Sherley Anne Williams
Letters to a New England Negro
Miss Ann Spencer
Lyme on Eaton
New Strowbridge, Connecticut
August 30, 1867
Dear Ann,
Caution is not so necessary
here as in some other parts
of the state, but we hear of
the "night-riding" and terror
and so are careful. Yet, Miss
Esther's bearing is such that
she is accorded grudging
civility by even
rabid Rebels and though there
was at first some muttering
at young white women teaching
"nigras," Cassie and Beryl are
likewise accepted; thus the
School escapes reprisals.
And,
if the local ladies lift
their skirts aside as I pass—
Well, perhaps I should smirch them.
If my cast-off clothes are
thought unsuited to my station,
my head held too high as I
step back to let the meanest white
go before me, why—What then
is a concert in Newport
or a day in Boston compared
to the chance to be arrogant
amongst so many southerners!
__________________
October 22, 1867
The girls are bold, fingering
our dresses, marveling at
our speech. They cluster around
us at recess, peppering
us with questions about the
North and ourselves. Today, one
asked why I did not cover
my head or at least braid my
hair as is decent around
white folk. We do not speak of
hair in the north, at least in
public, and I answered sharply,
It is not the custom in
the North and I am from the
North—meaning, of course, that I
am freeborn.
I know how
chancy freedom is among
us and so have never
boasted of my birth. And
they were as much stung by my
retort as I by their question.
But in the moment of my
answer the scarves worn by the
women seemed so much a symbol
of our slavery that I would
have died before admitting
my childhood's longing for just
such patient plaiting of my
tangled hair or cover now
my wild and sullen head.
__________________
November 24, 1867
There was in Warwick Neck, at
the time we lived there, a black
woman called Miss Girt whose aunt
had bought her out of slavery
in the District some fifty
years before. She was a
familiar and striking figure
in that town where there were few
negroes; of that color we
called smoothblack—a dense and
even tone that seems to drink
the light. The strawberry pink
of her mouth spilled over onto
the darkness of her lips and
a sliver of it seemed to
cut the bottom one in two.
She kept a boarding house for
negroes, mostly men who worked
at odd jobs up and down the
Coast. The white children whispered
about it—though the house
differed only in being
set in a larger plot with
two or three vacant ones between
it and its nearest neighbors.
It was the closest thing to
a haunted house the town provided
and on idle afternoons
the white children "dared
the boogey man"—though they seldom
got close enough to disturb
Miss Girt or her boarders with
their rude calls and flourishes—
and withdrew giggling and
pushing at the slightest
movement or noise.
We went also,
on our infrequent trips
to town, to see the boogey
man and sometimes heard a strain
of music, a sudden snatch
of laughter. Or watched the white
children from a distance. Once
George Adam called out, "Here She
come," sending them into clumsy
flight and us into delighted
laughter. Once Miss Girt herself
came round the corner on the
heels of their cry, "Nigger!"
"And
a free one, too," she called and
laughed at their startled silence.
They fled in disorder,
routed, so George said, by the
boldness of this sally, and,
I thought, by the hot pink in
the laughing dark of Miss Girt's face.
--from Letters to a New England Negro
Sherley Anne Williams, Some One Sweet Angel Chile, W. Morrow, 1982.