Speaking Truth to Power - Anita Hill [12]
When my parents moved there, Lone Tree was just a collection of small farms separated by anywhere from one-half to six miles of farmland, woods, and unpaved roads. Farms housing blacks or whites were interspersed throughout Lone Tree—a physical integration which belied the region’s social racial segregation. Blacks and whites paid few social visits to each other. Blacks only visited the “white” churches for funerals, and whites visited our “black” churches for the same occasions even less. No blacks or whites complained.
Except for the fact that my father owned the land on which it stood—a first in his family—the house was typical for most blacks in 1946 rural Oklahoma. It had no electricity or running water and its unpainted exterior was covered with tar paper for insulation. To make it home, my mother planted small plots of yellow jonquils and orange and black marigolds in the front yard and a half-acre garden immediately to the north of the house.
Along with the children who were big enough to do so, my mother and father worked for seventy-five cents a day and dinner (a luncheon meal generally consisting of beans or peas and a baked potato) chopping cotton in the Oklahoma summers, with temperatures often reaching one hundred degrees. In the fall, sometimes in near-freezing weather, they worked picking cotton for one cent a pound. In sacks nine to twelve feet long, the adults and teenagers of my family could count on picking 150 pounds a day. When my father purchased a car, he hired himself out to haul pickers to various cotton fields in the area. He earned five cents for every hundred pounds pulled by those he hauled. Soon the members of my family were not only hiring themselves out for others but were busy working our own land, land on the creek bottom just south of our house. And when my brothers John and then Ray were born, my parents just built on another room.
For years my parents slept in a closetless bedroom with whoever was the baby at the time. The older girls shared a second room and the older boys shared the third. This sleeping arrangement accommodated our family as at first it expanded and then contracted, the children leaving home one by one. The births of John and Ray came at about the same time that Elreatha left home for college and Albert, Jr., for the army. Two years later, Alfred enlisted in the army.
In 1948 an unfulfilled need for cheap labor in oil pipeline construction opened up opportunities for blacks who until this time had been farm laborers. With Winston, Billy, and Allen old enough to handle the family farming, my father started helping to build oil pipelines at various locations in the Tulsa and Sand Springs areas. “I was used to earning no more than a dollar a day in the fields and that was seasonal. The construction companies offered forty dollars a week for a ten-hour day,” my father recalled. “To us that was big money.”
My parents added an expanded kitchen onto the house just in time for the birth of my sister Jo Ann in 1950. In the meantime Elreatha had married and given birth to my parents’ first grandchild, Lila. But then for the longest stretch since she started childbearing, my mother went without conceiving. It was only just before Jo Ann turned four that I was born. As they struggled to name me, my sisters Joyce and Carlene prayed that I would be the last. As teens my sisters were a bit embarrassed by the fact that our mother, now in her mid-forties, had continued to bear children.
Outside the farm, with the introduction of a union, my father’s wages increased to seventy-eight dollars per week. But the boys were starting to leave home—Allen had just left to join the air force to become a paratrooper—and John and Ray, the only two now left, were too young at fourteen and twelve to handle