My Triumph over Prejudice: A Memoir

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Growing-up Years

Fayette, Mississippi, my hometown, is located about seventy-five miles southwest of Jackson, not far from the Mississippi/Louisiana border. The little town, with its surrounding rural communities, is nestled between Natchez and Vicksburg, two old historic steamboat ports on the Mississippi River. When I was growing up there in the 1950s, the population of Fayette was less than two thousand residents, and it hasn’t increased much since.

Both the town and the surrounding area were named for eminent political figures during the early nineteenth century, when the population consisted primarily of many slaves and their few masters. Jefferson County, then a collection of plantations and smaller farms, was named after our country’s third president, who had also been a slaveholder. Fayette was named after the honorary citizen and supporter of American independence, Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de La Fayette, who was taking a farewell tour of the region in the 1820s when the town was settled.

Even now, the downtown area has only two major thoroughfares, Main and Poindexter Streets, which cross at the very center of town. During my youth, a few ancient brick commercial buildings still existed, such as Freeman’s Department Store and the Guilminot Hotel, both dating back to the early 1800s. The Guilminot Hotel was then the only three-story building in downtown Fayette.

At the head of Poindexter Street stood the Jefferson County Courthouse, another old brick commercial building, where the lobby held an antique Coke machine and a WPA (Works Progress Administration) forestry display. Across from the courthouse was the Confederate Memorial Park, which could only be used by white people. The park’s single monument was a statue of a Confederate soldier leaning on his rifle. During the warm months, older white people sat on benches in the park or milled around on the lush green grass under the big shade trees scattered throughout. During the cold months, the park remained deserted except for that lone stone soldier.

On its face, Fayette was a charming hamlet in a pretty part of the state. Fine old elms, pecans, magnolias, and beeches shaded the streets. The trees seemed to have held the same air captive among them for so long that they had acquired their own unique atmosphere. Like many southern towns, Fayette was quiet and peaceful and, during my early years, about as segregated as a town could be. I could clearly see that blacks were the majority, but it seemed as if blacks knew their place and the whites knew theirs, and no one crossed those invisible lines.

In the white section of town, the stately homes had remained unaltered for so many decades that they seemed frozen in time, throwbacks from another era. The homes had yards of beautiful flowers with well-manicured lawns, all maintained by black hands. What were known as the black neighborhoods, however, were situated in downtown Fayette across the tracks. The proverbial railroad tracks separated the two regions.

To visit a black family who lived downtown, one had to pass through the pristine white neighborhoods, with their rich foliage and cement sidewalks. Once a person was across the dividing line, the difference was literally like night and day.

Sometimes it seemed that the only inhabitants of the black neighborhoods were small children and old people, all sitting outside in the sweltering heat of summer evenings while the young adult workforce toiled across the tracks, and the rest found other places to entertain themselves. The homes varied in quality, from broken-down shacks with no running water to moderately nice-looking wood-framed ones. The beat-up old shacks undeniably predominated, and since there was no indoor plumbing, that meant many smelly outhouses. There were no paved streets or sidewalks in the black neighborhoods; the roads were all dirt or all gravel, or sometimes both, but the dust was forever flying free. In my memory, I can still feel the heat and dust clinging to my body and still smell those smelly old outhouses.

My brothers and sisters and I did not live in the black section of town, but in a rural area outside Fayette, a world far removed from the happenings of the town, a countryside consisting of woodlands and farmlands with all kinds of wildlife running free. About a third of all black residents in Mississippi, like our family, were engaged in farming. Some families had their own farms to live on, but there were quite a few, like us, who sharecropped. This was a system where a landowner allowed a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the profits. My father farmed cotton, corn, and sugarcane. When the cotton was harvested, it was taken to the gin to be sold and the profits were used to pay off the landlord. Profits from the corn and sugarcane were used to pay off debts as well. My father made molasses from the sugarcane and sometimes cans of molasses were given in lieu of money.

In February 1950, when I was five months old, our mother, Verine Sanders Wyatt, had a heart attack and died. She was thirty at the time. The responsibility of caring for my siblings and me fell to my oldest sister, Dot. Although Dot was not quite twelve at the time, it was quite common in many black homes for the eldest child to assume the responsibility of an absent or dead parent. Our maternal grandparents had already passed away, and so had our paternal grandmother. Daddy’s father was still alive living in Roxie, Mississippi, raising his second family.

Dot said our father was very depressed after my mother’s death. Having five young children and a baby to take care of, he went off to work for the Army Corps of Engineers, where he accepted a job as a cook on a barge that went up and down the Mississippi River doing maintenance on the levees. She said before he left, he’d sit up nights, talking to the children about his wishes and dreams for them, telling them how he would miss being with them, but he had to do what was needed in order to make a better living. The only way he could provide properly for his family was to go away to work. The railroad and the Army Corps of Engineers offered the best-paying jobs for an uneducated black man back then. Dot’s courage in living up to her imposed responsibilities was admirable.

My father, born May 25, 1912, bore the name Shelby Davis Wyatt, though everyone called him S.D. Daddy was a handsome man, small of frame at about five feet, six inches and weighing 150 pounds. His skin was smooth and very dark, the color of a strong cup of coffee. His face was graced with high cheekbones, thin lips, and a very distinct nose, shaped kind of like that of an American Indian. I look a lot like my father, except for the nose.

Less than a year after my mother died, hoping to take some of the responsibility away from Dot, Daddy married a woman named Louberta Green. About the same height as my father, Louberta was a full-figured woman with a head full of healthy, thick, black hair, cocoa-colored skin, and a gold-capped tooth in the front, top row of her mouth. Her lips were medium-sized, and she had a full nose.

Her age was a mystery. She couldn’t read or write, so it’s doubtful she knew her true age. Rumor had it that she was about five years older than our father. This was verified by her great-uncle; that is, if he even knew for sure.

Louberta had six of us to deal with. Dot was the oldest, a tall girl with high cheekbones and the most serious of all of us because she’d had to be. My brother Shelby, Jr., was handsome and quiet. Next came Ruth, the sister I would become closest to, and Herman, my lanky, sly older brother who hoisted me protectively on his lap when one of the other siblings fussed at me about one thing or another and always seemed to have the uncanny ability to make us laugh. Louetta, the closest in age to me, was a little on the wild side, the least conventional of all of us.

For the first five years of my life, we lived near the main highway, Highway 61, which connected Minneapolis to New Orleans. Known as the Road of the Blues because so many blues singers had their roots along that highway, the thoroughfare was steeped in tradition, but to me it was simply the local road.

Our home was a shotgun house with a front porch, followed by a row of rooms, each opening into the next, from front to back. It was so named because, supposedly, a shotgun could be fired through the house while someone was standing on the porch, and the pellets would fly out the back door without touching a wall. My family used cast-off newspaper as wallpaper. We had a big potbelly stove for heat. Our water for drinking, cooking, and washing came from rain barrels. Daddy bent the eave troughs so they could funnel rainwater into the barrels.

To the north of Fayette at Vicksburg on Highway 61 was one of America’s largest patches of kudzu, a noxious, fast-growing weed imported from Japan for erosion control that threatened to overwhelm the local landscape. To the south before Natchez was the thirty-five-foot-high Emerald Mound, a national historic landmark covering eight acres built by the Natchez Indians.

When I was five, we moved up the road about a half mile from the old house. It had gotten too raggedy for us to live in anymore. The landowner, who owned both properties, offered my father a bigger and better white farmhouse, still on Highway 61, with eight huge rooms. Four other black families, living about a quarter of a mile from one another, formed our very small neighborhood. We congregated on weekends, late Saturday nights, and Sundays after church services to socialize.

Our new house had screen doors, a screened-in wraparound porch, and masses of colorful flowers in full bloom all over the yard. The yard was beautiful, with many pecan and oak trees for shade. I really enjoyed living in that big old house. Before long, I knew every nook and cranny of our home, which wrapped itself around us like a comfortable old blanket. It became a warm and welcoming place to play, not only for me, but for cousins and friends as well.

Jefferson County was one of the many cotton counties that flourished throughout the state of Mississippi. Some families had their own farms to live on, though the majority—like ours—were rented from white landholders and farmed for a percentage of each year’s crop profits.

In addition to cotton, our new accommodations provided land for cows, horses, pigs, and an enormous vegetable garden. Life on the farm was fun and truly rewarding, at least for me as a kid. Farming gave a family some independence, not having to purchase all the necessities for survival from a store. Like our old home, the farmhouse didn’t have running water or sanitation facilities or enough furniture to fill the spaciousness, but we did have a truck, a tractor, a freezer, and a car, luxuries that only a few black farmers could hope to attain. With the exception of electricity, we didn’t miss the absence of modern conveniences like running water or inside toilets.

We had always had an outhouse, but the one with the new farmhouse was the best we’d ever had. Built like a miniature house, it had two seats and a door that actually locked from the inside, and it was much bigger than the one we’d had before. The new outhouse was built on a concrete slab, whereas the previous one had been just thrown together and had a makeshift door that was tied with pieces of rope to remain closed during usage. The new one sat a good distance from the main house, near the barn, and was never smelly like the other one. It had two steps leading to the door and two little windows for ventilation. Looking back, I see that it was very modern for the times.

We were poor, but we didn’t consider being poor a hardship. Everyone around us basically lived the same kind of life. I never felt deprived or unhappy about our living conditions. My father used to say, You can live in a hut and eat shit with a toothpick and still be happy.

I used to take an ear of corn and shuck it, leaving some of the shucks for hair, lay the corncob out to dry, then fashion a doll with the cob as the body and the shucks as hair. I curled the shucks with a nail, fashioning them into a semblance of a hairstyle. My cousin Robert and I would take a used oil can, clean it, wrap it with rags, and use it for a ball. I still have a scar on my nose from when I was struck by a can while playing. Cardboard boxes were excellent for creating miniature houses and stores. We even made a cardboard house big enough for us kids to play in. One bottle of nail polish was such a big deal to the girls. We could entertain ourselves for hours, painting and repainting our nails. I remember making an awful mess of my hands the first time I was allowed to try painting my nails by myself. Our minds were always at work, creating our own fun, using whatever was available to us for entertainment. I lived a clean, wholesome life, untouched and unspoiled, far different from the materialism of today’s society.

My father was a good man who worked hard. I never heard him complain; he always gave my siblings and me an abundance of love and nurturing. He was a very proud and diligent man. Our lifestyle was made by his willingness to work and his wisdom about surviving life in the Deep South. The strong and positive relationship I had with my father was undoubtedly crucial to my developing into a well-adjusted adult.

One of my favorite experiences while living on the farm was the excitement of planting seeds in the ground and watching them grow into vegetables that we would later eat and can. Many times, while I was still too young to help, I watched my stepmother and sisters sitting on the porch, shelling peas and butter beans to make soup for canning. We ate vegetables from our garden as they ripened and canned others for the coming winter months. My brothers and sisters did most of the farm labor, running the farm in Daddy’s absence.

After moving into the new house, our father brought home our first wringer-type washer and our first electric iron. My sisters weren’t allowed to use them; those appliances were for my stepmother’s convenience. Louberta had to be in control of everything, and we all knew that from a very young age. Even though Daddy knew Louberta didn’t allow my siblings to use the new conveniences, he gave her complete run of the house—and us as well—rarely questioning her, in order to keep the peace. Louberta never drew her own water for washing; she made Ruth and Louetta do it. She did, however, wash her own laundry and hang it out on the line to dry.

Dot and Ruth still did our wash in a big, old tin tub with a washboard to scrub the clothes clean. My sisters drew the wash water from the well and heated it outside in an old, big, black iron pot on an open fire, then dipped the water into a pail and poured it into the tub, mixing it with cold water to do the wash. When the wash was done, they hung the laundry on a clothesline to dry in the fresh air. They ironed the family’s clothes by using the old-fashioned, flat irons that were heated by the fire in the fireplace.

I remember sneaking around the laundry hanging on the line as if a ghost was chasing me, playing and running between the clean sheets billowing in the fresh, open air. Joyously I played while listening for the opening and closing of the screen door, my warning that someone would catch me (most likely Louberta) and reprimand me for touching the clean, white fabric. Ah … the fresh smell of line-dried sheets. No other smell compared. No fabric softener ever invented can duplicate that wonderful, fresh scent.

Hogs were killed in the summers and salted down for the winters. The meat that wasn’t salted was kept on ice in the icebox for everyday meals. Louberta locked that up to keep track of how much was eaten and rationed out portions as she saw fit. The eggs that were gathered from the henhouses were locked up as well in her big, blue iron trunk, with the key kept in her possession at all times.

She hoarded food for large Sunday dinners which she made for the preacher. Many times my sisters and brothers broke into that old trunk to steal food, usually when Louberta was away spending my father’s money on herself. It was the only opportunity to fill our bellies, except when Daddy was home.

Growing up I had a little white-haired puppy with black spots. His hair was short, but for the life of me, I don’t remember what breed he was—probably a mutt. His name was Spotty because of his color. Sometimes I’d steal meat out of the icebox for Spotty and me when I thought no one else was around. One day as I was stealing meat, I heard Louberta approaching. Oh Lord! Panic set in, and I didn’t know what to do because I knew I’d get a whipping if I was caught. Without thinking, I picked up Spotty and jumped in the icebox, closing the door gently while holding on tight to my puppy. As she came closer I heard her yelling my nickname, Tootise, but I was afraid to answer. After a few screams of Tootise, Tootise, where are you? my puppy started barking; she found us. She yanked the icebox door open with a vengeance.

Standing there like a drill sergeant, shaking her head, she yelled, I can’t believe this. Get out of that icebox now!

I knew by the look on her face that I was in for it. I climbed out sheepishly with Spotty still under my arm, knowing what was coming next. Not only did I get a whipping for stealing the meat, but you can imagine her wrath at me for hiding from her and putting the puppy in the icebox with me. After the whipping I was sent outside with nothing to eat for the rest of the day as punishment.

No one I knew could out-dress Louberta; she was considered one of the best-dressed of the colored women in our town, but the same did not apply to us children. The only time I remember getting new clothes was the beginning of each school year, usually one pair of shoes, one dress dark in color so that it could be worn over and over again, a pair of socks, and a pair of underpants. The boys got a pair of pants, a shirt, and a set of underwear each. Those few articles of clothing had to last us throughout the whole school year. As my brothers got older, they were able to do odd jobs on the weekend to make extra money, which enabled them to buy more for themselves and later helped buy for all of us as well.

It was a long time before I realized that our stepmother had a boyfriend. His name was Mr. Rob Orbinson, but we called him Mr. Rob. As a child, I didn’t comprehend what was going on because he was considered a family friend. He frequently came to our house, both day and night. I was led to believe he came by to check up on us in our father’s absence. As I grew older, however, I realized that he was Louberta’s lover, and I grew to despise both of them.

Daddy either loved Louberta very much or needed her very much, because I told him numerous times about the visits and the goodies—a few peppermint balls or peppermint sticks or Tootsie Rolls—I received from her boyfriend. I don’t ever recall a confrontation occurring between the two of them about the boyfriend’s visits.

Over the years, I’ve repeatedly asked myself why our father allowed Louberta’s abusive and devious ways to continue. It seemed like an unwritten agreement prevailed: you take care of the house and kids, and I’ll take care of you. Children weren’t forward in their questioning back in the 1950s; we did pretty much as we were told, or we paid the consequences, and Louberta’s consequences were severe. Authority figures always had the upper hand, no matter if it was right or wrong.

Louberta aside, life on the farm was good. My favorite chores were helping my brothers milk the cows, gather the eggs, and feed the chickens and other farm animals. I especially loved riding on the tractor, which I learned how to drive at the age of nine.

My family was almost completely self-sufficient when it came to providing food. Seasonings