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Miss Ethel: Chapter 1 A Story of two boys of different races who form a friendship during the 40's and 50'sGrowing up in the south in the 1940’s and 50’s was an interesting time. It was a time that started with total segregation and ended with the beginnings of integration. The Washington family lived on my grandfather’s place and sharecropped about 20 acres of land in cotton, corn and cucumbers. I remember meeting Mrs. Washington the first time. I was eight years old and had been playing in the woods, as southern boys often did. I don’t think I had ever been on that part of Big Papa’s land when I burst from the woods next to a barn and cow lot where they kept the family milk cow and a few pigs. Mrs. Washington, a tall thin black woman in her fifties, was at the barn and saw me about the same time as their pack of cur dogs came barking and howling the alarm albeit late. “Morning,” she said on seeing me. “You Mr. Williams boy?” “Yes’um. My name’s Harvey,” I volunteered. “Pleez tu meet cheu. My name E-T-H-E-L, Ethel Washington,” she said formally introducing herself and extending her hand to shake. She always introduced herself that way, by spelling her first name, and I often wondered why. Maybe she thought it was polite to spell her name in case her speech was misunderstood, however, she spoke very clearly. I guessed she had developed the habit growing up and just continued it after she was older. “This is Big Papa’s land, ain’t it?” I asked. “Yeah, dis be yo Papa’s place. We been here ‘bout ten years,” she explained. “Ya’ll growing cotton, corn on halves?” “Yeah, and we got a garden with a row of watermelons over on thu side thare. Dis here land is good. Grows good crops.” She was an easy person to talk with, talking freely as if I were older and knew what I was talking about. Her family was made up of herself, and her husband, Isaiah Washington and six kids at home. They had several other children who were gone from home, some who were sharecropping on other folks land and some who had gone to Chicago or other places for the promise of a better life than in the south. One thing strange about this family was that in this society where the use of the term “boy” applied to even older teenagers was offensive, one of their teenage sons was call Boy. He didn’t have another name, only “Boy.” He was born at home and didn’t have a birth certificate with an official name and the family has always called him Boy. At the age of 25, he was still being called Boy and one day, he was gone. I learned he had gone to Chicago and when he returned a few years later he was Roy. On the way to Chicago with his cousin, they had changed his name to Roy. The education of the black citizens in this community was a mystery to me. I caught a bus at my front door everyday and went to school in the nearby town. But there was no bus for the black children. There was a schoolhouse on a man’s property, but it looked more like an old rundown house than a school. I often wondered what kind of desks and books they had since it was a given their equipment was hand-me-downs from the white schools and our desks looked like they were from the dark ages. I could imagine what theirs was like. I also wondered who taught in their schools and figured it was just whoever in the black community had basic writing and math skills and was willing. It was the blind leading the blind which was why the black community didn’t seem to progress. “Momma,” I asked one day, “Why don’t colored people go to school much?” “Well, honey,” she began, “Coloreds don’t need to go to school.” “You mean they just know things without going to school?” “No, I mean they can’t learn like white people. They just gonna work on the farm, you know, doing sharecropping or maybe they’ll have a small bit o’ land to raise some cows and pigs and a little corn and cotton.” About that time, my daddy stuck his head in the room and said, “Son, you might as well learn this now, it’s a waste of time and money to teach a nigger anything past how to sign his name and how to add simple numbers. All they gonna do is work the farm, cut pulpwood and clean floors. Be thankful you’re white and have a good school and quit worrying about the niggers.” That ended our conversation about why black people, or coloreds as was the term used then, didn’t go to school, but I was still perplexed about their innate ability to learn complicated things like math and science. Later that summer, I was in the woods playing alone. I was pretending to be an army scout looking for Indians in the wilderness somewhere out west, when I saw a black boy. I guessed he was about my age and was a little taller than me. “What chew doing on Big Papa’s land?” I asked with all the authority of a grandson. “I live here,” he said. “You live here? You must be on of them Washington’s.” I surmised. “Yeah, I’m Josh,” he introduced himself. “Don’t you mean J-O-S-H, Josh Washington?” I teased. “Yeah, my momma say dat all the time. She a embarrass tu me,” he said grinning. “Yeah, my momma sometimes embarrasses me, too,” I said sympathetically. So we decided to join forces in the scouting of this new land for the cavalry and enjoyed the whole evening playing together. “Josh,” I said while we were taking a break from our play, “Why don’t niggers go to school everyday like white people?” When Josh started to answer, he turned his head to one side and had a funny expression on his face and I realized I shouldn’t have used the word “nigger.” “Well,” he started slowly, “We ain’t niggers. We are Negroes or coloreds and the reason we don’t go to school everyday is because sometimes it rains and we’d have to walk to school in the rain. Sometimes we have to work on the farm or maybe our teacher be sick. Sometimes I just don’t wanna go cause there ain’t no reason to go. I’m gonna farm and I don’t need no school learning to do that.” “Don’t you want to do more than just farm?” I asked. “Yeah,” he said and for a few seconds, his eyes began to glass over like someone looking way off and dreaming of the future, but then that went away as he said a little sarcastically, “Sho I would, but ain’t much out thare for a little “nigger” boy like me. But you a white boy and you can be a doctor or sheriff or the head of a big company, but me, ain’t much I can do.” “What about up north like Chicago or out in California? Negroes have good jobs there. You could be like a Mexican in California,” I suggested. “Naw, I probably stay here and farm and be a preacher like my daddy. Maybe I can take over his church when he git too old to preach any more,” he said. “When you a preacher, people respect you.” “Yo daddy a sharecropper,” I said dogmatically, “People don’t respect no sharecropper.” “You talking about thu white world. But in the colored world, my daddy be respected. Folks come tu see ‘im ever’day and ask ‘im advice. You jest see what the white world sees, but us coloreds people sees both worlds.” I was beginning to see intelligence and education were not the same. Josh was intelligent and was only lacking in formal education. We were only eight years old, but I knew Josh was ahead of me in the wisdom of life. I had him beat in education by a little, but the very next year they began building new schools for the Negro community. By our tenth birthdays, Josh was riding a new school bus to his school, and while I knew their schools were still behind ours, it was a giant leap for the colored community. Sometimes our school bus and their’s would meet on one of the narrow dirt roads in our community. Both drivers had to move over to their side of the road, almost into the ditches in order to pass and all the kids on both buses would stand up on that side of their bus, barely a foot from the other and shout names, racial slurs, and throw paper balls through the windows. But I never did because on the day we scouted for the cavalry on Papa’s land we had formed a bond that would last a lifetime. RECOMMENDED READINGS
© Copyright 2001 Writer of the Winds (UN: caracas at Writing.Com).
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