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271 conclusion THANK GOD I AM INDEPENDENT ONE MORE TIME I am sure glad you are still good. Hope you haven’t forgotten your home teaching and religion. —Relative to paroled Bedford inmate Constance Mimms, July 27, 1923 I have lived sixteen bad years, but I am a good person. Because my life has been hard, I am very tired. It isn’t just being a good person that has made me tired, but being any kind of a person at all. No matter how good most of the people I know live, their lives are hard. —Harriet Jones to John Langston Gwaltney, 1980 In the early 1970s, sixteen-year-old Harriet Jones told John Langston Gwaltney, a black anthropologist who was interviewing ordinary African Americans, “I don’t see myself or most people I know in most things I see or read about black people. . . . I wish I could read something or see a movie that would show the people just, well, as my grandmother would say, drylongso . You know, like most of us really are most of the time—together enough to do what we have to do to be decent people.”1 Jones speaks for many of the working-class black women who are the subjects of this book. Although she was never incarcerated, Jones had to deal with an alcoholic mother and a cruel absentee father. Her neighbors supported and took pride in her “civil, principled survival in the face of maddening provocation” but understood that the physical and moral dangers in their urban environment continually challenged Jones’s steadfast determination to be a “good person ”—or, indeed, “any kind of a person at all”—and led her to lament, “My life has been hard.”2 Throughout the twentieth century, black working women’s words and ac- 272 Conclusion tions have testified to their struggle to defend themselves and to maintain their own distinctive sense of respectability. The case of Constance Mimms shows the resourcefulness young women exhibited as they sought to be “good” people amid the myriad challenges of the city. Like Jones, Mimms was taught to value respectable behavior by her family and community. In 1923, Mimms’s relative reminded the Bedford parolee of her “home teaching and religion.” Her urgent letter stressed that, whatever difficulties the Columbia, South Carolina, native encountered in New York City, she should apply that instruction to her everyday life and “Trust God for all things.” Charged with incorrigibility by another set of relatives, Mimms entered the criminal justice system because of familial conflict, rather than any alleged failure to negotiate the obstacles posed by urban life. Several years later, Mimms explained that she had incorporated her moral upbringing into her adult identity: “I’m able to take care of myself now . . . and also made a woman of myself.” Responding to her relatives’ continual questioning of her behavior and life choices, she stressed her maturity and independence: “I know write from rong . . . I am not a child anymore.”3 Although working-class people’s sentiments about morality and respectability seldom appear in the scholarship on early-twentieth-century racial uplift efforts, the poignant declarations made by Mimms and other incarcerated black women and their relatives reveal that working people labored diligently to uplift themselves and their community. Half a century later, Harriet Jones’s commentary about ordinary black people’s dayto -day struggles to survive and maintain a level of respectability in a volatile and unforgiving urban environment underlines the same point. Jones was frustrated by the proliferation of racial stereotypes that stigmatized and criminalized all impoverished black people, and she yearned for some public acknowledgment of the determined efforts of those who were “together enough to do what we have to do to be decent people.” Confronting the long-standing conflation of the working poor’s socioeconomic status with their ethical stature, she explained that under her grandmother’s tutelage she learned to validate ordinary people’s moral compass while disparaging the dominant society’s negative assessment of black people. Harriet Jones’s struggles with familial tensions and gendered expectations as she sought to make a respectable life for herself are representative of those of black working women living in New York City between 1890 and 1935. Although the women in this study were incarcerated, they understood the parameters of what it meant to be good, decent people, an understanding they shared with the proponents of racial uplift. Scholarship on racial uplift generally focuses on how the black...

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