political rallies and cursed the way white folks were treating us. “With God’s help, we ain’t goin’ to put up with Jim Crow the rest of our lives!” he used to shout, standing on a podium waving our shabby Bible. News about his arrogance always reached the Klan, and he received veiled threats too often for his comfort. That’s the main reason we roamed around like gypsies. I remember a very close call one night. While we were attending a revival somebody threw a firebomb in the front window of our house. We got home just in time to grab the shopping bags and battered suitcases we kept our belongings in. That same night we hid in a church member’s barn until Daddy arranged for somebody to drive us to a safer part of town, where we stayed in another shack until we had to flee again.
Daddy was a migrant laborer and worked in the nearby fields six days a week. Mama cleaned and cooked for rich white folks in Miami two days a week. The year was 1954, and segregation was a way of life. “I ain’t about to set in the back of nobody’s bus,” Mama often said. Mama didn’t even bother trying to ride in cabs, so we usually walked or hitched a ride on somebody’s mule-wagon to her jobs and everywhere else we went. She would prepare us a few sandwiches, usually sweet potato or baloney, and we would leave the house early in the morning right after Daddy did. Those walks were long and hard, and even though the Florida sand was soft, my feet developed calluses that remained with me for years.
I liked going to work with Mama. It made me feel grown-up and important. Rather than stand around all day waiting for Mama to finish her duties, I earned a few cents for myself doing odd jobs, like walking and bathing a dog or baby-sitting some old person. My favorite responsibility was sitting on the front porch of a large red house with an elderly Italian woman. Her name was Rosa Piaz and she was more than a hundred years old. Her daddy had owned slaves, and her mind was so far gone she thought I was one. “Go get me some goobers, Spooky,” she used to tell me. I’d sneak into the house for goobers and whatever else I could find to nibble on. My job was to fan her and empty her spittoon. She dipped a lot of snuff, so I was forever running around emptying spit. When nobody was looking, the old woman and I threw rocks at moving cars. When I made her mad, like the time I couldn’t find any more rocks for us to throw, she threatened, “You lazy heifer! I ought to sell you to one of them cane jockeys—make a field hand outta you!” When she made me mad I waited until she went to sleep, then I pinched her flabby neck. I knew the woman was senile, so I just hid my face and laughed every time she threatened to have me sold. A minute later, we’d be friends again, chasing some of the kids in the fancy white neighborhood where Miss Rosa lived with switches. One time Mama caught us. She grabbed my arm and shook me so hard my whole body ached. “Girl, Miss Rosa can do whatever she want. She white. But you can’t be messin’ with no white kids!” Mama and Daddy had me believing we were as good as anybody else, so it confused me when I got scolded for sassing or upsetting somebody white.
Every time I got comfortable in a particular situation, we moved and I had to start all over again. Our rootless existence was the only life I had ever known. I was used to it, but I didn’t like it. It made me feel like I was different from other kids in a way I didn’t understand, and it made me feel like I didn’t belong anywhere.
My favorite time during that period was when we lived at the bottom of a hill, off of a dirt road, in a rural section of Miami called Hanley. Our house had a living room, a kitchen, and one bedroom. I liked it because we were so close to the woods that squirrels and other creatures wandered into our backyard to eat out of my hand.
The only furniture we had was a stove with no legs and an icebox