Claudette Colvin (3 page)

Pine Level didn't have much more than a few shacks for the sharecropper families, a schoolhouse, a church, and a general store, but I was at home in all of it. I floated free, and slept at the homes of my mom's friends as much as in my own bed. They all raised me together. Some nights I ended up at Baby Tell's house—she was my mom's best friend, plump and short and always happy to see me. She lived in an old farmhouse, the biggest house in Pine Level. White people used to own it, and we never knew exactly how Baby Tell's family got it. Her attic was full of paintings and an organ and an old spinning wheel. Annie and I used to look out the attic window and pretend the Yankee soldiers were about ready to come charging over the hill.

Other nights I slept at Mama Sweetie's, a tiny woman in her sixties who was the best reader in Pine Level. She had read the entire Bible many times. She had her own blue-covered Webster's dictionary. Mama Sweetie taught practically every child in Pine Level their ABCs and how to write their names and how to count to a hundred, using peanuts. She cooked for all the people when they came in from the fields. Baby Tell and Mama Sweetie were like sisters to my mom, and mothers to me. They loved me to keep them company. My nonstop talking and constant questions seemed to drive my mom crazy, but it didn't bother them at all: they loved that about me.

Our school was a one-room white wooden building with red trim. Annie and I walked there together every day, lunch sacks in one hand, book sacks in the other. It had a potbellied stove in the middle and a picture of Abraham Lincoln on the wall. One teacher taught all six elementary grades, and sat us in sections around the room, grade by grade, two to a desk. The room was rarely full because students kept getting pulled away to do farmwork. A farmer would just appear in the doorway and yell, “I need two boys to help with the cows,” and they'd be out the door in a flash.

Spring Hill School in Pine Level, where Claudette attended elementary school, was newer than the school in rural Georgia pictured here, but like many schools for African-American children, it had one room, one teacher, six grades, and a potbellied stove for heat

I loved school. I memorized the Dick and Jane reader so my teacher would think I could already read. One day she asked me to read aloud, but I got way out ahead of the text. She couldn't figure out what was going on. She told my parents to take me to Montgomery to get my eyes checked. I learned the entire second grade in advance just by listening to Annie—she was a year older than me—and by hearing Mama Sweetie read from her Bible and her Webster's dictionary. When it came time for me to start second grade I could already read and write and spell and even do some arithmetic. They tested me and told me to go sit with the third graders. After that, I was always younger than the other kids in my class.

I knew plenty of white people, and they knew me. You had to be very careful around them. They never called the adults “Mr.” or “Miss” or “Mrs.”; they used their first names instead. Or sometimes they made up little nicknames to dominate us. I was Coot. A doctor gave that name to me when I was little to distract me from the shot he was about to give. He sang, “Oh she's the cutest little thing,” but it came out “coot”—and the name stuck.

I was very religious. Annie and I played church together out behind her house, setting up chairs and doing services. Her brother would be the pastor, or she would be since she was older. I'd be the shouter. The second Sunday of every month the Reverend H. H. Johnson came out from Montgomery and pastored a service at our little church in the country. We'd call it Big Meeting Sunday. People would flock in from everywhere, in cars, wagons, whatever they could get to move. On a Big Meeting Sunday, we'd pull up to church at noon and wouldn't get home until dark. First there'd be regular church, then a program, then a glee club competition, then another sermon, then different choirs would sing. You'd have food all day long and come home stuffed.

I remember this one Big Meeting Sunday, I was riding on the back of the truck before the service started, to go get ice at the general store. It was about 11:00 a.m., and we passed Mr. Jones, the white man who owned our property, walking to his own
church. It was hot, and he had his blazer slung over his shoulder. His Baptist church was just a short distance from the store. Forty-five minutes later we were coming back with the ice and we passed him again, walking the other way—he was already out of church! That was just one more thing that seemed different about white people. How could anyone serve God on Sunday in less than an hour?

W
HEN
C
LAUDETTE TURNED EIGHT
, Mary Ann Colvin inherited a house in Montgomery. Excited to live in a place of their own, the family loaded their belongings—including a horse named Mack—into the back of a neighbor's cattle truck and pushed off for Alabama's capital city. Their new home was a small frame house in a tiny hilltop neighborhood sandwiched between two white subdivisions on Montgomery's northeast side. King Hill, as the neighborhood was called, consisted of three unpaved streets lined with red shotgun shacks and frame houses like the Colvins'. Toilets were out-of-doors. Though King Hill had a citywide reputation as a depressed and dangerous neighborhood, the Colvins found it to be an extremely close-knit community where people knew and looked out for one another. Neighbors sat on their front porches fanning the humid air while children played in a small nearby park with a recreation center. Sad at first to leave Annie and the open countryside, Claudette soon made her peace with city life.

C
LAUDETTE
: I slept with Delphine in the back bedroom with our own little fireplace. She would say her prayers as fast as she could and then jump into bed, waiting for me to hurry up and finish mine. I was a serious pray-er, asking for help in this and that, and blessing about everyone I knew, but Delphine just whipped through the Lord's Prayer and jumped into bed. As soon as I got in she'd be talking and talking, asking me how to spell this word and that, and then she'd start singing songs she'd heard on the radio and twitching and squirming around with new dances. Delphine could keep me awake all night.

Daddy Q.P. had his own special chair in the front room, and no one else could sit in it. He was a small man, too small for the Army they said, but he was wiry and strong and he could do anything. He had built our house in Pine Level, and there was very little he couldn't make, grow, or fix. And he was fun. On Sunday mornings I'd sit on the floor next to him and he'd read me the funnies. We had an electric fan, but we only used it on Sundays because it sucked down electricity so fast. We didn't get a TV until the bus boycott, but our radio ran off a battery that gave us about an hour at a time of a white station, WSFA. My favorite show was
Mr. Comedian
, about this detective who worked in disguise. I listened to the
Grand Ole Opry
, too. The star of the show was Hank Williams, a famous country singer from Montgomery. When he died, his funeral drew the biggest crowd in the history of the city. Hank Williams's wife invited the black community to attend since so many of us liked his music, but Mom wouldn't let me go because the funeral was segregated.

Going to the movies with Jim Crow

I loved going downtown. Montgomery had stores like J. J. Newberry's and
Kress's five-and-ten, which opened onto Monroe Street—the main street for black people. Out back of Kress's there was a hot dog stand. A lady who worked there and knew my dad would stack up soda crates so I could sit down while I ate hot dogs and drank my soda.

But downtown could make me very angry, too. We could shop in white stores—they'd take our money all right—but they wouldn't let us try anything on. I never went into a fitting room like white people did. The saleslady would measure me and then go get the dress or the blouse and bring it out. She'd hold it up and tell me it was a perfect fit and expect my mom to buy it. When Delphine and I needed shoes, my mom would trace the shape of our feet on a brown paper bag and we'd carry the outline to the store because we weren't allowed to try the shoes on.

You couldn't try on a hat either unless you put a stocking on your head. They said our hair was “greasy.” They said it in such a degrading way; they never said “please” or asked if we minded. Once, I went into a store with my mom and saw a beautiful Easter hat I really wanted. None of the other kids had that hat. But the saleslady kept bringing out different hats. For some reason she didn't want me to have the hat I wanted. I got madder and madder. She kept saying, “Why don't you want
this
hat?” and holding up hats I didn't want. Finally, I got frustrated and answered, “Because my ears don't stick out like yours.” My mom was horrified—she covered my mouth up and marched me out of the store.

Another time I had to go to the optometrist downtown. My dad and I got to the office early—I was the very first patient. There was only one chair in the waiting room. The doctor told us to leave and come back at the end of the day. I didn't understand why until I overheard my dad telling my mom about it when we got home. The optometrist wasn't gonna let me sit in that chair until all the whites had sat in it first. He knew no white patient would ever sit in a chair that he'd seen a black sit in.