When the conductor asked her again to give up her seat in the ladies’ car, she refused. He didn’t say that the other passengers objected to her company, but simply ordered her to surrender her seat and move on to the segregated car. Until he attempted to remove her forcibly, the ladies had assumed she was a servant traveling with her mistress, so were comfortable with the place she occupied in the first-class car. Only after the dispute erupted and the brown-skinned woman insisted that her first-class ticket entitled her to a seat did the white ladies recoil and begin shouting and ordering her to “get away” because they were “not in the habit of sitting on the seat with Negroes.” Then their nerves were shocked by her presence and the imposition of such intimate contact. The distress aroused by her proximity was not lessened by the petite stature of the colored schoolteacher—she was a few inches short of five feet—or her discernible refinement. The attractive twenty-one-year-old was attired in a stylish linen duster. The rancor of the women and the threats of the conductor hovering above her did not weaken her determination to continue on her journey from Memphis to Woodstock, Tennessee, or lead her to doubt her right to assume the seat for which she had paid. The conductor’s eyes, the harsh tone of his voice, and then the rough hands were not enough to dislodge her. No, she would not budge. The conductor attempted to yank her out of the comfortable upholstered chair, but when he grabbed her arm, she fastened her teeth onto the clenched hand assaulting her and bit down with all the force she could muster.
She took pride in the fact that two additional men were required to assist the conductor in ousting her. She fought like a tiger. They clutched her hands and feet, dragging her through the aisle, tearing her traveling coat. She held on to the seats, scratched and kicked, but there were too many of them and only one of her. The white passengers stood on their seats and clapped when she was ejected. She was not a lady. She was not a woman. She was a Negro. The Jim Crow car had no gender designation. Ida Wells chose to exit the train rather than suffer the humiliation of the segregated coach, which also served as a smoking and drinking car for white men. The conduct prohibited in the first-class car was licensed in the colored coach. White men smoked in the foul car, spat on the floor, drank liquor, cursed, read lewd magazines, ogled and molested colored women. As one young woman recalled, “You were at the mercy of the conductor and any man who entered.” Ida was familiar with “all the awful tragedies which had overtaken colored girls who had been obliged to travel alone on these cars.” This had been the rationale for the ladies’ coach.
Luckily there were no bruises, or black eyes, or battered ribs. For Miss Jane Brown, another colored woman who had earlier been removed from a first-class coach, the action was justified after the fact by the charge that “she was not a respectable person” but “a notorious public courtesan, addicted to the use of profane language and offensive conduct in public places.” The damage done to Ida Wells was justified not by a bad reputation, but by her status as “not-quite human.” A darky damsel and a black cow were strangely equivalent and indicative of the category crisis she embodied. What kind of woman was she, if a woman at all? The question was no less prescient or urgent than it had ever been. A century later, it would achieve mythic proportions: Ain’t I a woman? The hold of the uncertainty was so inescapable that it mattered little that Sojourner Truth had never uttered such words. As Ida Wells experienced directly, a colored woman could be labeled a prostitute, cursed as a “slanderous and dirty-minded mulatress,” and threatened with castration.
On her way back home, she decided to hire a lawyer and fight the railway company in court. An obedient disposition did not come naturally to her. By her own description, she was tempestuous, hardheaded, and willful which meant she was prepared to confront and stand against white men and the law, and the whole world if need be. She would not stay in her place or kowtow to the ruling race. When she shared the story with her attorney, her voice did not break with the mortification the violent incident sought to produce; rather, it unleashed her innate fearlessness and a quality of courage so fierce and steadfast that it enabled her to do what “reasonable” Negroes declined—to confront, battle, boycott, and oppose white supremacy on all fronts. Only her skin betrayed her as she recounted what had happened; it prickled as she recalled the hands of white men on her arms and legs and tugging at her waist. The bitter taste of the words stuck in her throat might have caused a weaker woman to cry or to retch, but she held it all in check.
The conductor and the baggage handler might have done far worse, and the law would have permitted it. She knew first-hand the terrible things that happened to Negro women. That very day, she had read a story in the Appeal about a colored woman who had been lynched in Richmond, Virginia. Terrible things had happened in her family too. She remembered distinctly an exchange between her grandmother Peggy and her father, James Wells, about the old master and his wife. Her father was the offspring of the slave owner, property not son. Her grandmother mentioned that Miss Polly, the old mistress, wanted to see James and his children. The vehemence of her father’s response surprised the young Ida: “I never want to see that old woman as long as I live. I will never forget how she had you stripped and whipped the day after the old man died, and I am never going to see her.” Her father’s hard words raised questions that she dared not ask her grandmother, but which soon found their answer in the sexual violence that engulfed the south. In The Free Speech, Ida Wells would write stories about the schoolgirls and domestics and teachers raped and beaten and hanged. The women of the race have not escaped the fury of the mob. She would tally the atrocities. She would make a timetable of the deaths. She would denounce mob rule, lynching, sexual violence, and the white man’s law until the death threats forced her to flee Memphis and seek exile in the north.
In the parlor of well-appointed homes in Philadelphia and New York, she exchanged stories with other black women about the insults, the obscene propositions, the hateful glances, the lustful eyes, the threats of grievous bodily harm. There was no asylum to be found in the north either. The very words “colored girl” or “Negro woman” were almost a term of reproach. She was not in vogue. Any homage at the shrine of womanhood drew a line of color, which placed her forever outside its mystic circle. Together they recounted these stories in a world-weary tone, but without shame—they were treated less kindly than a stray dog, handled less gently than a mule, they were brutalized and abandoned by the law. Then there were the stories that made the room go silent: that woman in New Orleans murdered for living with a white man as her husband; the housekeeper lynched for stealing a Bible; the mother hanged alongside her son for the usual charge; the postmaster’s wife, Mrs. Baker, who lost her husband and infant daughter to the mob, enraged that a Negro had taken a white man’s job; the thirteen-year-old girl, Mildrey Brown, lynched in Columbia; the eight-year-old Maggie Reese raped in Nashville; Lou Stevens hanged from a railway bridge for the murder of the white paramour who had abused her; and it went on. The Red Record never ceased. More than a thousand Negroes had been murdered in six years. All the terrible things she and the other survivors would never forget no matter how hard they tried.
As the women drank tea and ate shortbread, they planned ways to prevent such things from ever happening, collectively dreamed of a country in which they might be citizens, weighed the pros and cons of African emigration, lamented the dead. Ida Wells described the virtues of the Winchester and concluded self-defense was the sole protection afforded black women. One had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or a rat in a trap. The sentence she penned about the outlaw hero, the attic-philosopher Robert Charles, could well be applied to her. She had already determined to sell her life as dearly as possible if attacked.
The delicate clatter of a porcelain teacup placed gently in a saucer, the ring of a silver spoon laid carefully on the Wedgwood pattern seemed to announce—Still here. It was the murmur, the music that animated their speech. Still here. They didn’t allow their voices to crack or their eyes to glisten at the cold facts, at the brutal calculus of life and death. Only us and we and still here allowed them to utter one atrocity after another without breaking.
