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My Stepfather [E]nlightenment was viewed as the greatest single opportunity to escape the indignities that whites were heaping upon Blacks. Children were sent to school when it was a great inconvenience to their parents. Parents made untold sacrifices to secure the learning of their children that they had been denied. John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom Let my son go to school; I’ll go to the field. Lee Daniel Thompson, my stepfather My stepfather was always difficult for me to understand. Here was a man who seemed to have very little ambition. He wanted, I suppose, to provide for me and my mother and sister. But he seemed not to want very much for himself. The only thing I ever saw him drive was a pair of mules pulling a sled loaded with stuffed cotton sacks or a barrel of water he had gotten from the commissary well. I remember this because I enjoyed riding atop the sacks, balancing myself so that I wouldn’t fall off. When he hauled water, I enjoyed the occasional splash from the barrel onto my face. I don’t know if he ever learned to drive an automobile. It wouldn’t have mattered in any case, since he had no vehicle to drive. I was always puzzled by his nickname, Bully, when his parents had given him such a My Stepfather 34 pretty name: Lee Daniel. Also, given his character, his nickname seemed odd and out of place. Lee Daniel was the oldest of six children born to Willie Green Thompson. Mr. Thompson’s first wife, Ida Ross, was the mother of Lee Daniel and three others. When she died around 1933, Mr. Green, as we called him, married Ruth White. Mr. Green and Miss Ruth had two children, Pearlene and Katie. They raised their children on Moore’s Lake in the small plantation town of Schlater. All the children seemed to turn out fine except for A.G., the middle son, who always found himself in trouble and running afoul of the law. Unlike A.G., Bully was a decent and honest man. Known to be a good worker, he often admonished me by saying that laziness will kill you. I don’t remember being very moved by this, since I believed that the kind of hard work he did would more than do me in. Bully had gone to school around Shellmound on Bledsau plantation. According to his younger brother, Shellmound in those days was a rough place in which to grow up. As long as the murder of a white man wasn’t involved, the plantation owner could reassure his best hands that “if you stay out of the grave, I’ll keep you out of jail.” Despite Bully’s upbringing and the period he spent in the army, he always appeared quiet and unassuming—that is, when he wasn’t drinking. When he drank, he became a completely different human being—assertive, boisterous, and even abusive to my mother. There were many nights when my mother had to wait up for my stepfather , only to learn the next day that he had been taken to jail. We would find terrible bruises on his body where “Smitty,” the deputy sheriff, had beaten him. Often he brought his anger home and took out his frustrations on my mother. If they argued, I simply stood aside, hoping they would soon stop. But if, as was frequently the case, he attempted to strike my mother, I tried to take her part, and on one occasion I struck him in the head with an ashtray. So, while he was generally a quiet, reserved, perhaps even timid fellow who tried to avoid confrontation at all costs, he could be a bear of a man when he drank—which was every weekend. But all that aside, my memories of him remain favorable. He certainly should receive credit for a large part of any academic success I’ve achieved. It was he, after all, who insisted to the foreman of the plantation where we lived that I should be allowed to go to school rather than to the fields, the fate of so many other black boys who reached the age of seven or eight. Whites in the Delta thought it not in their interests for blacks to receive an education. I don’t believe truancy laws applied to the children of black share- [18.226.93.209] Project MUSE (2024-04-18 15:33...

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