Chapter 2

On the second day of school, Marva taught the English folk tale "The Little Red Hen and the Grain of Wheat." She had long believed that fairy tales and fables were effective in promoting emotional, intellectual, and social development. Most of the students were intrigued by the modulation of her voice and the changes in her face as she read aloud, shifting from one character to the next.

After the fourth round of quacking and squeaking and grunting "Not I," Marva noticed that Bernette Miller had taken off her locket and was looping the chain around her fingers, twisting it into a Cat's Cradle.

"You knew how to play with a chain when you came to school," Marva said, "Playing with a chain is a good way to get a job, isn't it? put it away and listen to the story. I am not reading it just to entertain you. There is a lesson here. And we all better start paying attention to lessons like these, or this world we live in is surely headed for trouble."

Marva added, "I love you children all the time, even though I may correct you or disagree with you some of the time."

Marva finished the story. She closed the book, clasped it to her with one hand, and raised the other, index finger extended like a maestro's baton. Without losing the intensity delivered in the last line of the story, the discussion began. "Do you think the little red hen was right in not sharing her bread with the duck, the mouse, and the pig?"

Heads nodded in agreement.

"Why was she right?" Three were various demonstrations of squirming and fidgeting but no volunteers. After a while they would enjoy the heaping doses of teacher-student dialogue, but for now it was still a new and intimidating proposition. "Come on, come on," Marva said, "I am not going to leave you alone to become workbook idiots. You are not going to spend your time in here pasting and coloring and circling pictures. We're going to do some thinking in here. Now, why do you feel the hen was right?"

"She done it all. They was lazy." Came a voice from the back.

"She did all what? She did all the work, didn't she? She had to sow and cut and thresh the wheat, and she had to carry it to the mill to be ground into flour, and she had to bake the loaf of bread. The other animals were lazy. They didn't want to help do any of the work. They only wanted to help eat the bread. What is the moral of this story? What lesson does it teach us? If we don't work, we don't eat. If we don't work, we don't --"

"Eat." Came the unanimous reply. There was safety in numbers. Getting a child to take a chance and venture his or her own answer was another matter.

"Now, what would you say if I told you I think that hen was being selfish. She should have shared what she had with the other barnyard animals. What do you think about that?"

"No." they all shook heir head.

"Why not? Don't grown-ups always tell children that they should share their toys or their cookies or their candy? Freddie?"

"It ain't the same," he said.

"Isn't, sweetheart, it isn't the same. Children, listen to me for a moment. To succeed in this world you must speak correctly. I don't want to hear any jive talk in here or any of this stuff about black English. You must not just think of yourselves as black children or ghetto children. You must become citizens of the world, like Socrates."

"Now, Freddie, why do you think there is a difference between the little red hen who did not share her bread and little children, who are always being told they should share their toys with others?"

"The hen had to work hard for the bread."

"That's wonderful, Freddie. You are absolutely right. The hen earned what she had. There is no comparison between the two situations. They are not analogous. You all know the word same. Let's try to learn some big word. Analogous means same or similar.

"Suppose I ask a child to help me do some chores, and when the chores are done I give the child some candy. Does the child have to share it with you because you say 'Give me some?' "

They shook their heads again.

"Of course not. You have a right to be rewarded for your work, for your efforts, and you also have a right to keep what you have earned. You don't have to give it away every time someone comes up to you with a hand out asking for something. A person who has his hand out today is going to have that hand out tomorrow. You are not going to solve his problem by giving him something free. He has to learn to solve his own problem. If you give another student in this class the answer to the home work, are you helping that student? No you are cheating him out of learning how to find the answer himself.

"So the lesson of the story is one of the most important lessons you can learn. The person who does the work will be the one who has plenty of food, good clothes, and a fine house. The lazy person is always going to be standing there with his hand out. You have the choice, the right to choose which kind of person you want to be."

There it was. Marva had played her full hand. A teacher had to sell children on the idea of learning.

Oddly, Marva had not planned on becoming a teacher. She had not, in fact, given much thought to what she would do. As child she had had the usual fleeting sort of girlish aspirations. One day she wanted to be a nurse, the next a secretary. With a child's fickleness she moved on to each new thing, her wishes shaped by a character in a book or a picture in a magazine. In that she was no different from other children. But what distinguished Marva's life from those around her -- from the black children living in the wooden shanties with whom she went to school -- was that she could entertain the vagaries of ambition beyond the age when others had to reconcile or surrender theirs. Necessity made no such demands on her. She grew up wealthy, pampered, and sheltered by small-town innocence and a doting protective father. She lived the freedom other people only dreamt.

I was born on August 31, 1936, in Monroeville, Alabama, about fifty miles north of Mobile, I grew up during the Depression, but while I can remember hearing the grown-ups talk about how times were hard and there was no money, none of that really affected my own life.

My father, Henry Knight, was one of the richest black men in Monroeville. We lived in a six-bedroom white clapboard house that had polished wood floors, store-bought furniture, and oriental rugs. Ours was one of the finest houses in the northern end of town, which was where all the blacks lived. People used to joke that our house was so fine you had to take your shoes off before going inside. My mother, Bessie, dressed me like a doll in ruffled, ribboned dresses and crisply pleated store-bought school dresses tied in back with an ironed sash. Because I looks so different from the other children, I had to put up with a lot of teasing. My schoolmates were mostly dressed in clothes their mothers made from the empty twenty-five-pound flour sacks they got from my father's grocery store.

There was determination in my family. We were always a family of doers and achievers. My mother's father, William Nettles, farmed all night and peddled meat door to door during the day, and he was the first black man in town to have a car, a crank-up Model T Ford. Everyone else rode around in muledrawn wagons. My other grandfather, Henry Knight. Sr., owned a store and several houses and lived off his rental properties. He was a patient, thrifty man who always looked successful in a suit and tie, a gold watch chain, and well-shined shoes. I remember wondering why he always wore Sunday clothes.

I believed my father was the greatest man who ever lived. I would never meet anyone I admired more. He was the moving force in my life and we had a very special relationship. Of course, I loved my mother, but we weren't as close. My mother was very prim and proper, not as free with the hugs and kisses as my dad. She showed her love and concern for me by making sure I ate the right foods and wore the right clothes. I knew she loved me, but I missed hearing her tell me that she did. As an adult I have come to understand how important it is to be openly affectionate with a child, to be sensitive to a child's feelings. I couldn't talk things over with my mother, which was especially frustrating since I was the only child in the family until I was fourteen and always needed someone to talk to. My father was always there. I could say anything to him, even if it was silly, and he would patiently listen. I never felt I had to prove anything to him. I always knew where I stood. But I could never quite please my mother. I was not as ladylike or as well-behaved or as pretty as she wanted me to be. Parents don't realize how they can nag and pick away at a child until there is nothing left to pick. My dad always supportive, constantly telling me how smart and pretty and special I was, even when I wasn't, so I felt good about myself. However, I did become an overachiever, and attribute that to my mother saying I would never come to any good.

My father had only a fourth-grade education, but he was the smartest person I ever knew. He was a risk-taker with an instinct for business. Taking over his father's grocery store, he parlayed the assets into a thousand-acre cattle ranch and the town funeral parlor. He was a clever businessman, and even when he didn't have enough collateral, he some how convinced people to go along with him on faith. When products were scarce on every grocery shelf during the Second World War, my father made a deal with an A&P down in Florida that could buy goods in larger quantities. He was the only merchant in Alabama - black or white - who had steaks, nylon stockings, chocolate, and chewing gum for his customers.

The black community in Monroeville exit apart from the white community. Blacks who were engaged in business were important and had a lot of influence. Since my father was the only black undertaker and the only black proprietor of a grocery store, he was a leader in the black community. The white businessmen respected him, and among blacks he was well respected though he was not particularly liked. Many people were envious of him. Sometimes people said they didn't want to shop in his store and make him any richer, yet those same people came to him when they didn't have money because they knew he would give them credit.

If someone got into trouble in town and was headed for jail, my father stood the bail bond. Not only blacks but many whites - some who owned the big stores downtown - would sneak into our house after dark to borrow money from my father. They didn't want anyone to know they were having anything to do with blacks, much less borrowing money. My father never chased me out of the room or said "This is none of your business," so I learned very early in life that white society was not the bright paradise other black children thought it was.

My father treated me the same as he would have treated a son, mainly, I guess, because I was always following him around. I didn't have a lot of playmates my own age because the other children had to work in the cotton fields after school and during vocations. I used to beg my parents to let me go to the cotton fields with the other children. Once my father let me go and I caught a bad cold. My father said he had to spend more money for the doctor than I earned in two days picking cotton, so he didn't let me go back. It was just as well because the foreman had told me not to come back to his field. He didn't like my bright ideas for making my cotton weigh more, such as putting stones in the bottom of sack or pulling the whole cotton boll, branch and all. The other children took their job seriously because they had to.

Another reason I spent so much time with my father was that my mother constantly shooed me out of the house. She was a fastidious housekeeper, impatient with an awkward child who always seemed to spill and break things. "You can't keep a grow up 'cause the buzzards are gonna fly over your house." My mother didn't try teaching me to cook and sew. She later said she realized it was a mistake because when I first married Clarence Collins, he had to take charge of the cooking and sewing. The funny thing is that I picked up my mother's housekeeping habits and I now find I have many of the same quirks.

From the time I was eight I woke at dawn and went with my father to open the grocery store. The people in town would buy before they set off to work in the fields. Late afternoons I helped him add the day's receipts. I counted the pennies and quarters and put them into rolls, and I helped haul out the empty cartons and sacks, which my father burned in a huge bonfire. Sometimes we'd roast potatoes or hotdogs over the flames. When my father slaughtered a cow in the large yard behind the house, I was out there with him, sprawled across the overhanging limb of the chinaberry tree.

Sometimes I sat there daydreaming about travel to exotic places. Or I imagined myself grown up and married with children of my own. For all my tomboyish ways - climbing the plum and chinaberry trees, throwing the hard green berries, playing dark, cool caves - I was always sure I wanted to get married and have children with enchanting names like Chiquita Denise and Frenette Rene. Strangely, I ended up giving my children ordinary names - Eric, Patrick, and Cynthia.

At night when all the chores were finished, my father and I sat together and I would read aloud from The Montgomery Advertiser and The Mobile Press or Aesop's Fables or poetry books, until my mother waved me on to bed. And I would fall asleep thinking about the things I had read, pretending I was one of the characters in the stories.

On Saturdays I rode through town with my father, sitting next to him on the front seat of the new black Cadillac he bought each year for his funeral parlor. As we drove past the black men loitering in the town square, my father shook his head and said how undignified they looked. And when we saw black women carrying baskets of whitefolk's laundry on their heads, my father always said, "if I have to work all day and night, I'll never see my family doing other people's washing."

During the summer, from the time I was seven, I went on cattle-buying trips with my father. One day a week we would drive through the Alabama Black Belt, from country to country, through the rolling prairies filled with goldenrod and canebrake. Sometimes we went to the livestock markets in Montgomery.

In the 1940s Alabama cattle auctions were segregated, like everything else. Although everyone bid on the same cattle, blacks and whites sat in separate buying sections. I grew up with that racism. You were always reminded you were black. You were always expected to know your place. Blacks had to use separate water fountains and rest rooms. we weren't served in restaurants. We had to go around to a back window if we wanted food. My father always said he would whip me within an inch of my life if he caught me getting food at a back counter. He also wouldn't let my mother or me go into a department store because white sales clerks gave black customers a hard time about trying on clothes. Black women had to put a piece of plastic on their heads before trying on hats. My father would no allow my mother or me to be humiliated. He did all the shopping and brought clothes home for us.

He was a proud man and a nonconformist. He did things that were unheard of in those days. He marched into the dentist's office through the front door, though blacks were supposed to come in through the back. And he got away with it. No one said anything. I guess his money made the difference.

At an auction he outbid the buyers from Swift and Cudahy, the big meat packing houses. Afterwards, at the cashier's window, the buyers were waiting for my father. They shouted at him, backed him into a corner, and warned him not to come back to the cattle sales again.

I watched, frightened. Though I lived with the day-to-day realities of segregation and was used to hearing the word nigger, I had never directly experienced the violence and horrors of racism. I only heard about it. The grown-ups still talked about people who were beaten up by the sheriff and dragged off to jail in the middle of the night. None of that had ever touched my own family. The first time I saw race hatred up close was when those buyers surrounded my father.

He did not apologize. He was silent, his eyes firmly set, not a muscle in him moving. He stood there tall and distinguished-looking in his starched shirt and creased trousers with the Stacy Adams shoes he always wore. He looked the men straight in their eyes and said he'd be coming back to the next auction. If they were going to kill him, he'd take one of them with him when he died.

I thought the men would hurt him then. They hesitated, asking each other what to do about "that nigger." Just then two other white men came by and broke things up. The buyers shrugged and walked away . On the way home my father told me, "I made an honest bid. If you believe in what you do, then you don't ever have to fear anyone."

Every sale after that, my mother pleaded with my father not to go, but he said, "I'm not going to stay away. I can't die but once." That was the kind of determination I learned from him. He was a man of strong values and uncompromising beliefs. I always believed strength was passed on from one generation to the next. I guess I felt secure and confident, maybe because I was Henry Knight's daughter, but also because growing up in a small town like Monroeville, Albbama, I was sheltered and protected from a lot of things. We didn't have the kind of crime they had in the big cities. We didn't worry about rapes or muggings of drugs. If those things were happening somewhere else, we only learned about it from the newspapers, and by the time we got the news from Mobile it was already history.

I lived in a town where everyone seemed to know and trust everyone else. Just about everybody was cousin this or cousin that. Like that other children in Monroeville I was free to roam from yard to yard collecting pecans and figs in the autumn, free to roam through the pine forests searching for cones, free to play in the low red-clay hills, sliding down mud banks, wading in creeks, building dams along the shore. It was a happy, carefree childhood.

When I was twelve, my parents separated. My father remained in Monroeville, while my mother and I moved forty yards south to Atmore. I don't really know what went wrong between my parents. Maybe I have just blocked the whole thing out of my mind. But somehow I was able to cope with their separation. My father had already taught me to be a survivor. He taught me that whatever happens in life, a person has to go forward. Perhaps I forced myself to adjust so I could show my father I was just like him.

I remained close with my father, and he continued to be the strongest force in my life. I visited him summers, weekends, and sometimes during the week. He was never farther than a phone call or a sort drive away. In the meantime Atmore became home. I spent my adolescence there with my mother, her new husband, and a new baby sister, Cynthia.

But the years in Monroeville were the great, great years of my childhood. Those were the years that made me what I am.