Authors: Arnold Rampersad
Of these two places, the more plausible is the cottage on the Sasser plantation. Later, Mallie spoke of giving birth at a farmhouse with about five big rooms. With her were a doctor, her husband, her brother, and a brother-in-law. A major flu epidemic was raging, she noted; there were no women around. The physician, the first doctor to attend Mallie in her five birthings, was a white man, a Dr. Reynolds. Almost certainly he was
Dr. Arthur Brown Reynolds, a University of Georgia medical school graduate who had come to practice in the area around 1910. The epidemic was the “Spanish flu,” which in 1918 and 1919 killed millions of Americans.
Mallie had given birth to a healthy boy. In choosing his middle name, his family intended to honor Teddy Roosevelt. As President, the patrician Roosevelt had inspired many blacks because of his outspoken disdain for racism, especially during his first term in office, before white supremacist power made him retreat into conservatism. He had condemned lynching and had also attacked the system called peonage, which had emerged as the new slavery in much of the rural South. Working with the premier black leader of the age, Booker T. Washington of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, Roosevelt had appointed several blacks to high office. He had also tried hard, if with little success, to forge a political coalition of Southern whites and blacks under enlightened white leadership. Roosevelt, a bitter critic of the sitting President, the segregationist Woodrow Wilson, was widely expected to run again for the White House in 1920. But on January 6, 1919, he died. When Mallie’s son was born later that month, she named him after the twenty-sixth President of the United States.
Mallie had wanted a girl; now she had four sons, but only one daughter. She also knew that Jack’s birth would not help her marriage, which was doomed. She and Jerry had been separated at least three times. Every patching-up had meant only false hopes and another child.
Marrying for love, Mallie McGriff perhaps took a step down. Jerry’s father, Tony Robinson, had crossed over the state line from Florida to rent and farm land on the Sasser plantation. Jerry, most likely the eldest of eleven children, had labored all his life for the Sassers; tied to the soil, he could neither read nor write. Mallie had known a different life. The seventh of fourteen children, she had grown up on land owned by her parents and gone to school up to the sixth grade—no small feat for a black girl in rural Georgia. Born slaves, Wash and Edna McGriff had pressed education on their children; when Mallie was ten, she repaid her father by teaching him to read his beloved Bible. The McGriffs had brought up their children to fear God but also to plan for the future, and Mallie had learned those lessons well. For her, hope was essential. Everywhere around her, she could see history weighing heavily on the lives of blacks and whites alike.
Slavery had defined, and continued to shape, the culture of the region. Before the Civil War, the fertile “Black Belt” across the middle of Georgia comprised the densest population of blacks anywhere in the United States. Most were slaves, who lived and died on rich cotton plantations in what one observer mordantly called “
the Egypt of the Confederacy.” The region where the McGriffs and their relatives lived was well to the south, but
was usually seen as part of the Black Belt because it, too, was fertile and home to many blacks. Taking in Grady County and the adjoining Thomas County, this area rolled on as far south as Tallahassee, the hilly capital of Florida. Compared to northern Georgia, the region was isolated, and home mainly to striving small farmers. Striving was part of its history. Needy white pioneers, many coming from the Carolinas, had helped to drive the native Seminole Indians from their ancestral grounds. Most of the territory that in 1909 would become Grady County, with Cairo as its seat, was given away in the land lottery that followed, in 1820. The architect of the overthrowing of Indian sovereignty was undoubtedly Andrew Jackson, later President of the United States, who profited enormously from this wanton theft and destruction.
Slaves had been essential to the growth of the region; slave labor had cleared its primeval forests, nurtured and harvested its crops. After the Civil War, which saw little destruction in this part of Georgia, blacks like Wash and Edna McGriff had looked forward to enjoying the fruits of their labor and freedom. Instead, Reconstruction became for them, in the words of a local historian, “
a period of broken promises, abject poverty and crushed dreams.” By 1900, because of the punitive use of devices such as the poll tax and stringent literacy requirements, few blacks could vote, and Jim Crow laws and customs also harshly shut off even the most common avenues to prosperity, especially jobs.
White hostility took even more violent forms. Between 1890 and 1902, when about 200 lynchings made Georgia the worst state in the Union in this respect, six took place in Thomas County. The years between 1909, when Jerry and Mallie were married, and 1918 saw more than 125 lynchings of blacks across the state, often for flimsy reasons and always unpunished. Mob violence was a daunting feature of black life in Georgia, with the most harrowing single episode the Atlanta riot of September 1906, when four leading blacks were killed by whites, who also looted and burned black homes and businesses. The effect on blacks of so much repression was widespread poverty, disease, and crime, as well as cynicism and despair. For many, freedom had actually been a step down from slavery. “
Although there were white people in Thomas County,” it was noted, “who believed that blacks should have a chance to have freedom on a par with whites, most local white leaders opposed black advancement at every turn.”
Still, some blacks managed to rise. A chronic labor shortage made black people, no matter how poorly paid, necessary to white self-interest. In the 1880s, local blacks also benefited when tourism became important, as well as a new plantation culture that brought rich Northerners, including those with names such as Whitney, Vanderbilt, and Rockefeller, to acquire estates
in the region. Attracted by the sunny climate, stunning landscapes, and rock-bottom prices after a plague of bankruptcies, the newcomers began to transform decrepit estates according to their fanciful notions about the Old South in its golden age, before the Civil War. Blacks were essential to this fantasy, which also encouraged not only prosperity but new standards of civility as well. In 1904, the region ardently supported the charming Tom Watson as the Populist candidate for the U.S. presidency. Nevertheless, white supremacy was the first rule of life. In 1910, when the local Board of Trade published a brochure designed to attract new businesses to Grady County, it offered as one inducement “
the interesting fact” gleaned from the last U.S. Census that “the rural South is becoming white with the coming in of farmers from the Central West” to buy cheap land in Georgia. Cairo, the brochure boasted, “is the Diamond Stud on Grady County’s Snow-White Front.”
In southern Georgia, as elsewhere, some blacks seized on almost every passing chance, every loophole in the logic of Jim Crow, to build as best they could. Family, the land, and the church became central to their lives. Clearly the McGriffs, Mallie’s family, were part of this group; clearly, too, they prospered. When Wash’s sister Eliza McGriff married Jerry Walden Jr., her former teacher at the black school in nearby Beachton, the McGriffs became even more deeply rooted in the community of landed black farmers who believed in family pride, education, the accumulation of property, and God. (Walden was a Morehouse College graduate whose family owned several hundred acres of land.) In the region south of Cairo, with its fertile red clay soil and rolling, pine-covered hills, black families like the McGriffs, the Waldens, and their relatives the Hadleys (whose patriarch, Richard Hadley, owned four hundred acres by the 1870s) endured and, now and then, even flourished. Prolific in offspring and intertwined in marriage, they forged this union despite the resentments of most of their white neighbors; the black families bought land that their descendants would own tenaciously a hundred years later. Raising livestock and planting fields of corn, cotton, sugar cane, peanuts, and garden vegetables, they were able both to feed themselves in times of grave financial hardship, which were not infrequent, and also to save a little money toward the future.
Religion was important. Breaking away from white churches, where they were unwanted, blacks dipped into their meager resources to build and maintain more than thirty churches in the region by the turn of the century. Mallie’s people, generous in their support of religion, worshiped at churches like the Evergreen Congregational Church in Beachton, built on land donated by the Waldens; or the Rocky Hill African Methodist Episcopal Church, which the McGriffs attended; or Ochlocknee Baptist,
important in Hadley family history. Mallie’s faith in God was linked to her keen sense of family, and both were blended with her belief that family and God were the main defenses against the evils of the unjust world into which she had been born as a black in the Deep South.
Mallie no doubt would have remained in Grady County, a devoted wife and mother, but for her husband’s philandering. Handsome and virile, Jerry Robinson had first flashed his teeth at her during a party at Christmas, 1906. He was eighteen years old, she only fourteen. Taking her home, he promised to call on her on Sunday and escort her to church. Incensed, Wash McGriff put a stop to that: Mallie was too young, he insisted. Almost certainly, he saw that Jerry Robinson was a shabby prospect; instead, McGriff had in mind for Mallie an upstanding young man, originally from South Carolina, whose family lived in the best tenant house on the Sasser plantation. But Mallie, pretending to be scared of strange South Carolinians, ignored him and encouraged Jerry. On Sunday, November 21, 1909, about three years after their first meeting, she and Jerry Robinson were married.
At first, Mallie was happy with Jerry in their cabin on Jim Sasser’s plantation; but Sasser’s terms and conditions soon disturbed her. To her dismay, she found out that his tenants had to beg him for any farm produce they wanted, from collard greens to turnips. Hog-killing time that Christmas brought a further shock; Mallie was stunned to hear that Sasser allowed his black workers only scraps—he reserved even the neckbones and backbones. When Jerry, borrowing against his next year’s salary of twelve dollars a month, gave Mallie five dollars to make the season merry, she found the sum inadequate; furthermore, Sasser expected her to spend it all at his plantation store. Farming here smelled like slavery, and Mallie said so. A bold young woman, she set about changing their life. She made Jerry insist on sharecropping status with Jim Sasser rather than monthly wages. Sasser was not happy about the request, but agreed to it. In the usual arrangement, he provided housing, the land, fertilizer, and seed in return for half of whatever Jerry Robinson grew.
Mallie then threw her energies into making sharecropping pay, and their life improved dramatically. Soon the Robinsons owned their own fat hogs, chickens, and turkeys as well as the cotton and peanuts, sugar cane, corn, and potatoes that were some of the staples of the Sasser plantation. But prosperity worked poorly on Jerry; with money in his pocket, his eye began to rove. “We were just living as I wanted to live,” Mallie declared sorrowfully some forty years later; “only his love [was] drifting away.” Dazzled by the lights of Cairo, Jerry wanted to move to town, but Mallie could not be swayed. Fed up, Jerry tried to put her out, but she refused to leave. He left,
then returned; she forgave him. He left again, and came back again; she forgave him once more. Meanwhile, their children came—Edgar in 1910, Frank in 1911, Mack in 1914, Willa Mae in 1916; and Jack in 1919.
By this time, Mallie knew that her husband was romantically involved with one of the married daughters of a respected black family, the Powells, who owned a large tract of land across the road from the Sasser place. (“It’s true,” Olin Faulk said some seventy-five years later; “my grandmother Fannie Powell’s sister was having an affair with him. The family often talked about it.”) Deeply hurt by the knowledge, Mallie turned increasingly to God, who warned her in a dream that Jerry and his lover were about to run off together. When Jerry announced too casually that he was going to visit one of his brothers in Texas and would take little Willa Mae along, Mallie replied just as casually that Willa Mae could not go. On July 28, 1919, Jerry said goodbye to his wife and children and went down to the railroad station in Cairo. Someone saw him skulking around one end of the station; then he climbed aboard a local train heading north—a curious way to go to Texas. Next, Mallie heard that he was working at a sawmill and that the woman was with him.
When Jerry’s money and luck ran out, he was back on her doorstep. But she was moving now in a different direction. Jerry’s departure had put her on a collision course with Jim Sasser, who once told her to her face: “You’re about the sassiest nigger woman ever on this place.” Powerfully built, “
a tall, rawboned man, who scared a lot of people,” according to one person, Sasser ran his farm with a mailed fist. A county commissioner, he was widely respected as perhaps the most enterprising farmer in the region, but he was also rightly feared as one of the toughest. When he found out that Mallie had actually helped Jerry, perhaps his best worker, to leave, he was livid. But Mallie stood up to him. When Sasser sought to bring the sheriff into the matter, to compel Jerry back into the marriage and onto the plantation, she refused to go along. When he tried to hire her as cook for his household, she declined the honor. Sasser struck back after one of Jerry’s brothers offered to bring in the crops for her. “
You might as well go,” Sasser advised her. “I ain’t gonna give you nothing.”
To accommodate new tenant farmers, he evicted her and the children out of her house into another one, less spacious, then into yet another, which she found barely habitable. Still, when Mallie tried to take a job elsewhere, Sasser blocked the way. Finally she found work with another white family, who treated her kindly. But Georgia and the South itself had become a dead end. As Mallie tried to gauge the likely future for herself and her five children, she saw mainly poverty, humiliation, and possibly worse. In the preceding five years, race relations had become bleak. On
Thanksgiving night, 1915, at the behest of the same Tom Watson who had tried to lead blacks and whites under the Populist banner, the Klan was reborn in a ceremony atop Stone Mountain, Georgia. In 1919, when whites lynched seventy-six blacks in the United States, Georgia preserved its record as the most violently antiblack state in the Union. In April, three months after Jack’s birth, an incident in a church in Millen, eastern Georgia, led to the death of two white policemen; whites then killed five blacks and burned seven black churches and lodge halls. On May 10, a race riot broke out in Charleston in neighboring South Carolina. Early in September, in incidents across Georgia, a number of black churches and schools were burned down. Between the Charleston riot and the epidemic of arson had come the “Red Summer,” which witnessed at least two dozen race riots across the country, most notably in Chicago, brought on by bitter postwar competition between whites and blacks seeking jobs and housing.