Coming of Age in Mississippi (29 page)

The next morning around nine o’clock we boarded one of the school buses. Our destination was Liberty, Mississippi, where we were to meet one of the toughest teams in the state. On the way, I was extremely nervous. I began to wonder if I were as good as Dunbar and Hicks thought.

When we got to Liberty, we were greeted by a woman who was the exact picture of Emma. She reminded me of the fight we had had the night before. The strategy I had thought up on the bus vanished and throughout the entire game I thought of Emma and played as if I was playing against her. When the game was over, all my teammates ran to me and began swinging around my neck. We had won by two points. The score was 43 to 41. I had shot 27 points and had broken a tie of 41–41 the last ten seconds of the game.

During that spring I hardly saw Emma or Daddy at all. Johnson High had become one of the most challenged teams in the state and I was one of its most valuable players. In addition, I organized Johnson High’s first gymnastic and tumbling team, ran track, did substitute teaching, and spent all
day Sunday in church. Before I realized it, I was practicing for graduation.

Wilkinson County was a recipient of one of the new “Separate but Equal” schools built throughout the South as a result of the 1954 Supreme Court Decision. It had been under construction on a fifty-two-acre plot in Woodville for almost a year when I graduated in 1959. The following September all the Negro high schools in Wilkinson County would consolidate into the new school, giving it nearly three thousand students and eighty to ninety teachers. It was supposed to be the largest new school in the state and it caused much bickering among the Uncle Tom principals and teachers in the county. Many of the teachers sought positions as heads of various classes or departments and the principals challenged each other for the position of head principal. Since Willis was the biggest Tom among the principals of the merging schools, he was the one chosen by the state board for this job.

My class was scheduled to be the first to graduate in the new school building. Most of my classmates were all excited about this but not me. As most of them, students, teachers, and principals alike, were bragging about how good the white folks were to give us such a big beautiful school, I was thinking of how dumb we were to accept it. I knew that the only reason the white folks were being so nice was that they were protecting their own schools. Our shiny new school would never be equal to any school of theirs. All we had was a shiny new empty building, where they always had the best teachers, more state money, and better equipment. The only exciting thought I had about graduation was the fact that I was finishing high school and that would enable me to leave Woodville.

During the graduation ceremony each merging school was to be represented by the student with the highest average. I had a straight A average—the highest of all the seniors. But because I was a product of two schools, I had been ruled
ineligible to represent either. My homeroom teacher thought it was very unfair for me not to be the main speaker. She wanted to make an issue out of it but I wouldn’t let her. She didn’t understand and thought it was stupid of me not to want the speech after earning it. I told her I felt that the only thing I had truly earned was my diploma and if she could arrange for me to get it without marching and becoming a part of all that confusion, I would be grateful. Then she called me crazy and forgot the whole thing.

The night before graduation, I packed all of my clothes and prepared to leave for New Orleans the following morning. I said good-bye to Daddy before going to bed because I wouldn’t see him again before I left. I had expected him to object to my leaving so soon after graduation but he didn’t. He just told me that I should try and get into college in New Orleans and that he would help me as much as he could. That night I felt closer to him than ever. I realized that he had known all along that I was not happy there, that Emma mistreated me when he wasn’t home, and that he also understood Emma too and loved her enough to be patient with her until she was up and out of the house again. As Emma listened, I could tell she was touched by the feeling Daddy had shown toward me. The next morning, she got up and was nicer to me than she had been in a long time. She acted as though she was sorry that I was leaving. She even told me she would come to my graduation if she could wear shoes. I responded politely to her newly shown interest in me but by this time I didn’t care whether she came to my graduation or not, and I knew Daddy wouldn’t come because he had never been to a public event in his life. So the next morning I walked out of the house alone, my cap and gown swinging on my arm.

When I got to the auditorium, the seniors from Willis High and the other schools had arrived. There were about three hundred seniors standing around in caps and gowns. The whole scene was a barrel of confusion. I stood back looking at
everything as if I were not a part of it. Once all the students were there, the teachers went through a big ordeal about which class should lead the march. It was finally decided that the Willis High seniors would lead. Then the seniors at Johnson High objected and the whole thing started all over again.

We were about two hours late. About five hundred restless people were sitting in the auditorium and Mr. Willis was pacing the stage nervously. The teachers who were lined up to march ahead of us shouted to our teachers in an attempt to rush them into a decision as to how we would march. At about ten o’clock the pianist started playing. I don’t remember which class marched in first or who led the lines. But somehow we all got seated. I was so tired that I fell asleep as soon as I sat down.

When everything was over with, one of the students tapped me on the shoulder and told me we were about to march out. Marching down the aisle half asleep, I spotted a woman who looked just like Mama sitting next to the aisle in back of the auditorium. At first I had thought she was Mama but as I got closer she looked much too old. I couldn’t make up my mind if it was Mama or not. As I passed, staring at her, she whispered, “Essie Mae, wait on me outside.” I stopped, holding up the entire line as I took a good look at her. I saw that it was Mama and I was too hurt to say anything. I just walked away as tears began forming in my eyes. Instead of continuing the march outside with the rest of the students, I cut out of line and ran to the ladies’ rest room. I stayed in there a long time crying and blaming myself for the way Mama looked. When I left home, I hadn’t written her once even though I knew she worried about me. I was so concerned about getting my feelings hurt that I forgot that she even had feelings. At that moment, I hated myself for the way I had treated her.

I must have been in the rest room a long time, because when I got outside, everyone was leaving. A long line of cars
and buses moved slowly off the school grounds, and a steady flow of people walked alongside them. There were only a few people left standing in front of the auditorium. I looked for Mama among them. When I didn’t see her, I almost panicked. I thought she had left. If she had, I knew she was terribly hurt because I didn’t wait on her. I ran down the walk toward the road.

“Essie Mae! Essie Mae!” I heard her calling me.

I looked around but I still didn’t see her. “Essie Mae! Essie Mae!” I heard her voice again and started running up the road.

“Girl, where you runnin’ to?” a voice called out of a pickup truck moving slowly along beside me. I turned my head slightly and kept running. “Essie Mae!” This time Mama’s voice sounded as if it came from the truck. I turned and there was Mama leaning over Junior waving at me.

“Where you runnin’ to? Kin we give you a lift?” she said jokingly. Junior stopped the truck and I ran around and jumped in beside Mama. She was grinning as if she was so glad to see me. She looked at me as if she wanted to hug me but she didn’t.

“How you gonna git out to Emma them?” she asked me.

“I was gonna catch a ride back with Cousin Hattie.”

“Hattie them done gone. I thought you was going back wit’ them. But they said they hadn’t seen you.” Mama paused for a while, then asked, “Why don’t you come go spend the night wit’ me?” I didn’t answer, I just looked at her. She dropped her head and said, “You don’t have to stay wit’ us, you kin spend the night with Alberta and come see me tomorrow.…” I looked at Mama again and she seemed even older, she had lost weight and an air of sadness surrounded her. I sat there feeling so guilty.

“O.K., Mama,” I said at last, “I’ll go but I can’t stay but a couple of days because I want to go to New Orleans and get my job at the restaurant.”

Mama smiled and for a second she looked young again.

Two days after graduation, I arrived in New Orleans hoping to earn enough money at Maple Hill so I could go to one of the inexpensive colleges there. I had spent all my little savings while living with my daddy. After Emma was shot, Daddy was the only one bringing in any money and he had cut off my ten dollars a week allowance. I was afraid to work for the whites in Woodville, so I just lived off my savings.

But now I found myself in a real mess. Business in the restaurant that summer turned out to be worse than usual. For some reason, many of the regular summer school students hadn’t returned. Every evening, I got sick as I counted my tips. I was averaging only two or three dollars a day. At this rate, it would take me a whole year at the restaurant to save enough money for college, and I was scared to take the chance of being out of school that long.

In a panic I wrote Coach Dunbar. He had said that I had a good chance of getting a basketball scholarship to one of the junior colleges in Mississippi that had a girls’ team. I hadn’t even considered going to college in Mississippi and I was tired of playing basketball. But now I had no other choice. I
received a reply from Coach Dunbar about a week later, saying that the Natchez College coach, Mr. Lee, was considering me for a scholarship and would write me soon. While I waited to hear from him, I didn’t even count my tips. I just threw them in a big cigar box and prayed that Mr. Lee would say that I was accepted.

It was well past midsummer before I got a letter and all Mr. Lee could say was that he was “considering” me. I began thinking that maybe I was stuck in the restaurant and that I would probably never get to college. But finally late in August, a second letter came, telling me that I had gotten a scholarship, and that I was to report to school in two weeks. I ran to my cigar box and was surprised to find that I had saved nearly four hundred dollars. I still didn’t know whether I’d gotten a full scholarship, so I was scared to spend any money. I bought only a few cheap clothes, and since I had always wanted a suitcase of my own, I splurged on a three-piece eighteen-dollar luggage set.

All the way from New Orleans to Natchez, I was excited and anxious. I sat on the bus dreaming about Natchez College. I had seen all of the colleges in New Orleans with their beautiful spacious campuses, large modern dormitories, and many new buildings. The only thing I knew about Natchez was that it was a Baptist school. That didn’t impress me one bit. I just hoped it was a
rich
Baptist school and that it would be modern like the schools in New Orleans.

When the bus arrived in Natchez, there were lots of cabs lined up waiting. I grabbed the first one I saw. As the cabby headed for the college, I checked myself over. I thought I was looking real good with my little blue luggage set and the matching blue dress I wore. I leaned back in the seat and ran my hand admiringly over the largest piece in the set, which lay on the seat beside me. I stroked it gently, feeling proud that it was mine. Suddenly my eyes jumped. My hand had come to a big hole in the side of the suitcase. My pajama top was sticking out of it. I felt like I had been wounded and that
what was showing through that hole was my own insides. “Look at this,” I thought. “Eighteen dollars for three pieces of cardboard.” I didn’t feel so pretty anymore as I tried to glue the cardboard back together with spit. I got so wrapped up in trying to fix the suitcase before getting to the college that I didn’t realize we were there until the cabdriver said, “O.K., miss, this is it.”

“Is
this
Natchez College?” I asked as I sat there looking out of the cab at an old two-story red brick building, on which was engraved “Women’s Auxiliary.”

“You never been here before?” the driver asked as he opened the door for me.

“No, it’s my first year. Is this all there is to the school?” As I stepped out of the cab, I could see only three little old brick buildings.

“Sho’ is!” he said, pointing to the red brick building. “This is where the women live.”

When he said that, I felt like jumping right back in the cab and going back to New Orleans. I didn’t want to get involved with this place. I didn’t even want to see anyone connected with it. I was so upset I walked off without paying the man. I was halfway up the walk with my eyes fixed on that “Women’s Auxiliary,” thinking how it sounded so religious and looked so dead and dull, when he called after me, “Hey, miss! The fare is thirty-five cents.”

I walked back and handed him a dollar, telling him to keep the change. I never would have given him such a big tip if I hadn’t been so depressed.

“So this is what I left New Orleans for,” I thought, walking toward Women’s Auxiliary again.

When I got inside the building an old lady came up to me and said, “I’m Mrs. Evans, the matron, and you is …?”

“Miss Moody,” I said.

“Just bring in your luggage and follow me,” she said. Her speech was too proper. I could tell that she was one of those uneducated women who get this kind of a job and try to
pretend that they’re educated. “They always give themselves away with those broken verbs,” I thought as I listened to her. “I bet the teachers here don’t even have college degrees.”

Mrs. Evans showed me to a room, told me where the showers were, and said I could rest until dinner. She asked me so many questions and seemed so concerned about me that I got a nice motherly feeling from her.