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By Root 1248 0

and going over, looking at Dad, I said to the people that being the oldest child, I could remember things farther back about the gentleman lying there. For instance, my first distinct boyhood impression of love was noticing how Dad’s and Mama’s eyes would look at each other over the pianotop when Mama was playing some little introduction as Dad stood near waiting to sing in our church. Another early memory was of how I could always get a nickel or even a dime from Dad, no matter how tight people were going around saying things were. All I had to do was catch him alone and start begging him to tell me just one more time about how his AEF 92nd Division, 366th Infantry, fought in the Meuse Argonne Forest. “Why, we were ferocious, son!” Dad would exclaim. By the time he gave me the dime it was clear that whenever things would look really grim to General Blackjack Pershing, once again he would send a courier to bring Savannah, Tennessee’s, Sargeant Simon A. Haley (No. 2816106), whereupon the lurking German spies sped that news to their highest command, throwing fright into the Kaiser himself.

But it seemed to me, I told the people, that after Dad’s having met Mama at Lane College, his next most fateful meeting for all of us had been when Dad had transferred to A&T College in Greensboro, North Carolina, and was about to drop out of school and return home to sharecrop, “Because, boys, working four odd jobs, I just never had time to study.” But before he left, word came of his acceptance as a temporary summer-season Pullman porter. On a night train from Buffalo to Pittsburgh, at about 2 A.M. his buzzer rang, and a sleepless white man and his wife each wanted a glass of warm milk. Dad brought the milk, he said, “and I tried to leave, but the man was just talkative and seemed surprised that I was a working college student. He asked lots of questions, then he tipped well in Pittsburgh.” After saving every possible cent, when Dad returned to college that September of 1916, the college president showed him correspondence from the man on the train—a retired Curtis Publishing Company executive named R. S. M. Boyce—who had written asking the cost of one full year’s everything, then had sent his check. “It was about $503.15 with tuition, dormitory, meals, and books included,” Dad said, and he scored marks that later saw him win a graduate-study scholarship that the Cornell University School of Agriculture began giving that year to the top agricultural student at each of the Negro land-grant colleges.

And that, I told the people, was how our dad got his masters degree at Cornell, and then was a professor, so that we, his children, grew up amid those kinds of influences, which when put together with what a lot of other people on our mama’s side also had done, was why we were fortunate enough to be there seeing Dad off now with me as an author, George as an assistant director of the United States Information Agency, Julius as a U. S. Navy Department architect, and Lois as a teacher of music.

We flew Dad’s body then to Arkansas, where a second ceremony was thronged with his friends from Pine Bluff’s AM&N University and its area where as the dean of agriculture, Dad had rounded out his total of forty years of educating. As we knew he would have wanted, we drove him through the campus and twice along the road where the street sign near the agricultural building said “S. A. Haley Drive,” as it had been named when he retired.

The Pine Bluff service over, we took Dad to where he had previously told us he wanted to lie—in the Veterans’ Cemetery in Little Rock. Following his casket as it was taken to Section 16, we stood and watched Dad lowered into grave No. 1429. Then we whom he had fathered—members of the seventh generation from Kunta Kinte—walked away rapidly, averting our faces from each other, having agreed we wouldn’t cry.

So Dad has joined the others up there. I feel that they do watch and guide, and I also feel that they join me in the hope that this story of our people can help to alleviate the legacies of the fact that preponderantly