Roots: The Saga of an American Family

  “What you mean, Pappy?” she stuttered, flushing hotly.

  “Gittin’ married! Dat’s on your mind, ain’t it?”

  She couldn’t speak.

  “You done tol’ me. Well, I’d like to give you my blessin’s, ’cause I wants you to be happy much as you does. He seem like a good man—but I can’t let you hitch up wid ’im.”

  Elizabeth looked at him uncomprehendingly.

  “He too high-yaller. He could nigh ’bout pass fo’ white—jes’ not quite. He ain’t fish or fowl. Y’unnerstan’ what I’se sayin’? He too light fo’ black folks, too dark fo’ white folks. He cain’t he’p what he look like, but don’t care how hard he try, he never gon’ b’long nowhere. An’ you got to think ’bout what yo’ chilluns might look like! I don’t want dat kinda life fo’ you, ’Lizabeth.”

  “But Pappy, ever’body like John! If ’n we gits ’long wid Ol’ George Johnson, why can’t we git ’long wid him?”

  “Ain’t de same!”

  “But Pappy!” she was desperate. “You talk ’bout people not’ceptin’ ’im! You’s de one ain’t!”

  “Dat’s ’nough! You done said all I’m gon’ hear ’bout it. You ain’t got de sense to keep ’way from dat kinda grief, I gotta do it fo’ you. I don’ want you seein’ ’im no mo’.”

  “But Pappy . . .” She was sobbing.

  “It’s over wid! Dat’s all is to it!”

  “If ’n I cain’t marry John, ain’t never gon’ marry nobody!” Elizabeth screamed.

  Tom Murray turned and strode from the room, slamming the door. In the next room, he stopped.

  “Tom, what do you . . .” Irene began, sitting up rigidly in her rocker.

  “Ain’t got no mo’ to say ’bout it!” he snapped, marching out the front door.

  When Matilda found out about it, she got so angry that Irene had to restrain her from confronting Tom. “Dat boy’s pappy got white blood in ’im!” she shouted. Suddenly wincing, then clutching at her chest, Matilda lurched against a table. Irene caught her as she toppled to the floor.

  “O my God!” she moaned, her face contorted with pain. “Sweet Jesus! O Lawd, no!” Her eyelids fluttered and closed.

  “Grandmammy!” Irene shouted, seizing her around the shoulders. “Grandmammy!” She put her head to her chest and listened. There was still a heartbeat. But two days later it stopped.

  Chicken George didn’t cry. But there was something heart-breaking about his stoniness, the deadness in his eyes. From that day on, no one could remember him ever smiling again or saying a civil word to anyone. He and Matilda had never seemed really close—but when she died, somehow his own warmth died with her. And he began to shrink, dry up, grow old almost overnight—not turning feeble and weak-minded but hard and mean-tempered. Refusing to live anymore in the cabin he had shared with Matilda, he began to roost with one son or daughter after another until both he and they were fed up, when old gray-headed Chicken George moved on. When he wasn’t complaining, he’d usually sit on the porch in the rocker he took along with him and stare fiercely out across the fields for hours at a time.

  He had just turned eighty-three—having cantankerously refused to touch a bite of the birthday cake that was baked for him—and was sitting late in the winter of 1890 in front of the fire at his eldest granddaughter Maria Jane’s house. She had ordered him to sit still and rest his bad leg while she hurried out to the adjacent field with her husband’s lunch. When she returned as quickly as she could, she found him lying on the hearth, where he’d dragged himself after falling into the fire. Maria Jane’s screams brought her husband running. The derby hat, scarf, and sweater were smoldering, and Chicken George was burned horribly from his head to his waist. Late that night he died.

  Nearly everyone black in Henning attended his funeral, dozens of them his children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren. Standing there by the grave as he was lowered into the ground beside Matilda, his son L’il George leaned to Virgil and whispered: “Pappy so tough ’speck he wouldn’t o’ never died natural.”

  Virgil turned and looked sadly at his brother. “I loved ’im,” he said quietly. “You too, an’ all us.”

  “’Cose we did,” said L’il George. “Nobody couldn’t stan’ livin’ wid de cockadoodlin’ ol’ rascal, an’ look now at ever’body snufflin’’cause he gone!”

  CHAPTER 116

  “Mama!” Cynthia breathlessly exclaimed to Irene, “Will Palmer done axed to walk me home from church nex’ Sunday!”

  “He ain’t ’zackly one to rush into things, is he? Leas’ two years I seen ’im watchin’ you in church every Sunday—” said Irene.

  “Who?” Tom asked.

  “Will Palmer! Is it awright for him to walk her home?”

  After a while Tom Murray said drily, “I think ’bout it.”

  Cynthia went off looking as if she had been stabbed, leaving Irene studying her husband’s face. “Tom, ain’t nobody good ’nough fo’ yo’ gals? Anybody in town know dat young Will jes’ ’bout run de lumber company fo’ dat ol’ stay-drunk Mr. James. Folks all over Henning seen ’im unload de lumber off de freight cars hisself, sell it an’ deliver it hisself, den write out de bills, colleck de money, an’’posit it in de bank hisself. Even do different l’il carpenterin’ de customers needs an’ ax nothin’ fo’ it. An’ wid all dat fo’ whatever l’il he make, he don’t never speak a hard word ’gainst ol’ Mr. James.”

  “De way I sees it, doin’ his job an’ mindin’ his own business,” said Tom Murray. “I sees ’im in church, too, half de gals in dere battin’ dey eyes at ’im.”

  “’Cose dey is!” said Irene, “’cause he de bes’ catch in Henning. But he ain’t never yet ax to walk none home.”

  “How ’bout dat Lula Carter he gave dem flowers to?”

  Astonished that Tom even knew, Irene said, “Dat more’n a year ago, Tom, an’ if you knows so much, reckon you also know she carried on like sich a fool after dat, fawnin’ roun’ ’im like a shadow, he finally quit talkin’ to her at all!”

  “He done it once, he could do it agin.”

  “Not to Cynthia, he ain’t, not much sense as she got, ’long wid bein’ pretty an’ well raised. She done tol’ me much as she like Will, she ain’t never let on to ’im how she feel! Mos’ she ever say is howdy an smile back when he do. Don’t care how many gals buzzin’ after ’im, you see who he buzzin’ after!”

  “See you got everythin’ worked out,” said Tom.

  Irene pleaded, “Aw, Tom, let ’im walk de child home. Leas’ let’em git togedder. Dey stays togedder’s up to dem.”

  “An’ me!” Tom said sternly. He did not want to seem too easy to any of his daughters, his wife either. Above all, he did not want Irene aware that before now he had seen the potential, had weighed it, and thoroughly approved of Will Palmer if the time came. Having watched young Will since he had come to Henning, Tom privately had often wished that either of his two sons showed half of young Will’s gumption. In fact, the deviously serious, ambitious, highly capable Will Palmer reminded Tom of a younger himself.

  No one had expected that the courtship would develop so fast. Ten months later, in the “company room” of Tom and Irene’s new four-room house, Will proposed to Cynthia, who barely could restrain her “Yes!” until he had finished speaking. The third Sunday from then, they were married in the New Hope CME Church in a ceremony attended by well over two hundred people, about half of whom had come from North Carolina on the wagon train, and their children—and who now lived on farms scattered throughout Lauderdale County.

  Will with his own hands and tools built their small home where, a year later, in 1894, their first child, a son, was born, who died within a few days. By now Will Palmer never took off a weekday from work, the lumber company’s hard-drinking owner being so far gone into the bottle that Will practically was running the entire business. Going over the company’s books one stormy late Friday afternoon, Will discovered a bank payment overdue that day at People’s
Bank. He rode his horse eight miles through drenching rains to knock at the bank president’s back porch.

  “Mr. Vaughan,” he said, “this payment slipped Mr. James’ mind, and I know he wouldn’t want to keep you waitin’ till Monday.”

  Invited inside to dry, he said, “No, thank you, sir, Cynthia’ll be wonderin’ where I am.” And wishing the banker a good night, he rode back off in the rain.

  The banker, deeply impressed, told the incident all over town.

  In the fall of 1893, someone came and told Will he was wanted at the bank. Puzzled throughout the few minutes’ walk there, Will found inside, waiting for him, Henning’s ten leading white businessmen, all seeming red-faced and embarrassed. Banker Vaughan explained, speaking rapidly, that the lumber company’s owner had declared bankruptcy, with plans to move elsewhere with his family. “Henning needs the lumber company,” said the banker. “All of us you see here have been weeks discussing it, and we can’t think of anyone better to run it than you, Will. We’ve agreed to cosign a note to pay off the company’s debts for you to take over as the new owner.”

  Tears trickling down his cheeks, Will Palmer walked wordlessly along the line of white men. As he double-gripped and squeezed each hand, then that man hurriedly signed the note and even more quickly left with tears in his own eyes. When they had all gone, Will wrung the banker’s hand for a long moment. “Mr. Vaughan, I’ve got one more favor to ask. Would you take half of my savings and make out a check for Mr. James, without his ever knowing where it came from?”

  Within a year, Will’s credo—to provide the best possible goods and service for the lowest possible price—was drawing customers even from adjoining towns, and wagonloads of people, mostly black, were coming from as far away as Memphis—forty-eight miles to the South—to see with their own eyes western Tennessee’s first black-owned business of its kind, where Cynthia had hung ruffled, starched curtains in the windows and Will had painted the sign on the front: “W. E. PALMER LUMBER COMPANY.”

  CHAPTER 117

  Cynthia’s and Will’s prayers were answered in 1895 with the birth of the sound, healthy girl whom they named Bertha George—the “George” after Will’s father. Cynthia insisted on assembling a houseful of family before whom she told the gurgling infant the whole story back to the African, Kunta Kinte, just as Tom Murray had told it to all of his children at intervals when they had been young.

  Will Palmer respected Cynthia’s devotion to her ancestors’ memory, but it irritated his own deep pride to be considered as having married into Cynthia’s family rather than the other way around. It was probably why he began to monopolize little Bertha even before she could walk. Every morning he carried her about before he left for work. Every night he tucked her into the little crib that he had made with his hands for her.

  By the time Bertha was five, the rest of the family and much of the town’s black community quoted Cynthia and speaking for themselves echoed her opinion, “Will Palmer jes’ spilin’ dat gal to pieces!” He had arranged that she had credit at every Henning store that sold candy; and he paid the bill each month, though he made her keep an accounting, which he solemnly checked “to teach her business.” As her fifteenth-birthday present, when he opened a Sears, Roebuck mail-order account in her name, the people shook and wagged their heads in mingled astonishment, dismay—and pride: “All dat young’un got to do is pick what she like out’n dat pitcher catalogue, an’ write off de order blank, an’ firs’ thing you knows dem Sears, Roebuck white folks way yonder in Chicago done sent it—seen it wid dese here eyes . . . an’ her daddy pays fo’ it . . . you hearin’ what I’m tellin’ you, chile? Anythin’ dat Bertha want!’

  Later that same year, Will hired a teacher to come weekly all the way from Memphis to give Bertha piano lessons. She was a gifted pupil, and before long was playing for the choir in the New Hope Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, of which Will was the senior trustee and Cynthia was the perennial president of the Stewardess Board.

  When Bertha finished the local eighth grade in June of 1909, there was no question that she would be leaving Henning to attend the CME Church-supported Lane Institute thirty miles to the east in Jackson, Tennessee, which went from ninth grade through two years of college.

  “Gal, jes’ no way you can know . . . what it mean, you bein’ dis fam’ly’s firs’ one headin’ fo’ a college—”

  “Maw, if I can ever git you and Paw to please quit saying such as ‘dis’ and ‘fo’! I keep telling you they’re pronounced ‘this’ and ‘for’! Anyway, isn’t that why colleges are there? For people to go to?”

  Cynthia wept when she got alone with her husband. “Lawd God he’p us wid ’er, Will, she jes’ don’t unnerstan’.”

  “Maybe she best don’t,” he tried to console. “I jes’ know I’ll draw my last breath seein’ she have better chance’n us did.”

  As was only expected of her, Bertha achieved consistently high grades—studying pedagogy, to become a teacher—and she both played the piano and sang in the school choir. On one of her two weekend visits back home every month, she persuaded her father to have a sign painted on both doors of his delivery truck: “Henning 121—Your Lumber Number.” Telephones recently had come to Henning; it was typical of Bertha’s ready wit, which got quoted often around town.

  On later visits, Bertha began to speak about a young man whom she had met in the college choir, his name, Simon Alexander Haley, and he was from a town named Savannah, Tennessee. Being very poor, she said, he was working at as many as four odd jobs at the time in order to stay in school, where he was studying agriculture. When Bertha continued to talk about him, a year later, in 1913, Will and Cynthia suggested that she invite him to visit with them in Henning, so they could appraise him in person.

  The New Hope CME Church was packed on the Sunday it had been circulated that “Bertha’s beau from college” would be in attendance. He arrived under the searching scrutiny not only of Will and Cynthia Palmer, but also of the total black community. But he seemed a very self-assured young man. After singing a baritone solo, “In the Garden,” accompanied by Bertha at the piano, he talked easily with all who crowded about him later out in the churchyard, he looked everyone squarely in the eyes, firmly gripping all of the men’s hands, and tipping his hat to all of the ladies.

  Bertha and her Simon Alexander Haley—his full name—returned to Lane College together on the bus that evening. No one had a thing to say against him—publicly—in the ensuing community discussions. Privately, though, some queasy uncertainties were expressed concerning his very nearly high-yaller complexion. (He had told dark brown Bertha in confidence that his parents, former slaves, had both told him of having slave mothers and Irish white fathers, paternally an overseer named Jim Baugh, of whom little else was known, and maternally a Marion County, Alabama, plantation scion and later Civil War colonel named James Jackson.) But it was agreed by all that he sang well; that he seemed to have been well raised; and he showed no signs of trying to put on airs just because he was educated.

  Haley landed a summer’s work as a Pullman porter, saving every possible penny to enable his transferring to the four-year A&T College in Greensboro, North Carolina, exchanging weekly letters with Bertha. When World War I came, he and all other males in their senior class enlisted en masse in the U. S. Army, and before long his letters to Bertha came from France, where in the Argonne Forest in 1918, he was gassed. After treatment for several months in a hospital overseas, he was returned home to convalesce, and in 1919, fully recovered, he came again to Henning and he and Bertha announced their engagement.

  Their wedding in the New Hope CME Church in the summer of 1920 was Henning’s first social event attended by both black and white—not only since Will Palmer by now was among the town’s most prominent citizens, but also because in her own right the accomplished, irrepressible Bertha was someone whom all in Henning regarded with pride. The reception was held on the wide, sloping lawn of the Palmers’ brand-new home of ten roo
ms, including a music parlor and a library. A banquet of food was served; more presents were heaped than were normally seen at an average three weddings; there was even a recital by the full Lane College Choir—in whose ranks the ecstatic newlyweds had met—which had come in the bus that Will Palmer had chartered from Jackson.

  Late that day, Henning’s little railroad depot was overrun as Simon and Bertha boarded the Illinois Central train that took them through the night to Chicago, where they changed onto another bound for somewhere called Ithaca, New York. Simon was going to study for his master’s degree in agriculture at some “Cornell University,” and Bertha would be enrolling at a nearby “Ithaca Conservatory of Music.”

  For about nine months, Bertha wrote home regularly, reporting their exciting experiences so far away and telling how happy they were with each other. But then, in the early summer of 1921, Bertha’s letters began to arrive less and less often, until finally Cynthia and Will grew deeply concerned that something was wrong that Bertha wasn’t telling them about. Will gave Cynthia five hundred dollars to send to Bertha, telling Bertha to use it however they might need it, without mentioning it to Simon. But their daughter’s letters came even more seldom, until by late August, Cynthia told Will and their closest friends that she was going to New York herself to find out what was the matter.

  Two days before Cynthia was due to leave, a midnight knocking at the front door awakened them in alarm. Cynthia was first out of bed, snatching on her robe, with Will close behind. At their bedroom’s doorway, she could see through the living room’s glasspaneled french doors the moonlit silhouettes of Bertha and Simon on the front porch. Cynthia went shrieking and bounding to snatch open the door.