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Books by and about Daisy Bates
Long Shadow of Little Rock
(Daisy Bates,1998) /
Daisy Bates Civil Rights Crusader from Arkansas
(Grif Sockley, 2005)
The Power of One: Daisy Bates and the Little Rock Nine (Fradin,
2004) /
Young and Black in America
(Julius Lester,1972)
* * * *
* The Death of My Mother
By Daisy Bates (1914-1999) Shortly after my eighth birthday I was
playing with other children on a neighbor’s steps. An older
boy, whom I didn’t happen to like, came up to me and began
pulling my braids. I said I was going home. The boy said, “You
act so uppity. If you knew what happened to your mother, you
wouldn’t act so stuck up.”
Nothing’s wrong with my mother,” I
retorted. “I just left her.”
“I’m talking about your real
mother, the one the white man took out and killed.”
“That’s a story and you’re a mean and
nasty old boy!” I began to cry.
“It ain’t. I heard my folks talking about
it.”
Just then the mother of one of my playmates
came out on the porch and yelled at the boy. “Shut up! You
talk too much. I’m going to tell your mother, and you’ll get
the beating of your life."
“Honey,” she said to me, “don’t
believe nothing that no-good boy says.” Still I wondered what
if he was telling the truth?
At dinner that evening I looked intently at
my parents, all the while trying to decide whether I looked like
them. I could see no resemblance or likeness to myself in either
of them. I remembered many little things, like the day Mother
was talking to a salesman when I came in. He glanced at me, then
turned to my mother.
“Have you heard from her father?” he had
asked her.
When my mother said she hadn’t, the
salesman nodded toward me. “Does she know?”
“We haven’t told her,” my mother had
said.
During the next few weeks I kept so much to
myself that my parents decided that I must be sick. So I was
“dosed” up with little pink pills. My cousin Early B. came
to visit us. He was several years older than I, but I was always
glad to see him because he protected me from the boys who liked
to taunt and tease me.
One afternoon as we walked along the
millpond, I asked Early B. to tell me about my mother. He looked
puzzled.
“Your mother?” he said guardedly, and
pointed in the direction of my house. We could see her sitting
on the porch.
“No. I mean my real mother.”
“You know?”
“Yes.”
“Everything?”
“Well, almost.”
“Who told you? I’ll knock his block off!
Have you told your mamma and papa?”
“No.”
We walked in silence until we stood on the
bank that divided the millpond from the town’s fishing hole.
Large logs floated in the water. The smell of fresh cut lumber
mixed with the odor of dead fish. As we stood there, Early B.
told me about my parents.
“One night when you were a baby and your
daddy was working nights at the mill, a man went to your house
and told your mother that your daddy had been hurt. She rushed
out, leaving you alone, but she met a neighbor and asked her to
listen out for you while she went to see about your daddy,
“When your daddy got home the next morning,
he found you alone. He went around asking the neighbors if they
had seen your mother. The neighbor your mother asked to look
after you told him what had happened the night before--that she
saw a man who looked like he was colored, although she didn’t
get a good look at him because he was walking in front of your
mother.
"The news spread fast around town that
your mother couldn’t be found. Later in the morning, some
people out fishing found her body.”
Early B. stopped talking and sat down on the
pond bank. I stood over him, looking into the dark, muddy water.
“Where did they find her?” I asked.
After a long silence Early B. pointed at the
water and said, “Right down there. She was half in and half
out.”
“Who did it?”
“Well,” he answered, “there was a lot
of talk from the cooks and cleaning women who worked in ‘white
town’ about what they heard over there. They said that three
white men did it.”
“What happened to my father?”
“He was so hurt, he left you with the
people who have you now, his best friends. He left town. Nobody
has heard from him since.”
“What did my parents look like?”
“They were young. Your daddy was as light
as a lot of white people. Your mother was very pretty--dark
brown, with long hair.”
Early B. friends came along and he wandered
off with them. I sat there looking into the dark waters, vowing
some day I would get the men who killed my mother. I did not
realize that the afternoon had turned into evening and darkness
had closed in around me until someone sitting beside me
whispered. “It’s time to go home, darling.” I turned and
saw my daddy sitting beside me. He reached out in the darkness
and took my hand.
“How long have you known?” he asked.
“A long time,” I said.
He lifted me tenderly in his arms and carried
me home. . . .
In Arkansas, even in the red clay soil of a
mill town, flowers grow without any encouragement at all.
Everyone’s yard has some sort of flowering bush or plant all
spring and summer. And in this town of Huttig, where there was
so little beauty, I passionately loved all blooming things. In
the woods I hunted out the first of the cowslips and spring
beauties, and from the open fields, the last of the Indian
paintbrush. I was always bringing home bouquets.
All of the neighbors knew that flowers in our
yard were my garden, not Mother’s. I had no favorite and
delighted at each flower in its season. When the last rose and
zinnias had died, I knew in a few short months the old lilac
bush would start budding, for winter in Arkansas was
short-lived. But this year was different. One morning I was out
before breakfast looking for flowers to pick. All I found was a
single red rose, the dew still wet on it. I can close my eyes
today and see exactly how it looked. Unaccountably I turned,
leaving it on the stalk, and walked into the house crying.
My mother met me at the door and I saw her
face cloud with anxiety. What was the trouble? “All the other
flowers were dead,” I sobbed, “and my rose will die, too.”
That night I heard her say to Daddy, “I
can’t understand that child crying over a dying flower.”
Then I heard my daddy say, “Let her be. It just takes time.”
Later in the fall on a Saturday afternoon, my
father and I took a walk in the woods. It was a brisk day. Daddy
thought we might find some ripe persimmons. Also, some black
walnuts might have fallen from a big old tree he knew about. We
walked along sniffing the air, sharp with the smell of pine
needles, then came out in an open stretch in sight of the
persimmon grove. I was always happy on these excursions with
Daddy. I guess it just the feeling that I couldn’t be happy
now, couldn’t let myself be, that made me ask the question.
“Daddy, who killed my mother? Why did they
kill her?”
We walked a little way in silence. Then he
pointed to some flat rocks on a slope, and we made our way there
and rested. The persimmons and the black walnut were forgotten.
He began in tones so soft I could barely hear the words.
He told me of the timeworn lust of the white
man for the Negro woman--which strikes at the heart of every
Negro man in the South. I don’t remember a time when this man
I called my father didn’t talk to me almost as if I were an
adult. Even so this was a difficult concept to explain to an
eight-year-old girl; but he spoke plainly, in simple words I
could understand. He wanted me to realize that my mother
wouldn’t have died if it hadn’t been for race--as well as
her beauty, her pride, her love for my father.
“Your mother was not the kind to submit,”
he said, “so they took her.” His voice grew bitter. “They
say that three white men did it. There was some talk about who
they were, but no one knew for sure, and the sheriff’s office
did little to find out.”
He said other things about the way the Negro
is treated in the South, but my mind had stopped, fastening on
those three white men and what they had done. They had killed my
mother.
When we walked out of the woods, my daddy
looked tired and broken. He took my hand and we walked home in
silence.
Dolls, games, even my once-beloved fishing,
held little interest for me after that. Young as I was, strange
as it may seem, my life now had a secret goal-to find the men
who had done this horrible thing to my mother. So happy once,
now I was like a little sapling which, after a violent storm,
puts out only gnarled and twisted branches. . . . * * *
* *
Bill
Moyers Interviews Douglass A. Blackmon
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06202008/watch2.html
Douglas A. Blackmon,
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the
Civil War to World War II (2008)
* * * *
*
updated 3 October 2007 |
