Baby Alice Allison (Dunnigan Papers, MARBL, Emory University)
My journey began in the three-room, whitewashed cottage where I was born on April 27, 1906. The house stood all alone atop a low, red clay hill about two hundred yards from the highway (or “pike” as we called it). A railroad track stretched along at about the same distance, crossing the pike directly in front of our house. So in giving directions, we would describe our place as the big white house on the hill at the railroad crossing. A two-mile trip south on this highway would lead to the nearest town, Russellville, Kentucky, a village of some five thousand people, where we attended school and church, as well as shopped for food and other necessities.
My first family recollection is that of my father earning a living as a tenant farmer and my mother pitching in as a hand laundress. I sometimes referred to my father as a dirt farmer and my mother as a washerwoman. These titles were not meant to be disrespectful but rather to point out antiquated methods of operation necessitated by the lack of modern conveniences.
Unlike the majority of tenant farmers who lived in rent-free shacks on the boss’s farm, my family was a bit more independent because we lived in our own home. Since that one acre of land surrounding our house did not provide sufficient space to eke out a living, my father found it necessary to raise an additional crop on shares on the adjoining Wilhelm farm. The little tract of land the Wilhelms had deeded to Grandma was just large enough to grow a sizable vegetable garden and a small plot of corn for feeding the hogs.
Several acres of tobacco, the chief money crop, and more corn for the market were grown on the Wilhelm farm. In raising the crops, my father supplied the labor and the landlord furnished the land and stock (mules) for use in cultivation. The tobacco was carefully nurtured through the many cycles of growth until it reached the curing stage. It was then stripped and sold at the auctioneers’ market to the highest bidder. The profit was divided between the landowner and the sharecropper.
The corn was usually gathered in the field and divided between the two partners, who were at liberty to dispose of it as they wished. I don’t recall the exact portion of the intake shared by each partner, but I am pretty sure it was not divided equally. It was more like two-thirds of the profit going to the landlord and one-third to the sharecropper.
When the work on his own crop was “all caught up,” my father would hire himself out for a day or two each week to other farmers who needed extra help. For this labor he was paid $1.25 per day. This would provide some ready cash to supplement my mother’s earnings in purchasing necessary food for the family.
We always had an abundance of food because we raised a variety in our garden, including asparagus and peanuts. My mother would can the surplus green beans, corn, and tomatoes for the winter months. Such vegetables as black-eyed peas, gray peas, navy beans, pinto beans, and butterbeans were allowed to dry on the vine, then picked and stowed away for winter.
At the end of the summer season, root vegetables such as turnips, beets, white potatoes, and sweet potatoes were put in something called a keel. This was nothing more than a hole in the ground, lined with straw and covered with soil, leaves, burlap bags, and pieces of plank. This served the same purpose in preserving food as the old-fashioned root cellars.
We also had a variety of fruit trees such as apple, peach, cherry, plum, greengage, and damson, as well as a strawberry patch and a grape arbor. The fruit was dried, canned, preserved, jammed, or jellied for future use. Wild strawberries, raspberries, and dewberries were gathered from the fields and put to the same use. Many of the berries and fruits were made into delicious wines. Cucumbers and watermelon rinds were made into pickles, cabbage into sauerkraut, tomatoes into ketchup, and green tomatoes into relish.
The hogs my family slaughtered in the winter supplied enough meat for year-round use. Pork provides a variety of cuts including hams, shoulders, bacon, roast, spareribs, backbone, liver, lights (lungs), heart, chitterlings, hogshead, brains, pig ears, pig feet, pig knuckles, pig tails, sausage, souse, and hogshead cheese.
Our cow supplied sufficient milk and butter to serve our family needs and often enough to share with the neighbors. We raised hundreds of chickens; many supplied food and others were kept as “layers.” Thus we always had an abundance of fresh country eggs. Sometimes we raised our own Thanksgiving and Christmas turkeys. And sometimes my mother even tried her hand at raising ducks, geese, and guineas for food and for the market.
We carried our homegrown corn to the mill and had it ground into meal. Mother used much of the corn for making big pots of hominy, which we always kept on hand.
My mother contributed her share to the family budget by washing and ironing clothes for several white families, for which she was paid an average of one dollar per week per family. Her maximum earnings for this work never exceeded five dollars per week. She had no washing machine (nor did anyone else in that area in those days), so the clothes had to be scrubbed on an old-fashioned washboard, hand-rinsed, hand-wrung, and hung outside to dry. Imagine, if you can, what it was like hanging wet clothes outside in the winter with each piece freezing before it could be pinned on the line and your hands almost freezing in the process.
Since there was no running water in the house, the wash water had to be carried from a nearby pond and heated out-of-doors in a big kettle during the summer months or on the iron woodstove in the kitchen during the winter.
The ironing had to be done with old-fashioned “smoothing irons” heated around an outdoor brush fire in the summer or in front of an open wood fireplace in the winter. There was no rural electrification, and even if there had been, it would have made no difference since electric irons were unheard of, especially where I lived.
As I grew up, my household duties included setting the table, gathering vegetables from the garden, washing dishes, sweeping the floor, dusting the furniture, carrying water from the spring, washing and rinsing clothes, hanging them on the line to dry, bringing them in, and pressing the “rough” laundry such as towels, undies, and the like. By the time I reached my teens, I had learned to cook family meals, sew for myself, and iron all types of clothing, including the tedious white dress shirts. I also helped in the tobacco and cornfields and tackled almost any other task at hand.
We never had a lot of clothes, but we always had enough to keep clean and warm. My mother was a stickler for cleanliness and comfort. When we didn’t have a car, we had a horse and buggy, the common method of transportation of the day. It wasn’t many years, however, before my brother bought a brand-new Model T Ford. After that, the family was never without an automobile.
Our home was most unusual for a Negro family living in the country at this time because of its size. The three-room cottage where I was born was enlarged over the years, with rooms added as needed, until the roof was raised and a second story added, bringing the total number of rooms to seven, including the kitchen.
As I grew older and was able to analyze the circumstances of my youth, I realized that I was as well-off as any of the other schoolchildren—and maybe better off than most—who lived in the town and called me a country bumpkin because I didn’t. My mother tried to dispel the stigma by telling me we lived in “the suburbs”—not the country, but the word meant absolutely nothing to me or to any of my classmates.
No neighbors lived in sight of our house, and no girls of my age resided anywhere in the community. However, there were several older children scattered around the neighborhood. The only one anywhere near my age was a little boy named Charles Dunnigan who visited our house often to play with my brother. Although Charles was five years older than I, he was two years younger than Brother Richard, and I felt that because his age fell between ours I also had a right to play with him. I was always pleased to see this little, dirty-faced, barefoot boy coming down the path through the thicket that blocked the view of the two houses.
Regardless of my happiness at his frequent visits, Charles consistently refused to play with me. He and Richard would trek off into the nearby “crusher-pond” to fish or skinny-dip, and of course I was not permitted to follow them. Even if I tried to join them in such games as marbles, catch (baseball), or top spinning, they would yell for my mother to “make this little girl let us alone. We don’t want to play with her.”
My mother would sternly warn me, “The boys don’t want to be bothered with you. Why don’t you let them alone and go back to your mud pies and dolls?” With tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat, I would slowly return to my favorite spot in the back of the house and again begin pouring water in the dirt to make mud cakes, talking to myself, and pretending to be talking with a playmate. This went on day after day during the summer months. On rainy days or during cold winter weather, I would entertain myself indoors with my dolls, busying myself cleaning my dollhouse, which my mother had arranged for me in the attic. I would play mother to the dolls, talking to them and pretending to prepare meals for an imaginary husband.
As I look back over those days, I realize that this was my introduction to sex discrimination. I wasn’t sure how to deal with it and sometimes would just lie flat on the floor, giving vent to my emotions and crying for no discernible reason. My mother would rush to my side and ask, “What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing.”
“Are you sick?”
“Noum” (for “No ma’am”).
“Well, why are you crying?”
“I have a funny feeling.”
“What sort of a ‘funny feeling’?”
“I feel like Mama ain’t wid me.”
“You’re talking foolish, child. I’m right here, ain’t I?”
“Yessum.”
Soon the crying would cease and I would go back to my playing. Little did I realize then that the “funny feeling” was nothing more than loneliness—a desire for attention, a longing to feel wanted, a yearning for love and affection.
When I was about four years old, I often cried to follow my brother around despite his hostility toward me. To placate me, my mother allowed me to go to Sunday school with him, but it didn’t last long. Richard soon informed my mother that he was definitely not going to carry me to Sunday school anymore because I persisted in embarrassing him. “Every Sunday,” he said, “as soon as Sunday school gets underway, Alice leaves her card class and comes over to my class whispering in my ear that she has to go to the ‘closet’” (meaning the outdoor privy, which was used exclusively before indoor lavatories became prevalent). He went on to tell Mama that he always had to carry me out, unbutton my drawers, and wait for me to finish in the toilet so that he could button me up again before returning to class. His friends would laugh at him, tease him, and call him a nursemaid. This was just too humiliating, he complained.
Little girls in those days wore homemade, tight-legged, brown-domestic drawers with a trap door (three-button flap) in the back, buttoned up all around to what was known as a drawersbody. Little children couldn’t manipulate these buttons and always had to have some help in an emergency. And what would one expect from a four-year-old who had hiked two miles, except that she would be forced to relieve herself at the end of the journey?
But my mother sided with my brother on the premise that “Alice seems to have a knack for embarrassing people,” citing an incident during a typically long Southern Baptist church service when I had made a scene by crying and demanding a piece of cornbread after she offered me a cookie to satiate my hunger. I was too small to even remember the incident!
My grandma Minerva also sided always with my brother, but she took it a step further. My little heart would practically break when Richard refused to play with me, but it was pierced almost beyond repair one day when I heard her tell my brother, who was brown-skinned like our mother, not to play with “that little ole yallow gal.”
“I just can’t stand yallow niggers,” she said. “I never wanted none in my family. I can’t understand why Lena [my mother] married that old yallow nigger.”
Perhaps my brother would not remember our grandma’s snide slurs regarding my color, but there was one incident he remembered all his life, even into his retirement. No doubt based on Grandma’s disapproval of me, Richard developed a habit of mauling my head with his fist. He called it “putting the Nelson” on me. While it didn’t hurt physically, it did hurt my feelings dreadfully. So I would cry and yell for Mama to make him behave. After speaking to him several times about this, she finally ordered him never to “put the Nelson” on me again. But he didn’t heed her order.
The next time he did it, I cried and told Mama on him again. She became very angry, not so much for what he was doing as for disobeying her orders. She was sitting on the porch swing sewing, and without second thought she threw the sewing at him. Somehow the scissors got caught in the material and stuck in the top of his head. The blood gushed and she became terrified. Adding to her fear, Grandma shouted, “See what you’ve done! You’re trying to kill that boy for that little old yallow gal!”
In due time the wound healed, but it left a jagged scar. It seemed also to have left a scar of guilt on my mother’s conscience that never healed, because she appeared to spend the rest of her lifetime atoning for that one mistake. She humored Richard and catered to his every desire as long as she lived. Despite her humility, Richard often pointed to the scar on his head while telling people, “I’ll carry it to my grave. Mama put this scar here about Alice when I was just a little boy.” The scar that I carried was an unfavorable dimension to my character—a sense of intimidation, shyness, or fear of doing or saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. I cultivated the habit of quietness, refusing to speak up even when outspokenness was expedient or necessary. I found myself refraining from voluntarily reciting in the classroom, even if I knew the answers, for fear of making myself look silly. This introversion tended to create an image of stupidity, dullness, or lack of intelligence. Even today, I find myself holding back, for fear of becoming a bore.
Although Grandma Minerva failed to break up my parents’ marriage (which lasted happily until my mother’s death some fifty years later), she had started early in their married life to plant a wedge between my brother and me—based strictly on skin color. The color rivalry among Negroes was a holdover from slavery days, when lighter-complexioned slaves, who were obviously the offspring of the plantation owners, were frequently allowed to work, and sometimes even to live, in the “big house” with their fathers’ families. They were usually assigned to the easier and more dignified jobs such as houseworker or handyman. This “class” often scorned the black slaves, to whom they felt superior. In return, this group—commonly known as “house niggers”—was resented and often despised by the darker slaves of pure African descent who were relegated to hard, dirty field work.
Using this caste system as a barometer for social standing, my father would have fallen into the category of house nigger, while my mother would have been looked upon as a product of the field nigger clan. This old status system was passing away with the ages until the 1960s, when it was revived by the Black Power movement. Only this time it was not applied to color alone but also to social attitudes. The more militant blacks branded the conservative Negroes as Uncle Toms or house niggers.
We lived with my grandmother into my teens, even after she got married. Although she was in her late sixties, this was her first marriage. Her new husband, Jim Hardgrove, was a disabled widower who was no doubt seeking a home for himself. I didn’t realize it then but later learned that he was suffering from an advanced stage of what was then called old-fashioned consumption. Although he was unable to work, he was up and around spending a great deal of time rabbit hunting. He often entertained the family in the evenings, picking the banjo and singing or telling horrible ghost tales. His nighttime stories were so scary that my brother and I would often be afraid to go to bed.
These family gatherings were short-lived. After a few months of marriage, Mr. Hardgrove stirred up dissension in the family by persuading my grandmother to have a will drawn up leaving all of her possessions to him after her death, with a special provision that the real property would convert to his heirs after his death. This would have deprived our family of the home on which my parents had spent a great deal of money, having enlarged the house from a one-room cabin to a comfortable six-room (later, seven-room) cottage. After this incident, the two families became somewhat estranged, each confining itself to its own quarters with little communication between them.
One evening just before retiring, I went into the dining room for a drink of water and heard a strange gurgling noise coming from my grandmother’s room. As any uninhibited ten-year-old would do, I burst into the room without knocking. There I discovered my step-grandfather on his knees with his head resting in my grandmother’s lap, hemorrhaging from the mouth and nose. She was just sitting there speechless with her arms around his neck, apparently not knowing what to do. I yelled for help. My mother, father, and brother came running, but within a matter of minutes he became limp and died in my grandmother’s arms. I can recall how the puddle of blood on the old sandstone hearth left a stain that could never be removed no matter how much it was scoured. The entire hearth finally had to be replaced with new brick. With Mr. Hardgrove’s death, the property feud was settled and once again we became a united family.
It must have been about four years later, in November 1920, when my grandmother passed away. I remember the date so well because it was the first election day after the adoption and ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment—women’s suffrage—to the Constitution. My mother and grandmother, like all other women, were delighted to have the opportunity to cast a vote for their favorite candidates. They had planned to walk the two miles to town early that day to be there when the polls opened, thus avoiding the crowd. But on that election morning, Grandma woke up with a terrible headache and didn’t feel like getting out of bed. This was not especially alarming because my whole family suffered from chronic migraine headaches (“sick headaches,” as we called them). Mama went into town alone, leaving me to take care of Grandma and reminding me to “keep the fire up” in her room.
In the midst of my dishwashing, I got a sudden, strong urge to go put a log on Grandma’s fire. As I entered the room, she was making a peculiar noise. I went to the bedside to ask what was the matter, or what I could do for her. She only glared at me with a strange, glassy look in her eyes, unable to speak a word. I hastily applied a cold compress to her forehead, and another and another as she continued staring at me, apparently trying to say something. Soon, the noise ceased. She closed her eyes and was gone.
I didn’t know what to do. Fourteen-year-olds in those days were not as alert as teenagers are today. There were no telephones or close neighbors. I ran to the house of the nearest neighbor, asking her to come with me to see about Grandma. “She’s very sick!” I emphasized. The neighbor calmly urged me to go on back home—she would be there in a little while. “Please come now,” I pleaded. “I think she’s dying.” (I dared not admit that I thought she was dead.)
“Ah, go on back home, child,” she ordered. “You know your grandma ain’t dying.”
Eventually the neighbor came, after she had finished whatever work she was doing. I was standing on the front porch when she arrived.
“How’s she?” the neighbor asked.
“I think she’s dead,” I replied.
The neighbor rushed in and tried to find a pulse or a faint heartbeat. When none was discernible, she shouted, “Oh my God, she is dead!”
It was not the practice in that day to summon a doctor after someone had expired, since no death certificate was required. So we assumed that she had died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Although a decade had passed between the time that I’d overheard my grandmother castigating me because of my color, the incident crossed my mind as I stood beside her deathbed, and in my heart I secretly forgave her.