Alice as a teenager (Dunnigan Papers, MARBL, Emory University)
Looking back now to that Sunday school incident of my very early childhood, I realize that out of it came some good. After my mother took me out of Sunday school at my brother’s insistence, she was asked by my teacher, Miss Arletta Vaughn, why I no longer attended her class. When Mama explained the embarrassment I had caused my brother, Miss Arletta suggested that Richard drop me at her house on the way to Sunday school, and she would take it from there. She would bring me to the church and see that all my needs were taken care of. This arrangement worked out well.
My admiration for Miss Arletta, who taught regular school as well as Sunday school, helped build my confidence as I grew older. She was a stout, light-complexioned woman with a beautiful face and long, black hair that she wore in a bun at the back of her head. She was always pleasant and smiling, and she always showed a personal interest in everyone. She became my idol.
“Someday I’m going to be just like Miss Arletta,” I said to myself. I realized that we already had some common traits, although I knew I would never have a pretty face like hers. However, our bodies were similar. “When I grow up,” I vowed, “I’ll be a big, fat, yellow woman like her. I’ll never again feel guilty about my color. I’ll never again feel ashamed of myself because I’m fat. I will no longer feel like a freak just because my hair is long, even if other children tease me. I’ll be a schoolteacher when I grow up, just like Miss Arletta. I’ll smile and be pleasant to people. I’ll help them whenever I can. And I’ll even do more. I’ll write for a newspaper and let people know what other people are doing. I’ll go around speaking to people about the proper way to live, and advise them on how they can have a better life.”
I would then close my eyes and visualize myself in the future sitting on a speaker’s platform wearing a wine-colored velvet dress. My black hair would be parted in the middle and loosely carried back in a soft chignon at the back of the neck. I would be welcomed and admired by my audience, and I would humbly, but gracefully, accept their praise and applause. Perhaps this daydream accounts for my spending the first money I ever earned on the purchase of a wine-colored silk-poplin dress (I couldn’t yet afford velvet)—the first step toward my desired goal. And ever since, I’ve always managed to have a velvet dress in my wardrobe.
Unlike today, when there are local laws requiring children to stay in school until they reach a certain age, and truant officers to enforce these laws, the colored children of yesteryear were encouraged by their parents and white school authorities to leave school early and go to work. Boys dropped out at a much greater rate than girls. They had no incentive to do otherwise. There were no nationwide or government-sponsored “stay-in-school” campaigns as there are today. The adult community made no attempt to impress upon youngsters the necessity of getting an education. Therefore, children had no future to look forward to. This was especially true of boys since they saw no opportunity around them for anything more than hard manual labor like that in which their fathers and neighbors were engaged. Their parents encouraged them to leave school and go to work because it was the southern white man’s theory that masculinity was measured by the amount and type of hard work that a man could endure. I saw that theory in action myself when I applied for a job in a rural school and was informed that a male teacher had applied for the same job. The white farmer, who was trustee in that community, favored me and willingly signed my application with the comment, “That big-old man should get out there behind a plow and go to work. I see no need for him sitting up in the shade on his ‘hiny’ all day. That’s a woman’s work.”
It was the custom for white farmers to increase their productivity by having black farmhands compete with each other to see who could cut the most corn or set the most tobacco in the course of a day. The black men got a great kick out of these races, which they called “bucking” each other. There was no reward for the winner except a pat on the back and the spreading of word around the neighborhood that he was the “best” (most masculine) man in the community.
This old theory was handed down to boys, who concluded it would enhance their manhood to boast that they were hardworking men rather than sissy schoolboys. As a result of this culture, girls who managed to remain in school found upon graduation that they had no one to marry of their own caliber, at least not among their usual circle of friends.
As a preteen, my knowledge of the dropout problem was based on my limited experience with the two boys I knew best—Brother Richard, who dropped out of school in the sixth grade, and his buddy Charles, who dropped out about the same time. My brother sought work on the farm, while Charles ran away from home at the age of fifteen to escape family discipline. We learned later that he obtained a job in a coal mine in a nearby town.
America’s entrance into World War I in 1917 brought on a nationwide scarcity of manpower. Industrial plants holding government contracts had to send recruiters into small southern towns seeking laborers. The companies paid their transportation to the factory sites, the majority of which were located in Pennsylvania. This was the first opportunity for black people to escape the southland en masse for a job that paid a decent wage. Some who took advantage of the opportunity never returned south, becoming permanent residents of northern cities.
Since my brother and Charles were both below the compulsory draft age (Charles around sixteen and Richard nearing eighteen), they both traveled “up north” seeking work. America’s participation in the war lasted only one year. The armistice was signed on November 11, 1918. Factory recruits were discharged as veterans returned home to reclaim their jobs. Richard came home and made a deal with the Wilhelms to raise his own crop of tobacco on their farm “on shares,” but Charles continued to drift from city to city, and from job to job, until family and friends completely lost track of his whereabouts.
From the days when I watched jealously as my older brother went off to school, neither rain nor snow nor even bullying by classmates about being a “hick” would keep me from wanting to go to class every single day. Even when my father would call me a fool for going to school on a day that “looked like rain” and call my mother a fool for letting me do so, I persisted. When the deep snow came, letting me go would sometimes be against Mama’s better judgment, but she would wrap me up in long-john underwear, stuffed down in my black cotton ribbed stockings. Over this I would wear pink outing flannel or black sateen bloomers, a wool underskirt (made from one of Mama’s old winter dresses), a cotton dress, a sweater, a coat, high-top button shoes, buckled overshoes, a long, wool-knit stocking cap that fit tightly on my head with the end wrapped around my neck like a scarf, woolen mittens, and a veil tied over my face. She would then reluctantly turn me loose in the cold for the long walk to school.
On one of those days, Dr. Ulysses Porter, the town’s only Negro physician, passed me in his buggy en route to visit one of his patients in the country, and he smiled and waved at me. Some weeks later, when he was invited to address our student body about the importance of staying in school, he said he knew one student who would one day make good—Alice Allison, whom he had seen trudging for miles in knee-deep snow just to get to school. At first, the public pat on the back boosted my sagging ego and motivated me to strive even harder. But it also inspired my classmates to tease me all the more, saying that I looked like a stuffed rag doll, with a nose that resembled a rubber ball, and on and on.
In spite of all of my social frustrations, I still managed to stay on top, or near the top, of my class, completing eight grades and passing into the high school department. The school was known as Knob City High, but it was actually a combination of an eight-grade elementary school and a two-year high school. I had a special interest in writing and drama, and if I had any talent at all, it was in these fields. My eighth-grade teacher had recognized my writing ability and encouraged me to develop it. This was especially gratifying because, since I was very little, I had wanted to be a newspaper reporter. I don’t know where I got the inspiration for this because there was no Negro newspaper published in our town, nor did any circulate there. Negro newspapers were practically unheard of by most people in our community. There was only one white weekly in the entire county, and it certainly had no thought of employing black writers.
I shared my aspirations with a cousin, Virginia Herald, who taught school in Owensboro, Kentucky, a town about seventy-five miles from our home. She put me in touch with a friend who was editor of the Owensboro Enterprise, and he arranged for me to do a weekly column, composed of what I call “one-sentence stories,” on happenings in our little community. This column, along with similar ones from other small towns around the state, made up an entire page under the heading “Home Town News.” While I received no cash payment for the column, a number of papers were sent to me to sell for five cents each, out of which I got to keep three cents from each sale. The more papers I sold, the more space the editor would allot to my columns. The more space I had, the more names I could include, and more names would sell more newspapers. One item I wrote about, someone’s automobile being struck by a freight train, caught the editor’s eye during a week when hard news apparently was scarce. He lifted the one sentence from my column and elaborated on it (from his imagination), giving it a front-page spread with a bold black streamer. I was thrilled beyond description and vowed then and there that someday I would be a recognized journalist with many headlines and bylines. After two years as a columnist, my name was becoming known around the state as a prospective newspaperwoman.
As for my dramatic talents, except for a leading role in a high school play, I had no opportunity to pursue this. There was no demand for black actors in that era. Television had not yet been invented, radio employed only a few black people, and motion pictures still fewer. Whenever they were used on the screen, it was usually in servant type roles. So drama was not a profitable profession for Negroes to pursue. Public speaking, however, was something I became very good at, and it later became an important part of my professional political career.
The two-year Knob City High School was the only school for Negroes in the town of Russellville, while the whites had a fully equipped four-year high school and two colleges—one for girls, known as Logan College, and another for boys called Bethel College. The closest college for colored youth was in Frankfort, Kentucky, approximately two hundred miles away.1
Our school had no extracurricular activities. It taught no science because it had no laboratory. Since there was no demand for Negro typists or secretaries, nor for business administrators or executives, there were no provisions made to teach courses in office procedure such as typing, shorthand, bookkeeping, accounting, or any other business or commercial tasks.
No vocational education was taught since there were no opportunities for the employment of black boys in skilled trades. No courses in woodwork were scheduled since there were no shops. Up until this time, there had been no courses in home economics, even though cooking for private families was about the only type of work available in that area for girls who did not qualify to teach school.
During my first year in high school, an interesting young woman named Octavia Bigbee came to town to live with her uncle, the Reverend C. P. M. Bigbee, pastor of the city’s largest Negro church. Octavia could find no employment except in domestic service. Since it would have been rather degrading to have the niece of the town’s foremost black leader working as a domestic, Reverend Bigbee worked out an arrangement with the board of education to have Octavia teach a course in cooking—called home economics—at our school.
There was no provision for any such course in the school curriculum, and no money available in the budget for another teacher. After some negotiation, an agreement was reached whereby if the school would provide the space, and the teachers would allow the high school girls some extra time, the home economics teacher would purchase the food for practice work, train the girls to cook, then sell the food they prepared as hot lunches to the students at a minimal cost. Through this arrangement, the girls would receive training in the art of cookery and at the same time the children would benefit from hot lunches for the very first time.2 In lieu of an established salary, Miss Bigbee would be entitled to any profit, however meager, realized from the sale of the lunches.
After the plans were drawn, a large classroom was partitioned and converted into a kitchen and dining room. A secondhand coal stove was installed. Since there was no running water in the building, a sink was not needed. The water had to be drawn from an outdoor cistern and heated in teakettles on the stove. Dishes had to be washed from a dishpan kept on the stove at all times for that purpose. Dirty dishwater was disposed of by dashing it out the back door on the playground.
There was no thought of refrigeration in those days, so lunches had to be prepared from nonperishables such as dried or canned foods.
No theory of cooking was taught. No menu making was discussed. No consideration was given to balanced meals. No mention was ever made of calories. The word “nutrition” was unheard of among the students. “Vitamins” were not in our realm of knowledge.
We got right down to work on the very first day, preparing food for hot lunches. The first day was exciting as we prepared navy bean soup, salmon croquettes, and cottage pudding. The next day, the same menu was prepared, and the day after, and on and on for the entire two-year course, although the types of soup varied from day to day. Eventually we learned to make kidney-bean salad to add to the menu. These same items were prepared daily because they were inexpensive and good sellers. At that time, the price of a large can of plain white salmon was fifteen cents. When mixed with other ingredients such as eggs, diced potatoes, onions, and bread crumbs, at least a dozen croquettes could be made from a single can. I don’t remember whether each menu item sold for five or ten cents, but whatever the price, it netted a fair profit.
As I recall, Miss Bigbee brought no extra cooking utensils for our convenience, not even a can opener. We were taught to open a tin can with a butcher knife. I thought that ridiculous at the time, but if there was a lesson in it, it was improvisation.
Although the girls did the cooking, selling, serving, and dishwashing, we were not permitted to eat any of the food—not even a cup of soup or one croquette. Everything was counted, including the squares of cottage pudding, and each item had to be accounted for. Octavia claimed that the margin of profit was so narrow that she couldn’t afford to share any of the food with the girls who prepared it.
For me, that was almost too much to bear. I was still carrying my cold lunch to school in a little tin bucket. After preparing the hot lunch and smelling the appetizing aroma of onions, salmon, and other goodies, my cold biscuits and fat meat, or homemade jam between cold biscuits, just didn’t seem palatable, and my mouth would water as I watched the other children enjoy the hot, seasoned food.
One day I asked my mother if she could give me ten or twenty cents a day to buy a hot lunch like the other children. She answered with an abrupt “No! If you think you’re too good to eat my little stuff, you just get yourself a job and buy your own lunch.” This was the first time I was made aware of my parents’ financial status. While we had plenty of food, my mother was too proud to admit that their cash income was not adequate to cover additional expense, regardless of how small.
I racked my brain to come up with a way to earn some money out in the country. My situation was different from the girls who lived in town and could babysit in the evenings or find a little cleaning job in the mornings or dishwashing jobs in the afternoons after school. There was no one living near me who could use my services.
Then, one day on my way home from school, a white woman who lived on the edge of town asked if my mother could do another washing. I replied that I could do it for her. She seemed a little surprised and asked if I thought my mother would mind.
“No’m. Mama told me to get myself a job. And this is it,” I gleefully replied.
“Since you’ll be washing for only two people, my husband and myself, we will pay you seventy-five cents a week,” the white woman stated.
“Get the clothes ready. I’ll carry them now,” I insisted.
She brought out the dirty clothes in a soiled pillowcase, and I “wagged” them all the way home along with my usual armful of books.
I was pleased to tell my mother that I had found a job and would now be making my own money so I could buy hot school lunches. She agreed to help me all she could. So together we worked out a plan for how the job could be done.
Mama instructed me that I must “pack” my own wash water from the nearby pond on Sunday afternoon, filling the kettle. She was referring to the big black kettle that was permanently perched on three tall legs in the backyard. Its specific purpose was for heating water to do her laundry work. Then, she said, I must drag up some brush from the woods, break it into short lengths, and place it under the kettle, ready for lighting a fire. She would light the fire on Monday afternoon in time to have the wash water hot when I arrived from school.
I would stop by the lady’s house on my way home from school, pick up the dirty clothes, bring them home with me, and be ready to begin rubbing them on the old-fashioned scrub board as soon as I arrived. The scrubbed clothes would be packed in a tub of clean water, where they would remain overnight. I would have to get up early enough the next morning to rinse them out of the clean water then run them through another bluing water, starch them through a solution of homemade flour-starch, and hang them on the line for drying before leaving for school.
Mama would have the ironing fire made and the irons hot when I arrived home from school Tuesday afternoon so I could begin my pressing. The same would be true on Wednesday afternoon, when I could iron the better clothes. I should be able to finish my ironing on Thursday afternoon, pack the clothes in a little basket, and carry them back to the woman Friday morning on my way to school, at which time I would also collect my seventy-five cents for next week’s rations.
Sometime later that same year, I took on another job, cleaning house for a second white family on Saturdays. This was the county sheriff’s family, who lived in a big white house near town. It would take me the entire day, for which I was paid one dollar. Now I had enough for school lunches plus some other things I wanted, such as silk stockings like the town girls were wearing. I continued this work schedule throughout my two years in high school.
Prior to taking this job, Saturdays were the only days that offered any diversion in my weekly activities. When the weather was beautiful and warm, my mother and I would often spend the afternoons in town, visiting my father’s sister, doing a little shopping, or just seeing and mingling with friends like other country folks came to town to do on Saturdays. They would congregate on the street corners and swap jokes or talk crops while eating cheese and crackers or chocolate drops from brown paper sacks, fingerpicking sardines from tin boxes opened with a pocketknife, licking ice cream from dripping cones, and drinking hot soda pop from tall bottles.
It was during those long Saturday afternoon street sessions that I first actually began to feel the sting of racial discrimination. I discovered that no public restrooms were available for colored women anywhere in the downtown area. A man could easily step into an alley, partially conceal himself behind a wagon or parked car, and relieve himself. But a woman found it necessary to go to the home of a friend somewhere in the residential section to take care of her needs. The stores provided no public accommodation for black customers, and the only public restroom, located in the county courthouse, was clearly marked “White Ladies.”
Although just a child, I would walk right into the courthouse restroom whenever the urge arose, in spite of my mother’s protest. “You stay out of that place,” Mama warned. “You know that’s against the law and it’s dangerous. Them white folks are going to beat you half to death in there some of these times. And there ain’t a thing we can do about it.” But I kept going and nothing happened. The white women in there were just ordinary citizens who came in for the same purpose I did, and they had no authority to order me out. They would often give me dirty looks, but nobody ever openly challenged me.
I’d never heard the phrase “civil disobedience,” but that is exactly what I was practicing in effect on my very own initiative. From that time throughout the rest of my life, I have worked to break down discrimination wherever I found it.
When high school closed for summer vacation, I took a third job, cleaning house every weekday morning for a family who lived in a small farmhouse about a mile from our home. I would arrive at about nine o’clock and clean the entire house by noon. After eating the midday meal, I would wash the dishes and be ready to depart by two o’clock. For this service I received $1.25 per week. My afternoons were devoted to doing my little washing, and Saturdays to cleaning house for the sheriff’s family. This went along very well for a while, but it had gotten to be too much for me before the end of the summer.
The heavy work, plus the daily hike to the farm family’s house and the mile-and-a-half walk to the sheriff’s on Saturdays in the hot summer sun, took its toll, and I came down with malaria. When I recovered, it was time to go back to school, and I never worked for the farm family again.
In 1923, at the age of seventeen, I was a happy person to receive a beautiful diploma from my two-year high school. I wanted in the worst way to continue my education as other classmates were planning to do, but my parents said this was not possible since they lacked the money to send me away to school. As a sharecropper, my father had no steady income. His wages came in a lump sum at the end of the year when the crops were sold. My mother contended that she could not keep up with their current living expenses and send me to school on her small weekly earnings as a washerwoman. While she seemed willing enough to send me if she could, my father was less interested. He kept asking why I wanted to continue in school, and “Why do you want to be a teacher? None of my folks ever made a teacher; why should you?” I reminded them that other classmates who seemed to have far less than us were enrolling in distant institutions of higher learning. I was the only one in my class with no hopes for the future, although I had probably struggled the most over the last ten years, and had graduated at the head of the class. But my parents stuck to their guns.
I wrote to top officials at Kentucky Normal and Industrial Institute (KNII, later known as Kentucky State College), the only state school for colored students in Kentucky, and to Simmons University, a Baptist school in Louisville, asking for employment of any kind that might help pay expenses through school. Both schools replied that there were no in-school job openings, and out-of-town girls were not permitted to go outside of school for employment in those days. As far as I knew, there were no scholarships available during these years for needy or deserving youngsters.
The summer was passing swiftly, and as September neared I still had not figured out what I was going to do. I was still attending church regularly and serving as the Sunday school secretary, when one week before the opening date of Kentucky Normal, Sunday school superintendent Dr. William Russell, the town’s only colored dentist, asked me where I was going to school that fall. He was shocked when I modestly replied that I wasn’t going at all.
“What?” he asked in great surprise. “You were the best student in the whole class—the valedictorian—and you’re not going any further in school?”
With tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat, I sadly replied. “My parents say they aren’t able to send me.”
“Tell your parents that I want to see them!” he exclaimed.
I did as he said, but as the week passed and he hadn’t seen them, I became more despondent, finally going into a terrible mood where I couldn’t eat or sleep and wouldn’t talk. About midweek, my mother reminded me of a big picnic that was being planned for the following Saturday at Red River, a little rural settlement about ten miles away, and suggested that I go and then spend the following week with Ruth Spaulding, a good friend who lived there. The picnic was to be followed on Sunday by baptizing, one of two big affairs held annually at the rural churches throughout the area.
It was common practice for every rural church to hold an annual summer basket-dinner. This would be an all-day rally where members would bring great baskets of food and spread it out on tablecloths on the ground to be served free at noontime to all persons attending the meeting. People would come from far and near in buggies, wagons, and automobiles to meet and socialize with old friends, many of whom they had not seen in a long time. In that respect, these meetings served as homecoming events as well as religious fetes. During the autumn season, these same churches would hold big baptisms out-of-doors in a pond, creek, river, or whatever body of water happened to be located in the vicinity of the church. Like the basket-dinners, these occasions were as much social as religious gatherings and drew large crowds from around the country. I knew it would be an enjoyable event, and expected it might help take my mind off my unhappiness and disappointment, so I agreed to go.
As it turned out, I wasn’t let down. Ruth and I had a wonderful time at the picnic on Saturday. Without parents or older brother around, I felt free to talk and flirt with the young farm boys without the usual parental restriction. The baptizing on Sunday was also like old home week. Hundreds of people who had moved away from the village to other sections of the country returned home to mingle with friends and relatives.
We were in the midst of it when I was shocked to see my mother and father driving up in their buggy. As soon as the ceremony ended, they summoned me to go to Ruth’s house and get my things because they were taking me home.
Anger flared up in me and my face flushed. I all but choked out, “What have I done now? You said I could spend the whole week with Ruth.”
“Yes,” Mama replied calmly, “but you’ll have to go home today. You’ve got to get ready to go to school tomorrow.”
I couldn’t fathom what she meant. “What school?”
“We’re sending you to Kentucky Normal. Your other classmates, who were planning to leave tomorrow morning, have agreed to wait for you if you are ready by tomorrow night.”
On the way home in the buggy, they filled me in. They had gone to church that morning and seen Dr. Russell. He had “jumped all over” them for not making a sacrifice to send me to school. He had reminded them of the many sacrifices I had made on my own initiative to stay in school, trudging the long distance through rain and snow to obtain what little education the school had to offer. This was an indication, he said, that out of the entire class I seemed the one most likely to succeed if I had the opportunity. Then he asked if they wanted to be guilty of denying me that opportunity. It would be a crime, he told them, to keep me out of school.
They quoted Dr. Russell as saying, “Send her! Do what you can to keep her there. If you get to the place that you don’t have the necessary money, let me know and I’ll lend it to you. And I won’t hold either of you responsible for paying it back. I will wait until she gets out of school and finds a job, then she can pay me back. I have enough confidence in her to believe that she will make good and she will repay the loan. If she disappoints me, I will just be the loser, but I don’t believe she will. At any rate, that’s a gamble I’m willing to take.”
With this assurance, my parents had no alternative but to get me ready and let me go. I will never forget Dr. Russell for that.