by Anita Hill
My parents’ adult lives have been so consumed by family that it still takes effort to see them as independent personalities. Erma Hill, my mother, is a mixture of stern restraint and lavish generosity. Years into my adulthood I began to understand her. Underneath the crop of fine hair that has been gray or graying as long as I have known her lies a complex mind. She is never unnerved or flustered. She can appear almost haughty, and one glance can freeze its target. But upon closer examination, I have come to recognize that much of her moderation and even her severity can be attributed to shyness and modesty. Despite the fact that she is a farmworker and the mother of thirteen children, she is never less than dignified. Her erect posture suggests the propriety of an Edwardian lady. Those were the days in which she and her friends came of age. Those are the ways her behavior reflects. And she taught her children to carry themselves in that same way despite the differences in the times of our upbringing.
My mother was at her best during our Sunday morning routine preparing for church. “Finish eating your breakfast and wash the dishes, so that we can get to Sunday school on time.” A few minutes later she would call again to her children from her bedroom, “Are you all ready for church?”
“Yes,” we’d groan in response, anticipating the next command.
“Well, sit on the couch and don’t move until I tell you,” the command always came back. “And don’t get your socks dirty.”
My mother often expected from us what we considered to be the impossible, especially on Sunday mornings. But we dutifully complied. Even in the summer, when we walked the three miles along the dusty road between our home and the church, we arrived with our white anklet socks spotless and only a hint of dust on our patent-leather shoes. My mother’s church friend often served as her reinforcement. A woman nearly six feet tall and over 190 pounds in her prime, Mattie Hutton was her closest friend. We called her Miss Mattie. One Sunday morning when I was about twelve years old, she presented me with a purse. “Never let me see you at church without one again,” she warned to remind me that I had come of age. As my Sunday school teacher, Miss Mattie watched my progress in this respect. She hovered over us like her own. From the time she and my mother taught us the children’s “Jesus Loves Me” until we learned the more complex spiritual “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” (a song mourning a mother’s death), they reminded us that we were first the children of God and only after that theirs.
Miss Mattie no doubt reasoned that if I were carrying a purse, I wouldn’t be able to play tag with the boys between Sunday school and church as I liked to. Well, I carried the purse, but I certainly continued to play chase. Years later, in deciding on a gift for me, she would choose a handmade apron. I treasure the gift but I do not wear it, preferring to wear the evidence of my cooking on my clothes.
Another of my mother’s friends, Bertha “Red” Reagor, Miss Red, tried to make a similar impression on my role identification. Miss Red gave me a sewing basket for my birthday one year, and a miniature butter churn the year after. “I just thought this was the cutest thing for Faye” (everyone referred to me by my middle name). She laughed nearly each word, as was her customary way of talking. When I went away to college, my mother confiscated the sewing basket rather than let it go to waste. The butter churn I keep as a memento, knowing that butter will never be formed in it. Most of the gifts my mother’s friends gave to help ground me in what they considered my proper role and carriage, I still have. They serve as tangible reminders of the intangible gifts—the poise, the self-respect, the discipline—that were of far greater value.
But if she was the person who kept us in line, my mother was also an unselfish nurturer. My most distinct early memory of her is of her feet as they moved up and down with the treadle of the sewing machine that she had inherited from her mother. My mother sewed all of her daughters’ clothes until one by one they learned to sew for themselves. I would have my turn sewing soon enough, but then I was no more than four or five years old and too young for most household duties. During her sewing we would play a game for as long as her patience lasted. Having been taught the alphabet by my older sister Joyce, I would make up letter combinations, most of them nonsensical.
“What does ‘d-g-t’ spell?” I would ask. Though I had learned the letters, I had not learned the difference in vowels and consonants and the significance of vowels in correct spelling. “Nothing,” my mother would respond. “Nothing,” I would repeat incredulously. I had somehow gotten the impression that every letter combination spelled a word. Occasionally, I would hit upon a combination of letters that actually did spell a word. This only spurred me on. I am sure I would have played the game for hours if allowed. Though I never tired of it, eventually my mother did. “That’s enough spelling for now,” she would announce when her ability to endure my admittedly poor efforts waned.
Usually those words were enough. But certain signals alerted me that it was a bad idea to press any point. We all took my mother seriously. I knew that the appropriate response was to stop, at least for the moment. She often guided me to the next activity: “Let’s go outside and get the eggs.” Or the always welcomed “Are you ready for some lunch?” She would indulge me enough to try to distract me with food—a baked sweet potato or sardines and crackers. Though I remember enjoying these foods with my mother, I don’t think I ever really enjoyed the taste of them. We enjoyed mostly the communion of that time, so much so that I would never complain about the flavors.
I enjoyed a luxury shared by none of my other siblings. That was time alone with my mother. For the four years between the time when my youngest sibling, JoAnn, started school and the time I entered the first grade, my mother and I were nearly constant companions. Similarly, when JoAnn went away to college and I was in high school, my mother and I spent the summers together. And outside of her farm responsibility, I had her constant attention. By that time Mama had been raising children for thirty years, and knowing that I was the last child she would raise to adulthood, she seemed to take extra care with me. I never believed that she favored me, though my siblings might disagree. Certainly, she may have hung on to me a little longer. But she never excused me from discipline or the work that had to be done on the farm.
My favorite meals were the ones that my mother cooked for the family when I was a child. Food and physical warmth were two things that Mama lavished upon her family. She always assumed that her children were as hungry or as easily chilled as she. A sudden unexpected drop in the temperature (common in Oklahoma) during a spring day never caught us off guard. We were prepared with sweaters just in case. Each winter morning she rose before the rest of us to build a blazing fire in our wood-burning stove. And my mother did nearly all of the cooking. Meals of biscuits or corn bread, rice or fried potatoes, stew, pork chops or fried chicken, and greens were her specialties.
Summer and winter, my mother was invariably the first to rise in the household. In summer with no fire to attend to, she began the day by starting the preparation for breakfast. The sound of rattling pots was our alarm clock, followed shortly by the sound of my father sharpening the hoes for the day’s work in the fields. “You all get up, now. It’s almost seven,” she cried out at 6:35. Following breakfast my mother gathered us and we trekked to whatever field we were working, often on foot. (My father worked with the tractor and looked after the cattle.) Midday, we broke. My mother prepared the noon meal. We returned to often oppressive heat of the cotton or peanut patch for an afternoon of work. We ate a light meal at about sunset, washed up, and shortly thereafter fell into bed exhausted. My mother and her children kept this routine every summer until only I and my mother were left to do the “chopping.”
My mother regularly coordinated meals, field work, and home chores. In any given year, the household included as many as eight of the thirteen children. When my parents learned that an elderly man once married to my father’s aunt had again been widowed, they brought him into the household. At the age of four, I could not understand how
Charley Arvier, who spoke a kind of Cajun French and broken English with a Louisiana accent, was related to me. Yet we called him Uncle Charley, and he lived with us as part of the family until he died eight years later. She did this without any fanfare or self-consciousness. This was simply a part of her routine. As an adult I marvel at it.
My father’s personality is just as strong as my mother’s. Despite their differences in interests and background, as a young man my father, with his broad smile, smooth brown skin, and curly black hair, must have been quite appealing to her. He was handsome (though “Handsome” was the nickname that went to his older brother, Ralph), energetic, and athletic. And he probably served as an antidote to the sobriety of the Elliott family. Where my mother was shy and reserved, my father was always outgoing and charming. Still, they were never an odd couple so much as a matched set.
My father loved to tease, to make us laugh, and to laugh at his own jokes even when others did not. I recall once having incurred my father’s wrath. Late at night, when my mother was away, I was whining about having to share my bed with two visiting nieces and nephews, having been used to sleeping only with my sister. My father took objection to being kept up past his bedtime to listen to my protest. I learned then that my father had his limits too. His one demand of us as small children was that we be quiet. “You all cut out that noise,” he would bellow in the evenings. Daddy still has great charm about him and the ability to relax and feel at home in almost anyone’s company. Yet he can also be detached and reserved. Like my mother, he is a product of his time—a time when fathers were not necessarily expected to be emotionally available twenty-four hours a day.
My earliest clear memory of him is watching him getting ready to go to the Sunday night musicals where he would sing tenor with his quartet, the Oklahoma Spirituals. Though as a farmer he was in the home much of the day, he did not work alongside us in the fields. He drove the tractors and tended the cows. On Sunday, however, we were all together. He would shave his face of all but his thick mustache and slick back his hair with Murray’s pomade. The orange tin of hairdressing was for his exclusive use. In the background, Negro spirituals played on the radio broadcast from a station in Muskogee. “Be quiet so I can hear the announcements,” my father commanded. The “memory lane” segment was a “must hear” for him. The announcer told who had died that week and which of the black mortuaries “has the body.” All the children were dressed, heeding our mother’s admonition to sit quietly. My mother, having concluded her responsibility to us, was also finished with her routine. But my father was a different story. He regularly finished his routine as the rest of the family waited, fully dressed. No one dared urge him to quicken his pace. We’d just wait patiently for him to enter the living room and ask of those gathered, “Are you all waiting for me?” My mother never learned to drive a car. Had she mastered this skill, I suspect that we would have waited at church for my father’s arrival.
My father’s most memorable church activity was his singing. I often anticipated hearing him sing “Pass Me Not O Gentle Savior” in his untrained falsetto voice. This voice was inviting and pleasant yet so unlike his speaking voice, it seemed completely unreal. As a child, I could not understand how my father’s gravelly speaking voice could turn to a high-pitched singing voice. By the same token, my achievements at school were a source of pride and delight for my father. Though he expected me to do well in school, he never understood my attachment to learning. And I am certain that he never saw the significance of it for my future. I was, after all, always his “baby girl.”
Every Sunday the family went to Sunday school at Lone Tree Missionary Baptist Church, the church my paternal grandfather had helped to establish. And on every first and third Sunday we went there to church. The alternating Sunday church service was a part of the rural tradition of the “circuit” minister who pastored two or more churches and visited them on a rotating basis. Our pastor’s visit fell on these two Sundays. Presumably, he spent other Sundays at another church. This was typical of small rural communities and continues even today. The whitewashed wood-frame building now sits quietly during the week attracting little attention from passersby, as it awaits Sunday services.
In earlier days when my parents’ family was young, the building rattled with activity daily. Prior to 1960 it was the home of the grammar school for the “colored” children in the rural neighborhood. At one point two teachers taught as many as sixty schoolchildren at a time within its walls. Before my memory, on occasion on Saturday nights when musicals were not held in the church, there was a different kind of bustle in the building. That week’s farmwork completed, the members of the community dressed in close to their Sunday best and gathered at the “church house” for family movies. A man who traveled about with projector, film, and screen collected nickels from families and created a makeshift theater, thus compensating for the lack of entertainment available to rural blacks. My sisters Joyce and Doris recall watching the films The Wolf Man and Dracula in the church building and being afraid to walk the three miles home afterward. This was the 1950s. The family never went to the movie theater together, so it was not part of our experience. I saw my first movie in an actual theater in 1967 when my brother Ray took JoAnn and me to see Bonnie and Clyde.
On Wednesday night the school and social center became a place of worship as church deacons led parishioners in prayer meeting. Prayer meeting was my favorite church activity. I particularly enjoyed the traditional hymns as they were performed in the church. “I love the Lord, he heard my cry and pitied every moan,” Deacon Jesse Barnett (my friend Pocahontas’ father) would call out to the worshipers. “I love the Lord, he heard my cry,” they would sing in response, almost moaning the words. “Long as I live, when troubles rise, I’ll hasten to his throne,” again Deacon Barnett called. As the song went on, the imagery was so strong, coupled with the words and singing, that I would see Jesus “bowing his head and chasing my griefs away.” Perhaps childhood griefs were so limited that they vanished with ease.
On Friday night Lone Tree conducted business meetings. From appearances, the men mostly ran the church’s business, but the women of Lone Tree firmly yet diplomatically let their opinions be known. On Saturday night Lone Tree might offer a musical, bringing in choirs, soloists, and duos from Okmulgee and surrounding counties. My parents’ friends S. L. and Red Reagor were among the most interesting with their a cappella selection of jubilees—a lively syncopated form of gospel song that evoked images of happy times or deliverance. Due to their years together, the Reagors as a duo had mastered the form of singing like no other couple had and were known throughout the rural churches because of it. During service it was the tradition that the women sat on the right side of the church and the men sat on the left. Couples who came in together separated at the door and walked separately down the church’s two aisles to sit on one of the wooden pews. Young children sat with their mothers. When it came time for the Reagors to sing, they approached the front of the congregation from separate corners and returned separately when they concluded. It was our tradition and we never questioned or commented on it.
Lone Tree Missionary Baptist Church was the center of the family spiritual and social life. The women of Lone Tree were my role models. Most were farmers and homemakers who came out of the fields to clean their homes and the church building. The lessons they taught, both religious and social, are the most valuable to me. They were not “feminists,” in the modern sense of the word. They worshiped in a service which prohibited women from preaching or leading. When women and men sat separately in church, it was most likely out of this denigration of women’s roles. Yet they were essential to the operation of the church and voiced their opinions. Importantly, they expected just as much from the girls in the church as from the boys. Even more importantly, by example, they taught me about concern for the collective—the community. Some Sundays family members and friends assembled at our home around 2:00 P.M. for Sunday dinner. It was as though the
y just materialized. We had no telephones to communicate an invitation or to announce an event. Miraculously, or so I always felt, whether there were ten or thirty extra mouths to feed, my mother always seemed to have enough food. Each of those days seemed like a mini-reunion that gave me a sense of being in touch with people outside of the farmwork and my everyday school life.
Neither my parents nor the other people in rural Oklahoma were naive about discrimination and its impact on their lives. No doubt that is why Erma and Albert Hill insisted that their children finish high school and provided for their education beyond high school. In the fall of 1945 my parents had eight children and one due shortly. Elreatha, my oldest sister, then seventeen, graduated from high school in the spring. My parents were both thirty-four and neither of them had finished high school. My farmer parents’ vision extended well beyond their circumstances. They sent “Reat” to college at a time when only 5 percent of the black women in the country had white-collar jobs and 60 percent were working as domestics. On the average in Okmulgee County, females completed 8.9 years and males 8.6 years of formal education. Yet Elreatha was one of the few hundred black women who that year would begin her college education. The fact that Oklahoma made it a criminal offense to educate blacks and whites of any age together was not a deterrence. All of the children in the family attended segregated schools.
Before Oklahoma became a state, parents of two black children in a town named Guthrie challenged unsuccessfully the dual education system in Oklahoma Territory. Again, in 1946, a woman named Ada Lois Sipuel began to challenge educational segregation in a case argued in the U.S. Supreme Court two years later by Thurgood Marshall, Sipuel v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma. Though, in 1949, she ultimately won her right to attend the School of Law at the University of Oklahoma, the victory in the case only affected professional and graduate schools in the state. The practice of segregated education for elementary, secondary, and undergraduate education continued until well after the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Elreatha attended Langston University, the historically black college set up in the state to avoid integration of such institutions as the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University. She never graduated, choosing instead to marry and raise children—eleven, in fact.