Speaking Truth to Power - Anita Hill [6]
What I know of my family story goes back two generations on my father’s side and one on my mother’s. They came from Arkansas, North Carolina, and Texas, traveling to Indian Territory and Oklahoma to escape the racial hostility of those states. But what they and even their descendants found was merely a different, sometimes less violent, brand of inequality.
Like my parents, my grandparents and great-grandparents were farmers. The latter group all began as slaves on farms in the South. My mother’s father, Henery Elliott, was born a slave in Arkansas in 1864. His parents, Sam and Mollie Elliott, were separated by sale, before he was born. Henery’s mother and a stepfather, Charley Taylor, were brought together by the circumstances of their status. At the end of slavery, they married and raised my grandfather. Sam Elliott remarried as well, to a woman named Alice. Alice Elliott was known to her step-grandchildren and the generation that followed as “Granny.”
My maternal grandmother, Ida Crook Elliott, was born in Texas in 1872. Over a span of twenty-five years, she and my maternal grandfather had fourteen children—a large family even by farm standards. Amazingly, given the times and the family’s economic conditions, all but three of their children survived. I have the impression from them that my grandparents were much like my mother, their youngest daughter, quiet and determined. From the one photograph of my grandparents that exists, and a few stories my mother and her brother, my Uncle George, tell, I learned almost all I know about them. Ida Elliott was one of two children, born and raised in Texas. Her only brother, Danny, was killed when he resisted whites who were trying to drive him from his farm. My mother and her brother, my Uncle George, tell the story in a way reminiscent of the stories of loved ones killed at war.
The story that stands out the most is the one about how my mother’s family came to Oklahoma. It begins in the fall of 1913. Henery and Ida Elliott were living and raising their children on a farm in eastern Arkansas. About that time, as a small boy “in shirttails,” my mother’s brother George recalls being “visited” by a white neighbor on horseback. Consistent with the times, the call was work-related, social interaction between the races at that time being virtually unheard-of. Approaching the Elliott home, the neighbor cut a trail through my grandparents’ field, leaving to waste all of the cotton in his newly carved path. “My wife needs some help with her cleaning and cooking,” the neighbor said. He “asked” my grandfather if my grandmother was available to work for him. “She’s pretty busy just taking care of these children,” my grandfather responded on her behalf. But whatever care Henery Elliott took not to offend, his explanation that my grandmother was far too busy to work outside her home fell on deaf ears. “Have you forgotten who you’re talking to?” the rider demanded. Even at the turn of the century, his status as a “freeborn white man” left neither my grandfather, a former slave, nor my grandmother, a descendant of slaves, the option to say no. “I’ll be around to see you tonight,” he threatened as he rode away, cutting another path of wasted cotton through my grandfather’s field.
During the early twentieth century in much of the United States, even a polite, reasoned rejection by a black person of a white person’s request could be viewed as “uppitiness.” My grandfather knew through tales passed along from his father and through his own experience in Arkansas that the lessons for “uppitiness” were harsh and arbitrary, ranging from threats to burned crops to lynching. And those lessons were often doled out at the hands of night riders.
Between 1882 and 1968, Arkansas was the site of 284 reported lynchings. The incidents of lynching in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee, states with higher black populations, were fewer than in Arkansas. Higher incidents of lynching occurred only in the states of Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama, and Texas. The grimly illustrative