A Brief History
JACQUELINE WOODSON
The youngest was thirteen. The oldest, twenty. Decades later when the Scottsboro Boys’ musical came to Broadway, I began to cough as the actors smiled and danced their way through the play. I coughed as I turned to see the pleased faces of the white audience. I coughed as they clapped along and cheered. Coughed through the blackface on black faces. Through the minstrel show. I coughed so hard I had to leave the theater, and minutes later, I couldn’t stop coughing. Returned later to cough from my seat through the standing ovation.
It’s a response to stress, the coughing is. For as long as I can remember, my own body has told me to remember to breathe as it prevented me from doing so. Breathe. No don’t. Breathe. No don’t. Has told me, through the gagging spasms, that the moment I’m moving through is triggering. Call it genetic memory. Call it the curse of DNA. Call it America. Call it a country that makes black and breathing nearly impossible.
Please don’t tell what train I’m on…
Call it a song by Elizabeth Cotten.
Call it cotton.
Before someone white decided to turn a black tragedy into music and dance for two hundred dollars a seat and no intermission, there were nine brown boys leaving Alabama. Olen, at seventeen, was nearly blind.
Think Blind Boys of Alabama.
Think Huck Finn.
Think Trayvon Martin.
Think the broken promise of forty acres and a mule, Jim Crow, the Great Depression, the big black brute, the white damsel in distress, the American dream—
Think strange fruit hanging from poplar trees.
Think Amos and Andy. Think Toms, Coons, Mulattos, Mammies and Bucks and—
The first movie we watched in my African Americans in Film course in college was The Birth of a Nation. Before Cabin in the Sky with the beautiful Lena Horne. Before Fredi Washington graced the screen in Imitation of Life, there was D. W. Griffith’s gaze on America.
By then, four of the Scottsboro boys were already walking, two were suckling infants, and Ozie, Eugene, and Leroy hadn’t yet been born.
In February 2008, my son was born. We named him Jackson Leroi.
Think twenty-two sophomores and freshmen. All of us knowing how black and blue we were at our small liberal arts PWI. With no BSU. Far away from any HBCU. It was the mid-1980s. We had Anita Baker, Luther Vandross, and a professor with an afro named Dr. Jackson getting us through. But by then, my hair was permanently straightened, and when I left my African Americans in Film class, there was my all-white cheerleading team. There was my all-white dorm and white boyfriend. There was my all-white major of English literature, my all-white minor—British Lit. A year later, there would be my all-black sorority. A year later, I would learn about nine black boys. And as the years bent into decades, I would call out their names.
The youngest one, brown skinned and baby-faced, was named Leroy. Andy, Clarence, and Charlie were the oldest. And between them there were Haywood, Olen, and Ozie.
And baby-faced Leroy was leaving home for the first time.
Olen, who was nearly blind. His dream—a pair of glasses.
This wasn’t in the musical. The story of a boy so blind he had to leave home, steal a ride on a train with the hopes of a job. With the hopes of one day seeing.
How do we begin to tell this country’s story without turning our own selves inside out?
In 1992, my college boyfriend died from the complications of AIDS. I was living on Cape Cod by then. By then, I had long cut off the damaged processed hair of my college days and grown it back as locs. When I remembered college, I remembered The Birth of a Nation and Dr. Jackson and the dividing line between the many white cheerleaders and the three black ones.
In an article that ran in Life magazine (1937), Eugene was described as a “sullen, shifty mulatto.” What thirteen-year-old isn’t sullen?
Mulatto: The term may derive from mula (current Portuguese word, from the Latin mūlus), meaning mule, the hybrid offspring of a horse and a donkey.
I know I know: Don’t trust Wiki. Whatever.
Remember Leroy? Here’s an excerpt of the letter he wrote to his mama: “I am all lonely and thinking of you.… I feel like I can eat some of your cooking Mom.” Some sources say he was twelve. Some thirteen.
But the boys were from Scottsboro.
And this is America.
And the truth is never where it’s supposed to be.
So shucks, y’all.
Let’s all just keep smiling and dancing.
Smiling and dancing.