Certain People (30 page)

“Because it's not in the contract,” Yancey replied, and offered to show the contract to His Honor.

“I don't care about contracts,” said the judge, waving the document aside. “This lady says that you told her, in the presence of her husband, that you'd build the extra room, and so now you're just going to have to go ahead and do it.” And so Mr. Yancey built the added room, as ordered. His legal fees for the case had come to $150 and, of course, he made no profit on the job. He was beginning to see where he stood as a Negro contractor in the South.

Later, under a carefully worded contract, Aytch Yancey agreed to build a house for a white policeman named E. O. Eddleman, and the price agreed upon was $883. When the building was finished to Mr. Eddleman's satisfaction, Mr. Yancey presented his bill. The policeman demurred, saying that he wanted first to be sure that Mr. Yancey had paid all
his
bills for lumber and building materials. So Yancey accompanied Eddleman down to Mr. J. J. West's lumberyard, where Eddleman was assured that Yancey owed only $81. Eddleman then wrote out a check to Mr. West for the $81 and, in the process, muttered something about “That nigger still has eight hundred dollars of my money.” Overhearing this, Mr. West said, “Now, Eddleman, Yancey is a good boy and he always pays all his bills.” Eddleman handed West the check and started to leave, whereupon Yancey reminded him that he had still not been paid. Still grumbling
about “eight hundred dollars of my money,” and “damn niggers,” Eddleman wrote out a second check and tossed it to Yancey. It was for $800—two dollars short of the contract price—but Yancey, who considered himself lucky to be paid at all, made no mention of the discrepancy. Eddleman stalked out the door, and immediately Mr. West said, “Beat that man to the bank, Yancey!” Getting the point, Aytch Yancey leapt over the back fence of J. J. West's lumber company, ran through the D. R. Wilder Candy Company's plant, and all the way to the Atlanta National Bank, where he cashed his check. Later, the teller told him that Eddleman had appeared at the bank just moments afterward to try to stop payment on the check—too late.

Experiences like these made Aytch Yancey conclude that he could never succeed as a building contractor for whites and, of course, there were few building jobs for blacks. He took a job at the post office, as a letter carrier. The salary was only $600 a year, but at least the work was steady. And there was another advantage: no one knew the size of his paycheck, and there was no way for a white man to get his hands on it. Still, life for a black letter carrier was not without its vicissitudes. Early in his new career Aytch Yancey learned that the white housewives along his route presented a certain peril. Because he was a handsome, light-skinned man—like others, part Cherokee, part white, part Negro—women frequently invited him in and made seductive offers and advances. Aware of the terrible consequences of a charge of “rape,” he was meticulously careful to resist these overtures. Once, on his route, he was talking with a patron when a woman across the street called to him to come over and pick up a letter she wanted to mail. When he did not immediately come, the woman cursed, threw the letter on the sidewalk, and went back into her house. Yancey did not cross the street or pick up the letter. A few days later, his postmaster received a complaint which read:

Dear Sir:

I want to call your attention to the discourteous and almost insulting manner in which a certain nigger letter-carrier of your office treated my wife. I feel it is only necessary to report it to you in order to make him behave properly.

The letter was given to Yancey to reply. He wrote:

Dear Sir:

This charge does not state the infraction. It merely states,
as a
fact
, that it was a certain
nigger
letter-carrier. Perhaps it is there wherein lies the near insult. If so, the gentleman does not expect an apology from me.

Respectfully yours,

A. H. Y
ANCEY

The letter had to be channeled through the postmaster for approval. He returned the letter to Yancey, and instructed him to apologize.

Though his pay was small, Aytch Yancey was a thrifty man and managed to save enough to buy a lot and build for his family, in the Georgia style, a large red-brick one-and-a-half-story house, which still stands near the Atlanta University campus. Much of the work on the house he did himself, but he hired a workman to whom—as he set out on his mail route in the morning—in a joking way Yancey said, “I'll bet I get more work done on this house between when I get home from work and nightfall than you'll get done all day.” And he usually kept that promise. Aytch Yancey also managed to send all seven of his children through college. Three of his sons became physicians, and one of his daughters earned a master's degree. By the time he died several years ago, at the age of eighty-eight, he had established the Yancey family as members of the black aristocracy of Atlanta.

Though he lived to see segregation in restaurants, buses, housing, schools, elevators, and the Armed Services all outlawed, he still believed fiercely that blacks were unjustly treated in the South, that despite advances in civil rights, blacks were still regarded as second-class citizens. There was a word he coined—“interpositionullification.” He sent the word to hundreds of educators and lexicographers, urging that “interpositionullification” be included in dictionaries. Though he never got the term into a dictionary, in 1959, at the age of eighty-four, he wrote and published a book with that as its jawbreaking title. Mr. Yancey defined “interpositionullification” to mean that when a state interposed itself between federal laws and the rights of its citizens the result was the nullification of the rights of black people, that the prejudiced person could nullify any just act. As an old man, A. H. Yancey liked to gather his children and grandchildren about him, and talk about interpositionullification, how they must fight and work against it and yet learn to expect its effects when they occurred.

Mr. Yancey lived to see one of his doctor sons killed when,
working as an intern in an outdated black hospital in St. Louis, he was accidentally electrocuted by a faultily wired piece of X-ray equipment. It was impossible to sue the city, but the family was given a check for $1,500, which barely covered funeral expenses. A positive result of the accident, however, was the building of a much-needed new hospital, the Homer G. Philips, which became the finest black hospital in St. Louis.

Mr. Yancey liked to tell the children and the grandchildren about his own childhood, growing up in a two-room log cabin with a porch and lean-to in rural Georgia. Most of the Yanceys' neighbors were white and, because the Yanceys were hardworking and God-fearing, they were respected in the neighborhood. As a child, most of Aytch Yancey's friends and playmates were white children but, when they reached a “certain age,” the childhood friends became distant and barely spoke. Mr. Yancey remembered when a black man could not call another black man “Mister” in front of a white without fear of reprisal. When he was six years old, Mr. Yancey remembered how he had assumed that he would be going off to school, and how he had been puzzled by the looks of deep distress that came over his parents' faces whenever he mentioned school. He did not realize that, though there were black taxpayers in the town, there were no black schools. The nearest black school was miles away in another county. The white schoolmaster had offered “to put a few seats in the back of the room” just for the children of Green and Julia Yancey. But the Yanceys had declined this favor, fearing the reaction in both the white and the black communities if such an exception were made for their children and if even a small degree of integration were attempted. Two years later, however, Green Yancey succeeded in getting a one-room log cabin missionary school established for blacks of the area. Aytch Yancey did not start first grade until he was nearly nine years old.

One youthful memory remained indelible. It was late December 1900, and Aytch Yancey, who was nine years old, and his brother Homer, eleven, were walking across the wooded hills with two young girls to a Christmas-tree party in a nearby hamlet called Frogtown. It was late afternoon, most of the trees were bare of leaves, and the air was cool and crisp, with a promise of frost by nightfall. The children had bundled up against the cold, but their spirits were high and happy, looking forward to lighted candles and gifts under the
Christmas tree. Then, at a turn in the narrow woodpath, four white men suddenly appeared. The children recognized the men. They were the two Cox brothers and the two Edwards boys. The men arrayed themselves across the path, blocking it to the approaching children. One of the Edwards boys was carrying a shotgun.

As the children warily approached, the Edwards boy raised his shotgun, held it across their path, and demanded, “Where in hell you niggers gwine?” Aytch Yancey started to answer the question but, with that, the other Edwards boy walked around his brother's gun, stepped up to one of the little girls, opened her coat, reached under her dress, and seized her breast. She screamed, slapped him full in the face, and then spun past him and ran to safety in the underbrush. In the confusion of shouts and screams that followed, the other little girl managed to make her escape also, leaving Aytch and Homer Yancey faced with four men, one of them armed. The Cox brothers seized Homer and began pummeling him, while the Edwards boy held Aytch at gunpoint. Suddenly the four men had a new idea. They would force the Yancey boys back to their house at gunpoint, and then run after and catch the girls. Aytch Yancey was never certain of what happened next, but somehow, as the Edwards boy shifted his gun from his right arm to his left, he stepped backward and tripped over Aytch Yancey's foot. Aytch Yancey fell, and the Edwards boy stumbled over Aytch's body, did a backward somersault and also fell to the ground. In the process, the butt of the shotgun struck the other Edwards brother in the face, and a shot went off into the air, rendering the gun harmless for a few moments. Aytch and his brother ran off in the direction the girls had taken, with the Cox and Edwards brothers in howling pursuit. Soon the Yanceys managed to outdistance their pursuers, however, and they made their way to the cabin of friends, who took them in for the night. The last shouts the Yanceys heard were to the effect that they would be killed if they ever came back that way again.

Late that night, nine-year-old Aytch Yancey, with a borrowed Winchester rifle, set out through the woods toward home to tell his father what had happened. He arrived home without incident, and his father decided that he and Aytch should set out right away for the friend's cabin and collect the other children. They started off through the deeply wooded trails in the cold night, which was fortunately moonless. Father and son found the other children safe, and headed home with them. It was 1:30 in the morning when they approached
their own cabin, but, as they neared it, they knew that something was wrong. The light that should have been burning in the window was not.

The Yanceys entered their darkened home and found the younger children sleeping peacefully in their beds. But Mrs. Yancey was missing. Aytch Yancey's father called, “Julia! Julia!” and then, from a darkened corner of the front room, heard soft moans. Here he found the figure of Julia Yancey, a tiny woman, crumpled and bleeding. Yancey carried his wife into the bedroom and placed her on the bed. Her face was a mass of blood. Aytch Yancey was dispatched to get a doctor because, among other fears, Mr. Yancey knew that his wife was four months pregnant. When Mrs. Yancey regained consciousness, she told her husband what had happened. It was the Cox and Edwards boys. They had come to her door at midnight, and forced their way into the house, demanding money. When Julia Yancey protested that she had none, they called her a liar and began beating her about the face and shoulders with the butt of their rifle. That was the last she remembered. Then the white men had ransacked the house and taken, among other things, $42, which was the children's Christmas money. The doctor treated Mrs. Yancey for multiple bruises and contusions, but he was not able to save her unborn child. She miscarried the following morning.

The Cox and Edwards boys were eventually brought to trial and, though their defense attorney attempted to imply that the incident was actually just a case of a black man “beating up on his wife” in a domestic quarrel, character witnesses came forward for both Mr. and Mrs. Yancey, and the four men were convicted by a judge named Gober and sentenced to the penitentiary. It might have seemed as though justice had prevailed, but the story actually had another, more ironic, ending. Some months after the trial, a white politician named Patterson was campaigning for Judge Gober's job, and he came to see Mrs. Yancey. He asked her to sign a petition asking that the sentences of the Cox and Edwards boys be commuted. In return, Patterson promised Julia Yancey that if he won she and her family would never be molested again and would have his “protection.” Julia Yancey signed the petition. Patterson ran on a campaign that, among other things, promised that no white Georgia man would ever be sentenced to the chain gang and that used the Yancey case to brand Judge Gober a “nigger lover.” Patterson won. At the time, Julia
Yancey was severely admonished by the Negro community for signing Patterson's petition, which got the Cox and Edwards boys an early release from prison. But Julia Yancey had signed the petition out of fear and a desire to spare her family from any further trouble with the whites.

The trauma of seeing his mother beaten and brutalized by white hoodlums may account for what happened to Aytch Yancey's older brother Homer. His life turned out quite differently from Aytch's. Homer had been the fairest of the family, with blond hair and blue eyes. When he grew up he worked as a night engineer at the largest ice plant in Atlanta, and it was said that he could have had the job of chief engineer—he looked so white—but for the fact that “everyone knew” that Homer Yancey was a Negro. As a young man, Homer began to express deep shame, even hatred, of having black blood. He married a black girl, but he and his wife soon separated. He was sued for alimony, did not pay, and was thrown into jail. He was released when his first wife died, and he promptly married a girl who he insisted was a Puerto Rican, though his family was certain that she was as much a Negro as Homer was. Homer and his wife tried to invade Atlanta's white society, but were not successful; the fact that Homer was a Negro was too well known. He and his wife were divorced.