Blood Done Sign My Name Read Online Free PDF Page B

wave me on into the library, where my mother conducted storytime with her pupils. Her students considered me something of an honorary classmate, since they knew I was her subject, too, even though I was never in her class. (Once, when she pressed one of her slower pupils for the answer to a social studies question, he scratched his head and finally said, “I reckon Tim would know.”) I loved the sound of Mama’s resonant reading voice and her deep brown eyes, even though she could seem mighty proper at times.
    My mother had been raised by lovely people who believed that white people belonged on top and that white people, especially the better classes, had an obligation to treat blacks charitably and help lift them up, though not to the point of “social equality.” But Mama had grown out of this mold long before the spring of 1970. When she’d attended Greensboro College in the early 1950s, her professors had quietly organized interracial meetings with African American coeds from Bennett College, a historically black institution, which had helped to open her eyes to certain realities on the other side of the color line. Over the years, she’d continued to peel back the white supremacist assumptions of her well-kept world and to throw them off layer by layer. She never shook her mother’s convictions about our responsibilities to “those less fortunate than ourselves,” but Mama went far beyond her own mother’s worldview. It was not that she was untainted by the white supremacy that marked her world and all the people she knew, black and white. All of us breathed it in unconsciously, like we did the smell of curing tobacco. But like her mother, if not in precisely the same ways, Mama was an independent thinker who was never content to tack her thoughts to the prevailing winds and declined to let the world dictate her opinions.
    Her own mother, Jessie Thomas, a shrewd and lovely sharecropper’s daughter, never went to college, even though she followed her father’s plow down the furrows of spindly cotton and begged him to send her to Women’s College so she could become a teacher. But there was not enough money for that, and even if there had been cash stacked up like stove wood, most farmers in those days would have been reluctant to spend it educating a girl. What seemed much more likely was that Jessie would end up working in the textile mill. As willful as her daddy, Jessie Thomas refused to yield herself to the mill. Instead, she found a clerical job at Efird’s Department Store in Charlotte and began saving her pennies. Impressed with her wit and presence, Mr. Efird spoke highly of her to Charles Buie, the bright and amiable bookkeeper at the textile mill in Biscoe. Buie began by asking her parents if he could drive Miss Thomas back to Charlotte one Sunday and ended by marrying her. Soon afterward, the mill owners selected Charles Buie as general manager, offered him a handsome salary, and gave Mr. and Mrs. Buie a big white house in the middle of town.
    By December 7, 1941, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt told Americans that the Japanese had bombed the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, Jessie Thomas Buie had already saved enough money to open the Biscoe Sandwich Shop, which sat right beside the bus station in the little mill town. Those years were the heyday of bus travel, and tiny Biscoe was situated at the intersection of the major routes connecting Charlotte to Raleigh and Greensboro to Wilmington. As the country mobilized for war, soldiers, draftees, and workers poured through the bus station, hundreds and hundreds each day. Many of them bought Jessie’s yeast rolls stuffed with pimento cheese, chicken salad, or egg salad, each one carefully wrapped in wax paper with a napkin tucked into the fold. Though she never went to college, Jessie paid college tuition for both of her sisters, partly out of generosity and partly, perhaps, to spite her father. The