When Uncle Root sensed his charges’ boredom, when they began to fidget and rustle on the chapel pews, he would spin them a tale or two. His favorite subject was the great scholar Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, the first Negro to earn a doctorate from Harvard University. After he made history, Dr. Du Bois had come south to teach at Atlanta University. The color prejudice had been terrible, and the violence as well. Every year, there were tales of lynchings from the countryside, but the worst loss that he’d experienced was the death of his toddler son to diphtheria. Uncle Root didn’t linger on the great scholar’s feelings, though. He talked about what the man’s wife, Nina, must have felt, watching her child die.
“I know some of you young men in the room think the Negro man makes the money for his family. If he dresses in suits, he leaves the house to go to work. If he’s a farmer, he puts on overalls to work the fields. If the Ku Klux Klan shows up to the house, he stands in the doorway to protect his family, and, if need be, he’s the one who swings at the end of a rope. And you think because of all that, the Negro man should get the glory.”
Uncle Root raised a finger as the young men in the room shifted their seats. A few rolled their eyes.
“But when that Negro man leaves the house, he doesn’t understand, he leaves his wife alone. She’s the one who does the backbreaking work to keep his house clean. She raises his children. And that’s only if he earns enough money to make sure she doesn’t have to work. If he doesn’t, she’s leaving her children with her mother or grandmother, and dressing up, too, to make money, as a schoolteacher. Or, more likely, she’s working as a domestic in the white folks’ kitchen, or she’s out there in the fields right beside her husband, helping him to plow, but then she’s got to make sure the children are all right, and feed them, and feed him, too. And again, keep the house clean.
“So I want you to think about how Mrs. Du Bois felt that day her little boy died in 1899. There was a diphtheria epidemic in Atlanta that year, and because of how brutal the white people in that city were, the Negroes were afraid to give the vaccination to their children. Dr. Du Bois was afraid, and so he wasn’t able to save his child. The little boy that Mrs. Du Bois had carried inside her body passed away. No man can truly understand a mother’s pain.”
Uncle Root walked closer to the front pews of the chapel. Briefly, he put a hand over his mouth.
“Lord have mercy, that lady must have grieved so badly for her baby boy! But Mrs. Du Bois continued to support her husband in his work. We don’t see the written record of what she did, but rest assured Mrs. Du Bois labored right alongside him. And she bore him another child, though she must have been so afraid of losing another baby. I think that woman was so remarkable! If it weren’t for Mrs. Du Bois, there would be no great scholar. And if it weren’t for Adeline Ruth Hutchinson Routledge, another remarkable Negro woman, there would be no Routledge College. Make no mistake about that.”
Uncle Root raised the finger again. He let the quiet muster, for his young audience was listening now. They’d forgotten their boredom, or at any rate, the female students had.
“I want every one of you to meditate on the importance of the Negro woman. Without her struggles, who would our people be? We’d be heathens, that’s what we would be! We’d be stumbling around in the dark! The Negro woman is the best our race has to offer. My children, we must always cherish and love this woman. We must never leave her behind.”
Beside Belle, her roommate giggled: Marie had a very big crush on Uncle Root. She was gossipy, too. In October, when a boy named Stanley Culpepper walked across the refectory, sat down at Belle’s table, and asked her to the fall formal, Marie told everybody on campus the details about the young man. He was from Detroit and talked frequently about the many wonders of Motown. The word on campus was that Stanley only dated light-skinned girls, but something about Belle must have caught his eye, dark as she was.
For the formal dance, Belle wore a rose chiffon gown and Stanley cleaned up nicely for the evening. He bought her a carnation wrist corsage and gave her his arm to walk into the refectory, which was decorated like a ballroom with cloths covering the tables. But then he left her for twenty minutes inside the gym while he drank bug juice with his Gamma fraternity brothers outside, ignoring the danger of snakes that might be braided into the blackberry bushes a few feet from the gym’s back entrance. After the dance, Stanley asked her to walk to his Buick, and Belle thought things might be looking up. Maybe they would drive for a late dinner. They said Paschal’s in Atlanta had good fried chicken. The restaurant was owned by distant cousins of some folks in Chicasetta. But after Stanley stopped at the gate and paid the five-dollar bribe to the guard, he drove out to a country field. The car bumped along in the grass until Stanley stopped the car. Then he leaned over, and without kissing Belle, he shoved his hand up her dress.