This train is a clean train, this train,
This train is a clean train, this train,
This train is a clean train, ev’rybody’s riding in Jesus’ name,
This train is a clean train, this train.
Rosetta Tharpe
No doctor was in attendance when a black girl-child was born to Katie Harper on a farm just outside of Cotton Plant, Arkansas, in 1915. There were several white physicians in Cotton Plant, a relatively prosperous Mississippi Delta town about sixty-five miles west of Memphis, but no black woman would have bothered to call on them. The closest hospital was in Little Rock, more than seventy miles to the southwest, but even with the railroad, that was out of the question too. So Rosa, or Rosie Etta, or Rosabell—for she had many names before she became internationally known as Sister Rosetta Tharpe—was born on the grounds of the Tilman Cooperwood farm, where Katie Harper lived and worked. A midwife from the community was likely there to comfort and guide Katie when she gave birth to her first and only child at the relatively advanced age of thirty-two. The date of the birth was March 20, although no official certificate was issued; in those days, the only records country women like Katie kept were notes jotted down in family Bibles.
The girl Katie gave birth to was precocious from the start. It was said she began walking and talking before her first birthday. She had a gift of music in her, a God-given gift that she shared with her parents. Both Katie and her husband, Willis (or Willie) B. Atkins, a farm laborer, could sing—not in the manner of the trained vocalists who appeared at Cotton Plant’s Francis Opera House, a room in a building on Main Street—but in the manner of black working people who sang for their pleasure, or at church, or as a distraction in the fields or the kitchens where they spent most of their waking hours. Like his wife, Willis Atkins had a clear, booming voice, the kind that “when he sang you could hear him across a field,” remembers his grandson, Roy T. Scott.
Willis died soon after the second Great War, but Katie maintained that strong voice until 1968. Back when she gave birth, nothing would have been further from Katie’s imagination than recording an album with Dizzy Gillespie when she was seventy-seven. And no wonder: neither Dizzy, nor modern bebop, nor LPs existed in 1915. Nor could Willis or Katie have predicted that their little girl, born into humble circumstances in the segregated South, would become gospel music’s first national star and a pioneer of modern rock-and-roll guitar. Thirty years later, Rosetta would return to the area around Cotton Plant a bona fide celebrity in a fancy black roadster, thrilling the people there with her fine clothes, fistfuls of United States currency, and glamorous persona.
In 1915, however, these were fairy tales of a future beyond imagination. Back then, Willis and Katie raised Rosetta in the manner of all loving and well-intentioned parents of every station and background. They taught her to obey her elders, not to sass, and to remember the lessons she learned in church. As the cliché goes, children were to be seen and not heard—and such rules of conduct were particularly crucial for black children, for whom a careless word could spell mortal trouble. Unlike the state capital, Cotton Plant was never touched by the racial violence that rocked Arkansas in the early twentieth century, when fifty-four black people were lynched between 1910 and 1929.1 Yet that didn’t mean that the black citizens of Cotton Plant could speak freely. As ninety-three-year-old Sam Scott, Cotton Plant’s oldest living resident, recalls, “a young man come in, a white man, you had to say Mister to him.” Rosie would have been taught much the same racial etiquette, as a matter of survival.
At the same time, Rosie grew up with music in the air. Both Katie and Willis taught her to use her voice to sing, and both set her the example of playing an instrument, Katie the piano and mandolin, Willis the guitar and the mouth harp (harmonica). The area around Cotton Plant had other young people who imbibed these values: Louis Jordan, the bandleader and jump-swing innovator, born just ten miles down the road in Brinkley, blues musician Peetie Wheatstraw, and gospel singer Ernestine Washington.
Rosetta didn’t know her father for very long. By her sixth year, she and Katie had departed Cotton Plant without him to settle in Chicago, and by the time Rosetta reconnected with the Atkins clan living in Camden, Arkansas, in the early ’50s, Willis had already passed away. According to Donell Atkins, Willis’s son by his third wife, Effie, Rosetta “didn’t ’preciate being kept away from her daddy, because when she came she tried to pick up all the literature that she could about her daddy.” Although Willis’s ten living children by Effie—five boys and five girls, in addition to the five infants who died early—possessed among them only a few photographs of their father, they gave them to Rosetta, out of sympathy and respect for her fame as a musician. She promised to give them back, but never did. Thus, Willis Atkins lives on only in the memories of his surviving children.
That makes it difficult to know much about Willis’s heritage, Donell Atkins says. Willis’s mother may have had the surname Newton, but Donell isn’t certain whether “Atkins is a slave name” or a name Willis’s father took from another source. Family legend has it that Donell’s grandparents on his father’s side ran away from slavery.
Willis’s own personal history is clearer. Roy Scott, son of Willis’s daughter Elteaser, says he grew up hearing that his grandfather had had three separate families, including his mother’s and “Auntie” Rosetta’s. Born in 1876, just before the end of the relatively progressive and hopeful era of Reconstruction, Willis Atkins was married first at age twenty-four, to a woman by whom he had two children; then to Katie Harper; and finally, after he and Katie separated, to Effie, a woman twenty-six years his junior. By 1930, Effie and Willis were living on a rented farm in Ouachita County, in southern Arkansas, where Donell and Elteaser were born. Census records indicate that Willis could read and write, and that his oldest child by Effie, a daughter named Leona, attended school. In addition to farming, Willis worked for the Pacific Railroad, both as a switch man and as a tie-cutter, and later helped build highways, doing construction from Arkansas to Missouri. Donell remembers his father as robust and compact, a John Henry figure who, even in his older years, would march off without ceremony into the fields to cut wood. “I seen him pick up crossties and throw them over his shoulder and take them somewhere and stack them.”
To know what Willis Atkins looked like, you have only to look at Donell. “Everybody said I feature my daddy,” he attests. “I feature him a lot.” Elteaser, now ailing and on dialysis, agrees. “He was Donell height, about Donell tall,” she says of Willis Atkins. “My dad was kind of low. Dark brown skin. Dimples in his jaw. Gray hair.” (He was fifty when she was born.) He was also a devout Christian. “I never heard him sing the blues and I never seen him drink,” says Donell. “He was a beautiful man,” adds Elteaser. “He was real religious. He never whipped none of us. When things happened to us he took us on his lap and prayed for us and that was about it. . . . He did the best he could. He didn’t have too much to give us but he gave us love.”
Katie Harper’s heritage might be lost were it not for a document that she herself acquired from the U.S. Census Bureau in November 1959, when she was seventy-six years old, possibly so she could obtain a passport to accompany her world-famous daughter on an overseas tour. Bearing the stamp of the Commerce Department, the document, glued to a piece of cardboard, identifies the Katie Bell Nubin, then of 5046 Aspen Street in Philadelphia, as the Katie Harper born in 1883 and living in 1900 in Princeton, Arkansas, in Dallas County, about 120 miles to the southeast of Cotton Plant. Katie’s parents, Levi and Agness J. Harper, almost undoubtedly had been slaves; Levi was born in 1845 in Louisiana, to parents from Louisiana, Agness around 1842, to parents from Arkansas and Louisiana.
Like most black Southerners, they made their living working the land. The 1900 census taker noted Levi Harper as an “owner.” If this is so, then Katie may have grown up in relatively prosperous circumstances, since the vast majority of black people in the South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were either tenant farmers, meaning that they rented the land but owned the crops they produced on it, or sharecroppers, in which case they owned neither the land nor the fruits of their labor. Levi is entered in the 1880 census as a “renter,” so it’s possible that, in the twenty intervening years, he and Agness and their children managed to acquire their own farm.
Katie Harper grew up in a world that had precious little time for anything but work. Levi and Agness raised a large family, in part because, once they could perform even the most rudimentary chores, children were valuable additions to the family workforce. In all, they had five girls, Sallie, Dillie (or Dilly), Katie, Hanna, and Emma, as well as two boys, Rufuss and William—the latter probably named for an earlier William who died young. Like her parents and siblings, Katie received little if any schooling. The census enumerator of 1900 notes that at age sixteen Katie, like her father, Levi Harper, could neither read nor write. By that time, moreover, Agness had died, perhaps from the physical strain of giving birth to William, who was then one year old. Katie and her older sister Dillie (Sallie had moved out and likely married) thus greeted the new century as household and farm workers as well as caretakers of their younger siblings.2
How Katie Harper came to reside in Cotton Plant and how she met Willis Atkins are mysteries. Did she move there as a young woman, with other members of her family? Did she follow a husband, perhaps someone she married before Willis Atkins? Perhaps she migrated because she heard that good work could be found in a town that prided itself as “The Great Cotton Metropolis of Eastern Arkansas.”
Cotton Plant once belonged to lands inhabited by Cherokee and other American Indians, who were forcibly removed after the formation of Arkansas Territory in 1819. As local lore has it, its name came from the plant that sprang up from the ground after William Lynch, a white man, “accidentally” dropped cotton seeds onto its fertile soil. A prosperous town grew up where Lynch’s seed took root, but Cotton Plant declined in the late twentieth century. After the civil rights battle for school desegregation that raged in Little Rock in the 1950s, many of the young black people in Cotton Plant left to pursue their educations elsewhere, says Sam Scott. Like many other small towns across the country, Cotton Plant in the twenty-first century is in danger of extinction.
When Katie gave birth, Cotton Plant boasted a population of perhaps a thousand, with cotton farms, cotton gins, and a rapidly developing veneer industry that employed white and black men alike. Among the virtues of Cotton Plant noted by a 1905 version of The Hustler, a local newspaper, were its several Masonic lodges, its opera house, two banks, three hotels, a jewelry store, a shoemaker, a dentist, three lawyers, two white churches, and three “colored” churches. There was also a regular school system for white children and, for “Negro” children, the Cotton Plant Industrial Academy, originally a freedmen’s school founded in the 1880s by the Presbyterian Church. “In a country like ours where two races mingle in business relations so freely, it is very necessary for both to be educated. This education must be both literary and industrial. Skilled labor is always in demand. A thoroughly cultivated literary mind is always the pioneer of industrialism,” wrote The Hustler, in terms notably progressive for a racially mixed (approximately half-black, half-white) Delta town at the turn of the last century. “The school has given to the community around a different type of colored people, and it continues to rise higher and higher.”3
For the newspaper’s white editors, as well as for many black residents of Cotton Plant, a “different type” meant businessmen like Nat Darby, the town’s most prosperous black citizen; highly cultivated individuals such as Florence Price, a Boston conservatory-trained composer who gave music lessons in town; and members of a black middle class that drew from Cotton Plant’s small but significant service economy. According to Gwendolyn Stinson Gray, granddaughter of Nat Darby and daughter of one of the principals of Cotton Plant Academy, many black people owned farms and businesses in Cotton Plant in the early twentieth century. For example, although their property lay outside of Cotton Plant, the family of Pickens Black had thousands of acres and three airplanes: one to dust the farm, one to lift cargo, and a third for the family’s private use. Scott Barnes, a black citizen in nearby Forrest City, owned a rock quarry. Nat Darby was a farmer and builder who variously owned cotton gins, orchards and potato fields, a lumber yard, a planing mill, a commissary store, and a silent movie theater. Tilman Cooperwood, owner of the farm where Katie worked, was a black man.
Their wealth didn’t exempt these black families from segregation, of course; many lived in an area just south of town called Dark Corner. Nat Darby attended an African American church, belonged to a black Masonic lodge, and sent his children to Cotton Plant Academy. Participating in such vital black institutions, the Darbys and their social peers viewed themselves as models for and patrons to their less fortunate brethren. Like the Tilman Cooperwoods, remembers Gwendolyn Stinson Gray, they were “good livers,” prosperous people “who knew how to survive on what they had and who shared things.” Tilman himself was a particularly well established and resourceful man who owned a “pretty estimable piece of land.” His interest “was not in standing in command over people,” she says; rather, there was “interest in uplift.” “The conditions were not the norms that you hear about. . . . When you were a sharecropper there you were part of the family.”4 Sam Scott recalls much the same of the Cooperwoods: “They were the type that wanted you to look up and want the best things in life.”
Most black farmers—the majority in Cotton Plant—didn’t share the advantages of its landowning middle class. When Rosetta was growing up, the children of these families helped their parents tend to crops and animals and keep house; at best, they attended school seven months of the year: two at the height of the summer and five in the winter. So active were the many farms in and around Cotton Plant that Sam Scott remembers white cotton lint floating down Main Street at harvesting time. The Hustler, in the racially romanticizing terms of the day, waxed poetic about black laboring people: “For miles out from [Cotton Plant] in every direction stretches vast fields which in the fall of the year present the appearance of an immense blanket of snow. So white, so grand, so beautiful that but for the moving black people here and there who are eagerly grabbing the white, fluffy stuff from the bowls [sic] and placing it in sacks, one would think it a grand painting, the result of the brush of some master artist.”5
Sam Scott readily bursts the bubble of this fantasy of the happily laboring farm “Negro.” Although the son of an educated woman, Scott spent most of his working life farming, and he vividly recalls what this entailed in the era before mechanization. “I can remember when people used to have but one mule . . . they got one mule and eight or ten acres of cotton.” The owner of the farm “furnished the mule, he furnished the feed, then you give him half of what you made.” Each farm had a “riding boss”—“somebody to tell you what to do and everything, almost like [here he laughs] an improved slave.”
On the other hand, he has nostalgia for rural life in the nineteen-teens: fond memories of eating fresh meat and potatoes roasted in hot sand, of enjoying family time (“We were educated but we just, we believed in good living, you know”), and of Sunday evening entertainments after church. “Old folks would take the bed down,” he recalls, “and young people would gather in a room” where they would dance to the music made by someone playing piano or perhaps guitar. They did square dancing and a dance popular in the nineteen-teens called slow dragging, in which “couples would hang onto each other and just grind back and forth in one spot all night.”6 “All night” in Cotton Plant meant until ten o’clock, early enough to give people a bit of sleep before Monday morning’s rooster’s crow.
Social divisions within Cotton Plant’s diverse black population played themselves out not merely according to work and wealth, but according to religious affiliation. In general, wealthier black people belonged to congregations such as Westminster Presbyterian Church, which was affiliated with Cotton Plant Academy. Many working-class Southerners, on the other hand, were drawn to the new Pentecostal denominations that grew out of the Holiness movement of the mid-nineteenth century. Pentecostalism emphasized rigid standards of “clean” living—no alcohol, tobacco, gambling, social dancing, or other behaviors that might be construed as worldly—which meant that it exalted precisely the opposite of the conduct associated with the shameful stereotype of the lascivious, lazy, slovenly black slave. Yet in distinction to most Holiness denominations, Pentecostalism stressed the need for an experiential, lived faith, in which worshipers affirmed their baptism in the Holy Ghost through the “gift of tongues.”
Katie and Willis were early adherents of the Church of God in Christ, or COGIC, the most important of these emerging Pentecostal denominations. For their parents’ generation, few things had been more important and satisfying, in the years following Emancipation, than establishing their own places of worship, outside of white oversight. Yet while the majority of these churches, such as the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, took forms of white Protestantism as a model, COGIC was almost single-handedly generated by the efforts of a black man, Charles Harrison Mason. Born in 1866, Mason was an Arkansas native and an ordained Missionary Baptist minister who had earlier split with mainstream Baptists because of his embrace of Holiness beliefs. Then, in 1907, Mason’s life was transformed when he spent five weeks at a Holiness revival originally initiated by five black washerwomen in Los Angeles. The Azusa Street Revival, as it became known, began in early 1906 but gained quickly in strength and notoriety, particularly because its multiracial attendees had begun speaking a “Weird Babel of Tongues.”7
Elder Mason himself underwent a tongue-speaking epiphany. “When I opened my mouth to say Glory,” he would later report, “a flame touched my tongue which ran down to me. My language changed and no word could I speak in my own tongue. Oh! I was filled with the Glory of the Lord. My soul was then satisfied.”8 It was as though Mason were living out the words of Acts 2:4, in which, on the day of the Pentecost (the seventh Sunday after Easter), the people “were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.”9 Convinced that such outpouring of the Holy Ghost was essential to salvation, Mason—later, Bishop Mason—took his experiences back east with him, quickly attracting adherents to COGIC in Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Tennessee, particularly Memphis, which later became the international church headquarters.
In COGIC, Willis and Katie discovered more than an institution in which they could reaffirm, from week to week, a sense of black community and humanity. It also allowed them to express themselves in a way that connected them to the faith of their earliest enslaved ancestors, who gathered in “hush arbors” to perform African-based rituals like the ring shout. In a sense, Mason cultivated a style of worship in which modern black people, while reaffirming their essential dignity through Holiness living, might do so without abandoning the sustaining religious practices of the past. COGIC services were exciting and dramatic, with preachers who painted terrifying pictures of hell and soul-stirring images of heaven. Their music was lively and joyful, underscoring the pleasures of communal singing and dance as expressions of faith. At the same time, women were held to rigidly enforced standards of modesty, as an extension of Holiness living in the secular world. They were taught to dress without ornament and to shun makeup, jewelry, or any of the popular hair-straightening or skin-lightening products of the day. Such sanctions regulated and perhaps repressed their sexuality, but they also shielded them from degrading stereotypes of black women as Jezebels and temptresses.10
As in most Pentecostal and Holiness denominations, women in COGIC were banned from official ordination and lay preaching alike, but they enjoyed status in the church as evangelists, Sunday school instructors, and music teachers.11 Like men, who enjoyed dignified titles such as “elder” or “pastor,” regardless of their formal religious training, women in COGIC were anointed with honorifics such as “sister” and “mother.” Not by coincidence is African American gospel the only indigenous U.S. music in which women performers, especially soloists, predominate. Rock and roll, a form Rosetta Tharpe would help to invent, has long been associated with masculine prowess and male musicians. But rock’s gospel roots betray its feminine heritage—a heritage largely located in the Pentecostal Church.
Especially important for Katie and young Rosie—who had her first institutional exposure to religious song through COGIC services—Mason and his followers took a particularly liberal stand on the definition of “sacred” music. Instead of forbidding in church the everyday instruments associated with secular leisure, COGIC interpreted Scripture to dictate that congregants “shout” their faith with everything from tambourines and drums to trumpets and guitars. Indeed, whereas mainline Protestant denominations set strict limits on rhythmic music, or anything that might stir the body to movement, COGIC admitted into its musical repertory elements of blues, work songs, and ragtime, cross-fertilizing these in a glorious hybrid with slave spirituals and traditional hymns. Like speaking in tongues, exuberant singing and “holy dancing” affirmed the body, in its instinctive response to rhythm, as an instrument of God. Bodies, moreover, constituted unique percussive instruments. A great noise could be raised for the Lord through the collective clapping of hands and stamping of feet.
Katie’s affiliation with COGIC indelibly shaped the life of her baby girl. The church provided Rosetta’s earliest musical template, the sound palette on which she would draw throughout her career. COGIC established mother’s and daughter’s essential outlook on life as a striving for holiness, and imparted to them a profound and spirit-sustaining faith in God’s protection. No matter how far she might stray from COGIC principles of holy living, or how far she might fall from the favor of the denomination’s strictest and most unforgiving members, Rosetta’s musical sensibility still bore the distinctive mark of Pentecostalism. In later years, when she raised her hands above her head in performance, she recalled COGIC doctrine urging the use of the outstretched arms in prayer; when she put a little swing in her spirituals, she echoed COGIC’s liberal approach to blues. To use a gospel metaphor, when Rosetta “looked down the line” near the end of her life, all roads would lead back to the Pentecostal Church—the source of her first audiences and of her own determined belief in herself, no matter the discouragements and setbacks the world would throw at her.
Ironically, it was COGIC’s historical links to slave religion that rendered it an affront and an embarrassment to many middle-class blacks, who considered its practices a “heathenish” throwback to “pagan” Africa, and its charismatic leaders a dangerous influence on the people most in need of racial uplift in the rapidly industrializing United States. For some black Southerners who wanted to distance themselves from the trauma of a degrading and dehumanizing slave past, Pentecostalism’s roots in slavery were a source not merely of embarrassment but of pain. To paraphrase novelist Toni Morrison, for many, slavery was not a story “to pass on.” “Naturally enough when the Negro found himself free, he literally put his past behind him,” wrote John Wesley Work in 1915. “It was his determination that as far as within him lay, not one single reminder of that black past should mar his future. So away went all those reminders into the abyss of oblivion.”12
The willful repression of the black past seemed to hold out the promise of a more peaceful and prosperous black future, but it was not to be. During Katie’s and Willis’s young adulthood, Reconstruction gave way to the nightmare of a rising national tide of racism and racial violence. During the Red Summer of 1919, black soldiers returning from service abroad—including veterans in uniform—were harassed, abused, lynched, and even burned alive.13 The historical overlap of these two trends—the emergence of new Pentecostal-Holiness churches and the increased repression of black people of all backgrounds and classes, whether through violence or “ordinary” segregation—gave many even more reason to fear the perpetuation of religious practices outside the Protestant norm.
The progressive black intelligentsia of the early twentieth century also found much to disapprove of in the demonstrative worship of the “unlettered” classes. To the degree that Africans had historically been portrayed as incapable of reason and suited only for labor, COGIC and other Pentecostal denominations raised the fear of playing into the hands of the white majority. What might seem like a sheltering cocoon of religious commitment to people like Katie Harper and Willis Atkins could be construed, in the minds of others, as religious extremism. As one delegate to the 1900 National Negro Business League meeting put it, “I am one of those who believe the Negro must do something besides praying all the time. [Applause.] We started out directly after the surrender praying, ‘Lord, give me Jesus and you can have all the world.’ The white man in the South took us at our word and we got all the Jesus and he got all the world. [Laughter and applause.]”14
When Pentecostalism emerged, many non-Pentecostal black people took to calling believers like Katie Bell and her daughter “Holy Rollers,” disparaging their shouts and ecstatic movements. The term particularly reflected the defensiveness of middle-class blacks, who saw Holiness and Pentecostal religion as a threat to the accomplishments and progress of “the race.” Horace Clarence Boyer, a member of the Boyer Brothers gospel duo and a preeminent scholar of gospel, who was brought up in Faith Holy Temple Church of God in Christ, in Winter Park, Florida, notes that “Holy Roller” was virtually always used derisively. “You never heard that in polite society. It was just not to be done,” he says. “We were born in the Pentecostal church, and we were very sensitive.”15
Scorn from some segments of the black population didn’t prevent Katie and little Rosie from attending COGIC services in Cotton Plant every Sunday, according to Sam Scott. Their church was rudimentary. In fact, it was not unlike the Baptist Missionary church the Scotts attended: a small wooden structure with slats where windows might have gone. Working-class people typically walked to church, which meant that they arrived for services dirty; in the days before Cotton Plant had indoor plumbing, when people arrived at church, “they would go to the pump and wash their legs and dry ’em off and put the talcum on.” The big difference, as Sam remembers, is that at Shady Grove they had a piano and sang hymns like “Amazing Grace” “like it was wrote.” But at the COGIC church Katie Harper and Rosie attended, they had “a different version, they put a little spirit in it, you know. . . . They would add to it, you know. That’s what the difference. And they had the guitar for the back up, you know. . . . After a while, they quit singing straight by the note, you know . . . [and] sometime they’ll swing it.” Sam Scott is mildly disapproving of this “looser” approach to liturgical music. “ ‘Amazing Grace’ is telling you something, you know. So every song has got a message to it. . . . But I think if you want more out of it you have to sing it like it was wrote and what is meant.”
Still, as children, Sam and his younger brother Cheatam enjoyed passing by the COGIC church on a Sunday afternoon to listen in on worship practices so different from their own. “We never had been used to that kind of, uh, I mean service, you know, and they would dance and shout in church, and we thought it was fun, I guess.” He laughs. “So we would walk down there, when they first started. They’d have the guitar and the piano and all that stuff. . . . It was just amusing to us.”
Sam Scott remembers Katie Harper as a “spiritual woman,” but where Willis Atkins is concerned he draws a blank; in Sam’s mind there is only an image of “the woman with the little girl who’d sing.” Donell Atkins credits his father with teaching Rosetta songs when she was a child, but when the subject of Katie and Rosetta’s departure from Cotton Plant comes up, he can only speculate from what he inferred from Willis Atkins. “Sister Rosetta’s mother, she became a preacher, and at that time a preacher couldn’t be married staying in a house with a man, so she left my daddy while he was at work and he never did hear from her no more. That’s how it come out like that. I guess Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s mother never did let her forget about her daddy. Who he were. But they never did try to contact him.” Elteaser echoes her brother. “Her mother wanted to preach, you know, so she said she couldn’t preach and be married, too. Rosetta was going out in the world, playing the guitar and everything, and she [Katie] said she wanted to preach and Rosetta would play her guitar.”
Charles Mason’s establishment of a COGIC Women’s Department in 1911 could only have encouraged Katie to consider full-time evangelist work, particularly if she saw a better future for herself and her gifted daughter away from Cotton Plant. Perhaps Katie, a shrewd if untaught woman, understood that as the twentieth century progressed, the Emancipation Era pledge of forty acres and a mule—that is, the promise of black landownership—had drifted away, as the cotton lint wafted through the humid Cotton Plant air. If nothing else, becoming a missionary would have given Katie the opportunity to free herself and her child from the burdens of Southern life.16 It’s conceivable that Bishop Mason himself sent Katie out to evangelize.
Marie Knight, Rosetta’s closest friend and her singing partner beginning in the late 1940s, tells a very different story from that of the Atkins clan. As Marie heard from Katie, she was forced to leave Cotton Plant because “the church world didn’t accept her with a child out of wedlock.” “She said she never had the pleasure of actually being married to him,” Marie recalls of Katie Harper. The disreputable pregnancy “carried down on her mind,” Marie says. “She told me she used to go off and hide the larger she got with the baby . . . and the neighbors had to come to find her.” Yet “the thing that settled Katie Bell down was Rosetta,” she adds. Once she realized “she could make a living” through her child’s rapidly developing musical gift, it became a natural next step to consider moving to a more metropolitan area, where the opportunities for missionary work were greater and the sinners more plentiful.
Roxie Moore, Rosetta’s long-time friend, reconciles these different stories by noting that under church laws, female evangelists were not permitted to marry. Katie Bell therefore would have been married in the eyes of the community, but not in the eyes of the church.
Whatever the case, Sam Scott remembers clearly that Katie Harper left Cotton Plant with only her child at her side. They were en route to Parkin, Arkansas, a town fifty miles or so northeast of Cotton Plant that was on the east-west rail line heading straight to Memphis, and from Memphis to St. Louis, St. Louis to Chicago. The route taken by most black migrants from Cotton Plant was also to be Katie and Rosetta’s route.