Claudette Colvin

by Phillip Hoose

  I was a tomboy, tall and skinny and very fast, and I loved to be outdoors. I could climb trees as well as anyone. My best friend, Annie Ruth Baines, and I knew every trail and shortcut from Pine Level to our homes. A No Trespassing sign meant nothing at all to us. In the summer we would count the insect tracks in the sand across the road and try to figure out what bug made which track. We were walking to school together the first time we ever got close to a skunk, right out in the middle of the road. We ran up to pet it and got sprayed. The teacher took one sniff and sent us home.

  Pine Level didn’t have much more than a few shacks for the sharecropper families, a schoolhouse, a church, and a general store, but I was at home in all of it. I floated free, and slept at the homes of my mom’s friends as much as in my own bed. They all raised me together. Some nights I ended up at Baby Tell’s house—she was my mom’s best friend, plump and short and always happy to see me. She lived in an old farmhouse, the biggest house in Pine Level. White people used to own it, and we never knew exactly how Baby Tell’s family got it. Her attic was full of paintings and an organ and an old spinning wheel. Annie and I used to look out the attic window and pretend the Yankee soldiers were about ready to come charging over the hill.

  Other nights I slept at Mama Sweetie’s, a tiny woman in her sixties who was the best reader in Pine Level. She had read the entire Bible many times. She had her own blue-covered Webster’s dictionary. Mama Sweetie taught practically every child in Pine Level their ABCs and how to write their names and how to count to a hundred, using peanuts. She cooked for all the people when they came in from the fields. Baby Tell and Mama Sweetie were like sisters to my mom, and mothers to me. They loved me to keep them company. My nonstop talking and constant questions seemed to drive my mom crazy, but it didn’t bother them at all: they loved that about me.

  Our school was a one-room white wooden building with red trim. Annie and I walked there together every day, lunch sacks in one hand, book sacks in the other. It had a potbellied stove in the middle and a picture of Abraham Lincoln on the wall. One teacher taught all six elementary grades, and sat us in sections around the room, grade by grade, two to a desk. The room was rarely full because students kept getting pulled away to do farmwork. A farmer would just appear in the doorway and yell, “I need two boys to help with the cows,” and they’d be out the door in a flash.

  Spring Hill School in Pine Level, where Claudette attended elementary school, was newer than the school in rural Georgia pictured here, but like many schools for African-American children, it had one room, one teacher, six grades, and a potbellied stove for heat

  I loved school. I memorized the Dick and Jane reader so my teacher would think I could already read. One day she asked me to read aloud, but I got way out ahead of the text. She couldn’t figure out what was going on. She told my parents to take me to Montgomery to get my eyes checked. I learned the entire second grade in advance just by listening to Annie—she was a year older than me—and by hearing Mama Sweetie read from her Bible and her Webster’s dictionary. When it came time for me to start second grade I could already read and write and spell and even do some arithmetic. They tested me and told me to go sit with the third graders. After that, I was always younger than the other kids in my class.

  I knew plenty of white people, and they knew me. You had to be very careful around them. They never called the adults “Mr.” or “Miss” or “Mrs.”; they used their first names instead. Or sometimes they made up little nicknames to dominate us. I was Coot. A doctor gave that name to me when I was little to distract me from the shot he was about to give. He sang, “Oh she’s the cutest little thing,” but it came out “coot”—and the name stuck.

  I was very religious. Annie and I played church together out behind her house, setting up chairs and doing services. Her brother would be the pastor, or she would be since she was older. I’d be the shouter. The second Sunday of every month the Reverend H. H. Johnson came out from Montgomery and pastored a service at our little church in the country. We’d call it Big Meeting Sunday. People would flock in from everywhere, in cars, wagons, whatever they could get to move. On a Big Meeting Sunday, we’d pull up to church at noon and wouldn’t get home until dark. First there’d be regular church, then a program, then a glee club competition, then another sermon, then different choirs would sing. You’d have food all day long and come home stuffed.

  I remember this one Big Meeting Sunday, I was riding on the back of the truck before the service started, to go get ice at the general store. It was about 11:00 a.m., and we passed Mr. Jones, the white man who owned our property, walking to his own church. It was hot, and he had his blazer slung over his shoulder. His Baptist church was just a short distance from the store. Forty-five minutes later we were coming back with the ice and we passed him again, walking the other way—he was already out of church! That was just one more thing that seemed different about white people. How could anyone serve God on Sunday in less than an hour?

  WHEN CLAUDETTE TURNED EIGHT, Mary Ann Colvin inherited a house in Montgomery. Excited to live in a place of their own, the family loaded their belongings—including a horse named Mack—into the back of a neighbor’s cattle truck and pushed off for Alabama’s capital city. Their new home was a small frame house in a tiny hilltop neighborhood sandwiched between two white subdivisions on Montgomery’s northeast side. King Hill, as the neighborhood was called, consisted of three unpaved streets lined with red shotgun shacks and frame houses like the Colvins’. Toilets were out-of-doors. Though King Hill had a citywide reputation as a depressed and dangerous neighborhood, the Colvins found it to be an extremely close-knit community where people knew and looked out for one another. Neighbors sat on their front porches fanning the humid air while children played in a small nearby park with a recreation center. Sad at first to leave Annie and the open countryside, Claudette soon made her peace with city life.

  CLAUDETTE: I slept with Delphine in the back bedroom with our own little fireplace. She would say her prayers as fast as she could and then jump into bed, waiting for me to hurry up and finish mine. I was a serious pray-er, asking for help in this and that, and blessing about everyone I knew, but Delphine just whipped through the Lord’s Prayer and jumped into bed. As soon as I got in she’d be talking and talking, asking me how to spell this word and that, and then she’d start singing songs she’d heard on the radio and twitching and squirming around with new dances. Delphine could keep me awake all night.

  Daddy Q.P. had his own special chair in the front room, and no one else could sit in it. He was a small man, too small for the Army they said, but he was wiry and strong and he could do anything. He had built our house in Pine Level, and there was very little he couldn’t make, grow, or fix. And he was fun. On Sunday mornings I’d sit on the floor next to him and he’d read me the funnies. We had an electric fan, but we only used it on Sundays because it sucked down electricity so fast. We didn’t get a TV until the bus boycott, but our radio ran off a battery that gave us about an hour at a time of a white station, WSFA. My favorite show was Mr. Comedian, about this detective who worked in disguise. I listened to the Grand Ole Opry, too. The star of the show was Hank Williams, a famous country singer from Montgomery. When he died, his funeral drew the biggest crowd in the history of the city. Hank Williams’s wife invited the black community to attend since so many of us liked his music, but Mom wouldn’t let me go because the funeral was segregated.

  Going to the movies with Jim Crow

  I loved going downtown. Montgomery had stores like J. J. Newberry’s and Kress’s five-and-ten, which opened onto Monroe Street—the main street for black people. Out back of Kress’s there was a hot dog stand. A lady who worked there and knew my dad would stack up soda crates so I could sit down while I ate hot dogs and drank my soda.

  But downtown could make me very angry, too. We could shop in white stores—they’d take our money all right—but they wouldn’t let us try anything on. I never went into a fitting room l
ike white people did. The saleslady would measure me and then go get the dress or the blouse and bring it out. She’d hold it up and tell me it was a perfect fit and expect my mom to buy it. When Delphine and I needed shoes, my mom would trace the shape of our feet on a brown paper bag and we’d carry the outline to the store because we weren’t allowed to try the shoes on.

  You couldn’t try on a hat either unless you put a stocking on your head. They said our hair was “greasy.” They said it in such a degrading way; they never said “please” or asked if we minded. Once, I went into a store with my mom and saw a beautiful Easter hat I really wanted. None of the other kids had that hat. But the saleslady kept bringing out different hats. For some reason she didn’t want me to have the hat I wanted. I got madder and madder. She kept saying, “Why don’t you want this hat?” and holding up hats I didn’t want. Finally, I got frustrated and answered, “Because my ears don’t stick out like yours.” My mom was horrified—she covered my mouth up and marched me out of the store.

  Another time I had to go to the optometrist downtown. My dad and I got to the office early—I was the very first patient. There was only one chair in the waiting room. The doctor told us to leave and come back at the end of the day. I didn’t understand why until I overheard my dad telling my mom about it when we got home. The optometrist wasn’t gonna let me sit in that chair until all the whites had sat in it first. He knew no white patient would ever sit in a chair that he’d seen a black sit in.

  There were so many places you couldn’t go and so many things you couldn’t do if you were black. Oak Park was the nicest park in the city, just down the hill from us, but blacks could only walk through it. If you tried to play ball or even sit down on the benches, the police would run you out.

  One year we all got excited because there was going to be a rodeo with Roy Rogers and Dale Evans at the Montgomery Coliseum. They’d do one show for whites and another for blacks. My parents bought me a cowboy hat and bought cowboy boots for Delphine. Q.P. kept our horse, Mack, in a pen out back, and every day we’d brush him until he shone and we’d take turns getting rides in our new cowboy clothes. And then the word came down that Roy and Dale didn’t have time to do two shows after all, so they were cutting ours. That was the South.

  CLAUDETTE EXCELLED as a student in junior high even though she was younger than her classmates. Her parents bought her a dictionary of her own, giving her an advantage in classroom spelling contests. After school she usually headed for the library or, if her homework was light, to the King Hill Recreation Center, where she learned to crochet. She studied piano, too, until her mother, impatient for her favorite songs and frustrated with Claudette constantly practicing scales, stopped paying for lessons.

  Claudette (fifth from left, back row, the tall girl smiling) developed a lifelong love of crocheting through a club that was formed at the King Hill Recreation Center

  Late in the summer of 1952, just two weeks before Claudette was to begin her freshman year at Booker T. Washington High School, her sister Delphine came down with a fever Sunday just before church. Her temperature climbed steadily through the afternoon. By nightfall, her body was burning and the bedsheets were soaked with perspiration. Far worse, she couldn’t move her arms and legs to get up. The family tried everything to break her fever, but nothing worked. They rushed her to a doctor the next morning.

  CLAUDETTE: Polio came down on a lot of kids that summer. It shriveled the leg of one girl in our congregation and deformed the arm of a little boy. The doctor knew what it was as soon as he saw Delphine. He sent her to St. Jude Hospital and put her in an iron lung to help her breathe. She couldn’t move. All she could do was whisper through her breath, that’s what my momma said. I used to go in the car with them to visit, but Mom and Q.P. made me wait outside the hospital. They didn’t want me to get sick, too, and they didn’t want me to see Delphine like that. Once I tried to slip inside to see my sister, but a nurse caught me and led me back out screaming. I never saw Delphine alive again after the day she left our house to go see the doctor. The next time I saw her she was dead.

  After that, I began to question everything: I asked God why He didn’t answer my prayers. I asked, “Why would You take my sister? Why did You say no when I asked for my sister’s deliverance?” My mom disagreed with my thinking. She said, “You prayed for Delphine’s deliverance? Well, let me tell you what I was prayin’ for: I was praying for God to take her, because I didn’t want the Devil to have the upper hand. I didn’t want her to be paralyzed for the rest of her life.” I said, “Mom, I would have taken care of her. I would have gone to school to be a nurse and learned to take care of her.” I would’ve, too.

  Delphine died September 5, 1952. It was my thirteenth birthday.

  ST. JUDE HOSPITAL IN MONTGOMERY

  To many blacks, the hospital where Delphine was treated was an island of kindness. St. Jude opened in 1951 as the first racially integrated hospital in the Southeast. It provided health, education, and social services to all comers, black or white. Its founder, Father Harold Purcell, was loved by many blacks. “St. Jude’s was clean and easy to get to,” remembers Claudette. “Father Purcell refused to put up White and Colored signs anywhere in or around the hospital, no matter what anyone said.”

  Hot comb and hair-straightening products typical of the 1950s, when Claudette attended Booker T. Washington High School

  CHAPTER THREE

  “WE SEEMED TO HATE OURSELVES”

  “Radical” simply means “grasping things at the root.”

  —Angela Davis

  CLAUDETTE LEFT HER HOUSE on the first day of high school determined to put her mind on her studies. Delphine’s funeral—just two weeks before—had been as sad and bewildering a day as she could remember, but now she hoped she could put it behind her. Now it was time to focus.

  Booker T. Washington High, whose sports teams were known as the Yellow Jackets, was one of Montgomery’s two public high schools for black students, the other being George Washington Carver High. Almost all the sons and daughters of Montgomery’s working-class black families went to either Washington or Carver, with a few Catholic students attending St. Jude’s and many of the children of Montgomery’s black professionals enrolled at other private schools.

  Booker T. Washington High was a buff-colored, three-story brick citadel. The glass in the lower windows was painted white so students couldn’t look out at the street. Desktops were gouged and book covers cracked. Pages were torn from years of use. There was so little money from city funds that each year the principal put on a fund-raising event to buy desks, books, and equipment for the cafeteria. In the fall of 1952, the air around the building was thick with the dust of construction, as workers raced to complete a new wing to the school before winter in an effort to keep up with Montgomery’s expanding black population.

  Claudette in 1952, age twelve

  Though being smart was an asset, Claudette soon found that having light skin and straight hair was the surest key to popularity at Booker T. Washington. Many girls woke up early and spent hours applying hot combs to their hair, trying to straighten it to look, as some said, “almost white.” But Claudette’s hair wouldn’t stay straight or flat no matter how long she pressed it, and her skin was very dark. On top of that, she was from King Hill, a neighborhood she loved but others scorned. And no matter how hard she fought it, Delphine’s death had left her feeling raw and lonely, especially when she passed the spot each day where her sister had always waited for her after school. Suddenly alone, Claudette started life as a Yellow Jacket feeling she was at the very bottom of the social heap.

  CLAUDETTE: Right after Delphine died, I became very sensitive. Just about any cruel word or insult could start me crying, even if it was aimed at someone besides me. One thing especially bothered me—we black students constantly put ourselves down. If you were dark-complexioned they’d call you “nappy-headed.” Not “nappy-haired.” Nappy-headed. And the “N” word—we were saying it to each othe
r, to ourselves. I’d hear that word and I would start crying. I wouldn’t let people use it around me. How could you hear such things and not feel emotional? When girls said things like that, it was bad enough, but when boys said them to you, it really hurt.

  For some reason we seemed to hate ourselves. We students put down our hair texture and skin color all the time. Can you imagine getting up in the morning every day and looking in the mirror and saying to yourself, “I have bad hair”? Or “I’m black and nobody likes me”? The football players went for the girls with flowing hair and lighter skin. And who could grow wavy, shoulder-length hair? It’d be a biracial kid. The girls with the darkest complexions never got picked to be queen of anything. Middle-class black girls would always try to separate themselves from dark-skinned girls like me and emulate white girls.

  TRAGEDY STRUCK ONCE AGAIN in November, when Claudette’s schoolmate and neighbor, sixteen-year-old Jeremiah Reeves, was arrested and charged with raping a white housewife. Reeves confessed to the crime. Police quickly expanded the charges, claiming that he was responsible for raping six white women after breaking into their homes. Blacks in Montgomery were furious. Most were convinced that the police had forced him to confess. “One of the authorities had led him to the death chamber, threatening that if he did not confess at once he would burn there later,” Martin Luther King, Jr., then the new pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, wrote.

  After a brief trial, an all-white jury sentenced Reeves to death in the electric chair. This brought blacks throughout Alabama to a boiling point. Even if Reeves was guilty of the charges—something few blacks believed—he hadn’t killed anyone. Why should he pay with his life? Blacks knew that no white man accused of a similar crime against a black woman would have been convicted at all, let alone sentenced to die.