Reimagining Equality

by Anita Hill

  I wanted to believe that even as his stab wounds healed, Ernest Hale became a beacon for racial healing among whites in his community. Hale fed and sheltered Goody and made sure he was educated, even beyond the eighth-grade level that Hale had attained. Hale went on to hire blacks as foremen, positions of authority that most white farmers reserved for other whites. Hale’s example of racial magnanimity, however, did nothing to alter the community in a way that would have allowed my grandparents—his neighbors—to remain in the place they called home. Yet in talking with Hale’s grandsons, who are still attached to the land that Ernest farmed, I got the sense that he had planted the seed of hope that we could live together as neighbors.

  In April 2009, August Wilson’s play Joe Turner’s Come and Gone returned to Broadway. Set in 1911—the year my mother was born—it is, as the New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley observed, “about nothing less than the migration and dispersal of a race and culture, searching for an identity and home.” Brantley noted that despite the seeming calm of the everyday experiences of the play’s characters, “there’s a storm whipping within and around the breezy talk, a gale-force wind that picks up and scatters people as if they were dandelion seeds. That wind is cold, uncaring history, propelling an entire population of men and women, only fifty years out of slavery, as they try to find footholds on a land that keeps shaking them loose.”7 As I learned my grandparents’ story, I was nearly overwhelmed by how easily uprooted they were and how thorny their path from refugees to citizens had been. The deep roots that they had hoped to establish in Arkansas never took hold.

  Henry and Ida Elliott, however, kept their faith—in God and the church, in each other, and in the belief that life would be better, if not for their children, then for their children’s children—even if it meant moving to a different land. The feeling of being uprooted that I felt as I uncovered their story had a surprisingly positive side. Henry and Ida’s struggle taught me that home need not feel like something that was forever lost. In moving to Oklahoma, they affirmed their belief that home can be found if one is willing to risk pursuing it. I realized how proud I was that my grandparents’ brave commitment to the future pressed them to move to an unfamiliar place in search of a home for their family. Erma Hill then fulfilled and exceeded her parents’ vision of equality by remaining on the land and raising her children to live a better life. My mother followed in their footsteps when she gave me luggage and sent me on my way. Each time they put down roots, Mollie, Ida, and Erma must have believed that they were making progress, and I am forever in their debt. If I could speak to them today, I would want more than anything to reassure them that none of their efforts were in vain. Their search for liberation was the prelude to my search for equality. Each of us travels the same path—a route to home. To my surprise, understanding their journey helped me understand my own.

  For me and others in my generation, family stories force us to reconcile our desire to feel rooted with our need to seek our own place. When my mother and Miss Young each sent me off with a set of luggage, they encouraged me to leave behind a world in which household roles were dictated by gender and where community divisions were delineated by race. I had to define what home would become. Since then I’ve gone through several sets of luggage as I’ve packed my belongings to move from homes in New Haven; Washington, DC; Tulsa and Norman, Oklahoma; and finally Waltham, Massachusetts (with layovers in Northern and Southern California and Munich, Germany). I always knew that I was searching for more than a house. I was looking for the place where I belonged.

  I am also privileged to have grown up during the 1960s, an era of seemingly endless possibilities. My appreciation for the exquisiteness of that time is influenced by my mother, whose life was shaped by the gender and race limitations she experienced and by what she learned from her mother’s experience. Despite what she witnessed in her lifetime in Oklahoma, my mother instilled in me a will for optimism. Together we formed a vision of progress shared by many Americans, one that acknowledged the steepness of the road to equality but assumed that the trajectory was linear and continuous. Now, much of what I believed was possible in the 1960s has yet to be accomplished, and the progress of equality seems to have stalled. Rather than retreat, we must reassess and reimagine our goals and how to achieve them, understanding that the route to equality is a winding path that ends at a yet-to-be-determined place of refuge from prejudice and violence. The granting of rights will guide—but alone, will not assure—our arrival.

  In April 2009, while researching this book, I visited the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, a Duke University library, to discuss donating my papers to the center’s archives. Handing over my papers, at fifty-three years old, symbolized a finality to my work that I had trouble reconciling with my doubts that we are achieving gender equality. Moreover, I was amused by the idea that I had experienced enough for researchers to study. But I was attracted to Duke for one reason in particular: John Hope Franklin, the noted historian who wrote the seminal book From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, had trusted his papers to the university.

  I’d had the opportunity to talk with Dr. Franklin on a few occasions, and we spoke about our shared native state, Oklahoma. His assessment of racial progress there was that even as more and more rights were gained, Oklahoma uniquely defied the dominant narrative of a continuous march to equality. In 2008 Dr. Franklin had traveled from Duke University, where he was a professor emeritus, to Tulsa for the groundbreaking of a park to be named in his honor. I had planned to visit the park and attend one of the programs honoring the historian whose work I’d followed throughout my career. Then I had hoped to have one more conversation with Dr. Franklin about our home state and to ask his advice about donating my personal papers. But that trip never happened; neither did the conversation I had hoped to have.

  The last stop on my April visit to the Duke campus was the John Hope Franklin Research Center, a three-story office building with a gallery devoted to world peace art. The weather was unseasonably warm, and I was tired but determined to find the center, which is on the outskirts of Duke’s sprawling campus. A month earlier, Dr. Franklin had died, and a memorial book and video of the historian’s ninety-four years greeted visitors. Certainly the world had lost a great historian, and Duke had suffered a significant loss. But I pondered what his death meant to me and other Oklahomans. As the video ended and I added my name to the list of those who had paid tribute, it dawned on me that this man was my mother’s contemporary. They shared the same race and the same “can’t sit around and do nothing” mind-set. But their life stories were vastly different. My mother lived in rural Oklahoma most of her life. Dr. Franklin grew up in a similar environment, but in the end, he traveled the world. His was a story of movement; hers was of staying.

  On that day in 2009, I thought about questions I would have asked John Hope Franklin, the man President Bill Clinton had called upon to be chairman of his President’s Initiative on Race: Is the story of Oklahoma’s progress more accurately a story of the country’s progress? How did my mother’s experience fit within Dr. Franklin’s understanding of progress? What if the struggle for equality in America is bigger than simply a discussion of the evolution of rights as defined by law? Would it then need to include an account of how people live, in addition to what rights they enjoy?

  Ira Berlin, a historian and ambitious raconteur, has attempted to capture the entire African American experience from the 1600s to the present as a series of migrations—“the story of a people uprooted and searching for home.”8 In his book The Making of African America, Berlin builds on the long-prevailing slavery-to-freedom narrative so brilliantly developed by his friend and colleague Dr. Franklin. Berlin is correct in his assessment that the story of African America is not one of linear progress. It is a “contrapuntal narrative” of “movement and place; fluidity and fixity.”9 What would equality look like if we imagined it from the per
spective of those who seek it not by moving, but by staying and building? My mother’s greatest gift to me was the freedom to leave. But over time I have come to realize that the most enduring lessons Erma Hill passed on to me were about how, once planted, to stay and make a home.

  In the chapters that follow, I will focus on “place” and “fixity” in the lives of African American women. Their stories are about home: the place and the state of being, a pathway to equality. They all, in some ways, represent a measure of how far we’ve come, but also point to where we as a country need to move next. In order to understand those stories, one must understand how early in our country’s history African Americans and women adopted home as a symbol of their belonging and independence.

  Chapter 3. Gender and Race at Home in America

  Home: 1. Any valued place, original habitation, or emotional attachment regarded as a refuge or place of origin.

  2. The place where one was born or spent his early childhood, as a town, state, or country.

  The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

  Since before the United States was formed, the home has figured prominently in the imaginations of individuals committed to gender and racial equality. At the urging of individuals devoted to equality and full citizenship, home became a powerful symbol of race and gender advancement, the great signifier of our belonging and independence, in the public imagination as well.

  In March 1776, Abigail Adams was keenly aware of the domestic abuse that women in the colonies suffered when she implored her husband, John, to “Remember the Ladies” in her memorable letter. She sought protections for women, in particular married women, in the Declaration of Independence. Though women were largely ignored in the language set out in that document—and later in the United States Constitution, completed just over a decade later—Abigail Adams introduced two powerful ideas into the public discourse: that women needed legal protections that differed from those conceived of by men and granted to protect the power held by men, and that those safeguards must reach into the core of married women’s experiences—the home. Women of all races and backgrounds knew that this hallowed space, often thought to be beyond the law’s reach, was indeed a place where they could be tyrannized and that any chance they had to live as independent members of society must begin there.

  Exactly what Adams had in mind when she wrote to John is unclear. She lived at a time when a married woman could not own property, not even the home in which she lived, in her own name. Perhaps Adams wanted her husband to allow wives control over property—at least inherited property—something that was denied to them under English law. She most likely thought that women could best protect themselves from physical harm in the home if they were specifically granted the same rights that the men of the revolution were presumed to have. Those rights certainly would have exceeded the rights women enjoyed in England, but Adams viewed the break from British control as the opportunity for a new way of looking at every citizen’s participation. She relished women’s aggressive resistance to British authority during the Revolutionary War. Most likely the plea in her letters was for a formulation of the law that would protect women from the “cruelty and indignity” of men who would treat women “only as the Vassals of [their] sex.”1

  Already Adams enjoyed an independence in her marriage that few women of any race knew. Gail Collins, author of America’s Women, calls Adams “a widow to the Revolution.”2 With her husband away for long stretches of time, Abigail Adams raised their children, took care of the family’s finances, and ran their farm. She renounced England as a “tyrant state” in her own voice.3 Yet John Adams dismissed Abigail’s plea for women’s independence in the home with no more than a laugh.

  From Babylon to Zion

  As limited as Adams’s political influence was, her home life was privileged well beyond what many women experienced. Many women, regardless of race or class, were subject to the cruelty Abigail described in her letter to John. For some, home may well have been a prison. Indeed, for most black women prior to the Civil War, home was a plantation or farm in the rural South from which there was no escape. Undoubtedly, despite romantic portrayals to the contrary, most aspired to leave the harshness of slavery for some kind of “promised land” where they could enjoy even a modicum of freedom. Harriet Tubman’s engineering of the Underground Railroad is legendary. Yet even at the end of the war, my maternal great-grandmother Mollie Elliott and her son Henry lived within a stone’s throw of her former owner. Liberation is not always freedom. In addition to remaining on the slaveholder’s property, like so many other former slaves, they continued to work his land years after the war was over.

  A few slave women managed to escape Southern bondage to reside in the North or West. One such fortunate soul was Sybela Owens, writer John Edgar Wideman’s great-great-great-grandmother. Wideman credits Sybela, a runaway from a farm in Maryland in 1859, as a founder of a community named Homewood that continues even today, where Wideman spent much of his early life.4

  No more compelling example of the important role that black women played in establishing the family home exists than that of Biddy Mason. In 1848 Miss Mason, a mother of three daughters—one of whom was nursing at her breast—accompanied her owner, Robert Smith, along with his family and ten other slaves, on a journey from the Smith farm in Mississippi to a brief stay in Utah before settling in San Bernardino, California. On each portion of the journey, which took the caravan through Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada, Miss Mason’s job was to walk behind the wagons and herd the livestock. It’s also likely that during the trip she assisted in the birth of Robert Smith’s child, as well as that of a child born to fellow slave Hannah Owens. The caravan arrived in San Bernardino in 1851, a year after California entered the Union as a free state. According to state law, individuals who had been brought into the state as slaves became free people once they took up residence there.

  For five years Smith’s party remained intact, with Biddy Mason and her fellow, ostensibly, former slaves working for Smith in San Bernardino. In 1856 Robert Smith decided to move his family, along with Miss Mason and the other slaves, to Texas. Mason resisted and petitioned the court for a declaration of her freedom, as well as that of the others Smith had brought to live in California. Smith’s argument—that Mason and the others were members of his household who had been duped into asking to be freed—fell on deaf ears. The judge ruled in Mason’s favor, on her behalf and on behalf of the other former slaves.

  Biddy Mason’s story does not end there. She became known for her medical skills and earned a living as a midwife and healer for residents of all races in Los Angeles. Eventually, with $250, she purchased what she called “the Homestead,” a lot on Spring Street in what is today downtown Los Angeles. She continued to purchase land extending from Spring Street to what is now Broadway, between Third and Fourth Streets—but not for speculation, as many were doing during that period. Mason used her holdings to house her extended family and to stake family members who wanted to enter business, enabling them to make the successful transition from rural and frontier life to independent urban living.

  According to historian Dolores Hayden, Mason’s use of the property was “as an urban, economic base for her family’s activities.” In 1872 Mason gathered a group of black locals for a meeting in her home to organize the First African Methodist Episcopal Church. Her home became the location for her philanthropy, which she supported with income derived from other property. In 1884 she instructed a local grocer to open accounts for families made “homeless by season floods.” In 1891, when Mason died at her home in Los Angeles, her grandsons had to turn away hundreds who, unaware of her passing, sought out her services as a midwife and healer. Biddy Mason’s life story is a remarkable testament to her will to find her way out of slavery and create a home where she and her family would live as truly free people. After her death, Mason�
��s family held the land until the beginning of the twentieth century.5

  Biddy Mason was not alone among black female pioneers seeking refuge in the western United States. Religion drove some free black women to set up home in unlikely locations—like Boulder and Salt Lake City, and as far west as Hawaii—as missionaries. For example, in 1843, two years after hearing a sermon by a Mormon missionary, Jane James abandoned Presbyterianism. James, who had been born free in Connecticut, left the state of her birth and “followed the convert’s departure from ‘Babylon’ to ‘Zion’ ” to make her home as a live-in maid, first for Joseph Smith in Illinois and then for church leader Brigham Young in Utah. Later she married and set up her own home in Salt Lake City.6

  Whether they came as servants or slaves, one common denominator in many of these women’s experiences is the effort they made to overcome discrimination, establish their place in the communities where they settled, and thereby advance the race. Unlike Biddy Nelson, most of the women were not wealthy; some died impoverished. Yet many left a mark on the communities they helped establish. They were our founding mothers.

  Home, The Grand Signifier

  Historians often view the “Great Migration” of blacks from the rural South to the urban North as a mass movement of black men and women made in anticipation of economic opportunity and freedom from racism. But such a description suggests a tidiness that is not altogether true. The movement was not simply from south to north or even west, nor from rural to urban. At the turn of the twentieth century, it was as if the “gale-force wind,” to borrow Ben Brantley’s image, that “picks up and scatters people as if they were dandelion seeds”7 deposited blacks in places beyond and between destinations like Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, and New York.