Clifton L. Taulbert - Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

It vyas a beautiful Ocuoher day in the 19-'()s. It was not quite like those other Octoher clays when I as a child growing up in this southern cotton community, but it was beautiful nonetheless. I had come home for my yearly pil grimage to see Glen Allan, Mississippi, to remember the life I once knew and visit my older relatives. Somehow I always felt better after visiting those tired old people who had given me strength when I was a child. So many changes had taken place in Glen Allan. "Colored" people were now "black," soap operas had replaced quilting bees in their homes, and the schools their children attended were now integrated. But the land was the same: the rich delta land had not changed. And the cotton smelled as it did in the early '50s when I picked it as a way of life. Now, however, the quarter of a mile long cotton rows seemed shorter and instead of the bent backs and scratched hands of hundreds of coloreds picking cotton, there were scores of big red machines harvesting the white fields. As always, the land was giving life, being faithful, fruitful and productive, providing stability and a sense of worth.

I made it a point to visit my old aunt, Mozella Alexander. She insisted I sit and listen as she vividly recalled the times when her grandparents owned a plantation five miles from Glen Allan - a plantation they called Freemount. As we sat in her shotgun house that was falling on one end and propped up on the other, she rocked, swatted flies and told ~ e all about old man Sidney Williams, Miss Phoebe, Rosa Morgan, Tom Williams and the rest that were known at the turn of the century as "the big colored landowners."

As she talked, her smooth black face shone with a pride that I don't know if I'll ever possess. "Son, my pa and your great-great grandpa were somebody. Oh chile, they had plenty land, mules, hogs and chickens and jest bout eberthang."

She talked with increasing excitement. Even though she was renting a run-down house, she knew that she was descended from the colored landed gentry. I guess thats why she was labelled "uppity" Even at her age she walked straight as an arrow

'All out dar in de colony was colored when I wuz a chile. Yez sir my ole grandpa worked dat land like it was no t'morrow"

I knew the land she spoke of, although Freemount no longer existed. It was near the colored colony, a large parcel of land which I'd also heard was once in my family I remember some of the older people saying, "Chile y'all folks shore had some land out dar in de colony." But for some reason those sayings never reached my belly. Land ownership and the sense of worth it brings seemed to have died out during my parents' time. I responded to this story as if it might be colored folklore. All my life most of the land owners had been white. When I'd go to the colony, it was their stately homes I'd see first. It never dawned on me that these houses, so seemingly permanent on their sites, were not the beginning. Little did I know they were built upon the sweat and blood of a different set of landowners, black men and women who tamed the land and gave it such an appropriate name, "Freemount."

Aunt Mozella talked for hours and I listened politely. At last I attempted to take my leave, but she stopped me.

"Set down, son. Lemme give ya something. And you hold onto it. It's valuable. No matter what happened to me, I'se always held onto these."

She got up and walked over to a trunk that was probably twice her age. She was old, colored and proud, with not a wrinkle in her cinnamon face. As she bent over her trunk and undid the double locks, I looked around at her tattered home, wall papered with pages from the Sears catalog. I wondered what of value she could possibly give me, her educated grand nephew.

Turning from the trunk she stood in front of me holding in her black hands a bundle of papers tied securely with old rags. Her cinnamon face shone as she pressed the papers to my hands.