Right, right. But we were—she made our home life so pleasant, so
wonderful, that I wasn't able to see how—the hurt that she was feeling,
except that I could hear it in her voice. And I could hear it when they
were discussing—-when the adults would be discussing what was going on
or what had happened. Let me tell you an incident. She was working
for—before she worked for the Belk family she was working for a family—.
I remember the name. It was a—his name was Turner Stevens. And he worked
for the hardware company.
Page 8And I heard my mother
relate a story that happened at—while she was on the job. She was
telling my daddy what happened that day. And she said, "You know today,
Mr. Stevens had some of his grandkids visiting. And I was serving dinner
and one of the grandkids looked at me and looked at a little dog that
Mr. Stevens had. And said to Mr. Stevens while looking at me, 'Uncle
Turner, is Nippy's name really Nippy nigger?'" It was a little black
dog. And my mother said, "I couldn't help but speak up." And I said,
"No. His name is not Nippy nigger. It's Nippy Stevens." And said, the
little boy got upset and said, "Uncle Turner, is it really Nippy
Stevens?" And she said that Mr. Stevens said to him, "Yes, it is. Now
shut-up and eat your dinner." But she said it made her know he was
teaching that child hatred of black people. And had—when she was not
there they called the dog Nippy nigger rather than Nippy, you know. And
so those kinds of things made me know that there was hurt. She was being
hurt from the society the way it was going. Well, I had a younger
brother who died with tuberculosis at the age of—he was six. No. He was
nine and I was six. And while my mother was working for the Stevens, I
had been diagnosed as having anemia, being anemic and so we had to have
milk every day. Well the milkman did not come to the black community.
And so my mother would have milk delivered to the Stevens' house and she
would bring it home. And on occasion, on the weekends, I would have to
go walk to the Steven's house to pick up the milk and bring it back
home, you know. So those kinds of things, you know, the society was just
so structured that it was just racist to the core. And there were
hurtful things that were happening all the time. And I could hear my
father and some of his friends discussing racial incidents, but not
Page 9necessarily all that was going on. But they were
talking about how they would be insulted and how white men on the
railroad would talk about black women in front on them and things like
that. And that they—there was a lot of things that they just had to
swallow in order to keep their jobs. And then they would really be proud
when somebody would stand up even if they would have to go to jail and
get beaten up. They would be proud of the fact that well at least he,
you know, he resisted what was going on. But I don't think that the
white society—they didn't look on us as human beings. They just did not
feel that we were people who had to be considered. We were just servants
and kind of nuisance people in the community, I guess. But going through
high school and elementary school, I had teachers who were very
dedicated black teachers. And there was one man who was a member of our
church. He was a professor. Had a little college started. His name was
Baxter Perry. And Mr. Perry was—he was very much a, I guess you would
call him a Booker T. Washington type. He wanted us to—he encouraged all
of the young black people to excel in education. And he believed in
education. And he tried to instill in us a pride in being who we were as
black people and the fact that we had a history. And to try to get away
from the slave mentality that we had a heritage from, the slavery. And
once a year we got to study black history, you know, once a year—Negro
History Week at school. And we would learn about Booker T. Washington
and people like that. But Dr. Perry would tell us about people like Nat
Turner
[Laughter] —. And Nat
Turner—right—and those people: Frederick Douglas and Sojourner Truth and
people like that. But it was done in a way—. He was always—. The white
people call him that crazy Baxter Perry. And some of the black people,
too, were afraid to associate with Baxter
Page 10Perry
because he was—he was teaching us about the rebels within our race who
would not accept being less than a human being in the society.