Tigerbelle

by Wyomia Tyus

  The Sundays when my mom wasn’t mad at my dad, which was most Sundays, we did the thing that I loved best: my dad, my brother Junior, and I would go walking in the woods. Jimmy Lee was usually off hanging out with his white friends, and Jackie was already gone; he had lied about his age and joined the military when he was sixteen. But Junior and I would run and hide and climb trees, pick up rocks and see who could throw them the farthest—just be kids. At one point or another, we would stop walking and we would sit. We would always have our knives with us, and we would whittle while we were sitting; we didn’t have to talk about anything although sometimes my dad would tell us about everything he saw, so we learned a lot about nature without really knowing that that was what we were doing. We would dig in the soil, and he would say what was rich soil, what was not, and I would ask questions: “How did they get all these trees here?”

  “They planted some, for sure,” he would say, “but then seeds just go places and grow.”

  “How could seeds just go places and grow?” I was always asking stuff like that. And he would explain it all to me. Not that he was giving out any great wisdom; more like he was telling us what there was to see, if you knew enough to see it. Sometimes it was just practical things like, “You shouldn’t play in these bushes because that’s where snakes hang out,” or, “You need to watch out for this plant—it’s poisonous.” But other times, he wasn’t so much explaining things to us as exposing us to the feeling of being free. I think that’s how he looked at being in the woods, why he brought us there. “This is what nature is about; it’s about freedom. This is all out there for you, this beauty, this freedom, this is how life is supposed to be—beautiful, calm, and serene.” He didn’t use those exact words, but that was the idea that I got from our walks. He had a sense of wonder about it all, especially in the springtime and the fall, when things were changing. He would say, “Look how pretty this is!” So it was never like he was teaching us a lesson. More like: “Look at this. Do you ever wonder how that got here? God put it here.”

  “How do you know God put it here?” I was always bucking up against the God thing. “You never seen God. How do you know the devil didn’t do it? He has powers too!”

  And my dad would say, “Now baby, you shouldn’t be saying things like that.” But I’m sure he got big joy out of the fact that I questioned every durned thing. My mom would say, “You are not to question God.” But my dad was more like us. He had questions too. And he wanted us to be expressive. He didn’t talk much, so he didn’t really know how to teach us; his teaching was more through making us feel comfortable—through making us feel free. He wanted us to be able to express ourselves, to look at things with wonder and question them.

  The farm was so big, but now, when I think back about it, we probably walked the same path all the time. The cows had to be milked twice a day, in the mornings and then at night, so at the end of our walks we would round them up and push them all the way back to the dairy. That was the best time of my life. I just totally enjoyed those walks. I think about it a lot of times now, and when I was working the last job I had, which was in outdoor education, sometimes in the mornings driving to work I would think, This job is just like walking the farm. It was all so pleasant. I just felt comfortable in my whole situation, and it was wonderful. My favorite remembrance still is of walking the farm with my dad.

  * * *

  We were not the only people living on that land, though. We were the only people working the farm, but Ben Brown had about three or four houses that he rented out when people would come looking for places to live. Some of the people who came didn’t get along with us; they were white and didn’t want to have anything to do with Black people. We kids would say, “Okay, we don’t care, but then their kids won’t have anybody to play with.” Because if they were going to play with the other white kids in the neighborhood, they also had to play with us. The people who lived on the west side of the road, the other side of the road from us, were there before us, and we were all neighbors and acted like neighbors. For the adults, it was a white-and-Black thing: we didn’t go over and sit with them and have dinner or anything like that, and they didn’t come over and sit with us. But that was all it was. My brothers cut their grass and raked their leaves for money, and we all played together, us children—well, me and the boys, at least. None of the white girls were allowed to play with “the coloreds.” But if any of the new boys came with the attitude, “I’m not going to play with you people,” then they played alone.

  “You people.” I’m not going to use the words that they would use. That was a rule in our house. My dad would say to us, “You do not let them call you by any names but your name. They cannot call you the N-word.”

  So when new neighbors would come, we had to let them know that that was not something that was going to be tolerated. Sometimes it was a fight, and my brothers would make me do the fighting. One family that moved in had four boys, and they weren’t the nicest boys in the world, but it didn’t matter because we always felt we could beat anybody. So if they were calling us names, we just wouldn’t play with them, or we would draw a line in the dirt and say, “This is our property, and that’s your property. You cannot come over here. You can’t play with us. Stay over there and you’re fine. But you step across this line and call us names, then it’s a different story.”

  Of course they didn’t believe us. They had to cross the line and call us names. And my brothers would say, “We won’t beat you up. We’ll just let this girl beat you up.” And I could do it. It was amazing. I don’t think it happened but two times. No telling what they would call us after they left—but as long as they were with us, there was no name-calling.

  In other places, it might have been dangerous for us to stand up like that. But where we were, like I said, it was kind of a safe haven. There were a lot of things happening in the fifties and sixties—bad things—but they just never really applied to us because we were kind of in a little cocoon. Not that everything was equal. We played with white kids, but we went to a Black school. We could have walked to the white school, but we couldn’t go there; we had to wait for a bus, and since we were the first to be picked up, it took us an hour or better to get to our school.

  Going to elementary school, there weren’t that many people in my classes, and then at a certain season of the year, during cotton-picking time, a lot of those kids would be gone for a month or two. That was just a part of going to school in the rural South at that time. The other part of school was that the teachers were always looking out for you, wanting you to do better. Because they were like my dad: they wanted you not to have to be on that farm, not to have to pick that cotton. That’s what I felt then, and as I got older I could see it even more clearly.

  When I wasn’t at school, I played with the white kids—the white boys—and we really didn’t think too much about it. Because it was just: white people live here, and we live here; what else are we going to do? Griffin was small, and it was rural, so people were pretty spread out. You could go a mile or two down the road, and there were other Black people that lived on other people’s farms, but not near enough to be our neighbors. I never felt threatened by the white people or felt that someone was going to take our lives or harm us. Off and on, my mom would find people walking the roads, usually white people, and she would always feed them, and some folks would say, “Why do you feed those people? Why are you bringing those people onto the porch and all?” And she would say, “God probably had a reason for him to be here, and he needs to eat. No one should be hungry.”

  Both of my parents made sure the farm was a safe haven. They were helped along by the fact that we were not in town. I didn’t live in town as a young child, and I didn’t find out until after I was in high school, maybe college, that when they had a parade in Griffin, the Ku Klux Klan would walk through. According to my friends who lived in town, they would have on their hoods, but they were people that you knew—the people who owned the stores and ran the
town. So I’m sure if you talked to Black people from Griffin who lived in town and not so much in our little refuge, they probably had a very different experience than we did.

  Even in our safe haven, however, we were totally aware of the situation, of the separate-and-not-equal status of Blacks and whites. But we never really had any confrontations with grown people wanting to hurt us or make racial remarks or say much of anything to us. At that time, you just lived separately. “Look,” my dad would say to us, “they don’t want to be with you? You don’t need to be with them. You’re here now, but someday you’re going to be out of this situation. You’re going to grow, and you’re going to do things in the world.” And that was truth to me.

  * * *

  Being Black in Griffin was one thing. Being a girl was another. Along with the neighbors and some of the renters, we played with Ben Brown’s boys. Ben Brown had five children—three boys and two girls—and like the neighbors’ girls, his daughters were never allowed to play with us—definitely not with Black boys, and not with me either. That’s what they would say. But that was okay with me. They didn’t do too much playing anyway, because in those times girls did girl things, and boys did boy things. The white girls rode horses and played with dolls.

  Playing with dolls was not my thing, although I would sometimes get a doll for Christmas. I would play with it for a while, but then the doll would become our football. Back then the dolls had devices in them that we called crybabies: you turned the doll upside down and it would make a crying noise. One day when we were playing football with one of my Christmas dolls, it got ripped and the crybaby came out. We just looked at each other and thought, Mom is going to be so upset. We never told her. We went and buried that doll outside and had a funeral and said a few things over the grave. We kept the crybaby out because we would tip it to bother each other. That about sums up my thing with dolls.

  During the Jim Crow era, Black women were less than second-class citizens, and they had to work—they had to work hard. But at the same time, they were supposed to be good in the kitchen; they were supposed to be nurturing and dainty and all that. Those things were not in my psyche; I grew up with three older brothers, and the only people I had to play with were boys. But when I went to school, it was a little different. The teachers would say, “Girls are not supposed to be playing with boys. Girls play over here; this is your place.” It wasn’t enforced so much as understood; I often left “my” area to watch the boys play ball, but when I started to play, they would call me back.

  I also wore pants almost all the time because I couldn’t wear a dress and play with the boys. One year for Christmas, my brother was going to get a cowboy suit, and my mother wanted to buy me the cowgirl version, which included a dress. “I won’t wear it,” I said. “I won’t!”

  In the end, they got me the whole Hopalong Cassidy outfit—the hat, the gloves, the gun—just like my brother, and you could not tell us apart. My mom took us to get our picture taken—that’s the first picture I can remember us ever getting—and the guy who took it said, “What cute little boys!”

  “I’m not a boy.” I pulled my pigtails out from under my hat. “I’m a girl!”

  My brother Junior (Willie) and me on Christmas day, ages six and seven. (Photo by Gray’s Photography, Griffin, GA.)

  And I guess that’s why my mom was dead set against me getting the boy version of the outfit. But my dad knew I was never going to wear a dress, not even as part of a cowgirl outfit, and that it would just have been a waste of money. So I was off the hook that time.

  At one point, though, it became a mission to make me wear dresses at school; the teachers really wanted me to wear them. “Okay,” my dad told me, “now you’re going to have to wear a dress to school. But you can put your pants on underneath.” And that was how I would go to school: with a dress on and pants underneath. What could they say? I can remember a teacher asking my mom, “Does she ever wear a dress?” And my mom saying, “Yes—to church.”

  This was funny because I was never a regular churchgoer; my dad didn’t really go to church, and I wouldn’t go if he didn’t go. His feeling was that there were people in the community who needed us a lot more than the preacher. So when my mom would go to church, my dad and I and my brother Junior would go and visit the elderly people in the community and sit and talk. “You can learn more from these people,” my dad would tell us, “than from that man up there preaching.”

  So we did a lot of that, going to visit the surrounding people. My father knew them well—we all knew them well—and that was another one of the finest things in my life: listening to my father talk to the elders. When grown people were talking, we were not supposed to be sitting around listening—most of the time, we weren’t allowed to be in the same room. But when it was nice weather they would sit outside, and we could play in the dirt and listen to them tell stories.

  They would talk about how each person was doing, or how the farm was, who had gotten sick, who had died, who had gotten put out the house, those kinds of things. Or they just sat. One of the people—Uncle Sam, we called him—taught us to whittle. We made popguns and slingshots and whistles and little cars and boats. Sometimes we whittled just to be whittling, for practice. We would sit and whittle, and they would talk, and sometimes Uncle Sam would turn to us and say, “You’re not doing that right!” And then he’d show us the proper way of doing it.

  We would also visit folks who were around the same age as my father; they talked a lot more, and they didn’t go to church either. Not that they weren’t churchgoing people; just that they were like me and my dad—not going to church all the time. I get my religion through a whole lot of things. I will go to church, but I like to go to different types of churches and listen to different messages and different ways of preaching.

  Sometimes we would visit my dad’s mom. Her name was Ada, and we called her Grandma. Grandma lived with her youngest son, and they had a farm in a town called Jackson, not that far from Griffin. It wasn’t their farm, any more than the dairy farm was our farm. They were sharecroppers; they picked cotton and did whatever they needed to do to keep the farm going—fix the tractors, plant the seeds, turn the earth, all that. They raised hogs and chickens and kept a garden to feed themselves, and they had an outhouse and the kind of well where you had to drop the empty bucket down and roll up the full one with a crank—unless the well was dry.

  Grandma was a very wiry, thin lady, and she chewed on a chewing stick all the time and sometimes dipped snuff—seems like everyone dipped snuff. They put it behind their lips or in their cheeks, and I just hated it. They would say, “Come give me a kiss!” And I would say, “Eww! No!” They had this little tin cup that they spit in—that drool, that snuff drool! But my dad’s mom, Grandma—if she had snuff in her mouth in company, you never saw her spit.

  Some Sundays we would go to church with them—not that we often went inside. They would sit outside the church and talk in the car, and I would sit in my dad’s lap and listen to the conversation. I don’t know why, but it was a little different there, somehow. There we were allowed to listen.

  It was not that we never went inside the church; in fact, we were in church on my fourteenth birthday, the day my life would forever change. It was revival time. For Southern revivals, the pastor has a service every night, and a big church dinner on Sunday, and some people turn the revival into a way to honor their pastor. But on the evening of August 29, 1959, they were just having a service, and all of a sudden we heard a noise and turned around and saw four white men come into the church.

  Everybody froze, and you could practically hear us all thinking, Oh, wow, why are they here? Because white people just did not go to Black churches at that time. And these were not just any white people. They were the white people from our neighborhood—our neighbors from the west side of the road.

  As it turned out, no one had any cause to be alarmed except me and my family. Because those white men, our neighbors—I don’t remember who i
t was exactly, but there were four of them—had come to tell us that our house was burning.

  Looking back, I can see that being in church might have saved us; at least we were not at home asleep when the fire started. It’s hard to remember that night. One memory is this: My dad is driving, and my mom is beside him. Jackie isn’t there. So it’s Jimmy Lee, Junior, my dad, my mom, and myself. And we’re driving home from the church. Other than that, I don’t remember the drive at all; I just know that it must have happened. The next thing I remember is smelling smoke, and once we got off from the main road, I could see the blaze. Church then seemed like it was eons away from the farm, but it wasn’t; it was maybe ten minutes away. Still, by the time we got there, the house was totally engulfed in flames. We turned into our driveway and that was as far as we could go; it was too hot to get any closer. We parked the car right at the curb and got out.

  It was a big house, a big wooden house, so the fire was huge. We were practically in the street, and we could still feel the heat. You couldn’t really see the house anymore, nothing but the little sticks of the frame poking up against the flames, and the two chimneys, all black, so you could see those too. The house had been sitting up on bricks, and those were still standing and burned black like the chimneys, but other than that it was just flames, roaring.

  For a while we simply stood there, staring at the fire. It was clear that my mom couldn’t believe it. She was almost hysterical. She would grab one of us and hold on to us and cry and then let go and grab another. Finally my dad took her hand and my hand, and then I looked at him. And my dad—I will never forget the look on his face. He was crushed. The life just drained right out of him, right then, and he went limp, and to me, that’s how he always was after that. Just didn’t have it anymore. His whole life gone. The fire took everything he had worked for—everything we owned. We didn’t have much, but whatever we had was in that house. And standing there, watching him look like that, listening to my mother cry, seemed to take forever. I had never seen devastation like that in my parents, not ever. They had always been the strong ones. And I think I was so overcome by seeing that in them that for a while I couldn’t hear or see anything else that happened.