Isabel Wilkerson Read online

  He towered above them and always wore a tie. But all the children could see was the left pant leg pinned up at the knee and air where a calf and foot should have been.

  One day Mr. Kirk came in, and his pant leg wasn’t pinned at the knee. He had a new leg. But he couldn’t walk on it like a real one. “He throwed the leg, like it was tiresome to him,” Ida Mae said. “And it would swing. He kind of swing it around.”

  It was the talk of the schoolyard.

  “He finally got him a leg!” the children whispered to each other.

  When Mr. Kirk wasn’t looking, Ida Mae tried to tug at his pant cuff. “I sat side of him,” Ida Mae said years later. “I try to do all I know how to get up under there and see how that leg look. I’d sat by him, and I just rub and do. He couldn’t feel it no way. And I could see the clear foot in the shoe.”

  Ida Mae had to make sure Mr. Kirk didn’t catch on. For the slightest infraction, Mr. Kirk would send some boys out to the woods to get branches off a tree. Then the child who was talking out of turn or drawing when he should be listening was called up front for lashings with the switch.

  Ida Mae knew how that felt. In the fall after her father died, they were in the middle of a spelling lesson. One of the words was a city in the North called Philadelphia. Mr. Kirk called on Ida Mae to spell it. Some words, the children turned into jingles to help them remember. For geography, it was George Eat O Gray Rat At Poor House Yesterday. For Mississippi, it was M eye crooked-letter crooked-letter eye crooked-letter crooked-letter eye humpback humpback eye.

  Ida Mae had heard about the North but didn’t know Philadelphia or any ditties for it. She stumbled over the word. Mr. Kirk thought she was acting up. He told some boys to go out to the woods and get him a switch. He held the branches over the fire and told Ida Mae to come up front. He told her to bend over. He drew his arm back, and, in front of all the other children, he whipped her. And each time the switch snapped her back, he shouted a letter: P-H-I-L-A-D-E-L-P-H-I-A.

  She was hurt to be singled out that day. She wasn’t saying she hadn’t done a devilish thing in her life. She was just thinking to herself all she had done was miss the word, and the whipping wasn’t called for. After school, she went up to Mr. Kirk and told him so.

  “If I had a daddy, you wouldn’ta whoop me,” Ida Mae told him. “You whoop me ’cause I don’t have a daddy.”

  He never whipped her again.

  She seemed to be more aware of how life was harder now. Things she wouldn’t have paid attention to before, she seemed to be noticing.

  On her way to and from school, she passed the farm of a man named Mr. Bafford. His wife had left him to raise their son by himself, and he seemed to take out his grief on those around him. He had a yard full of trees that bore more fruit than he could ever consume or pick fast enough to sell. The peaches and apples and pears were some of the biggest and sweetest in the bottoms. They ripened and fell to the ground, and still he dared anyone to come onto his land to get any.

  Ida Mae figured out a way to get some. She stopped by and talked with Mr. Bafford and made sure to keep him talking. And if he ever looked away, she reached down and slipped a pear or an apple into her dress. “You know they fall off, he coulda give us some of ’em,” she said. “Every time I got a chance, I got me some.”

  It was approaching Christmas, the first Christmas since her father had died. One day when Ida Mae stopped to see Mr. Bafford, she started wondering aloud whether Santa Claus was going to come this year, what with her daddy gone and all.

  “That’s the first thing they teach y’all, a lie,” Mr. Bafford said. “Ain’t no such thing as Santa Claus.”

  It crushed Ida Mae to hear him say that. She was ten, and, even in the gaunt world she lived in, she still believed in Santa Claus. She started crying when Mr. Bafford said it.

  “That taken all the joy out of life then,” she said.

  There would be no Christmas that year. “I’m not able to pay Santa Claus to come to us,” Miss Theenie told the girls. Ida Mae began to resent everybody now. She was getting into more scrapes coming and going to school and getting ornery without cause.

  A boy named Henry Lee Babbitt used to ride his horse to school every day and brought corn to feed him with. Ida Mae lived farther than Henry Lee did and had to walk. Something got into Ida Mae one day, and she told Henry Lee she was going to set his horse loose. She went up to the horse and reached for the bridle bit that tied the horse to the hitching post.

  “Tom, you bet not turn my horse aloose,” Henry Lee said.

  “What if I do?” Ida Mae shot back.

  “You do, I beat your brains out.”

  The two of them stood there next to the horse, Ida Mae holding the bridle bit and threatening to pull it off and Henry Lee trying to keep her from doing it.

  “I dee-double-dog-dare you to pull that bridle,” Henry Lee said. “You take that there, and you take a nickel off a dead man’s eye.”

  She yanked the bridle off the horse and dropped it to the ground. “And down the road we went, me and the boy there, fighting,” she said years later.

  Henry Lee reached down and grabbed the bridle bit from where she left it and raised it up against her. “He took it and nearly beat me to death,” she said. “I got a knot in back of my head now where he hit me with that bridle bit.”

  Without her half brothers and her father around, she was on her own. “You had to fight,” she would later say. “Them boys would mess with you. You couldn’t whoop ’em. But you did what you could.”

  Within a few years, the boys would not want to fight with her anymore. They wanted to sit and hold her hand and talk. The spark that made her fight them drew the quiet ones to her when it came time for courting. She was fifteen when two in particular started showing up at the front porch with those intentions.

  On a Sunday after service in the summer of 1928, the church mothers at New Hope Baptist set out the hot platters of corn bread and collards and salted hams. Whoever made the collards worried if they were tender enough. Whoever baked the pound cake prayed that people would favor her cake over somebody else’s potato pie.

  It was the time of the year they called the lay-by, when the people left the cotton alone and waited for it to sprout. The people had turned the benches up and spread the food on the tables outside the little frame church. They called the event Children’s Day, in the spirit of Men’s Day and Women’s Day other times of the year. An event like this was all there was on colored people’s off day in the backwoods of Chickasaw County. People came in from Buena Vista, or Bewnie as they called it, and from over near Houston, the county seat, and even Okolona, arriving in their wagons and surreys.

  These were the times when sharecroppers and servants could recede into a world of their own making, where Jim Crow didn’t bother to enter. They could forget that there was such a thing as colored or white and just be. Sundays like this turned the churchyard into courting grounds for marriageable girls and young men looking for wives or diversions.

  George Gladney showed up with a bunch of other young men from across the creek in somebody’s old Model T Ford. He was twenty-two, stern-faced, and serious even then. “He wasn’t no smiling man,” Ida Mae said.

  He was from around Bewnie, which was seven or eight miles south of Van Vleet. He was among the last of twelve to fifteen children. (No one alive knows for sure how many there were; his father had children by several wives, who died young or at least before he did.) George’s mother died before he acquired much to remember her by. He was raised by an older brother, Willie, and the weight of his circumstances seemed to show in his face.

  It was getting to the time when he should settle down. So he walked up to Ida Mae that afternoon. She was eating on the grass in her Sunday dress. He introduced himself, but she didn’t pay him much attention. Her mind was on someone else, and she was mad at the moment. A boy by the name of Alfonso Banks had shown up at church that day with another girl.

  Alfonso was th
e love of her short life. He was friends with her brothers, older and sure of himself in a way that drew the girls to him. No one had really taken her anywhere her whole life, and she felt grown up and free when he did. Excitement seemed to follow him even when he had nothing to do with it. One time he took her to a church revival, which was the country equivalent of a night on the town. It was Alfonso and Ida Mae and Ida Mae’s big sister, Irene, and another young man who was escorting Irene that night. They drove up to the church and got out of the car, all of them young and giddy. They attracted the attention of a man named Bay-Bay, who had designs on Ida Mae’s sister. He saw them and got enraged.

  “Who is this out here laughing?” he said to them.

  They ignored him. They started up the steps, and as they walked toward the church door, Bay-Bay pulled out a gun and shot at them six times, aiming at Irene or her escort or both. He was a bad shot and didn’t hit anybody. But it was exciting and the talk of the woods and further proof to Ida Mae that Alfonso Banks sure knew how to show a girl a good time, even though he had nothing to do with it.

  She had been out with Alfonso enough to feel a kind of ownership that was implied if not outright said. When she saw Alfonso come to Children’s Day with another girl, she went up and spoke her mind.

  “What’d you bring her here for?” Ida Mae said.

  “I brought her for Children’s Day.”

  “Unh-huh.”

  Something rose up in her. She took the umbrella in her hand and knocked it across his head. “Boy, I loved that boy,” she said years later. “And he come bringing that girl over there. And I hit him all cross the head. My mother hit me with a poker when I got home. Everybody was talking about it. You know how folks talk. Said I was wrong. Had no business hitting him cross the head on church grounds.”

  When George showed up that day, she was distracted and didn’t give this new face much thought. But he seemed to have made up his mind about her and started coming by her house on Sunday afternoons, giving her time to see the light.

  He endured the stone face of Miss Theenie’s disapproval and the teasing curiosity of Josie and Talma to spend time with Ida Mae. When he felt he was on firm enough ground to do so, he began making noises about the other young men: David McIntosh, Alfonso Banks, and another one, Freddie McClendon. He didn’t like them coming around, and it showed on his face.

  The other men must have noticed an intensity of purpose in George that they could not have fully understood, and they avoided running into him. It got to the point where, during his final visits, David McIntosh, sensing the hour growing late, would say, “Well, I guess I better go ’fore Gladney get here.”

  George’s steadfastness won her over, and she finally agreed to marry him and be free of life under her mother. But she and George had to keep it to themselves. Miss Theenie wouldn’t allow it if she knew. She never liked any of the boys courting Ida Mae, and she didn’t like George.

  “He’s old enough for your daddy,” Miss Theenie used to say of George, who was by now twenty-three to Ida Mae’s sixteen.

  In the middle of October 1929, George made arrangements for them to run off and get married. He found a preacher and a place near Bewnie outside her mother’s circle. He went into Houston and bought a yellow dress with a blouson waist low on the hip, as was the style back in the twenties, for Ida Mae to wear.

  The morning of October 14, 1929, Ida Mae fed the chickens and did her chores like any other day and kept a lookout for George to come and take her to a new life. But before he could get there, a neighbor man pulled up to their cabin and went in to see her mother.

  “I heard your daughter gettin’ married in Bewnie tonight,” the man said.

  Miss Theenie started cursing and went looking for Ida Mae. Ida Mae knew she would pay for plotting under her mother’s nose. She ran and hid under the bed and wondered how she would get out when George came for her. Now that Miss Theenie knew George was on his way, Miss Theenie would be ready for him.

  Josie and Talma and Miss Theenie looked out in the crib and out by the cows and called out to her in the little wood house and couldn’t find her. The search for Ida Mae must have touched something in Miss Theenie. Something must have told her it was time for Ida Mae to leave her. She got through cursing, and Ida Mae felt safe to come out.

  Miss Theenie went up to her second daughter and told Ida Mae her decision about the wedding.

  “Well, I give you tomorrow,” Miss Theenie said, “providing all us can go with you.”

  The next day, October 15, 1929, they all went to the minister’s house. Ida Mae put on the yellow dress with the blouson waist that George had chosen for her. The yard was filled with people as they stood on the porch steps and George Gladney and Ida Mae Brandon were declared man and wife.

  “We wish you much joy,” the people in the yard said.

  George took her to the Edd Pearson plantation, a few miles away, where he would sharecrop cotton and she would learn to be a wife. Two weeks later, something called the stock market crashed, and things would get harder than they ever knew they could. Because, if the planters suffered, so much more would the sharecroppers under them.

  An invisible hand ruled their lives and the lives of all the colored people in Chickasaw County and the rest of Mississippi and the entire South for that matter. It wasn’t one thing; it was everything. The hand had determined that white people were in charge and colored people were under them and had to obey them like a child in those days had to obey a parent, except there was no love between the two parties as there is between a parent and child. Instead there was mostly fear and dependence—and hatred of that dependence—on both sides.

  The particulars of all this eluded Ida Mae. White people were everywhere around her, but they were separate from her, in a separate schoolhouse, on separate land on the other side of a firewall that kept white and colored from occupying the same sidewalk. Colored people had to step off the curb when they passed a white person in town, and if the minutest privilege could be imagined, the ruling class claimed it. Ida Mae lived only a few towns away from Calhoun City, Mississippi, where there were white parking spaces (the ones closest to the bank in the town square) and colored parking spaces (on the other side of the street) well into the 1950s. There were no signs for them; it was just the work of the invisible hand.

  Neither Miss Theenie nor George ever took Ida Mae into Houston or Okolona, where white people transacted their business affairs, and, growing up, Ida Mae had few direct dealings with white people. When she did, it was in the service of them and their whims whether she wished it or not, and, in the short time she was in their presence, it seems they made sure to remind her what her place was in their eyes even when she was too young to understand it.

  She was about six or seven years old when one day her father told her to take a small section of plow to get sharpened at the blacksmith. That way, he wouldn’t have to quit working to go himself. She rode the horse down the dirt path through the hackberry trees to the blacksmith’s house.

  The blacksmith was a kind and middle-aged white man with two grown sons. The blacksmith pulled the plow sweeps off the horse and went into the back to sharpen them. As Ida Mae stood waiting, the blacksmith’s two sons came up to her. They were in their twenties and, with their father occupied, were looking to have some fun.

  “We gon’ put her in the well,” they said to each other and laughed.

  Each man took an arm, and as she screamed for them to let her go, they dragged her to a well with a wall around it and dangled her over the mouth of it. Ida Mae could see down the black hole of the well, her legs hanging over the rim. She fought and kicked and screamed at the men to let her go. She looked around and saw nobody there to help her. The men’s father was still working on the plow bits.

  The men watched her squirm and laughed at the sight of her squirming. They held her over the well until the fun wore off. Then they put her down, and she ran to where the blacksmith was and waited for him to come out
with the freshly sharpened sweeps.

  Her father used to send her there all the time. After that, he never sent her anymore. When it came down to it, there was nothing he could do to keep it from happening again. Decades later, she would think about how they could have dropped her, even by accident, and how she would have died and nobody would have known where she was or how she’d gotten there.

  “They wouldn’t have never told,” she said.

  Ida Mae soon discovered that, when it came to white people, there were good ones and bad ones like anything else and that she had to watch them close to figure out the difference. She was too good-natured to waste energy disliking them no matter what they did but looked upon them as a curiosity she might never comprehend. She learned to give them the benefit of the doubt but not be surprised at anything involving them. This alone probably added decades to her life.

  A white lady named Miss Julie McClenna lived across the pasture, and she was nice to Ida Mae. After Ida Mae’s father died, Miss McClenna paid Ida Mae to gather up eggs in the henhouse. Sometimes she took her into town to help her carry eggs to sell. She gave Ida Mae live chickens and leftover food, knowing that Ida Mae’s mother had just been left a widow.

  After school, Ida Mae walked a mile to the big house across the pasture to gather eggs for Miss McClenna in the evenings. She always hoped for a lot of eggs. If there were too many for Miss McClenna to carry herself, she would take Ida Mae into Okolona with her. It was the only chance Ida Mae got to go into town.

  Ida Mae gathered more than usual one time, and Miss McClenna took her into Okolona to help her sell them to the white people in town. They delivered the eggs to customers’ houses, straight to their doors, and Miss McClenna had Ida Mae carry the basket of eggs for her.