Speaking Truth to Power - Anita Hill [7]
Though the night visit the neighbor promised my grandfather never occurred, Henery and Ida Elliott decided that for the sake of their children they would no longer live under such threats. That night my grandfather began preparations to move his family. After the season’s crops were harvested and the Elliotts had collected their pay, they would leave. Throughout the black communities in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee rumors spread that Oklahoma provided escape from the racial tension prevalent in these more southern states. “Mama and Papa were told that things were so much better in Oklahoma,” my mother recalls with a chuckle. Like thousands of other southern rural blacks, my maternal grandparents packed their wagons and moved to farmland in Oklahoma where a number of all-black or predominantly black communities were developing.
Farming was all my grandfather and grandmother knew. Immediately following slavery, 60 percent of the blacks in the country were employed in some type of farm labor. But between 1915 and 1940 many blacks had been encouraged by economic and social opportunities to migrate to northern urban areas, trading in the farm and farm labor for more modern living conditions and factory jobs. And for those who stayed, farmwork rarely led to farm ownership. As late as 1930, 80 percent of black farmers were working land owned by someone else. My grandparents never owned any of the land that they worked in Arkansas or in Oklahoma. But unlike many southern blacks, my grandfather with his large family chose to remain a farmer.
In January of 1914 Ida and Henery Elliott and ten of their eleven children moved to Wewoka, Oklahoma. Their departure was tearful as they left behind family members including my Aunt Zodia and my great-grandparents, Sam and Alice, as well as Charley and Mollie Taylor. Uncle George remembers the day they left for Oklahoma as “the first time I ever saw my papa cry.” They all cried as they said good-bye to Zodia, my mother’s oldest sister. Though my grandparents wanted the promise of Oklahoma for all of their children, Zodia was a new bride whose husband wanted to remain in Arkansas. She stayed with him as much of the rest of the family made their way to Wewoka, a town with a relatively large black population, many of whom were members of the Seminole Nation or their descendants. When Henery Elliott’s father, Sam, died a few years later, he brought his stepmother, Alice Elliott, the woman my mother knew as Granny, to live with him and his family. Later, when my mother was thirteen, the family moved to a small rural community called Lone Tree in Okmulgee County.
The only photograph of my mother’s parents, a snapshot, pictures them in an open, flat landscape that looks like it could be almost anywhere in Oklahoma. The only thing that separates Henery and Ida Elliott from this austerity created by the background and the black-and-white photography is a patch of flowers and a young boy who seems to be running to escape the camera. They are dressed in simple clothing—the clothing of farmers. Yet the clothing gives some hint that it is Sunday or some other special occasion—my grandfather wears a jacket, and my grandmother a long full dress and cotton stockings but no apron. I try to place the picture among all of the stories. To me my grandfather looks like a man who would have been a deacon in the church. A serious man who would have been approached by neighbors in the Lone Tree community about rebuilding the membership in the Lone Tree Baptist Church. A man who would have succeeded in such a challenge. The season appears to be fall, and