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7 1 Texas Roots of Rebellion under the Chinaberry Tree Born in Wharton, Texas, on December 25, 1897, Thyra Johnson Edwards was the oldest of five children, including sisters Thelma, Anna Bell, and Marian and brother George. Her parents—Horace Ferdinand Edwards and Anna Bell (Johnson) Edwards—had married in San Antonio but then moved to Wharton , at that time an unincorporated town on the lower Colorado River, about forty-five miles from the Gulf of Mexico. The family also lived in Glen Flora and Hungerford, other small communities in Wharton County, which was known before the Civil War as part of the Texas sugar bowl because of its slave-based sugar plantations. In Wharton, where she spent her early childhood, Edwards’s parents taught in the town’s segregated schools and were active in community affairs and social reform. The images of Wharton County that stayed with Edwards for the rest of her life centered on rural southern culture. Canebrakes, country stores, cotton fields, watermelon patches, and outdoor privies dotted the landscape that shaped her earliest memories. Also prominent in the imagery of her childhood weresnuff-dippingfarmwomeninquaintdressesandsawed-off shoescooking in  8 Thyra J. Edwards their lean-to kitchens. Religious fervor, singing, shouting, and “lay exhorting” in the Macedonia Baptist Church,as well as her mother’s devout religious views, piano playing, and singing, provided important parts of her cultural upbringing. Edwards later rejected religious dogma, but she grew up reading Bible stories in Easy Steps for Little Feet, “aided by the interpretations of my own very devout mother.”1 As teachers, Horace and Anna Edwards could afford to provide their children with a decent standard of living in Wharton. They lived in a three-room wall-papered house whose furnishings included a piano, jewelry box, bearskin rug, and dressing table, as well as books and the Ladies Home Journal. Edwards apparently believed that her mother was driven somewhat by class pretensions. For her mother, home ownership and city living were two of the three most important things in life. To rent, Anna considered a disgrace. In Wharton, the Edwards household included a black domestic servant to help keep house and take care of Thyra and Thelma, who was two years younger, while Anna and Horace were teaching.2 Anna Johnson, who had graduated from high school in Galesburg, Illinois, in 1894, first came to Texas with a friend, Daisy Walker. An 1893 graduate of Galesburg High School, Walker eventually left Texas for Alabama, where she attended the Tuskegee Institute, but Anna met Horace Edwards in Texas, married him, and became a teacher.3 It was the escape from slavery in Hannibal, Missouri, via the Underground Railroad by Thyra Edwards’s maternal grandparents—George Washington (“Wash”) Johnson and Eliza (“Liza”) Wheeler Johnson—that had established the roots of her mother’s family in freedom. For Edwards, the story of their “bold stroke for freedom” remained vividly etched in her memory throughout her life. No doubt passed on and reinforced through family stories, and embellished a bit by Edwards for literary purposes when she began to sketch her autobiography, the compelling account of runaway slaves among her ancestors provided her an important source of inspiration. According to Thelma, Thyra’s personality was much like that of their grandmother, whom Thelma described as “a direct-actionist, not too concerned with diplomacy.” Thyra would draw on her grandmother’s courage in the face of racial oppression and adversity to guide her civil-rights activism.4 Liza, born a slave in Virginia around 1841, had come to Hannibal with her owner’s family, whose surname was presumably Wheeler. The exact date and town of her birth are unknown. According to Thelma, Liza, who was likely the daughter of her slave master, “was of slightly stocky build, light skinned and straight-haired. Her lips were thin and very firm, her nose was a little heavy but not Negroid in form.”5 According to Thyra, Liza was “white with chestnut braids.”6 Texas Roots of Rebellion 9 When Liza was about eight years old, her master brought her“to the big house as the sort of nurse-playmate” for his children who were close to her in age. “From that time on,”Edwards described,“she slept as she chose, wither on a cot in the alcove of the play room or out in the quarters in her mother’s one roomed, dirt floored cabin.” Liza’s mother did the cooking for the master’s family, and...

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