INTERVIEW NO. 1 CLOTIE GRAVES

A young Clotie (center) with her sisters, brother, and uncle.

Where were you born and what was your home/community like?

I was born right in the spot where I’m living now, Clinton, Mississippi. On the same land. Ten miles west of Jackson.

We live in the country. We lived on my grandparents’ property that they bought in 1908. It was called the Mount Hood community. My dad had built a house. His part of the house was a two-bedroom shotgun-type house. There was a bedroom and kitchen, and that was it. And then he later added on two more bedrooms, a larger kitchen, and dining area. A woodframe house with a roof and siding on it.

Mom and Dad had eight children. Two boys and six girls. I fell in the middle, I’m the middle child. My family is a unique family situation because my father married this lady. She was a young lady named Rose Daggers. They had one daughter named Virginia. My older sister, Virginia. And Rose died when Virginia was three years old, of cancer.

My mother was married. This guy, she married a man named Excel Russell. Excel got killed in a truck accident around the time my father’s wife died of cancer. And Mama was left with.… Excel had a son named Tony. And she was pregnant with Excel Junior when her husband got killed in the truck accident. He was riding on the back of a truck, and the truck turned over. And he was killed. So that left my mother pregnant with one child and she already had one child.

That one, the child that she was pregnant with, lived to be two years old, and then he died from pneumonia. And so when my mom and dad got together, Mama had one son, Tony, and Daddy had the one daughter. So that’s the first two sets of children. And then they got married. They were married—Daddy said four years—and then they had my sister Gladys and then my sister Amy. And then I came. I’m the third child, but I’m really the fourth girl. And then my sister Edith and my sister Ann. That’s six girls. And then they finally had another boy. Mama and Daddy had five girls and then they had one boy. And the other two kids that they brought into the marriage made eight of us.

Both of my parents’ spouses died young. They were in their twenties. They died young, but if they hadn’t, we wouldn’t have come on this earth.

What did your parents do?

My father was a farmer and worked at O. R. Johnson Milling Company in Clinton. That’s a company that made cornmeal. They also made horse and cow food from the corn, and that kind of stuff. My daddy ran one of those machines, that’s all I know. I have heard him say he would have to hold the sack as the mill or the feed would come out of the processing machine; he would hold it and fill it up, then put it under the machine where it was sewed up and closed. That was full-time. Eight hours a day at the mill. He would get up in the morning time and go to the field too. We had three acres of cotton. Two acres was on the white folks’ land that he’d lease, and then we had one acre on our land. We had 10 acres of land that my grandparents had bought. So he’d get up and work in the field in the morning before he’d go to work, then come back in the evening time and go back to the field and work. And he did that five days a week.

We had what he called a truck patch. A truck patch is something larger than a garden. It’s like a whole field of vegetables that he raised. And so on Friday night, we would have to pick all the vegetables, then on Saturday mornings, we’d shell the peas and butter beans and measure them out so we could sell them by the quart. Then we would go to Jackson and he would walk the streets selling vegetables to the white people. And, of course, we always had to go to the back door, you couldn’t go to the front door. We always had to go to the back in those days. Blacks could not go to the front door of anybody’s house. And he would sell those vegetables, and the amazing part about that, he would make more money selling those vegetables on Saturdays than he would make working eight hours a day for five days at the milling company. Sure would.

He worked every day to take care of all of us. On Sundays, he was like the Uber driver. A lot of people didn’t have cars. He always had a car. And on Sundays, he would carry people to visit family members up in the Delta, up to the prison system, wherever. He’d drive people to church.… He just worked nonstop.

My mom was a housekeeper and raised all of us. She had this one white lady, that she knew as she was growing up, I think, that would come maybe once a month and get her to go work for her for about two hours, and then she’d ride her back home. Other than that, her job was to raise us. Daddy didn’t want her to have to do anything but raise all of us.

You said that your grandparents were able to purchase 10 acres of land that y’all lived on? Do you know how they were able to purchase that land?

Yes. My daddy … this was my daddy’s parents. William Robinson and Avis Darrages. They had a son named Rafe, and he married Julia. And these are my grandparents, now. They’re the ones that bought the property. My grandmother, they said, ironed clothes for all of the white folk. That’s what she did, ironed clothes. And my granddaddy was a farmer. And once he got the land, that’s what he was doing. I don’t know how they saved the money. But they said my grandmother Julia paid most of that money to buy this land. And the land was what they call landlocked, when you don’t have no frontage at all. And it was 10 acres. And so the white people sold it to her because it was landlocked and they figured it would never be worth anything. And that’s how they bought it. She ironed clothes: washing and ironing for the white families to raise the money to buy this land.

Y’all had the 10 acres but then your dad also worked on white people’s land as well. But y’all lived on your land right?

My dad leased two acres of land from the man that owned the milling company, and raised cotton. We never had over three acres of cotton.

I’m wondering why he would go and lease land from people when y’all had 10 acres yourselves.

That’s what I don’t know. I don’t know why he did that. But like I said, he was farming it, our land, he was using it to raise the vegetables on. And you know back in those days, cotton was just a going thing. I guess he just wanted to have some cotton. But after some time, he realized that there was more money in the vegetables than in the cotton. Because see, with three acres of land, he might would get three bales of cotton. The first acre of cotton that we got went to the man for leasing the two acres. It went to the white guy, Mr. Johnson. Anything else that the land produced went to him [my father]. It was a business arrangement.

Most of the time, he would get about a bale per acre. So he would clear two acres of cotton, two bales of cotton. Do you know what bales of cotton look like? Big old things.

We really weren’t sharecropping in the traditional sense. Everybody else around here was sharecropping, living on the white man’s place. And they never were able to work out of debt with those white people. Because they made sure they kept them year after year, not being able to pay off their debt. We were the ones that were not doing it like that.

I was speaking to somebody else. She was actually raised in Alabama. And like y’all, they also own their land. And she was telling me that, in school, she would be one of the only people that would be able to stay in school the whole year, because the sharecroppers’ kids had to leave school to bring in the harvest. Was it the same for your classmates?

They would, that’s true. And then, see, this is the thing. The cotton gets ready in the fall. We would all stay out of school, sharecropping or not, maybe the first two months that school would start back. Because we would have to pick the cotton and get the cotton from those three acres that we had. But we would always get back to school, though, before the kids that were in a sharecropping situation because they had more cotton to pick than we did. So, we would miss school because we were trying to get it in before the rain started.

September and October were the months that we would be out. Only time that we would go to school during those months is when it would rain. Because it would be too wet to pick. The sharecropping kids, everybody. Okay. And we’d miss the first part of school, but we would always catch up.

It’s interesting that your lives revolved around cotton in a way.

It did. Mmhmm. Even though we weren’t living on a white man’s place, cotton was a way for us to make money.

What was school like for you? Did you enjoy it?

Loved it! I loved it until my fourth grade year, when I had a new teacher. My first grade year, in the community, we had a Rosenwald School. Rosenwald schools were started by—you heard of Sears and Roebuck, right? Well, Booker T. Washington and the Sears and Roebuck guy, with his money, set up what they called Rosenwald schools within the community. The school that I went to was called Mount Hood. It was a church building that they put the school in. Black folks, we didn’t have schools built specifically for us at that time. I was born in ’46, and I guess I started school in ’51. So it wasn’t that long ago.

It was grades one through eight in the same room, but at different tables. So it was a community school, and we had one teacher that taught grades one through eight. I only went to that school for one year. By my second grade year, they closed the church school down and moved us to the public school in the city of Clinton named Sumner Hill. And that was first through tenth grade.

Why did the school close?

Rosenwald schools were put in the churches. The county, or the state I guess, was putting some money into [public] schools for educational purposes, to educate Blacks. But we didn’t have the nice schools and stuff like the whites did. So they decided they would consolidate schools in this area and put us all in one school. That’s when they moved us to Sumner Hill.

What was your favorite subject in school?

History. It was history and science!

Were you and all of your siblings able to finish school?

Yes. My mom and dad, they had one goal: every last one of us had to finish high school. And all of us did. And all of us went to college, except three. The three older ones didn’t go to college, but they were able to get training in special fields.

Were your parents able to finish school?

My dad finished sixth grade. And my mom finished eighth grade. And see, back during that time, if you had an eighth grade education, you could teach school. So my mom taught school for a while until she had all of us. Then she started just raising us.

After all of us were out of high school, Mama went back to get her GED, and then her high school diploma. And she was so proud! And we were proud of her, too.

As a little kid, were you aware of any unwritten rules that governed race relations in your area?

Oh, yeah. You had to be. You knew it was strictly separate and not equal, in everything. Some rules were written, but they were all taught to you. And your parents made sure you understood. Like, if a white person was coming through the door and you were getting ready to go through the door, you had to back back and let them go. I remember once, my mom was in line in a department store in Jackson, getting ready to pay. We had been standing on the line, and she was the next person on the line to pay. And this white person just walked up there, and she had to step back and let the white person pay. And I couldn’t understand that. I said, “Mama why you back up?” And she said, “Just be quiet.” So then, when we got to the car, she told me that she had to do it and why.

I remember once, I asked my daddy, I said “Daddy, why?” You know, I got to the point when I was about 14 or 15, after I’d heard about Emmett Till and a lot of other things, I couldn’t figure out why everything we did, the white man decided for us. If it was something going on in the world, in the city, the white man’s going to do this, the white man’s going to do that. So I said, “Daddy, why is it that the white man makes all the decisions for us?” And he said, “That’s just the way it is, Clo. And we just have to deal with it.” And that’s what he said. So I left it alone. But I couldn’t figure that out.

Then, I realized the issue was we couldn’t vote. They could not vote. We didn’t have the right to vote.

So when you were a kid, Black people couldn’t vote at all?

Oh no, no. My goodness! Didn’t get the right to vote until … whew … Medgar Evers came on the scene and started registering people to vote, then the Voting Rights Act passed, Lyndon Johnson … President Johnson.… I was out of high school by then.

Did people talk about wanting to vote or show interest in wanting to vote then?

They wanted to, but if you went down there and voted, see they had these unspoken rules for you. First of all, you had to pay what they called a poll tax just to try to get a chance to vote. And then, when you tried to vote, they’d ask you these awful questions. Now, they wouldn’t do it to the whites, just the Blacks. Like, “How far do you have to walk before you strike a sweat?” Now, you know don’t nobody know the answer to that. Or, “How many bubbles are in a bar of soap?” That’s how they disqualified us to vote. It was just old crazy stuff like that.

Did people try? Do you remember people trying to go and vote?

They tried. They would try, but they would make sure they failed every time. And wouldn’t let them vote. I don’t remember my parents trying to vote, but I know my grandfather did. He was voting in 1871 after Reconstruction. After the Civil War, during the Reconstruction era. They literally, him and his brother, were voting right here in Hinds County. They had been slaves, but during Reconstruction they were voting, able to vote. And then, of course, they put Jim Crow laws in place to take away our voting rights and all that.

But yeah, my grandfather was voting. We have proof that he voted in two elections. They had senators, and we have not been able to get a Black senator in Hinds County since. Well, in Hinds County, we had this Black senator, and my grandfather voted in the election that elected him to the Senate seat. And then, white people, they had a riot here in Clinton. It was 1877 or something like that [author’s note: The year was 1875, and the senator was Charles Caldwell]. The state had elected this Black guy here in Hinds County, in the state of Mississippi. And the white people had a picnic; that’s what they called it officially. They wanted to kill the Blacks because they were making progress during Reconstruction.

So here in Clinton, they invited them to have something like a political rally, and they told them they were going to have food and all, and told them to come. But it was a setup to kill the Blacks here in the city. Well, the Blacks did go, but they took their guns, too. Well, history shows that 50 Blacks were killed, and the Blacks killed five of them. But looking at how they twist things, I don’t believe those numbers are true.

Okay. So they had the “riot,” and that was after the election of the senator. So this happened in September. And then this Black guy that was elected senator from this area, they invited him on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, telling him to come to the market—to the store—saying they wanted to talk to him. So he went, and they assassinated him. They killed our Black senator. And now, we have two markers here in Clinton to commemorate him. But the point is, my grandfather and his brothers voted in that election. So the answer to your question, did Blacks try to vote, yes they did, until Jim Crow was put in place to stop us.

Was your grandfather a part of the “riot”?

I’m sure he was. Because he was living during that time. But he didn’t get killed. Now, I’m told that when they started shooting and killing, people ran everywhere. And they came north of Clinton. Well, one lady had her baby. And she was running. And she found a tree that had a hollow in it. And she put her baby up in the hollow of that tree until she could get back.

In the cemetery where my grandparents are buried, some of the people that were killed in the “riot” are buried up here in this cemetery. I’ve been working so hard trying to get it set aside as a historical place. They stopped the Blacks from burying in it, but the markers are still there. But you know how they don’t want us to preserve any of our history. So that’s what I’ve been battling here lately. But I’m not going to give up. God will work it out.

That history is not that far away. Some people think that it happened so long ago, but it really wasn’t that long ago, when you think about it.

It wasn’t. I lived it. I’m 76 years old now. The Jim Crow laws went up until the Voting Rights Act was passed. And Medgar Evers was working to get people registered to vote. I was not old enough then. But that’s when my mom, dad, and every Black person that we know went and registered to vote. And they voted. And they did not miss one election. I don’t care what it was. They were going to vote.

Those of us that lived through it, we know. Because the right to vote is the thing. I have my company, the African American Heritage Tours, and I speak to young people who say, “Well, they don’t count my vote anyway.” That’s probably true, but the point is, you’re exercising your vote because people died for us to have just the right to vote. Stop worrying about whether it’s counted; exercise your right. Don’t stay at home just because you think they won’t count it!

So aside from having to allow white people to go first and not being able to vote and these things that you started to see as a kid, what other rules became apparent to you?

Everything we got was used. Like our books would have four or five names in them, of the white kids who had already used them. We always got used books, we never got new books. They would call a Black adult by their first name, but we had to address them by Mister or Missus. But Black people couldn’t be called that. That was a rule.

When integration came and all the Jim Crow laws were swept under the rug, rather than call us Mister and Missus, they started calling everybody by their first name. That was so obvious to me. And then, public transportation; although we didn’t travel that much on public transportation, I knew that we had to move to the back. Black people had to sit in the back. That was an obvious thing.

The injustice of police brutality was right in our faces because my brother got beat up by the police. They said he was resisting arrest. They beat him so bad that when my mom and dad went and got him the next day out of jail, we didn’t even hardly know him. His head and face was so swollen and big.

What did he say happened?

He said that he was in Jackson in my daddy’s car, and the people that saw it happen, they later told my mama and daddy that he wasn’t doing anything. They were picking on him because Daddy always had a car, we lived on our own place, and we just think he was singled out. Their attitude was, “You think you somebody,” and all this kind of stuff. But he said that they said he resisted arrest. And everybody that saw it said he did not resist arrest. But that was what they said.

When they got him in the car and took him to the jail—they hadn’t put their hands on him then, he said. But when they got him in the elevator, where couldn’t nobody see him, that’s when they beat him up. And they would knock him down and tell him to get up. And he got up the first time. The second time, when they told him to get up, he got up. And he said they knocked him back down. And that’s when he realized, “They’re gonna kill me if I keep getting up.” So he stayed on the floor, and laid there. And there were three or four of them in there just beating him with those sticks and knocking him down. He was like double his size when Mama and Daddy picked him up.

So after that, Mama and Daddy sent him to California. He was already out of high school and working with my dad at the milling company then. And Mama sent him to California.

So she sent him to California because she was concerned about his safety going forward?

That’s correct.

What would have happened if he stayed?

You know, he could have been killed. Lynched. Anything could have happened.

Did you know or hear of anybody in your family or neighborhood that had been lynched?

I knew a lady. This was when I was about 10 years old or so. This lady went to church with my mom, a Methodist church here in Clinton. And I remember seeing her once or twice at church. Her name was Miss Jane. I don’t know her last name.

I remember Daddy coming home from work and telling my mom that they hung Miss Jane. They found her hanging in her outhouse one morning. She lived here in Clinton. I never will forget it. I talked with one of my cousins and asked him about it earlier, to be sure I remembered this right. Miss Jane was working for this white lady. And the white lady was fussing and arguing at her and hit her. And she hit the woman back. And that night, the white woman’s sons came and drug her out of her house and hung her outside in her outhouse. And nothing was ever done about that lady’s death. I never will forget that.

There were two lynchings that stood out in my mind growing up. Miss Jane and Emmett Till. And I couldn’t deal with it. I wasn’t able to reckon with it until later, when I was grown. Emmett Till and Miss Jane’s hanging.

Did she have a family?

All I know was that she had a brother. I think she lived by herself. There was a road here in Clinton at the time called Sand Road. She lived down on Sand Road. But now, they never arrested anybody. Back then in those times, if somebody killed a Black person, they weren’t going to do anything about it anyway. But this white woman’s two sons came to that house that night. Somebody saw them go. And they hung that lady. I think my mom went to her funeral.

I wonder what they would have written on her death certificate. They always had some trumped-up reason.

They probably said self-inflicted suicide. They might not have even put anything on there. But she was lynched.

Did you hear of any other racially motivated violence that took place in your community?

This guy that lived right up the hill from us. But he was … he was kind of a disorderly person.

He got in trouble a lot, okay? I remember he went to prison, but I can’t remember what they sent this boy to prison for. I can’t remember, but he would be considered a bad child in the neighborhood, right? So he wound up going to prison. And somehow he escaped. And in the process of him escaping up in the Delta area, where the prison is, they claimed he broke in this white woman’s house, and that he raped this white woman. Of course they got him and they put him back in prison, and they electrocuted him. Now, I remember that.

I’m surprised that a mob or something didn’t come to the prison and get him out.

I know. No, they electrocuted him. His mom and dad lived about a mile from where we stayed.

And then, I remember my uncle, my mom’s sister’s husband. He was on this bus. He got on the bus in Jackson going to Columbia, Mississippi, which is down in south Mississippi. And when they got to some town, the police got on the bus. My uncle had a cap on, and he was at the back of the bus. And they said, “You, the one with the cap! You come on off the bus.”

Some lady up in Greenwood, Mississippi—which is north Mississippi, about 100 miles from where he got on the bus in Jackson—said that some Black guy had touched her hand, or some old crazy mess like that. The police was looking for him. They got my uncle off this bus, brought him all the way back from Brookhaven, I think was the name of the town, and carried him all the way up to the Delta, which is about 70 miles north of Jackson. And by the time they got up there he said it was about three o’clock in the morning. They go take him to this white man’s house, knock on the door, she come out and they say, “Is this the one that touched your hand?”

And she looked at him. And she said, “No, that’s not the one.” Now, all she had to do was say yes—if she had said yes, they would have killed him right then and there. After she said he wasn’t the one, they carried him back to the bus station up there instead of bringing him back to Jackson where he got on. He didn’t have the money for another ticket, and he said, “Ain’t y’all gonna take me back to Jackson?” And they said, “No, you got to get back the best way you can.” They were just lowdown and evil.

It makes me also wonder what was going through his mind, you know, the whole time. That had to be so scary.

It took them three hours to get there, he said. He said all he could think of was: “They’re gonna kill me and my family will never know what happened to me.” But God blessed him and they didn’t kill him.

If she would have said yes.… It’s so crazy how just one word could have changed everything.

Could’ve changed it all, that’s true. That’s true. But God was in the plan that she didn’t say he was the one. Because they were so sure they had him. They thought they had them somebody to hang and kill that night.

One thing that is hard for me as a millennial, and as somebody who never experienced slavery, Jim Crow, the Black Codes, none of it, it’s hard for me to understand what it was like to live in an environment where anything could happen. And you could be beaten or killed at any time, just based on whether a white person was having a bad day. A lot of people that read this are going to be like me—like, we can’t imagine a world like this. Can you comment on that?

All it took was somebody to lie on you and you were gone. For me, it was the feeling of—and I don’t know if I ever heard anybody really tell us this, but it was the fear of thinking that I’m the dumbest person. God created me and I’m dumb, and these other people are superior to me. And I will never be able to accomplish things and get to where they are. But that was the mind job they were doing on us because, you know, they owned everything and they had everything. Everything you saw on TV was white.

I didn’t really worry about them killing me. But then, when they beat my brother up, that kind of made it full circle. We would feel insecure and not safe, because you were Black. The only thing that ever happened to me that really made me really afraid for myself was in fall of ’65 when the Civil Rights Movement was really going, and I was down in Vicksburg, in nursing school. We had all been out that night and we were walking home and these white kids just came by and just pelted us with raw eggs. They threw raw eggs all over us. And it’s that kind of stuff that makes you afraid because you don’t know what they’re going to do.

The same man I told you about—my uncle who married my mama’s sister—when I got out of high school, they paid all my money to go to college. They lived in California and that’s the same family that my mom sent my brother to after he got beat up by the police. When I got out of high school, they said, “Clo, if you want to go to college, we’ll pay your money.” They paid every penny. I never had to pay one penny to go to college. And so, the fear of messing up when they were spending money on me kept me going.

When Johnson signed the Civil Rights bill, I was working at a hospital where I was doing my clinical work. They had a colored cafeteria and a white cafeteria. We had to eat separately. We worked on the floors together, but we’d eat separately. The superintendent of the hospital came in one day, and, I guess it wasn’t a fear, but I felt like I let my race down at that point, because the day came when they had to take the Colored and White signs down. The superintendent came and said, “The federal government says I have to take these signs down. But if I catch any of you over there in the white side eating, I’m going to kick you out of school and I’m going to call you a rabble-rouser, and fix it to where you’ll never be able to get into nursing school again.”

I felt like I couldn’t mess up my aunt and uncle spending all this money on me. The next day, the nurses and all the Black people working there got together and said, “We going to the white side.” About two or three of us, including me, didn’t go. I felt guilty and beat up on myself for not going, because they went on over there and ate in the white cafeteria, and they didn’t mess with them! So, the next day, we all went over there and ate. And they didn’t do nothing to us. They didn’t want to lose that money, see. He was playing with our minds.

And what school was this?

My college was Mississippi Valley State University. And then, in the last nine months, we had to do clinical work on the floor at the hospital. And it was at Kuhn Memorial Hospital in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

What was that experience like being in that environment?

When we left Mississippi Valley, that was a historical Black college. I was valedictorian of my class, and all my instructors were Black then. My teacher called me in and she said, “Robinson, you going there, and I want you to know that they’re going to pick at you because all your teachers are going to be white there. Because you had your good grades, they’re going to pick at you.”

We had orientation the first week we were there. The white instructors told us that the first week we were on the floor, we would be shadowing a senior student. They would assign us a senior student. My senior student was this white girl, and I was shadowing her. That’s all I was supposed to be doing. Okay? So, the first day I was on the floor, we had a patient who was on complete bed rest. We go in the room to take care of this patient, and the white girl, the senior student, I was supposed do what she said, right? Okay, the patient was on complete bed rest. That means she doesn’t get to use the bathroom, she ain’t supposed to get up out this bed. The white girl said, “Let’s get her up and put her in the chair to make up the bed.” I said, “Oh no, we’re not supposed to do that.” She said, “I know what I’m doing, you have to get this woman out the bed and we’re going to put her in the chair.” And I’ve got to do what she say, right?

The minute we put that lady in the chair and start making up the bed, here come our teacher. She walked in that door and saw that woman sitting in that chair, and she didn’t call nobody but me. She said, “Nurse Robinson, come to my office!” Now, this is my first day on the floor. I went in there. Now, one thing my mom taught all of us was to never hold your head down, and look people in the eye. She would never let us hold our heads down.

I go in that office, and she said, “Did you look at the patient’s orders?” I said, “Yes ma’am, I did.” “What did those orders say?” I said, “They said she is on complete bed rest.” See, she thought I was going to lie. But that was the first thing I told her. Complete bed rest. She said, “What does that mean?” I told her, “It means she wasn’t supposed to get up out the bed for anything.” She said, “Well, why did you get her up?” I said, “I didn’t get her up. You told me to do what the senior student said to do, and the senior student told me to get her up. That’s why we got her up out the bed.” She jumped up out of her chair and told me to go on back. And from that day forward, I didn’t have trouble out of none of my instructors.

Isn’t that something that she called you though and didn’t call the other girl.

She didn’t call the white girl at all. And she was ready to kick me out of class, right then and there. And, because of that one run-in.… See, we had to do six weeks in OB. And then, six weeks in the nursery. I hated it because I hated seeing the premature babies. So, she asked me one day how did I like working with the premature babies? I said, “I hate it.” So she made me stay another six weeks down there with those babies.

But actually, I grew to like that old white lady because she became somewhat like a mother to us. After we got to know her, she would look out for us, bring snacks and stuff to school. She was really a nice old white woman at the end of it all.

How did your parents feel about you being in this environment and them not being able to protect you?

Well, my mom’s thing was, “Always follow the rules.” That was the first thing. See, I’m in nursing school when there’s very few Blacks going to nursing school. And they said, “Clo, if it gets too rough, you can always come home.” But you know, God is always good, and He works things out for you, so I was able to make it through. And once I got out of school, then they started putting school nurses in the school system. And so I was one of the first nurses in the state of Mississippi. I came home and I thought I was going to take it easy for a while. You know when you’re young you say, “I’m going to take a break, I’m not fixing to go to work right away.” But I got a job three weeks after I got out.

Were you in a white school?

No, it was a Black school. Public school. It was a high school in Ackerman, Mississippi. It was one of the poverty-stricken areas. And it was during that time, you know Headstart? It was a three-year program where they put nurses in these poverty-stricken areas. One of the things they don’t teach you in nursing school, because most of your training in nursing is to work in hospitals, is how to work in schools. The person who hired me—this man had never seen me, but he wanted a Black nurse. My mom and dad were friends with the … they called them Jeanes supervisors. These were Black people that were over the Black school system. So, the Jeanes supervisor, Louise White, told this principal in Ackerman about me, and he called me and said, “Well, if you want the job, you can have it.” This man had never seen me, and hired me just like that!

And so I went there to Ackerman not knowing what to do. I was 21 years old. They had all these things that they wanted me to do, and I said Lord I don’t know where to start. Something told me to get up and go to the local health department. I went to the health department in Ackerman, and of course they had colored and white, so I went to the colored side. Told the woman who I was and what I was doing, and of course they were all white too, so she said okay, but didn’t try to help. I was wanting to order supplies through them like eye charts to test the kids’ eyes, and most of them had never had vaccines, and things I needed to do. I had to get them to help me.

From there, I was supposed to set up an agreement with the medical doctor in the community, so if the kids got sick at school, I could take them to the doctor. And then a medical agreement with the dentist for dental work and all that stuff. So, I went to the medical doctor first. And I walked in there with my white dress on, and they were looking at me like they had never seen a Black nurse before. I remember them. They were real cold. I told them I needed to talk to the doctor. Finally, the doctor—an old white guy—came down. And he was acting funny. But after I told him how much money I had available to spend on the medical treatments for these kids, his whole attitude changed. They realized I had all this money!

So then I went to the dentist and told him the same thing. Now, the dentist was a younger guy. He was more receptive to me than any of the other ones. He worked real good with me. It was all such a learning experience. I realized that community health and school, working with children in school, was what I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing. So that’s what I wound up doing mostly, working with children and teenagers.

When the public schools integrated, did that affect your job since you were in the school system?

I was there on a program that had a three-year grant, and the schools were integrated the year after I left. They closed the school where I was working. It was 1st–12th grade. They made it an elementary school, and then the high school, they moved the Black kids to the white high school. I was gone by the time they integrated.

What did you do for fun as a young person?

Okay, up until I finished high school, the fun was Friday night football games, school dances, and going to the movies. Clinton was a small town, so we didn’t have a colored theater and a white theater. They had the white folks on the bottom floor, and the Blacks had to go upstairs in the balcony to watch the movie. We all went to the same theater. There was this old crazy boy named Dave. I ain’t going to say his last name. Up in the balcony, we didn’t have a bathroom to go to, right? Dave went to a movie one day and had to use the bathroom, so he decided to take his thing out and pee down on the white folks. So that was the end of our moviegoing in Clinton! Black people couldn’t go back to that theater anymore. No more Blacks could come to the movies.

So he ruined it for everybody! But that’s what they get for making y’all sit in the balcony. That’s funny!

Very funny. So then, we had to go to Jackson if we wanted to go to the movies. And in Jackson, we had separate theaters. We had two movie theaters for Blacks in Jackson: the Ebony and the Alamo.

Did y’all ever want to sneak and do something like, for instance, drink out of the whites only water fountain?

I didn’t, but they used to have these restrooms at the Greyhound bus station. The waiting rooms were all separate. They had two doors at the Greyhound bus station, colored and white. Everything was separate, you couldn’t really do anything. But my sister did something, I can’t remember what she did. She went in the whites bathroom or water fountain or something, and we said, “Mama is going to have a fit!”

Clotie’s great-grandparents, Frank and Edith Woods, her Aunt Gladys, and her mother, Exie.

I remember you used to have to put 10 cents to use it, and maybe she crawled up under the door and just used it.

Did you have a good relationship with your grandparents?

I never knew any of my grandparents. My mom’s dad died when I was five years old, so I remember him. But her mother died when my mom was eight and her sister was 10. And her grandparents raised them. Then my father’s father and mother were both dead when I was born, so I didn’t get to really know any of my grandparents.

Did you have a lot of extended family members?

Oh, yes. And this was the unusual part about my mother. Because her mother had died, we only knew her mother’s side of the family. One lived in Atlanta: Uncle Scott, her mother’s brother. We would go see him once a year. And the other was in South Mississippi. But the unusual part about it, my mom’s dad who died when I was five years old? She used to tell us all the time, she used to say, “I’m sorry, I cannot tell you all anything about your ancestors, your grandparents, because my daddy left Florida, ran away when he was a young man, and never went back because he and his brother got in trouble.”

She used to tell us this all the time. They went into this town and these white people were acting like they’d never seen Black people before. Calling them monkeys and all this kind of stuff. And in the process, they got in a fight. In the process of the fight … now, remember, in Jim Crow, you weren’t supposed to be fighting white people. So they got into this fight, and my grandfather’s brother ended up killing one of the white guys that was messing with them.

And so, my grandfather ran. The two of them left Florida, and never went back. They left their family, their grandmother, and their mother, which would have been my great-grandmother; she never knew what happened to her two sons. Now, they ran from Florida. Later, we got letters from my cousin who had saved the letters from my grandfather. My grandfather stopped in Mississippi, and his brother continued on to Louisiana. They split up so they wouldn’t be caught, you know. But they survived killing a white man under the Jim Crow law.

So what happened was, from the late 1800s until around 1980, the families on my mom’s dad’s side—the Florida family—knew. Their mother always told them that she had two brothers that had just disappeared and she never knew what happened to them. And then, our mother, and my aunt in California, always told us that their dad said, “Well, we have sisters and brothers in Florida, but we never went back to check on them after that trouble.” So my sister Edith, my sister Amy, and myself went to California, and my cousin, the son of the brother that went on to Louisiana, he had these letters. When we went to California, we met him for the first time. He showed us these letters where my grandfather wrote him.

He wrote my grandfather wanting to know why the two brothers had different last names. So my grandfather took the time, wrote this letter back in 1937, telling him that his daddy changed his name because of the trouble that he got into. He changed his name from Jackson to Hall. He was really a Jackson, but he changed his name.

Have y’all been able to connect with the Florida family?

Yes. When we went to California and we read those letters, it was like the spirit of my grandfather and his brother … their presence was in that room as we read that letter. And my grandfather was saying that he wanted to go back to Florida. He was up in age when he was writing that and begging his brother’s son to come get him and take him to Florida. And I told my sister that we had to find the family so our grandfather could rest at ease. We set out and started looking. All we knew was that his last name was Jackson. We didn’t really know where to start.

This was in 1975. We knew they were in Tallahassee, Florida. And this lady I was working with was going to visit Tallahassee. I asked her to bring me a phone book back so I could see if I could find some last names of my family. So, when she brought it back to us, my sisters Edith, Amy, and I drafted a letter and just started sending it out to every person with the last name of Jackson. And we also knew that one of my grandfather’s sisters had married a Wynns. So we sent these letters to every church, people with the last name of Jackson, and people with the last name of Wynns in Tallahassee. We sent out the first batch of letters, waited for about two months, and we didn’t hear anything. We sent out the second batch of letters—and see, we were prepared to send out letters until we found somebody. But we sent out that second batch of letters, and one of the letters went to the church that their mother, which was my great-grandmother, was a member. She had died at that church on New Year’s Eve; they say she was praying on her knees. She never knew what had happened to her two children.

And so, when the preacher got the letter, he knew one of our relatives. He told them that we were looking for our family. So the person he showed it to carried it to Jacksonville and showed it to one of her first cousins in Jacksonville. So, they debated on what to do next. But they remembered that their mother had always said that she had some brothers somewhere.

So finally, one Sunday morning, I never will forget it. My husband was sick that morning. I went to church and he stayed at home. And he called me at church and told me to come on home. He said “Clo, I think y’all have found your family. A lady called here and left her phone number. They got your letter and she wants you to call.” So I got home and I called. And you talking about some crying? We cried and we cried. We were separated for over a hundred years.

And we finally got back together.

Clotie’s grandfather, Tony Calvin Jackson, who escaped from Florida along with his brother, Louis Jackson Hall.

So we went to Slidell, Louisiana, and met the Slidell family. And finally, we connected to the family in Florida. It was so amazing because the two brothers had told their children about their sisters and brothers and Florida, and then the siblings in Florida had told their children about their missing brothers. And we could put the pieces together finally. And we finally had a reunion. God brought us back together.

That’s a beautiful and amazing story. But it’s also a hurtful story because these two young guys had to leave their entire families and were never able to go back home again.

Never. And their mother never knew what happened to her two children. And my granddaddy told my mom that they had a mob after them, a lynch mob, when they ran. And what they did, the way they survived, was that they came up on a creek, and the creek had an embankment up under it. They could hear the bloodhounds barking, they were right on their trails. So they jumped off into the creek and got up under the embankment where the dogs couldn’t smell them. The mob went all up and down the creek and never did find them, but they were right there. Somehow or another, the dogs lost the scent of them. And they stayed there until the sun came up, and they got out from under there.

Mama said my granddaddy said that they would travel at night. Then my granddaddy stopped in Mississippi. His name was Tony Calvin Jackson. And his brother was Lucius Jackson. And Lucius went on to Louisiana and changed his name to Louis Hall. But that just goes to show that Black folks, we have always been able to survive.

I wish there would have at least been a way that they could have told their parents what happened.

I tell you what else they say happened. Until those boys came up missing, she and her husband, my great-grandfather, they were still married. They were living together. But they wound up separating after all this happened. I guess the stress and the pressure of losing the boys and all that.… He ended up leaving her, and she ultimately lost her husband and her two boys.

In a world like that, I’m sure both of them were thinking, you know, there’re just so many things that could have happened to them. I wish that they would have been able to reach out, but I know that it would have been too dangerous for them to do that.

Exactly. It would’ve been. They didn’t have telephones. And they couldn’t write back because the letter could have been traced. It just would have been too dangerous. Neither one of them ever went back to Florida. They say she died one New Year’s Eve at a Watch Night service, on her knees praying.

Goodness. I do thank God that it’s come full circle. And God has brought the family back together even though it took 100 years. But it’s yet another element of racism and white people’s laws ripping families apart. It reminds me of people being sold away, on the auction block, and never being able to see their family again, not knowing what happened to their family members.

Exactly. It’s the same thing. That’s exactly right. I think about that. Crossing the Atlantic on the slave ships; it’s all the same thing. I make sure my kids and young people in my family know about all of this.

In my family, I am the second generation away from slavery. My kids are the third generation away from slavery. And my sisters and I are passing the torch to the younger members of the family. Because we had written and documented all of our family history on the Jackson side and the Robinson side. And I tell the young people, it’s time for you guys to step up to the plate and just document stuff. Because when you’re gone, and we’re already gone, all this stuff can be lost. You’ve got to document.

Black folk, we’ve always preserved things through the oral tradition.

That’s right. Because we didn’t have anything else. White folks get a joy out of telling our history. I don’t like that. They don’t know nothing about our history. Talking about how we lived as slaves and how happy we were. One of the things that the white man tried to do was break our spirits. They don’t understand how all of the stuff they inflicted on us.… Sure, we were singing. Sure, we were dancing. Sure, we were laughing. That doesn’t mean it didn’t affect us. They thought that because we were doing that despite all they did to us, that we didn’t have the ability to love. But that wasn’t it. It’s the fact that we are so heartstrong. We are heartstrong.

And I tell my kids that the mere fact that you are alive here today tells you that your ancestors survived coming across the Atlantic. You’ve got to think about that. That’s a serious thing. If your ancestors hadn’t made it, you wouldn’t be here today. And the willpower that they had is what you need to maintain.

As African Americans, our existence alone is a miracle. And existing with our spirits intact.

It’s all about maintaining power.

Were you involved in the Civil Rights Movement at all?

I didn’t march because my parents were so protective of me after my brother got beat up. But my sister Amy, when she went to college, she marched with Medgar Evers. She was involved with the Movement. And we did some integration stuff on our own. My dad would always do things. For instance, when Billy Graham came to Mississippi in the ’50s, he told the white folks that if Blacks couldn’t come to hear him preach, he wasn’t coming. So they advertised it. Daddy and Mama got us ready, they said, “We going.” And they carried us all over there. It was outside on a hill, you know; you could sit outside, everybody was on their blankets and all. So, we would always do things like that. We integrated on the ground like that.

They made sure to expose us to what was going on, but they didn’t let us get out there and march. But Amy did when she left and went to college and stuff. My cousin, Dr. Amos Brown, he was the youth president of the NAACP, when Medgar Evers was living. Amos went to jail because of his work with the Movement. He’s my first cousin, and they have a record of him in the Smithsonian.

Do you believe that Dr. King’s dream is possible in America?

Oh, yes! It is definitely possible. But we have to get back focused. You know, when Dr. King was alive and Medgar Evers was alive, and the churches were united and we were organized, with God’s help, yes. The dream is coming true. It’s already coming true, and I believe that.

It’s swinging toward justice for us. I truly believe this country has to be turned around, because you can’t have this prejudice and discrimination embedded in your laws. It’s in the laws. A lot has happened, but that has to change. But I choose to believe it’s possible.

It’s just so interesting that despite all that you’ve been through, you have this optimism about where this country could be.

I just think we are headed to that “more perfect union.” And that’s why defending democracy is so important. And that’s why some people in this country don’t actually want democracy. But your perfect union will come about with democracy. But see, when they penned those words, they weren’t thinking about the perfect union including us. Black people. That’s what’s powerful about Dr. King. He said I’m ready for them to pay me. They owe me. Because you put it in your Constitution, you wrote it in your rules, you wrote it in everything. I just want you to give me what is in that. When they wrote all men were created equal, they didn’t include us. They wasn’t talking about us. They need to stick to the Constitution that they wrote.

If you remember when David was getting ready to go fight Goliath, God told David this battle is not yours, it’s mine. It’s really the Lord’s battle.

I watch a lot of documentaries. This lady asked this old white guy something in an old clip, and he said, “The Blacks should’ve been content when they were slaves. We were good to them. They didn’t have to worry about paying bills, we were good to them. They should’ve just been content.” And the newslady asked, “When you brought the slaves over, did you really think that they would stay your slaves forever? For the rest of eternity?” And you know what he said? “We didn’t make it that far with the plan. We never even thought about them wanting to be free.”

Remember when they fought President Obama for eight years over Obamacare? And then when Trump got in and asked them what they wanted to do about it, they didn’t have a plan? That’s the point I’m making now. They ain’t have no plan! They never have a plan. They never thought when they brought us over here that we would be free. They didn’t plan it out. And their only thought now is to tear up democracy. Just like the Civil War—they wanted to tear it up, but they didn’t have a plan. They’re still mad they lost the Civil War, that’s all that is.

What would you say to an African American person a hundred years from now?

I think the message would be to remember your ancestors. Always know your history, your family history, and the history of your country. And the most important thing is: never, never allow anybody to put your race down. Know within yourself your value, and your self worth. And if you do that, no matter what’s happening, you will survive, and will carry the rest of your generation and family along with you. Always lift your head. That’s what my mama and my daddy taught us. They preached that to us day in and day out. Never let anybody take your self worth away from you. God and your ancestors are calling you and pushing you to do what you need to do. When our ancestors came over on the slave ships, they survived, and they want us to keep it going. Take it another notch forward.

I remembered I wanted to tell you, going back to being involved in the Civil Rights Movement. My neighbor was Alice Walker, the poet and the writer Alice Walker. Alice came here to Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement, and she and this white guy, Leventhal, got married. So, they tested the laws of Mississippi that there couldn’t be interracial marriages.

Alice and I got to be the best of friends. We lived right next door to each other. One of my major parts of the Civil Rights Movement was my husband and I watched their house for them. We lived in danger because they tried to bomb houses and all. Alice’s husband was the civil rights attorney that integrated the public schools here in Mississippi. So, everybody had a role. Big or small, we all had our roles.