Speaking Truth to Power (6 page)

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 they 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.

Eleven of my brothers and sisters attended segregated schools. In 1958 JoAnn was the first to begin her education at the integrated Eram School. Neither she nor I, who followed her in 1962, ever attended segregated schools. Interestingly, Eram School was integrated because of fiscal necessity rather than because of the mandates of the law. Eram was a rural school district whose size in a dwindling farm community would have required its closing without the numbers of black children who still resided in the area. Rather than close, the board made the choice to integrate in 1958, and Carlene, John, JoAnn, and Ray began attending there. Prior to attending Eram, Ray had been in classes at Lone Tree.

All of my brothers, except for one, chose to go into the military following high school. My parents waited patiently at home as each went off to duty. Amazingly, only one, Albert, Jr., was involved in combat. The promises of the military to give young men the opportunity to see the world was fulfilled in my brothers. The promise to promote their educational development was not as readily fulfilled. Yet each enlisted in a branch of the service one after the other, until my youngest brother, Ray, broke the chain. Ray chose to go directly into college.

My school life and activities were typical of girls in rural Oklahoma in the 1960s and 1970s. When I began my formal education, there were five children at home. Carlene, John, Ray, JoAnn, and I each day began
with the near-half-mile walk to the bus stop. Ray, JoAnn, and I traveled north to the two-room elementary school at Eram. Carlene and John, though they earlier had attended Eram Grade School, were bused south to the segregated high school in Grayson. At Eram grades one through four studied together in one room with a single teacher and grades five through eight with another. In each classroom four rows of aqua-blue seats with attached desktops faced a single blackboard. Each row was designated for a single grade, which averaged about eight students. Next to the blackboard was a huge gas heater that heated the entire room. Due to my nearsightedness, I often sat near the front and close to the heater. Accordingly, I was often scalding hot while my classmates in the rear shivered.

My first-grade teacher was Mrs. Johnson, whose husband taught in the other classroom, where my brother was. Later Mrs. Broadhead, then Mrs. Morton and Miss Pope—all women, all white—taught each of the four classes in her charge each of the required subjects. Mrs. Harris and her husband, Lee Wade Harris, rounded out the school staff as cook and bus driver/janitor, respectively. Under Mrs. Broadhead and her successors, I excelled, often doing the next grade’s work in order to be challenged. But the highlight of my promotion from grade to grade was that it brought me away from the inner wall and the cloakroom and closer to the outer wall of the schoolroom and the area I loved most. I knew from grade one that, once in the fourth grade, I would be allowed to sit next to the wall. I could hardly wait—for underneath the large windows was the room’s library. There, lining the shelves were the encyclopedias, geography books, and the Nancy Drew mystery series just waiting for me to finish my work.

In grades one through three, when I finished an assignment early, I would ask permission to cross the room to the library. But by the fourth grade I could simply reach out and pull whatever I wanted from the shelf without leaving my seat or drawing attention to my idleness. I liked my schoolwork and did well in it, but I loved reading the library books even more. Perhaps they were a greater incentive to complete my assignments
quickly and correctly. By the end of fourth grade, having read all of the books in the first library, I was anxious for the promotion to the next set of books.

T
he peacefulness of my family life continued through most of my childhood. Yet at about the time when the outer world seemed to be in chaos with war, antiwar demonstrations, civil rights protests and rioting, personal crisis disrupted our idyllic existence. One evening during the fall of 1967, my parents left my sister JoAnn and me alone at home. Usually when my parents had to be away in the evening, we went with them, or one of my older brothers, John or Ray, stayed with us. However, on this night my parents were going to the hospital to visit my Aunt Sadie, who was critically ill from a stroke she had just suffered. My brother John had left home for the air force, and Ray, the only other sibling still at home, was playing in his senior year of high school football. JoAnn was fourteen and I was eleven; by today’s standards of latchkey and otherwise independent children, we were certainly old enough to be left alone for a few hours. Yet this was the first time that I remember we were left alone. Since our closest neighbors were miles away, we felt fairly isolated and we imagined that every dog bark foretold some terrible misfortune about to befall us. We teased each other, laughed, and did our normal sibling squabbling about whose turn it was to wash and whose to dry. Upon finishing our homework and chores we waited for our parents to come home with some news of our aunt.

As the night wore on, the time when we were sure our parents should have been home passed. Our joking and bickering ended and real fear crept in. At midnight the dogs began to bark to warn of a car’s approach. We quickly hid in our parents’ closet until we could be sure that it was really our parents and brother. By this time, we were convinced that the dreaded stranger would arrive before our family. We knew our parents would not knock. Tom Barnett’s knock on the door sent us into a small panic. But the news the neighbor brought was even worse. Our parents and Ray had been in an accident and had been taken to the hospital.
Thus began the winter of 1967: Aunt Sadie was in the hospital suffering from a stroke from which she would soon die; my father and mother and brother snatched away without warning in the middle of the night; and my brother John enlisted in the armed forces as a private during the escalation of the Vietnam War.

My mother came home from the hospital within two weeks of the accident. Her major injury was a broken collarbone. After her return home, the household returned to some semblance of normalcy. My father’s injuries, however, were more extensive and severe, including a collapsed lung and a shattered right arm. He had to be taken to the hospital in Tulsa, over an hour by car from where we lived. From my one visit with my father in the hospital, I remember him covered in bandages and strapped to countless sustaining and monitoring devices. Even as a child I knew the reason for the visit: that it might be the last time I saw my father alive. The prognosis for his survival was very poor. We were grateful that my father proved the doctors wrong—he lived—but never spoke of the danger of his condition. After what in a child’s mind seemed an interminable stay in the hospital, he came home for a recovery that lasted throughout the winter. He was in and out of bed, and my mother, my sister, and I were constantly tending his shattered arm. We bathed and massaged it, hoping to revive it from its now paralyzed state, though I never believed that the therapy was adequate for or scientifically related to his full recovery. Still, he did recover partial use of the arm.