they had carried throughout their lives. Through their tragic demise, we glimpse how threatened the men of Ruby were by women’s ownership and shaping of their own space. Though the Convent was a place to which Ruby’s residents had no claim, the men of Ruby were willing to deny the Convent’s residents the sense of owning and belonging that the men themselves coveted. That is no surprise. Conformity dominated the vision that the leaders of Ruby had for their paradise. But by their refusal to accept new ideas and vehement insistence on rigid submission to their ideals, they ensured their own demise. With or without their acquiescence, the world around them changed. From them we learn the impossibility of achieving equality though isolation and exclusion. By constructing their liberation through an ability to expel from their separatist compound the blacks who did not think like them, the leaders created their own prison in which they were both wardens and inmates. They replicated what they sought to escape—the order that had been imposed on them by whites—and, in time, imposed that same scheme’s ultimate control mechanism, violence.

  The real black towns of Oklahoma did not end with catastrophe, nor did they self-destruct as the fictional Ruby did. They wasted away and often disappeared. Cut off from the economies and social networks of the rest of the world, they could not sustain the people within them, and their inhabitants lost the will to hold on to them.

  In time, that fate befell Lone Tree. Mercifully, Henry and Ida would not witness the demise of their community. When Henry died in 1936 and Ida followed in 1937, they were surrounded by two new generations of Mollie Elliott’s descendants, poised to make good on the promise of Oklahoma, the promise of a new home.

  Erma Elliott Hill and Albert Hill: Home at Last

  My mother was three years old when her parents, Henry and Ida, fled Arkansas. Aside from stories told by her parents and siblings and an occasional visit to Little River County, Oklahoma was the only home she ever really knew. Erma was the youngest daughter, the family darling, and her father’s favorite. Despite her shyness, she was strong willed and somewhat accustomed to getting her way.

  Shortly after the Elliotts moved to Lone Tree, Erma met Albert Hill, the boy that she would marry when she was sixteen, despite her parents’ misgivings. Teen marriages were not unusual in 1927. Their marriage license lists their ages as sixteen, the legal age for marriage. In fact, Albert was only fifteen. As the youngest of three children, Albert—nicknamed “Be” by a Creole uncle, short for bebe, “baby”—was not ready to leave his mother’s home. At seventeen, Erma gave birth to her first child in her mother-in-law’s Miss Hill’s kitchen. By nineteen, pregnant with their second child, she exerted her will and threatened to leave her husband if he didn’t get them their own home by the time the baby was due.

  With a dowry of a cow and a calf from Ida and Henry, and with money from Albert’s grandfather, Erma and Albert began to cobble together the pieces to assemble a home. In time came the land and the house that she and Albert built themselves, just as Ida and Henry had done thirty years before. On their land, Erma and Albert raised thirteen children and grew much of their own food. By the time I, the thirteenth, was born in 1956, the rural community called Lone Tree—where they had lived most of their lives—felt like home to Erma. She and Albert had achieved what Ida and Henry had lost: ownership of their own farm. Lone Tree had survived—not as the family enclave that her parents envisioned, but as a community of loving neighbors nevertheless. Erma Hill knew its residents through the kind of familiarity that came from knowing the songs they sang, the prayers they prayed, the food they ate. She made sure her children did too. On Sundays, when Ralph Hutton—brother of the schoolteacher, Iola Young—sang about letting the light God gave him shine “all around my home,” we knew what home he meant. We had been in it.

  We shared social activities, assembling in the church or the school for birthdays and funerals. We did the same kind of work. Those who were not farming at the time had farmed in the past, had been raised by farmers, or were being raised by farmers. The community also helped shape and reinforce the religious, work, and family values I’d first learned from my parents. The people who lived down the road from our house were, in more modern lingo, my homies. We all felt rooted in the place and at home together, even though the houses were separated by expanses of fields and woods. So in 1973, when my mother and I knocked on Miss Young’s door for the luggage that would carry my belongings to college, we felt a comforting familiarity in her home, which was set back from a dusty road.

  My mother and Miss Young were perhaps as different as two women could be in such a small rural community. My mother never finished high school. She married at sixteen, was a mother by seventeen, and every two years or so for the next thirty years, she bore another child. I was her youngest, born two months shy of her forty-fifth birthday. My mother had spent more than half her life negotiating the restrictions of overt racial segregation. She sent ten children to segregated schools and attempted to protect them from the harshness of segregation’s intended message of inferiority. Erma Hill watched her three youngest children graduate from integrated schools, shielding them from the vestiges of segregation and racism that hung in the air at previously all-white schools. She made it clear that homework, even when she didn’t understand the lessons, was our priority. We were obligated to do it, just as we were to help feed the livestock, wash and iron our clothes, and mop the floors. She grilled us daily, laboring with us to make sure that we appreciated the
difference between a living earned from backbreaking labor and a living earned sitting at a desk. My mother understood the end game and made it clear that I would need an education that exceeded hers if I expected to get anywhere in the world.

  Miss Young was married but had no children. She worked outside the home and earned more money as a teacher than most others in the community, men or women, earned from working their farms. She even went by her initials, I. B., something typically done only by men. Being a teacher was a socially acceptable undertaking for African American women in a segregated society; being one helped Miss Young escape some of the class constraints of our community. Like many African American schoolteachers, she was one of the most respected and vital members of the community.

  By 1959, five years after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education banned segregation in public schools—and when desegregation finally edged its way into the Oklahoma schools—the new, integrated system deemed Miss Young dispensable. She, along with many other experienced black teachers, found herself looking for a job after the black schools closed and black students were educated in what had once been all-white schools. During the first few years of the integrated system, she often used her Samsonite luggage as she traveled the dusty roads to teach at a high school hours away from our community. Each weekend she would return to her husband and their small, secluded farmhouse on one of the single-lane roads that connected Lone Tree’s residents. But Miss Young grew weary from all the commuting, and her health began to fail. As soon as the English teacher was eligible for a pension, she retired and came home to Lone Tree for good.

  When my mother and I went to collect the luggage, Miss Young greeted us at the door with a smile that couldn’t cover the fact that she was in her final days. She was dressed in a loose-fitting housedress that in no way resembled the neat and proper clothing she had worn when she taught my brothers and sisters English. She looked tired, drawn, and defeated.

  For all their differences, Erma Hill and Iola Young shared a faith in education. To them, education promised liberation, even if they had not experienced it. Miss Young often stressed the value of education and encouraged my parents to view me as gifted; my mother treated all her children as if they were gifted. If nothing else, my mother knew she had given us the gift of understanding how to work hard and how to survive. My mother raised me to believe that I must be responsible for supporting myself and any children I might have. “I don’t want a daughter of mine to have to rely on a man for money,” she asserted. I was eleven when she first declared that to me; at the time, I had no idea of the personal frustration behind her statement. As the mother of thirteen, she exhibited amazing organizational and management skills in the areas of human and fiscal resources—skills that far surpassed the settings in which she could display them: our home and farm. Her identity was tied to motherhood, and she grieved as she watched each of her children leave home, even as she reaffirmed, “I didn’t raise you to stay here.”

  For forty years, children were the center of her life. Her empty-nest experience was palpable: I heard it in her voice when we spoke after I left home; I saw it in her face when she welcomed her grandchildren for long summer visits and when she said goodbye to them as they returned to their homes. Despite her desire for independence from the demands of marriage and parenting, she showed no signs of rebellion. She lived the freedom she craved through her six daughters. Gender and race constraints were inescapable elements of Erma Hill’s life. The same was true for her neighbor Iola Young. They had made the best bargain with tradition that the times afforded them, and they lived to see a day when change was in the air.

  My mother and Miss Young knew that their worlds and their lives would not be my world or my life. They knew that they wanted something different for me. Neither woman told me where I should go or what I should do, but each expected me to do better than she had done. To ensure that, they knew I would have to travel to where I could make decisions without regard to my race and gender and where others would respect those choices. Erma Hill, who had never spent much time outside of Lone Tree, had seen enough of the world to know that the change her parents sought in moving to Oklahoma was now happening at a much faster pace elsewhere.

  My mother was largely detached from the legal developments that had drastically changed the country: the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. She watched the 1960s revolutions on a black-and-white television set and read stories in Life magazine about experiences that contrasted with her own. She had voted in every election, but never discussed politics at the dinner table. Erma’s instincts told her that attitudes in Oklahoma had not kept pace with those in other parts of the country.

  In 1977, four years after being given Miss Young’s luggage, I began to understand my mother’s ambivalence toward her friend’s gift. By the time I graduated from Oklahoma State, my mother had saved enough money and S&H Green Stamps for a new set of Samsonite luggage—blue with silver hardware, bearing my initials. With it I headed to New Haven, Connecticut, and Yale Law School, taking along the work ethic she had instilled in me to face the challenges there and thereafter. My mother, who had modeled her life largely after her mother’s, knew that she could not fully understand, much less prepare me for, the life I would have. It is a testament to her courage and to her confidence in me that she sent me anyway.

  In 1992, when my uncle George reluctantly spoke about his family’s departure from Arkansas, he seemed to revert to the frightened and excited five-year-old he had been at the time. His most searing recollection was the sight of his father crying, but my mother spoke of it in more guarded terms. She shrugged her shoulders when asked how she felt about leaving her childhood home. “That was just the way it had to be,” she said. Yet in their voices and in their careful choice of words, I sensed a longing for what had been left behind.

  When she died, at the start of a new millennium, Erma Hill was the last Elliott family member still living in Lone Tree. She had seen the family compound, built when she was a young bride in the 1930s, dissolve as her siblings, then her own children, left the land in Okmulgee County for work in Tulsa and beyond. She remained especially committed to two things: the land and the Lone Tree Missionary Baptist Church. She gardened each year as if she were still feeding a large family, and she attended church long after my father had given up on the Sunday ritual. I believe she held on to both fiercely because they reminded her of who she was and they made her feel at home in a fast-changing world.

  Anita Hill: A Long Journey Home

  When I began to explore my family history, I was in search of the perfect past. What I found were surprises and a messy, complicated reality that forced me to abandon the myths that filled my head about family, progress, and success. I was stunned to find that my grandmother had a child before marrying my grandfather and becoming mother to a total of fifteen children. I accepted that neither of my grandparents could read or write when they married in 1890, but I was disappointed that my grandmother never gained those skills, even though her husband managed to do so, perhaps by teaching himself or picking them up from his children.

  I understood, in the abstract, the brutality of racism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but was somehow convinced that it didn’t matter today. When my uncle George recalled how his parents left Arkansas in fear of racial violence, he warned me that if I told anyone, “they might use it against you.” It took months of probing into the family history for me to appreciate how thoroughly he understood the power of racial memories.

  Sociologists speak of the push and pull factors that prompt migration. Blacks migrated from the South to avoid the harsh realities of segregation and embrace better opportunities. I had wanted a family story about movement toward the positive. What I found was a family driven from its home, making the best of the situation. It pained me all the more to learn that my grandparents had come so close to
their American Dream—owning, then losing, the eighty acres of land they had homesteaded. I would never be able to walk into one cemetery and see the headstones for three generations of my family. I understood why my mother rarely spoke of her childhood home and why we were not encouraged to visit it. To my surprise, learning why I had never set eyes on the place where my mother was born disrupted my present sense of rootedness. My grandparents’ exile from their home in Arkansas resulted in a family diaspora that was, in its own way, as profound as my distant ancestors’ wrenching displacement from the shores of Africa.

  With slavery, a system was put in place to deny black people their liberty. In researching my family history, I was forced to come to terms with the reality that the system established to correct slavery’s depravities had failed my mother and her siblings—people I loved—as well as their parents, people I learned to love by uncovering their stories.

  Americans like to believe that their ancestors were fierce protectors of their homes, patriots of a sort. But in searching through the history of Little River County, I could not distinguish between the patriots and the refugees. Nor could I exclude strangers from my history. I was not related to the McClains or the Hales, but they were a part of my family story. None of them escaped the violence born of racism, and I ached for them all—relatives and nonrelatives, black and white, those I knew and those I had never met.

  I wanted irrefutable evidence that Mary McClain and her children had triumphed over the demons that her husband’s lynching might have unleashed. I wanted to know that Mary, Lizzie, and Ezekiel had found a loving community that firmly secured their roots in Little River County. I wanted to correct what I considered a gross sin of omission in the official report of Dock McClain’s lynching: its failure to tell the tale of his survivors. I never found what I was looking for; the last record I could locate was Mary’s tombstone.