Roots (104 page)

C
ynthia’s and Will’s prayers were answered in 1895 with the birth of the sound, healthy girl whom they named Bertha George—the “George” after Will’s father. Cynthia insisted on assembling a houseful of family before whom she told the gurgling infant the whole story back to the African, Kunta Kinte, just as Tom Murray had told it to all of his children at intervals when they had been young.

Will Palmer respected Cynthia’s devotion to her ancestors’ memory, but it irritated his own deep pride to be considered as having married into Cynthia’s family rather than the other way around. It was probably why he began to monopolize little Bertha even before she could walk. Every morning he carried her about before he left for work. Every night he tucked her into the little crib that he had made with his hands for her.

By the time Bertha was five, the rest of the family and much of the town’s black community quoted Cynthia and speaking for themselves echoed her opinion, “Will Palmer jes’ spilin’ dat gal to pieces!” He had arranged that she had credit at every Henning store that sold candy; and he paid the bill each month, though he made her keep an accounting, which he solemnly checked “to teach her business.” As her fifteenth-birthday present, when he opened a Sears, Roebuck mail-order account in her name, the
people shook and wagged their heads in mingled astonishment, dismay—and pride: “All dat young’un got to do is pick what she like out’n dat pitcher catalogue, an’ write off de order blank, an’ firs’ thing you knows dem Sears, Roebuck white folks way yonder in Chicago done sent it—seen it wid dese here eyes . . . an’ her daddy pays fo’ it . . . you hearin’ what I’m tellin’ you, chile? Anythin’ dat Bertha
want!’

Later that same year, Will hired a teacher to come weekly all the way from Memphis to give Bertha piano lessons. She was a gifted pupil, and before long was playing for the choir in the New Hope Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, of which Will was the senior trustee and Cynthia was the perennial president of the Stewardess Board.

When Bertha finished the local eighth grade in June of 1909, there was no question that she would be leaving Henning to attend the CME Church-supported Lane Institute thirty miles to the east in Jackson, Tennessee, which went from ninth grade through two years of college.

“Gal, jes’ no way you can know . . . what it mean, you bein’ dis fam’ly’s firs’ one headin’ fo’ a college—”

“Maw, if I can
ever
git you and Paw to
please
quit saying such as ‘
dis
’ and ‘
fo’!
I keep telling you they’re pronounced ‘
this
’ and ‘
for’!
Anyway, isn’t that why colleges are there? For people to go to?”

Cynthia wept when she got alone with her husband. “Lawd God he’p us wid ’er, Will, she jes’ don’t unnerstan’.”

“Maybe she best don’t,” he tried to console. “I jes’ know I’ll draw my last breath seein’ she have better chance’n us did.”

As was only expected of her, Bertha achieved consistently high grades—studying pedagogy, to become a teacher—and she both played the piano and sang in the school choir. On one of her two weekend visits back home every month, she persuaded her father to have a sign painted on both doors of his delivery truck: “Henning
121—Your Lumber Number.” Telephones recently had come to Henning; it was typical of Bertha’s ready wit, which got quoted often around town.

On later visits, Bertha began to speak about a young man whom she had met in the college choir, his name, Simon Alexander Haley, and he was from a town named Savannah, Tennessee. Being very poor, she said, he was working at as many as four odd jobs at the time in order to stay in school, where he was studying agriculture. When Bertha continued to talk about him, a year later, in 1913, Will and Cynthia suggested that she invite him to visit with them in Henning, so they could appraise him in person.

The New Hope CME Church was packed on the Sunday it had been circulated that “Bertha’s beau from college” would be in attendance. He arrived under the searching scrutiny not only of Will and Cynthia Palmer, but also of the total black community. But he seemed a very self-assured young man. After singing a baritone solo, “In the Garden,” accompanied by Bertha at the piano, he talked easily with all who crowded about him later out in the churchyard, he looked everyone squarely in the eyes, firmly gripping all of the men’s hands, and tipping his hat to all of the ladies.

Bertha and her Simon Alexander Haley—his full name—returned to Lane College together on the bus that evening. No one had a thing to say against him—publicly—in the ensuing community discussions. Privately, though, some queasy uncertainties were expressed concerning his very nearly high-yaller complexion. (He had told dark brown Bertha in confidence that his parents, former slaves, had both told him of having slave mothers and Irish white fathers, paternally an overseer named Jim Baugh, of whom little else was known, and maternally a Marion County, Alabama, plantation scion and later Civil War colonel named James Jackson.) But it was agreed by all that he sang well; that he
seemed to have been well raised; and he showed no signs of trying to put on airs just because he was educated.

Haley landed a summer’s work as a Pullman porter, saving every possible penny to enable his transferring to the four-year A&T College in Greensboro, North Carolina, exchanging weekly letters with Bertha. When World War I came, he and all other males in their senior class enlisted en masse in the U. S. Army, and before long his letters to Bertha came from France, where in the Argonne Forest in 1918, he was gassed. After treatment for several months in a hospital overseas, he was returned home to convalesce, and in 1919, fully recovered, he came again to Henning and he and Bertha announced their engagement.

Their wedding in the New Hope CME Church in the summer of 1920 was Henning’s first social event attended by both black and white—not only since Will Palmer by now was among the town’s most prominent citizens, but also because in her own right the accomplished, irrepressible Bertha was someone whom all in Henning regarded with pride. The reception was held on the wide, sloping lawn of the Palmers’ brand-new home of ten rooms, including a music parlor and a library. A banquet of food was served; more presents were heaped than were normally seen at an average three weddings; there was even a recital by the full Lane College Choir—in whose ranks the ecstatic newlyweds had met—which had come in the bus that Will Palmer had chartered from Jackson.

Late that day, Henning’s little railroad depot was overrun as Simon and Bertha boarded the Illinois Central train that took them through the night to Chicago, where they changed onto another bound for somewhere called Ithaca, New York. Simon was going to study for his master’s degree in agriculture at some “Cornell University,” and Bertha would be enrolling at a nearby “Ithaca Conservatory of Music.”

For about nine months, Bertha wrote home regularly, reporting their exciting experiences so far away and telling how happy they were with each other. But then, in the early summer of 1921, Bertha’s letters began to arrive less and less often, until finally Cynthia and Will grew deeply concerned that something was wrong that Bertha wasn’t telling them about. Will gave Cynthia five hundred dollars to send to Bertha, telling Bertha to use it however they might need it, without mentioning it to Simon. But their daughter’s letters came even more seldom, until by late August, Cynthia told Will and their closest friends that she was going to New York herself to find out what was the matter.

Two days before Cynthia was due to leave, a midnight knocking at the front door awakened them in alarm. Cynthia was first out of bed, snatching on her robe, with Will close behind. At their bedroom’s doorway, she could see through the living room’s glasspaneled french doors the moonlit silhouettes of Bertha and Simon on the front porch. Cynthia went shrieking and bounding to snatch open the door.

Bertha said calmly, “Sorry we didn’t write. We wanted to bring you a surprise present—” She handed to Cynthia the blanketed bundle in her arms. Her heart pounding, and with Will gazing incredulously over her shoulder, Cynthia pulled back the blanket’s top fold—revealing a round brown face....

The baby boy, six weeks old, was
me.

I
used to be told later by Dad, laughing in recalling that night of big surprise as he loved to do, “Seemed I’d nearly lost a son a little while there—” Dad declared Grandpa Will Palmer walked around and lifted me out of Grandma’s arms “and without a word took you out to the yard and around the rear of the house somewhere. Why, he must have stayed gone I believe as long as half an hour” before returning, “with Cynthia, Bertha, or me saying not a word to him of it, either, I guess for one reason just because he was Will Palmer, and the other thing was all of us knew how badly for many years he’d wanted to have a son to raise—I guess in your being Bertha’s boy, you’d become it.”

After a week or so, Dad went back alone to Ithaca, leaving Mama and me in Henning; they had decided it would be better while he finished pushing for his master’s degree. Grandpa and Grandma proceeded to just about adopt me as their own—especially Grandpa.

Even before I could talk, Grandma would say years later, he would carry me in his arms, down to the lumber company, where he built a crib to put me in while he took care of business. After I had learned to walk, we would go together downtown, me taking three steps to each of his, my small fist tightly grasped about his extended left forefinger. Looming over me like a black, tall, strong
tree, Grandpa would stop and chat with people we met along the way. Grandpa taught me to look anyone right in their eyes, to speak to them clearly and politely. Sometimes people exclaimed how well raised I was and how fine I was growing up. “Well, I guess he’ll do,” Grandpa would respond.

Down at the W. E. Palmer Lumber Company, he would let me play around among the big stacks of oak, cedar, pine, and hickory, all in planks of different lengths and widths, and with their mingling of good smells, and I would imagine myself involved in all kinds of exciting adventures, almost always in faraway times or places. And sometimes Grandpa would let me sit in his office in his big, high-backed swivel chair with his green-visored eyeshade on my head, swiveling around and back and forth until I’d get so dizzy my head seemed to keep going after I’d stopped. I enjoyed myself anywhere I ever went with Grandpa.

Then, when I was going on five, he died. I was so hysterical that Dr. Dillard had to give me a glass of something milky to make me sleep that night. But before I did, I remember drowsily glimpsing many people, black and white, gathering in a ragged line along the dusty road that ran nearby the house, all of their heads bowed, the women wearing headscarves, the men holding their hats in their hands. For the next several days, it seemed to me as if everybody in the world was crying.

Dad, who had by now nearly completed his master’s thesis, came home from Cornell to take over the lumber mill, as Mama started teaching in our local school. Having loved Grandpa so deeply myself, and having seen Grandma’s terrible grief, she and I soon became extremely close, and there weren’t many places she went that she didn’t take me along with her.

I suppose it was somehow to try to fill the void of Grandpa’s absence that now during each springtime, Grandma began to invite various ones among the Murray family female relatives to spend
some, if not all, of the summers with us. Averaging in her age range, the late forties and early fifties, they came from exotic-sounding places to me, such as Dyersburg, Tennessee; Inkster, Michigan; St. Louis and Kansas City—and they had names like Aunt Plus, Aunt Liz, Aunt Till, Aunt Viney, and Cousin Georgia. With the supper dishes washed, they all would go out on the front porch and sit in cane-bottomed rocking chairs, and I would be among them and sort of scrunch myself down behind the white-painted rocker holding Grandma. The time would be just about as the dusk was deepening into the night, with the lightning bugs flickering on and off around the honeysuckle vines, and every evening I can remember, unless there was some local priority gossip, always they would talk about the same things—snatches and patches of what later I’d learn was the long, cumulative family narrative that had been passed down across the generations.

It was the talk, I knew, that always had generated my only memories of any open friction between Mama and Grandma. Grandma would get on that subject sometimes without her older women summer guests there, and Mama always before long would abruptly snap something like, “Oh, Maw, I
wish
you’d stop all that old-timey slavery stuff, it’s entirely embarrassing!” Grandma would snap right back, “If
you
don’t care who and where you come from, well,
I
does!” And they might go around avoiding speaking to each other for a whole day, maybe even longer.

But anyway, I know I gained my initial impression that whatever Grandma and the other graying ladies talked about was something that went a very long way back when one or another of them would be recalling something of girlhood and suddenly thrusting a finger down toward me say, “I wasn’t any bigger’n this here young’un!” The very idea that anyone as old and wrinkled as they had once been my age strained my comprehension. But as I
say, it was this that caused me to realize that the things they were discussing must have happened a very long time ago.

Being just a little boy, I couldn’t really follow most of what they said. I didn’t know what an “ol’ massa” or an “ol’ missis” was; I didn’t know what a “plantation” was, though it seemed something resembling a farm. But slowly, from hearing the stories each passing summer, I began to recognize frequently repeated names among the people they talked about and to remember things they told about those people. The farthest-back person they ever talked about was a man they called “the African,” whom they always said had been brought to this country on a ship to some place that they pronounced “’Naplis.” They said he was bought off this ship by a “Massa John Waller,” who had a plantation in a place called “Spotsylvania County, Virginia.” They would tell how the African kept trying to escape, and how on the fourth effort he had the misfortune to be captured by two white professional slave catchers, who apparently decided to make an example of him. This African was given the choice either of being castrated or having a foot cut off, and—“thanks to Jesus, or we wouldn’t be here tellin’ it”—the African chose his foot. I couldn’t figure out why white folks would do anything as mean and low-down as that.