With Her Fist Raised

by Laura L. Lovett

  The lumber industry required a number of different kinds of skilled labor, such as sawyer, lumber hacker, log cutter, and oiler, typically filled by white mill workers. The all-around identification of “helper” was assigned to Black lumbermen, suggesting an elision of aptitudes among Black males that allowed them to be moved according to the mill’s needs. The fact that almost all these “helpers” were employed the entire year suggests either a falsification for the sake of the Census taker—trying to make things appear fine in the midst of hard times—or, more likely, the fact that African Americans were crucial to the operation of the mill. Lumber was the largest industry employing African Americas in the early twentieth century.

  The Southern timber industry, designed originally to be transitory, drew on a mobile young male culture, as alluded to by Southern writer William Faulkner in Light in August, when he describes the main character, Joe Christmas, as being like other “young bachelors, or sawdust Casanovas” wandering through Alabama and Mississippi sawmill towns, selling moonshine whiskey, and seducing young women. This idea of timber work as a part-time paycheck was of some appeal to farmers who worked land near the timber sites. As Nate Shaw notes in his autobiography, timber work was a way “to make a speck if I could and then go back to my farm.”20 According to historian William P. Jones, this temporary work came to be viewed through the “lens of nineteenth-century republicanism,” which meant that Black workers purchased land close enough to mills to allow them to take industrial jobs without relinquishing the independence associated with farming.21

  This transitory vision, however, had begun to change, especially after World War II. While all of the houses in Charles Junction were rented from the local timber company, the African American families in these houses had been there, almost without fail, for decades by 1940. Multiple generations had settled down, not following Faulkner’s fictive “siren call” to move on.

  The intertwined nature of the independence of farming and the possibility of independence in working for a lumber company was too often a matter of trading one misperceived form of security for another. The sharecropping, or tenant, economy seemed to offer the independence and connection to yeoman republicanism while still managing to keep Black families tied to debt. The 1940 US Census for the timber settlement near Charles Junction reveals that timber workers and farmers rented their land and homes, often from the same owners. This connection often led to overlapping centers of business and field work.

  Dorothy’s father had been a cook in the Navy during World War II before returning to Charles Junction, where he worked as a driver and mechanic. Dorothy remembers him having lots of part-time jobs as well. Her favorite was his job at the local candy factory because he would come home with sweets for the kids.22

  Of the work categories described in the US Census for Charles Junction, only the Ridleys and Willie Lee Piortt, among African Americans, were listed as “Drivers.” All the other drivers for the lumber company were white, including the son of the sawmill manager, Ambers Jossey, and the brother of a foreman, Erskme Dunnaway. Driving for the mill offered an independence saved for the relatives of white supervisors and for those African Americans able and willing to risk traveling the dirt roads loaded with logs.

  Of all the truck operators, only the Ridleys are clearly identified as owning their own truck. One white family, the Vasseys, seemed to operate a logging truck on which their older son, Claude, “helped.” This family, like the Ridleys, may have been independent operators. The fact that a younger son in this household was named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, the founder of the Ku Klux Klan, suggests that they may not have enjoyed sharing this status with Dorothy’s father and grandfather.

  Dorothy remembered her father’s truck well. He had taken an old school bus, stripped it down, and converted it into a flatbed truck suitable for hauling lumber. Dorothy understood the importance of his driving this truck and wanted to try it herself. One day, when she was about twelve or thirteen years old, while her mother and aunt were cooking dinner, Dorothy asked if she could drive her father’s truck. Without listening carefully, her mother agreed. Dorothy then climbed into the truck and drove to but not on the highway. When she got back, she swept the tire tracks to hide the evidence that she had driven, but by then, her mother had realized what was going on. Dorothy wasn’t punished, though, because she had asked, and her mother had agreed.23 Dorothy didn’t say if her father ever found out.

  Dorothy’s father usually spent evenings after work at home on the front porch talking about his day, playing checkers with his children, or visiting with neighbors. The Ridleys had one of the larger houses in the neighborhood, and their porch was a place where people regularly stopped by to talk. He did not join his family at Mount Olive on Sundays; he had been raised in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Ray stayed home from services but cooked Sunday dinner every week.24

  Her father’s role as an independent truck driver had an impact on Dorothy’s understanding of the world. As the lumber industry boomed, the markets expanded to the North. Her father sometimes traveled as far as New York to deliver Georgia pine for the company. As a result, unlike many in rural Charles Junction, the Ridley family had a sense of mobility. When Ray Ridley loaded his truck and drove to far-off states and cities, he did so with a mind to returning, with stories of other places, to his family in Charles Junction. Unlike workers from previous times, he had no plans to move. His stories, though, allowed his children to imagine other places to go. It did not take long for Dorothy’s sense of adventure to take her beyond her small Georgia hometown.

  CHAPTER 2

  FINDING HER VOICE

  Moving “Up South”

  Fighting racism was a cherished goal for Dorothy Pitman Hughes. But challenging the structures of racial inequity introduced her to other structures of power. At the tender age of eleven, Dorothy decided to join the regional NAACP chapter in nearby Lumpkin, a good hour’s walk away from her neighborhood in Charles Junction. When she met the regional organizer, Dorothy remembers being told of the need for a “gown” to attend the group’s annual gala. Her young mind wondered why she would need a nightgown to fight white supremacy. When Dorothy questioned the necessity for a particular kind of dress, the woman’s laughter made clear Dorothy’s precocious dedication to political organizing came with another hard lesson: the “gown” she would need was an evening gown for a social gathering, a fancy acquisition that was far out of reach for the near-adolescent and her family. The NAACP organizer might have been gently trying to discourage a child from membership in a political organization that was considered dangerous to belong to in 1949, but the message that young Dorothy took away was that structures of class, as well as race, were integral in efforts to remake power.

  The fact that the regional NAACP was housed in Lumpkin, and not in the independent unincorporated African American settlement in which Dorothy lived, marked a further difference in both status and opportunity. Lumpkin, named for the governor who had championed the removal of the Creek and the Cherokee from Georgia, held on to a past that made it a good place to leave. Bypassed by market changes, the region was described in the 1930s as the poster child for soil erosion turned to timber. Later, the old Black Belt plantation borough became the first small town in Georgia to turn to historic preservation as a way to hold on to its feeling of significance.1 The St. Marks AME Church, out of which the regional NAACP was organized, stood near the intersection of Cotton and Pine Streets, on the periphery of the small town, near the reservoir and the cemetery. The location was far enough from the wealthy white historic uptown to remind congregants that, while the backbreaking labor of African Americans built the town, they were not a central part of it. This distance, though, had the benefit of giving them some relief from the constant surveillance of their white employers.

  Having learned her lesson about limited opportunities in small, stultifying towns, Dorothy decided to travel as far as she could. The lack of resources for rural Afri
can American children in Georgia meant she attended school with only a single teacher from “primer grade,” or kindergarten, to fifth grade in the basement of the Charles Trinity AME Church before attending high school in Lumpkin. Stewart County native Thomas Jefferson Flanagan, one of Georgia’s renowned African American poets and an Atlanta World editor, had returned to Lumpkin Public Schools as principal two decades before Dorothy attended. Remembering his “crude start,” he sought to improve things but was unable to get the necessary resources to elevate the region’s Black schools to a satisfactory level.2 Dorothy says that her high school diploma gave her the academic skills equivalent to the seventh-grade education of whites in her state. When she graduated in 1956, two years after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, Dorothy knew little would be done to improve her school. Indeed, two years after her graduation, the state of Georgia passed a state law that mandated shutting down any school district that integrated. She felt keenly the frustration of limited opportunities that her discriminatory education codified.

  The decision to leave had been cemented for Dorothy, as for many African Americans, with the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, when she was sixteen years old. The coverage in Jet magazine of the open-casket funeral of the Chicago teenager, sent to live with relatives in Money, Mississippi, and brutally murdered at the age of fourteen, was unforgettable. The courage of Till’s mother in displaying her son’s body inspired Dorothy to leave the South and its dangers for African American youth. Whether it was Philadelphia, where her father’s sister lived or elsewhere, she knew her future lay in the North. She had to start by leaving Lumpkin.

  Dorothy took her first salaried job working for whites at Fort Benning, forty miles away, just outside of Columbus. She cleaned houses on the military base. To get there, she took an informal bus—a pickup truck with a cab on the back—driven by her uncle, from Lumpkin to the outskirts of Columbus, where she would catch a bus to the fort, at a roundtrip cost of seventy-five cents. A day spent scrubbing red Georgia mud from floors, windows, and clothes earned her three dollars. After paying twenty-five cents to her family for the household “kitty,” she was able to save two dollars a week for her future.3

  Cleaning for white households at Fort Benning offered little encouragement to teenaged Dorothy. Nighttime opportunities seemed more compelling. Her older sister, Julia, had paved the way by moving to Columbus to work. Dorothy was captivated by the prospect of moonlighting as a singer in the nightclubs that surrounded the base. She and her sisters already had some local fame, singing at almost every African American event from Americus to Columbus, often remaking school auditorium concerts into popular happenings. Being able to stay nearby with her sister would free her to sing in Columbus on the weekends without having to commute or part with a quarter of her pay.

  Fort Benning was established as a US Army training camp during World War I. With the advent of a permanent infantry school in 1920, the fort eventually replaced mills on the Chattahoochee River and even timber and agriculture as the area’s primary source of employment. The locations around the base did not have a good reputation, however. Just across the river from Columbus and Fort Benning, Phenix City, Alabama, was known at the time as Sin City. During World War II, Secretary of War Henry Stimson called it “the wickedest city in America.” Efforts to clean up the city began in the mid-1950s, but it remained notorious.4 Rumors of rape and violence circulated in the Black press in the 1940s and made working safely as a nightclub performer a real concern.5 As historian Danielle McGuire notes, “As a kind of cultural narrative, rumors of rape and sexualized violence had enormous symbolic power and political potency. Whites used outrageous racial rumors and rape scares to justify strengthening segregation and white supremacy.”6 If Dorothy was concerned, it did not deter her, and with her parents’ permission, she began performing on weekends.

  Singing in Columbus exposed the beautiful young woman to opportunities that fed her desire to leave. Eventually a local talent agent offered to help manage her and move her north. To Dorothy, this prospect seemed to satisfy her mother’s requirements. Lessie Ridley had insisted her daughter have a proposal that demonstrated “respect [for] her plan for me. Being very careful and [to] not be sexually abused.”7

  Dorothy had spent years begging her mother for the chance to escape the stifling atmosphere of the South. She happily presented her plan for moving north with a legitimate manager, a talent agent who offered “to be her Berry Gordy,” the famous founder of Motown, and promised to book her in bigger nightclubs in New York. Lessie agreed to meet him. As Dorothy explains, they arranged to visit the manager in his home office in Columbus, driving to the city in the afternoon. The hour spent in the car was followed by a twenty-minute interview, cut short by her mother. She came into his office, began listening, and then said, “Okay, sir, thank you. Let’s go.”

  The brief encounter told Mrs. Ridley all she needed to know. “Did you see those iron prints on his pants?” her mother asked. In the days of cotton fabric, hot irons were a necessary part of dressing properly. Indeed, the man offering to take Dorothy to New York could clearly not afford to hire help for his ironing as there were marks where the hot metal had touched the fabric.

  “Why do you think he can do for you when he cannot do for himself?” Lessie asked her daughter. Her message was clear: this man would take advantage of Dorothy Jean, leaving her vulnerable, without family to protect her.

  “I still needed to give her a plan of what I was going to do for myself and how I was going to take care of myself,” Dorothy later explained. More importantly, the way Lessie had evaluated the situation conveyed a lasting lesson to her daughter: “Iron prints made me see details. Whenever I was going to be interviewed, I interviewed them silently.”8 Examining the details and learning to assess dangers and inconsistencies in the tiniest unspoken messages became a way of life for the young Dorothy Jean.

  Taking her mother’s message to heart, Dorothy decided she would get to New York City, the nightclub capital, in a way that she could support herself. An ad in the local newspaper for a live-in maid seemed to offer the answer. Domestic service agencies often reached into the South to lure what seemed to be a docile workforce west or north, depending on the historical moment. Dorothy saw her chance. Taking the ad to her mother, she insisted that she would be able to support herself, have a place to stay, and even be reimbursed for the journey. For years, the strong daughter and stronger mother had clashed over her future. This plan seemed to meet Mrs. Ridley’s requirements. The push of violence and discrimination in Georgia—and the pull of opportunity in New York—were irresistible.

  In 1958, Dorothy Jean Ridley packed her bags and took the train north. Arriving in New York, in Rockville, Long Island, where the domestic service agency was headquartered, she applied her mother’s lesson to her first job interview.9 Maid candidates were picked up by bus, brought to the agency, given numbers, and interviewed right away. Their tickets needed to be repaid and a quick placement and contract with an employer was the most efficient way of doing so. In her thesis on the topic, in 1940, Esther Cooper Jackson identified the practice of hiring Black live-in domestics as one of the most exploitative employment situations of the time. What she called the Bronx Slave Market was “one of the worst types of human exploitation . . . found in New York City and one of the ugliest aspects is the way in which girls are shipped up by the car loads from the South to stand on corners waiting for work for 25 to 35 cents per hour.”10 The situation had not vastly improved by the 1950s.

  When Dorothy’s number was called, she was interviewed simultaneously by the agency owner and a woman with a young child. The woman seemed friendly. She asked questions, along with the agency owner: What was her experience? Had she worked with children? Where was she from?

  “The woman they’d picked out for me was nice. I liked her. The kid was cute. The man gave us papers. I signed mine and she signed hers,” Dorothy explained later. While her immediate future seeme
d secure, the next transaction provided the kind of detail that caused her to reflect on her worth. The agency owner gave Dorothy’s new employer one hundred Green Stamps as a gift for employing the young woman. These were trading stamps that could be redeemed for goods from a catalogue. This gesture, more than anything else about that day, affected Dorothy: “I put it in my head that I was very angry that I was only worth one hundred Green Stamps. That stayed with me all of the time I was in domestic work. That taught me to have a different kind of value to myself.”11

  The new environment and the household labor took a toll on Dorothy. She was learning what it meant to be a “sleep-in maid,” working long hours, with occasional verbal abuse. She stayed in touch with some of the agency’s other employees and was soon making connections on the regular Thursday nights out that live-in employees were allowed.12 This guaranteed domestic service for white employers for the weekends.

  One day, her “nice” employer asked Dorothy Jean to walk the dog in the rain. To a Georgian like Dorothy, who was always cold in the new climate, this seemed absurd: “In Lumpkin, dogs walked themselves, did their number, and came back.” The woman insisted that her maid take the animal out on the wet day, threatening to fire her if she did not. In Dorothy’s words, the measure of her worth and the woman’s disregard for the “kind of value” that she should have as a human came to a head. “I said, Okay,” and with that, Dorothy Jean Ridley left.