two• Up from Troubled Waters

I was conceived in Monroe, Louisiana, in the depths of the Great Depression, the reign of Jim Crow, and the “Flood of the Century” on the Ouachita River. My mother, a laundress who earned four dollars a week, was only fourteen years old.

Apparently if I was going to be lucky in life, I would have to be patient.

No doubt I would never have been born if my mother, Florene, had known how to resist the charms of John Melton. My father was a handsome, savvy but volatile man who swaggered his way through life, despite never having finished grammar school.

In 1932, Monroe was in dire straits, inundated when the Ouachita River crested fifty feet above flood level and gushed over the millions of sandbags futilely attempting to hold it back. By the beginning of February, more than a quarter of Monroe was submerged, and the Ouachita did not dip below flood level until mid-April. “The flood waters are contaminated beyond realization,” the director of the Ouachita Parish Health Unit declared, warning that without vaccination “one is very likely to contract typhoid from merely wading and working in the flood districts.” Makeshift tent cities sprang up on higher ground, as white and black families began living next to each other in a fashion that would have been unimaginable in any condition short of an emergency.

With twisted but typical Southern irony, although Monroe’s blacks vastly outnumbered its white residents, whites nonetheless possessed all the political and economic power. Blacks knew all too well that their white bosses could crush them over a transgression such as knocking on the front door of a white family’s house instead of the back, and that hooded Klansmen still inflicted lethal retribution against anyone they reckoned was “too uppity.” It was said in Monroe that Negroes woke up every morning fearing that they might be lynched, while whites woke up every morning fearing a Negro uprising. Given the discrimination and the demographics, neither fear was irrational.

The town sat at the rim of the Old South cotton belt, but by the early 1930s the cotton market had hit the skids and Ouachita Parish’s agricultural income, payroll, and retail sales dropped by nearly two-thirds in five years. The Depression was challenging for Monroe’s white citizenry but disastrous for blacks.

And if a flood was the last thing Monroe needed, I can only imagine that a baby was the last thing my mother needed. Nonetheless she delivered me that October inside my father’s already overcrowded shotgun house—so named because you could shoot a bullet from the front door straight out the back door. The one-story clapboard was on obscure D Soloman’s Alley, a dirt lane about twelve blocks north of the river.

The clerk who drafted my birth certificate misspelled both of my parents’ names, and listed my father as a “com laborer” and my mother as a “domestic.” I was given the name Belvagene, after my maternal grandfather Eugene Howard. But the ink on the document was barely dry before I was bundled up and hustled out of the lives of my overwhelmed, ill-equipped parents.

For my first few years of life, I had no clue that they had given me away. I was adopted by my Aunt Ophelia and her husband, who had a home, a spare bedroom, and an unfulfilled desire for a child of their own. I simply believed they were my real parents. I called Ophelia “Mamma” and can still remember how her hair was fashioned into finger waves in the front and flowed to her shoulders. She dressed me in organdy pinafores and doted on me—“primping,” she called it. As I sat propped on her knee in front of her long dresser mirror, she would gently comb my hair and adorn it with fussy bows and colorful barrettes. “Belvagene, you’re such a pretty baby,” she would coo in my ear. “Just look at us—aren’t we beautiful together?”

Life with her was sweet but short. I don’t really recall her cough or the bloodstains on her handkerchief or anyone uttering the word “tuberculosis” in my presence. All I remember was that she was sick in bed, frail and quiet, and then she was dead.

My childhood died that day as well. I was three years old.

The unspeakable loneliness that seeped through me didn’t abate even after I was returned to live with my mother and father and his family. They were in a different, larger house than before, but it was filled with even more people. Our home was a frenetic place, with relatives perpetually moving in or out depending on whether they had secured a job. I no longer had a room or a bed—instead I slept on a blanket pallet on the floor. Curiously, although my mother and father lived in the house, I don’t remember them ever playing with me or even acknowledging my existence. Perhaps they feared that I carried Aunt Ophelia’s deadly disease. More likely, they were preoccupied with their prized new baby, my brother John Jr.

All I know is that overnight I went from being blissful to miserable. I cried every day until my eyeballs were raw and my stomach ached from the sobs. People in that house pretty much stepped around me and went about their business.

My father was the head of the household, overseeing the welfare of his mother, four sisters, and younger brother—his own father had abandoned the family and taken a new wife across the state line into Arkansas. A child himself when he was forced to go to work at the local sawmill, my father used encyclopedias to teach himself to read. He was intoxicated by knowledge and could recite a trove of trivia, including the names of state capitals and lengths of North American rivers. His secret weapon was The Old Farmer’s Almanac, which he attempted to memorize verbatim.

At the mill, he smartly made himself indispensable by tackling and mastering the most intricate and treacherous saw machinery. As a result, he earned thirty dollars a week, which was a mighty high Depression-era salary for a black man in Northern Louisiana.

His youth, quick reaction time, and keen intellect protected him: many less fortunate coworkers left severed fingers and hands on the mill floor. His intellect protected him in other ways as well. He used the weekend as a tension valve, blowing off steam in Five Points, a three-block area of “colored town” owned by the same influential white family who owned the lumber mill. The money the owners paid their workers came back to the owners via the gambling dens and saloons they operated. My father’s carousing and brawling in Five Points landed him in jail on a regular basis.

He was smart enough to know he wouldn’t be there long. Miraculously, an anonymous benefactor—no doubt looking out for the interests of the sawmill—always managed to secure his release every Monday morning just in the knick of time for the start of his mill shift.

My father had an explosive temper: in particularly foul moods, he was known to whip out his pistol—but everyone generally regarded “Johnnie” as a big bluffer who merely wanted to be the epicenter of attention. One way he got noticed was by joining gospel quartets. The quartets afforded him the chance to perform in sanctuaries and town halls, and to flirt with adoring young women who sat and flapped paper fans that depicted Jesus as the Good Shepherd on one side and advertised the local funeral home on the other. Gospel singing also gave him an excuse to spend part of his paycheck on snazzy suits and to slick his hair back with cans of Murray’s Superior Hair Pomade. John Melton was a man who savored the ladies’ attention.

My mother didn’t much care for my father’s extracurricular “spreading of the gospel,” but she couldn’t do much about it. She was a beauty herself—I used to open my candy bars to see if any of the colors of the chocolate that covered them were as pretty as the rich mocha tone of my mother’s skin. She had wide-set eyes that seldom looked directly at you, but her downcast glances showed off her long, curled lashes.

Like almost all the women in my family, my mother worked for G.B. Cooley’s Monroe Steam Laundry. At any given time in the 1930s, the laundry employed more than a hundred black women as laundresses. Their job was to scrub, wring dry, starch, and iron the shirts and dresses and even bedsheets of well-to-do whites. The workday was long, air-conditioning was nonexistent, the sticky heat and humidity were stifling—and for their labors, they earned less than a seventh of the pay my father received.

As for me, I tried hard to make myself useful, as though to justify my presence. Often I was sent off to deliver messages or packages to my father at the mill or to another relative’s home. As simple as that sounds, I found such errands terrifying, because I was compelled to cross a lumberyard infested with huge rats. As I made my way through the maze of wood stacks, I could hear them scampering about and would catch glimpses of their beady eyes or twitching tails. At sundown, a trek across the lumberyard was a passage through my own private chamber of horrors.

I also came in handy when my maternal grandmother suffered a stroke and moved in with the Melton family. The adults would get her out of bed in the morning and position her in the rocking chair on the porch. I heard some of the grown-ups say that my grandmother adored spending time with me after my birth—I was her first grandchild. Now, my job was to sit holding her hand, help her to the bathroom, fetch her a drink of water or a sandwich, and keep her company. We were an odd, forlorn pair: she was unable to speak, rocking and humming for hours on end; and I was at her side watching her and hoping someone would pass down our street and wave at us, to bestow a grace note of excitement on the dull day.

The truth is that my family really didn’t know quite what to do with me, nor did they seem to have much space in their home or hearts for a sad little girl. So I became portable—rather like an old suitcase that they would pass from place to place.

Sometimes they would send me to stay for weeks with my Grandpa Eugene in Rayville. Grandpa was what my father called a jackleg preacher— a self-ordained reverend with no education or training in the ministry. When I had outstayed my welcome at Grandpa’s, I would be dispatched to Mississippi to visit my great-aunt Issaquena. Her shack wasn’t accessible by any road—instead we had to drive across a meadow, undo the wires of a fence and roll it back, and then bump across the rutty terrain into the middle of nowhere.

I’m pretty sure if you had looked up the word recluse in a Delta dictionary, you would have found a tintype photograph of Issaquena. Resembling an Indian, she always wore men’s clothes and fastened her long hair in a single braid down her back. Her house tottered on rickety stilts near a fishing stream, and she kept a loaded shotgun by her door. I detested the snakes that slithered around her place, and I dreaded every trip to her outhouse; but otherwise I actually enjoyed my time with Issaquena. She would let me trail behind her as she gathered wood or weeded the garden, and sometimes we would sit by the stream monitoring our fishing lines, simply waiting for something to happen.

We ate nothing that she hadn’t grown or killed herself. The only staples she required from the outside world were flour and lard, which my parents would deliver whenever they retrieved me.

By the time I was five, I had returned to Monroe with renewed optimism. My buoyancy had nothing to do with Monroe’s having recovered from the 1932 flood or with the town then weathering the Depression better than the rest of the Delta. A huge natural gas discovery boosted its industries—carbon black plants, saw mills, and paper mills—and through the rest of the decade the town was cushioned, its white citizenry comfortable. I had no idea that that Monroe’s city fathers had installed the first publicly owned streetcar line in the country, nor did I know that Delta Air Lines had been organized in the boardroom of Central Savings Bank and Trust on Desiard Street.

My newfound optimism sprang from the fact that I had a mission: to maneuver my way into someone’s heart and home. And I sized up my mother’s childless older sister, Aunt Pearline, as my most promising prospect.

Pearline and her feisty husband, my Uncle Ezra, had recently fulfilled their dream of opening a small grocery store. They had stocked rough plank shelves with canned goods and dried staples, and they were extending credit to people like them who strained paycheck to paycheck. In those days, a trip into a white-owned market was an exercise in humiliation: if a black customer was checking out and a white customer approached, the black shopper was obliged to reload her basket and go to the end of the line, sometimes over and over again. Our neighbors agreed it was time for a black-owned market in our midst.

Again, I strategized ways to make myself useful. I volunteered to deliver groceries to the few customers who owned telephones and thus could call in their orders; and I also picked up grocery lists and shopped for customers who were shut-ins. Eventually my aunt and uncle took me in, and I moved into the second of two rooms behind their store. The three of us felt like a real family.

I called Aunt Pearline “Tee.” Like my mother and the rest of her sisters, she was frugal with conversation. The woman didn’t chitchat; she sang. I could decipher her moods by the hymn of the day. “I Know the Lord Done Heard My Cry” indicated something was wrong. “Ain’t That Good News” or “In the Great Gettin’ Up Morning” meant it was a good day to ask her for just about anything.

Her church was the anchor of her existence. She saw to it that I attended Sunday worship, Sunday school, Wednesday night prayer meeting, and Saturday night children’s programs at Zion Traveler Baptist Church. Sometimes I would sing for the children’s talent show, and adults would toss pennies onto the stage to show their approval. I made a point of always donating my pennies by dropping them in the offering plate—my aunt would beam with pride. I would like to think I was a generous child, but I suspect my motivation had a lot more to do with making sure my aunt loved me better so she would keep me.

Aunt Pearline was one of Zion Traveler’s “Mothers”—a group of women who aided the pastor, counseled the flock, and provided spiritual guidance to those who had lost their way. Although many of the Mothers were virtually illiterate, they could recite an impressive host of New Testament verses. Once a month, these women would march to the front of the church, in white outfits reminiscent of nurses’ uniforms, to be recognized for their special role. One of their responsibilities was to prepare candidates for baptism in the Ouachita River.

As soon as I could, I declared Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior and asked to be baptized. That testimony would become a lifelong faith, bolstering my courage and assuring me that, regardless of the circumstances of my birth, I remain a child of God, wanted and loved unconditionally. Aunt Pearline was thrilled with my decision, and she and the other Mothers went to work sewing old bedsheets into flowing white robes that we baptismal candidates would don for our journey through the river and into salvation.

Being led into the Ouachita is one of the most vivid memories of my young life. One Sunday, as soon as the church service concluded on a final round of Amens, we all marched blocks down to the riverbank. The Mothers walked alongside us and sang hymns; and as we neared our salvation spot, they took up the chorus, “Wa-aade in the water, wade in the water, children, wa-aade in the water. God’s gonna trouble the water...”

My young mind suddenly focused on the lyrics, and I panicked. What did that mean, troubling the waters? Just what exactly was God going to do? But I had little time for hesitation: the pastor already was standing far from the bank when two deacons held me under my arms and solemnly carried me into the Ouachita. My body shivered from apprehension and chill as we approached the pastor. The water was at my chin, and my bare feet could no longer touch the river bottom. “Oh Lord,” the pastor intoned, “cleanse this child’s soul.” I sucked in my breath when the deacons tilted my body backward and the current began to cover me. “I baptize you in the name of the Father...” Then I lost his voice as my head was dunked under water.

Just when I thought I must be on my final journey to Heaven, a cool breeze hit my face and I could inhale again, secure in the knowledge that my sinful soul was cleansed. I had been saved for eternity, and my Aunt Pearline cried with joy.

Life was pretty good. I had begun attending Miss Bessie’s Brooks Academy, a private school for Protestant Negro girls—my father boasted of what it cost him to send me to that school, which was a conspicuous symbol of affluence in our community. I was learning to read and write, speak well, and practice proper etiquette.

Unfortunately, I was about to discover how God was going to trouble the waters.

Because our grocery store was not yet sufficiently profitable, my Uncle Ezra had retained his grueling job at the Armour Meat Packing Company. One day he was hit hard by a swinging side of beef, injuring his back so severely that he could no longer work. Without Ezra’s weekly paycheck, my aunt and uncle were forced to shutter the market they had worked so hard to establish; and they moved us all back into the already jam-packed Melton house.

So my uncle did something unheard of in Monroe, Louisiana: he sued the company. My relatives warned him that he was crazy—no colored person had ever sued a white company in Monroe. Amazingly, he found a young white lawyer to take his case; and even more incredible, a Louisiana judge found in his favor and ordered Armour to pay him two thousand dollars in damages. We were overjoyed—but it was like licking syrup from a serrated knife. Ezra’s lawyer came to alert him that, according to the talk of the town, Monroe’s white businessmen had no intention of letting him collect a dime. Instead they were plotting to make an example of him with tar and feathering.

Fear ricocheted through our entire extended family, and with justification. Twenty-one blacks already had died at the end of ropes in Monroe; and while the last lynching had been in 1919, it was seared into adult memories as though it were only yesterday. My father took charge. All the men in the family were determined to be in imminent danger by association and would have to leave immediately. They scattered into the night in various vehicles. Ezra hopped a freight train to keep him off the roads.

I don’t know why the men chose to rendezvous in California, except that it was far, far from Louisiana.

As for me, eventually I was packed up and farmed out yet again—this time in the company of my little brother—to our paternal grandfather Horace Melton and his wife, in El Dorado, Arkansas. I’m certain our step-grandmother had a name, but we knew her only as “The Lady with the Switch” because of her penchant for whipping us for the petty crimes of childhood. She had no children of her own, and thus she could never fathom why two youngsters couldn’t keep the red clay of Arkansas off their shoes and out of her immaculate house. We would watch in utter trepidation as she broke a branch off the peach tree in her backyard, rubbed her hand up to strip off the leaves, and then called us to bend over and brace ourselves. She played no favorites in her house. The welts on our young skin never healed before another offense would inspire a fresh whipping.

I hoped desperately for a rescue. I wasn’t sure anybody cared enough to reclaim me, but I secretly counted on the strength of my father’s love for my brother motivating him to come get us both. Within half a year he did.

The segregated train bound for California had no seat for me, so I sat on the floor on top of my suitcase and silently prayed about my new life. I knew that God loved me and Jesus loved me. But I also wanted somebody down here to love me—and it didn’t seem like too much to ask.