Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [367]
Later that same year, Will hired a teacher to come weekly all the way from Memphis to give Bertha piano lessons. She was a gifted pupil, and before long was playing for the choir in the New Hope Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, of which Will was the senior trustee and Cynthia was the perennial president of the Stewardess Board.
When Bertha finished the local eighth grade in June of 1909, there was no question that she would be leaving Henning to attend the CME Church-supported Lane Institute thirty miles to the east in Jackson, Tennessee, which went from ninth grade through two years of college.
“Gal, jes’ no way you can know . . . what it mean, you bein’ dis fam’ly’s firs’ one headin’ fo’ a college—”
“Maw, if I can ever git you and Paw to please quit saying such as ‘dis’ and ‘fo’! I keep telling you they’re pronounced ‘this’ and ‘for’! Anyway, isn’t that why colleges are there? For people to go to?”
Cynthia wept when she got alone with her husband. “Lawd God he’p us wid ’er, Will, she jes’ don’t unnerstan’.”
“Maybe she best don’t,” he tried to console. “I jes’ know I’ll draw my last breath seein’ she have better chance’n us did.”
As was only expected of her, Bertha achieved consistently high grades—studying pedagogy, to become a teacher—and she both played the piano and sang in the school choir. On one of her two weekend visits back home every month, she persuaded her father to have a sign painted on both doors of his delivery truck: “Henning 121—Your Lumber Number.” Telephones recently had come to Henning; it was typical of Bertha’s ready wit, which got quoted often around town.
On later visits, Bertha began to speak about a young man whom she had met in the college choir, his name, Simon Alexander Haley, and he was from a town named Savannah, Tennessee. Being very poor, she said, he was working at as many as four odd jobs at the time in order to stay in school, where he was studying agriculture. When Bertha continued to talk about him, a year later, in 1913, Will and Cynthia suggested that she invite him to visit with them in Henning, so they could appraise him in person.
The New Hope CME Church was packed on the Sunday it had been circulated that “Bertha’s beau from college” would be in attendance. He arrived under the searching scrutiny not only of Will and Cynthia Palmer, but also of the total black community. But he seemed a very self-assured young man. After singing a baritone solo, “In the Garden,” accompanied by Bertha at the piano, he talked easily with all who crowded about him later out in the churchyard, he looked everyone squarely in the eyes, firmly gripping all of the men’s hands, and tipping his hat to all of the ladies.
Bertha and her Simon Alexander Haley—his full name—returned to Lane College together on the bus that evening. No one had a thing to say against him—publicly—in the ensuing community discussions. Privately, though, some queasy uncertainties were expressed concerning his very nearly high-yaller complexion. (He had told dark brown Bertha in confidence that his parents, former slaves, had both told him of having slave mothers and Irish white fathers, paternally an overseer named Jim Baugh, of whom little else was known, and maternally a Marion County, Alabama, plantation scion and later Civil War colonel named James Jackson.) But it was agreed by all that he sang well; that he seemed to have been well raised; and he showed no signs of trying to put on airs just because he was educated.
Haley landed a summer’s work as a Pullman porter, saving every possible penny to enable his transferring to the four-year A&T College in Greensboro, North Carolina, exchanging weekly letters with Bertha. When World War I came, he and all other males in their senior class enlisted en masse in the U. S. Army, and before long his letters to Bertha came from France, where in the Argonne Forest in 1918, he was gassed. After treatment for several months in a