Segregated schools, segregated churches, segregated doctors’ offices–we all knew our place. Mammy Lee never prepared me for the world that I had to enter once I left the placenta-like fairyland she had created for me within my home. Lee never warned me that I would sing, “Jesus loves the little children,” in my fourth-grade Sunday School class. “Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight. . . ” The words still painfully lurk in my memory. Where was this world of which I so enthusiastically sang?! Lee never told me that I would wipe the steam from my school-bus window and see tattered black children standing with their tattered books — some of which I had discarded only the year before. As I peered into their consuming brown eyes, I felt a part of me die, I felt my innocence departing. I felt myself being drawn into this madness called racial anger . . . And it was clear to this ten year old that all the adults around me were very angry. Poor Mammy Lee could no longer solve all my problems with Vick’s rub and caster oil.
I heard about my first lynching from Lee. An African American had been beaten nearly to death on the old Red Fork Road by the Klan. No one really knew why. It no doubt frightened her. It terrified me because it frightened her.
But she tried. “Hush little Jimbo, don’t yo’ cry,” I can still hear Mammy’s husky voice whisper, “Mammy’s gonna love yo’ ’til I die. All yo’r troubles will soon be over.” But they were not over, they had just begun. Like an unfaithful mistress, the land I loved was betraying me.
Lee’s departure during my eighth year irreparably damaged me. I still feel the pain. It was like losing a parent. My parents told me that they could no longer afford her but that was small compensation to a child whose most frequent semblance of love and order lay in the countenance of an overweight woman of color.