Into the molten new society that was Durham, North Carolina, in 1888 came Dr. Aaron McDuffie Moore. With John Merrick’s help, he secured a small farm away from the industrial center. The county line ran through part of the property, and a portion of the Fitzgerald Brickyard, a thriving black-owned business, was also on the property. The first Moore farm in Durham was where the Stanford Warren Library stands today.1 In the absence of a basement, the house sat off the ground to avoid flooding, and stairs rose steeply up to the wide porch, which would become a kind of outdoor surgery area. The front of the house was on a slope, while the back rested on stilts high enough for a small person—or a tall one bent double—to walk underneath. There were fruit trees and enough land to garden and keep livestock. A housekeeping aunt or cousin was likely sent from the country to “do” for Dr. Moore as he got his practice and his little farm together. He began immediately to attend White Rock Baptist Church and was probably introduced every Sunday for months from the pulpit in order to make his presence and his practice known.2
It was in these early days that he began to understand the layers of need that most families exhibited. If they trusted him, the doctor did what he could for an immediate crisis. Then he also did what he could to make sure sustenance, warmth, and shelter were available to give the patient a decent chance to heal. He plied his trade and used his expertise, especially in the area of obstetrics and family medicine, to give his patients a fighting chance, but he longed to do more. He had to do more.
A brief foray into Durham politics—he decided to allow himself to be nominated for Durham County coroner—made Dr. Moore’s name part of the public record. He is listed as the “colored” nominee in the Tobacco Plant of Friday, October 5, 1888, and the Durham Recorder of Wednesday, October 3, gives us an ugly snapshot of how that nomination was received:
Do the white people of Durham County want Dr. Moore, colored, to act as their coroner? Will any republican in Durham County swallow the ticket that was nominated Saturday by 11 Negroes and four Whites? We invite all who cannot “stomach” that ticket to come out to the Democratic Party and vote for the success of the white man’s Party. W. G. Pearson, colored, is Chairman of the Republican Executive Committee in Durham County. White men of Durham, those who have any respect for the Anglo-Saxon race, will you fail to do your duty on the 6th of November? Will you allow a Negro rule, or a white man’s government? Stand to your colors. Vote for the interest of your homes—your children’s homes and education.3
This article was doubtless only a small part of the threats, intimidation, and vitriol that Moore encountered. His brush with running for office was an ugly awakening for him. The situation was sufficiently alarming that he withdrew from the race and would never run for office of any kind or even participate in any way but peripherally for the rest of his life. This brand of insidious racism and the politics of the Southern Democratic Party in opposition to the party of Lincoln was not new to him in theory, but it had not yet singled him out directly as its target. He was a new name in a new town, and his practice was at stake, not to mention his life and property. It was a rude and dangerous episode indeed, one he never forgot.4 Historian Walter B. Weare notes, “Even in the late 1880s, well before North Carolina’s white supremacy campaigns, he [Aaron Moore] found the white majority … hostile to his efforts in direct politics, so he, like other black leaders of the New South, redirected his energies to self-help, racial solidarity, and the formation of all-black institutions.”5
It was a rugged first year for the young doctor in Durham. At the end of it, however, was the prize he had no doubt been hoping and planning for.
Pastor J. W. Perry joined Dr. Aaron McDuffie Moore and Sarah McCotta Dancy, called “Cottie,” in marriage on Wednesday, December 18, 1889.6 Aaron was just a few months past his twenty-sixth birthday. The ceremony took place in the old brick structure of White Rock Baptist Church, which had become Aaron’s spiritual home during his first year in Durham. The witnesses listed in the marriage record were J. D. Harget, C. D. Howard, and J. H. Dancy. This J. H. Dancy, surely a relative of the bride, is not John C. Dancy, Cottie’s illustrious uncle, who at this time was the first black recorder of deeds in Washington. John Merrick would seem an obvious choice for a witness, but since only three witnesses are named in most of the entries in the marriage records of that month, there is nothing to prove or disprove who else might have attended. It is very likely John Merrick and his wife were there to celebrate the new pair.
The bride, “Miss Cottie,” is listed in the record as age twenty-two, and both the bride and groom are marked with a C for “colored.” Lyda Moore Merrick (the older of their two daughters) later described her mother’s origins as “growing up in the shadow of slavery” and remarked that Sarah McCotta Dancy’s mother, Martha Dancy, had borne both “white” and “colored” children. Cottie’s father was probably white. Martha Dancy is listed in the census records as a household dependent in several different households, including those of her grown sons.7 But Cottie’s uncle John C. Dancy, a black Republican activist, had made sure that Cottie got the best education, went to St. Augustine for the normal course, and was placed in the coveted society of those colored people allowed to live in the downtown center of Tarboro. It was a serene and pastoral town known for its fine manners and strict social mores. Nevertheless, Lyda recalled her mother saying that she was “anxious to get away” from that little town and to “get a good husband.” Cottie taught school for a short time before she apparently caught the interest of young Dr. Moore while she was sitting in church. He spotted her long braided hair hanging down in a pew ahead of him as the collection plate went around. Lyda remembered her mother saying years later how she had been “just plain happy to find anyone who could look after her, give her a home and be kind to her.” Lyda added that her father “did all those things excellently.”8
It would be remiss not to illuminate the aspects of both classism and racism inherent in this match. The nuances of skin color during this era, especially for women, could determine an individual’s level of freedom to move about with any degree of safety in society. (That fact is, frankly, not much different today.) Lighter skin meant life could be marginally easier because of the rewards in both black and white communities that came with being more socially “appealing.” Aaron had noticed Cottie’s beautiful long hair in church because hair quality was deemed socially important. “Good hair” was a prize to be added to the family gene pool and often came from Native American heritage in a freedman family’s background. Lighter eyes were also considered desirable. White European standards of beauty were imposed then, as they are now, and the closer one was to that standard, the more acceptable one was on all sides.
Respectability and religious upbringing were estimable in both men and women. Once again, there was safety inherent in the trappings of moral character and propriety. Women who did not work as domestics or appear in any way servile were in less danger of assault or disrespect in public places. They could uphold the reputation of a professional, middle-class family with more success, or so it was widely felt. This intraracial bias was an uncomfortable but very real aspect of everyday life at the turn of the century in the American South.
Lyda Moore Merrick was herself somewhat dismayed in hindsight by the attitudes of the time, even though she was a product of them. When she addressed these “rules” in her taped interviews, her voice faltered in a way that was not like her usual frankness. She laughed nervously, even though her interviewer was also African American and it was the 1980s. Lyda said of her family roots,
They had a farm, and they lived comfortably. And among them there were brown people and there were black people, and … [the nervous laugh] there was prejudice, too. As a result, they intermarried quite a bit among cousins, because they didn’t want to marry anybody dark. Now, they never told me that verbatim, you know, but we went down there about every other summer, and you observe … certain things. Everybody down there was what we called “purty” and had “pretty hair.” There is quite a settlement of Lumbee Indians down there, and they intermixed with them, too, and still they were not “black” as a rule. All through the family you see the Indian blood in them. I remember them saying “not to marry anyone from Bladen County” [significant pause] they were too dark over there. I don’t know, they sort of felt like, if you had good hair, that helped.
Later, in her memories of her mother, Lyda got very emotional about her mother’s looks and especially that legendary hair:
Mama was a little darker than me and my sister, but she had beautiful hair. [Sighs] She could sit on her braid. I remember her taking it like this in her hand and throwing it back with a thump [laughs]. Papa said he wouldn’t let her cut it. He used to joke: “I saw that hair before I saw you.” She had beautiful hair. It wasn’t straight, it was curly, just as soft … and beautiful.9
It seems Cottie was a kind of Rapunzel for Lyda, and Rapunzel she remained in her memory.
Fortunately for Dr. Moore, his choice of a wife went far beyond more superficial or socially imposed dreams of a mate. His bride proved to have a good brain, an indomitable spirit, and a courageous heart under that beautiful soft, curly hair.
Their small wedding ceremony took place on a Wednesday morning in chilly December. The sanctuary of White Rock Baptist Church must have displayed some hints of the Christmas celebrations that the following week would bring. They would be seeing Aaron’s mother and father and his home folks soon enough; still, it may have felt a bit lonely to be entering into this chapter of his life without the grounding and connecting presence of family.
This December morning would mark the official end of Moore’s youth. Since he was a child, he had always been part of some larger group—a bustling family unit, a congregation. Then he had joined a student body and been surrounded by the fraternity of his colleagues. This impending union would be so very different. This accomplished, sweet St. Augustine girl, who was diminutive yet also precocious—Cottie of the long brown braid and the warm laugh—would today link her life with his forever. Her safety and prosperity would be his entire responsibility. Together, if they were lucky, they could make a world that none could pull asunder. This kind of family life would be, at least initially, frighteningly intimate—one man looking at one woman, depending on one another, reaching for each other’s hand in the darkness. The very food she ate and clothes she wore would depend on his ability to provide and succeed. When Aaron was a single man, the possibility of failure inherent in lofty ambitions had been a threat only to himself. As a married one, all successes and all failures would affect her life and the lives of their children. This girl, her eyes as sweet and dark as summer blackberries, would need to be his partner and his dearest friend.
Placing the small ring on her finger, he repeated the words he had heard before at other weddings. He spoke the vows, and her softer voice repeated hers in return: forsaking all others; in sickness and in health; to love, honor, and cherish. And then the Reverend Perry said “man and wife,” and they were.
Dr. and Mrs. Moore spent their honeymoon and first Christmas as a married couple with Aaron’s family in Columbus County. When they returned home, Durham’s society made much of the pair. The community was ready to receive this new bride. Then Aaron and Cottie began setting up housekeeping together in a life that was dazzlingly new.10 It was a lonely first winter, and Cottie had a lot of adjusting to do. They would need to make a strong family bond and establish their routines quickly in the midst of the chaos of a doctor’s life.
Dr. Moore became a father very soon afterward on November 19, 1890, when Lyda Vivian Moore was born. Cottie delivered her at home, because home was the hospital. The young couple enjoyed their one-child household until Lyda was two years old, and then Cottie became pregnant with their second child.
Mattie Louise Moore, Aaron’s second daughter, was born on June 6, 1893, ready to take on the world with a studious face like her father’s and a spicy personality that would astonish her older sister for years to come. Mattie would always be in a hurry to catch up to Lyda—in school, in all areas of accomplishment, even in piano playing and teaching.
“I was always in the shadow of my sister,” the first-born Lyda Moore (Merrick) said as she remembered Mattie Louise. “She was always smarter than I was.” When asked why, Lyda replied [her voice full of both admiration and annoyance], “Well, she always had a smart answer. Anything anyone could think of, she had an answer. Whoo! She would get you told! She had a sense of humor. She was the life of the house.” Lyda continued wistfully, “I was always the quieter child.”11
If Lyda styled herself as quiet, Mattie Louise must have been like a freight train in white muslin and pigtails.
Dr. Moore adored his two girls, and even as a busy doctor he found time to be involved in their lives and notice their different personalities and talents as they grew up. At the end of his day, if they were awake, they would run to see him after he had washed up and tell him all the things he wanted to know about their playtime or studies. Those early years in Durham were a succession of calls and emergencies. “He frantically answered calls from the destitute,” wrote scholar Louis D. Mitchell in an article about Moore for The Crisis. “He fed the hungry, delivered babies, comforted the bereaved, and dashed about on horse and bicycle in the black community to visit and bring relief to the miserable.”12 At every turn he was faced with the poverty and struggle of his people who had filled the cigarette factories, sewn cotton bags for grain and flour, and worked the looms in the textile mills—domestics, laborers, washerwomen, field hands, railroad porters.
In 1900, in the handwritten U.S. federal census for Durham, Aaron Moore is listed in the sequence of his neighbors with “Physician” next to his name. (The professions of his neighbors read house servant, teacher, sack stringer, field laborer, cook, preacher, locomotive fireman, laundress, hack driver.) His entry is also the only one with a farm schedule number, which would indicate that he had enough land that he was required to report the level of produce and amount of livestock on it to the government at tax time.13 That land and the sustenance it provided were invaluable to the young doctor, who charged his patients only a dollar per visit. And if the visit was paid for at all, it was rarely in cash. Often gifts would appear on the porch—a loaf of bread or a bag of seed, grain, or milled flour—or he would come home with some eggs in his pockets. He even sold his own produce to make ends meet.14
Lyda Moore Merrick remembered her father pulling teeth and doing minor surgeries on the porch of their first farmhouse. On Sunday he might take them on some of his house calls after church and drive them in the buggy through the surrounding neighborhoods. Sometimes they would visit the Fitzgerald mansion and play under the grape arbor.15 When Lyda was ten years old and still living in the old farmhouse, her papa found time to build her and sister Mattie a backyard playhouse “big enough for them both to turn around in.” Mattie had thirteen different dolls, and most of them were in a constant state of sickness and in need of many operations. Both girls undertook these operations but none more zealously than “Dr.” Mattie Louise. One of her sick dolls was named Octagon and another one Priscilla. The sisters used to say they wanted to “sleep out in the playhouse all night,” but they always lost their courage as soon as night fell and the real house looked warm and full of light and safety. Lyda never much liked the dark, even as an adult. It stands to reason, since darkness back then was more profound than any light-diluted darkness we experience today. The sisters also loved to create whole worlds and neighborhoods in the crawl space under the back porch using bricks and dirt and all sorts of improvised tools. “We made our fun,” Lyda reminisced in her taped interviews, a girlish giggle creeping into her voice. “There was always something to do. The chickens never did learn they didn’t belong under there.”16
Gifts for birthdays and Christmas were simple things like art supplies, books, and one year a blackboard on an easel that Papa Aaron liked Lyda and Mattie to keep full of fresh illustrations. He would always pause and comment on their work, no matter how rushed or tired he was when he came home. Lyda’s talent for the visual arts likely began with that blackboard easel and the desire to delight her father’s attentive eye for beauty.
Lyda remembered that there were gas streetlights on the street, and the lamplighter came around and lit them one by one at dusk. The front parlor had an organ in it, and Cottie played hymns and sang at bedtime while the candle sconces shed a soft light from the walls. But light was expensive. Dark time meant bedtime for all.17