Sharp began his argument by reciting both Section 207 of the Mississippi Constitution (“Separate schools shall be maintained for children of the white and colored races”) and Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment (“No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States”). By juxtaposing the two sections, Sharp was able to demonstrate that the state and federal constitutions were fundamentally at odds when it came to the education of Martha Lum.
He calculated that Brewer would have to rely almost exclusively on the Fourteenth Amendment, while Sharp could build his argument around Section 207 of the Mississippi Constitution. To grant or deny Martha Lum entry into a white high school would require enforcing the laws of one body while violating the laws of another. In a few short sentences, Sharp had resurrected an age-old conflict, that between nation and state. He wagered everything on the belief that sons of the Confederacy would always side with Mississippi. The only way Sharp figured he would lose would be if Martha could somehow be classified as white.
“We come back to the question, and really the only question, involved in this case,” he said. “Are Chinese children of the white race and entitled as such to attend the schools of the white race?”
Segregation, Sharp argued, was for the purpose of protecting the white race from all other races. This included the Chinese.
“It has been at all times the policy of the lawmakers of Mississippi to preserve the white schools for members of the Caucasian race alone,” he continued. “Our lawmakers . . . were desirous of prohibiting an intermingling of any race with the Caucasian or white children of our state.”
If the Caucasian race was considered white, then all other races were to be categorized as colored. Therefore, Sharp argued, Martha and all children of Chinese descent should be classed as Negroes. He stressed that there was no need for the judges to refer to the federal constitution in their deliberations. Mississippi had created segregation to the exclusive benefit of the white race.
“We do not have to look to the cases of other states,” he said, “to determine the legislative classification of the Chinese or Mongolian race in Mississippi. The status or classification of this race has been declared and fixed by our own legislature. It has in unmistakable terms placed the Chinese or Mongolian race in the same category with the negro.”
“We, therefore, submit that the demurrer should be sustained,” Sharp concluded. “And that the judgment of the lower court should be reversed.” Sharp returned to his seat. His address had lasted only a few minutes. It may have been even shorter. Everything he could have said was already written into the state’s constitution: “Separate schools shall be maintained for children of the white and colored races.” In the eyes of the state, Martha was a colored child. Even while in the eyes of the nation, she was simply a child.
Brewer rose from his chair, his hulking figure towering over Sharp. He loped to the front of the court, his hands empty. He had no notes. He never needed any. At the back of the room, the Chinese were gathered together, a silent and powerful presence. Brewer leveled his gaze, took a breath, and began.
“The demurrer admits that Martha Lum is a citizen of the United States and of the state of Mississippi and a resident of Rosedale consolidated school district,” Brewer stated. “She is denied admission to the school at which she presented herself solely on the ground that she is a Chinese child.”
Before launching into the main argument of his defense and invoking the federal protections guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment, Brewer drew back. He was theatrical by nature and relished these waning moments of his fading career. Instead of talking about Martha, Brewer segued into a history lesson.
He recalled the passage of Mississippi’s 1890 Constitution, a document that outlined the means by which segregation would be upheld in the state. It was a story and a document with which every judge—and every member of every single Mississippi court—was familiar. Brewer was simply biding his time. After the long-winded lecture, he returned to Martha.
“It is conceded that she is not of the race whose presence in the south occasioned the Constitutional and statutory provisions for separate schools,” said Brewer. “The requirement in the Constitution of 1890 that separate schools must be maintained for the races dealt with only two races. The purpose was to make it certain that negro children should not attend the same school with white children.”
There was no need to explain segregation to the court. They understood as well as he did that the races would always be separated in the South. Yet, in order for Brewer to win over the judges, he had to convince the men to see Martha as the federal government saw her. He had to shift the focus away from the color of her skin, to the strength of her character. He had to somehow convince the judges that a person should not be defined by their race, but by their ambition. Such words were so dangerous, they could have splintered stone.
“The state collects from all for the benefit of all,” Brewer declared. “Martha Lum is one of the state’s children and is entitled to the enjoyment of the privilege of the public school system without regard to her race.”
There it was, the Fourteenth Amendment, the guardian of privileges for all citizens of all races. By speaking its lines, Brewer was demanding that the state see Martha not as a Mongolian, a Chinaman, a colored girl, or a yellow child, but as a citizen of the United States. He begged the State of Mississippi to do something it had never done before, to treat a student as a citizen “without regard to her race.”
If there was silence, it was never recorded. If there were cheers, they too went unmarked. For as soon as Brewer uttered the words, he recoiled back on them. Maybe the notion was too revolutionary for the very man who devised it, or maybe he saw on the judges’ faces the resolute prejudice against any threat to social order. He tempered his rhetoric into words they would understand. And in doing so, he committed a fatal flaw. He forced Martha back into her skin and let it dictate her future.
“It is merely suggested by opposing counsel that the Chinese children should attend the negro schools,” said Brewer.
But it is clearly shown by the authorities cited herein that the Chinaman is not a “colored person” within the meaning of our laws. He would therefore not go to the negro school as a negro. The court will take judicial notice of the fact that members of the Mongolian race under our Jim Crow statute are treated as not belonging to the negro race. The Japanese are classified with the Chinese. These two races furnish some of the most intelligent and enterprising people. They certainly stand nearer to the white race than they do to the negro race. If the Caucasian is not ready to admit that the representative Mongolian is his equal, he is willing to concede that the Mongolian is on the hither side of the half-way line between the Caucasian and African.
In a feeble attempt to return to the equality that he was so quick to cast aside, Brewer closed out his speech with a reiteration of the Fourteenth Amendment. He recalled its lines from memory.
“We wish to be understood,” he concluded, “that to exclude a Chinese citizen child from the public schools . . . is to do a thing prohibited by the last clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
Brewer walked back to the counsel’s table and eased himself into his chair beside the bench. The judges told the lawyers that they would confer and announce their ruling within the coming weeks. With a parting thud of the gavel, the session was over.
Brewer walked back through the crowd of spectators, under the marble pillars of the court’s entryway and into a wide corridor. Its low ceiling seemed to bear down on the hallway.
At the end of the hall, the low beams opened into a soaring white plaster dome, the main rotunda of the state capitol building. Brewer could see senators, secretaries, and porters milling about in the balconies overhead. Their activity echoed off the dome’s yellowing, smoke-stained walls.
At the upper reaches of the vault, carved into the rotunda, was a bust of Lady Justice. Her eyes
were tied with a blindfold. In her hair were two magnolia blossoms, one above each ear. Her jaw was set in deliberation. Brewer passed beneath her as he made his way to the exit.
Four weeks after the trial, the Mississippi Supreme Court issued a verdict. The unanimous decision, written by Judge George Ethridge, was in favor of excluding Martha Lum from Rosedale’s white school. In the ruling, Ethridge cited a decision that he himself had written eight years earlier.
He relied almost entirely on the precedent of Moreau v. Grandich, a case in which the white children of Antonio Grandich of Hancock County, Mississippi, were expelled from public school due to a rumor that the children’s great-grandmother bore “negro blood.” The rumor came about in part due to a revelation that two of Grandich’s great-aunts may have married outside their race.
When it was brought to the court’s attention that the children’s great-grandparents were fully white and that the children could not possibly have descended from the great-aunts, Judge Ethridge still ruled in favor of expulsion—despite the undisputed fact that the children were genetically white. He sided with the school’s board of trustees, giving them full power to determine the race of a student, regardless of the child’s genetic history. “In Moreau v. Grandich,” Ethridge wrote in the Rice v. Gong Lum decision,
we held that . . . the word “colored” included, not only negroes, but persons of mixed blood. In the argument in the present case it is insisted that this definition of “colored” limited and restricted the term “colored” entirely to persons of the negro race or who were of negro descent. We think a careful reading of the opinion in the Moreau v. Grandich case, supra, in the light of the statement of the facts, shows that the court did not intend to restrict the term “colored” to persons having negro blood in their veins or who were descendants of negroes or of the negro race.
“It is the policy of this state to have and maintain separate schools and other places of association for the races so as to prevent race amalgamation,” Ethridge continued. “Race amalgamation has been frowned on by Southern civilization always, and our people have always been of the opinion that it was better for all races to preserve their purity. However, the segregation laws have been so shaped as to show by their terms that it was the white race that was intended to be separated from the other races.”
The court’s ruling had serious consequences for ethnic enclaves throughout the state. Suddenly, to be anything other than white was to be defined as black. Thousands of first- and second-generation immigrants, who once navigated a permeable line between the races, now found themselves forced onto the Negro side of the Jim Crow South.
Upon conclusion of his decision, Ethridge dictated the terms by which Martha Lum, and all Chinese children in the state of Mississippi, could receive an education.
“If the plaintiff desires,” Ethridge wrote, “she may attend the colored public schools of her district, or, if she does not so desire, she may go to a private school. . . . A parent under the decisions of the supreme court of the United States has a right to educate his child in a private school if he so desires. But the plaintiff is not entitled to attend a white public school.”
CHAPTER VII
SPRING, 1925
THE NEWS CAME TO Martha by way of her mother. There was an anger in her voice that Martha had never heard before, like the sound of a snake writhing under its own skin. Katherine ordered her children to pack their bags. She said the courts had rendered a decision to exclude all Chinese students from Rosedale’s high school. If Katherine’s children could not return to classes, they would have to leave Mississippi.
It was early May and the rain swells had finally given way to summer. Just ten months earlier, Martha was preparing for exams, unfolding her books onto milk crates and Royal Crown Cola boxes. Now, in the spring of 1925, there was no reason to study. Martha and her sister had been out of school for nearly a year and there was little hope of ever returning.
Katherine decided to send the children north to Jackson, Michigan, where Jeu Gong’s brother operated a laundry in the center of the city. Meanwhile, Katherine and Jeu Gong would sell the store in Mississippi. Katherine would find a new home, where the children could attend school. When the time was right, she would send for them.
The only land Martha had ever known were the river towns of the Mississippi Delta. What she knew of the North she learned mostly from Negros, a story about a cousin who went up to Detroit and returned with his own Cadillac, a sister who left for Chicago and never looked back. Then there were her own family’s stories, recounted to Martha by her big sister Berda, the vague childhood memories of their uncle, Ah Bok, and his son Lee, who came south when the war in Europe was over.
They talked about the chop suey shops and teahouses, streets of people speaking their native Cantonese. Berda was suddenly an expert in this foreign land of their distant family. There was something deep within her that had always wanted to leave Mississippi, to travel, to know more of the world outside Rosedale.
Unable to discern exactly what she would need in the North, Martha packed what she could. She selected several hand-sewn dresses, each one not quite fashionable enough for metropolitan life, with their faded fabric and uneven collars. Martha’s mother urged her daughter to wear the dresses with pride. Miss Sales was a good seamstress. She worked hard.
Miss Sales didn’t have a sewing machine of her own, so she came to the Lum house to do her sewing. Martha watched Miss Sales work, her brown fingers binding the thread, feet moving steadily over the pedal. She built a business out of that machine, hemming and sewing dresses for all the colored folk.
In return, Miss Sales cared for the children. On Saturdays, when Katherine was busy at the grocery, Miss Sales prepared supper. On weekdays, when the children returned home from school, Miss Sales made sure they completed their studies. Martha grew accustomed to the meter of her machine, the taste of her cooking, the comfort of her conversation.
Then one day Miss Sales was gone, the sewing machine frozen in place, untouched. When Martha asked her mother where Miss Sales had gone, Katherine responded that she moved to Chicago. There was no more of an explanation. Katherine didn’t tell her daughter that Miss Sales left in a hurry, that she begged Katherine to come with her, that the souls strung from branches, hung from bridges, drowned in rivers were too much a burden to bear. Folding Miss Sales’s dresses, Martha packed all that was left of her nanny into a suitcase and prepared to follow her north.
The children arrived at the Rosedale depot shortly before the midday train from Vicksburg. Across the tracks, the bright letters of the Lum grocery flashed along the red brick of their house at the far end of Bruce Street. Katherine placed into Berda’s palm a tiny purse, bursting with rolled bills. She was told to guard it carefully, for the money would provide a safe passage north.
Martha, Berda, and Biscoe, who was just barely six, stood on the platform as the Illinois Central eased into the station, passing the old hay warehouse, the ice plant, and the vacant outpost of the Coca-Cola Bottling Company. This was the same train Martha used to chase, watching the faces pass by in the windows, traveling to cities she could only imagine. Now it was Martha’s turn to become one of those faces, staring out from a boxcar as it hurtled through small country towns, where barefooted children chased the pound of an engine, waving at strangers headed to those far-off, imaginary places.
Martha picked up her suitcase and walked to the entrance of the train, taking her place in line. A railing divided the stairs on the platform, one side for white passengers, the other for colored. Shifting on her feet, Martha moved to the left side of the stairs, where the white passengers waited to board the back of the train. The colored car was always the front car of the train, closest to the engine and the danger and soot that went along with it. The children trailed each other through the open door of the train and down its narrow aisles. Coming to an empty row, they folded themselves onto the frame of their seats and waited for departure.
Once, in third grade, when Martha was studying American literature, she read a story about a colored girl named Olive who was raised to believe she was white. The girl’s mother, Madame Delphine, tried to give her daughter a better life. She promised Olive to a charitable banker named Monsieur Vignevielle, but in order to make this promise, Madame Delphine had to disown her only child.
“Oh, my darling little one, you are not my daughter!” Madame Delphine said to Olive.
On a warm summer day, at a noon wedding inside a little church, Madame Delphine quietly watched her daughter marry the wealthy white banker and become a proper Southern lady. After the service, Madame Delphine entered the confessional, where she told the priest the sin of her deception. There kneeling, with her forehead resting in her hands, Madame Delphine died.
“It makes little difference whether it is all true to life or not,” read a passage in Martha’s textbook. “In literature one looks for the spirit of a time and place, not for historical accuracy.” What was important about the story, the textbook said, was the lesson of a mother “who for the sake of her beautiful daughter, sacrifices herself.”
With a shudder of steel, the train pulled away from the station. Martha watched as the wide platform of the depot slowly drifted from view. Behind her was a childhood, races over the levee walls, hymnals, revivals and churchyard picnics, the slow pop of salted fatback sputtering in her mother’s skillet, the shine of cotton pickers, cleaned up sharp on a Saturday night after harvest. The train gathered speed and with it Martha’s old life moved into the past. She prepared herself for a future in a distant city.
Biscoe was restless. He complained about needing to relieve himself. As the eldest, and the one in charge of the money, Berda acted the parent. As Biscoe’s complaints continued to escalate, Berda promised to escort him to the restroom. She nudged Martha out of her seat and pushed her two siblings up the aisle. Together, they tottered along the train cars until Biscoe finally found the toilet.
Water Tossing Boulders Page 13