So Big Thom sent Uncle Root up the road to Routledge College, where his love of books was nurtured. There, in a history class taught by a tall, thin man, the boy read The Souls of Black Folk for the first time.
“Do you have any more books by that Du Bois fellow?” he asked.
“A few,” his professor told him. “But be careful with them.”
Though only teenagers when they met, Aunt Olivia had calmed Uncle Root down. After they graduated college, they traveled together to the City for graduate school. There, they married young. Study calmed Uncle Root further, and he was a dedicated student at Mecca University. He finished his master’s and doctorate in history in record time. It had been easy, he would say, researching and writing about the freed slaves who’d migrated to the City after the Civil War. Aunt Olivia was a perfectionist—it had taken her a bit longer to finish her dissertation on the free Negro women of nineteenth-century Philadelphia. Then Uncle Root took her back south to Chicasetta.
Uncle Root and Aunt Olivia taught at Red Mound Church School in Chicasetta, and it seemed that he was a changed man. But shortly thereafter, his bad temperament reappeared when Uncle Root took his frustrations with the conditions at Red Mound Church School to the white members of the Chicasetta board of education. Uncle Root was furious that, while the board finally had allocated a tiny budget for his school, during harvest times the three rich planters in town—including Tommy Jr.—would send their foremen to the school to collect the Negro children to work in their fields. And the textbooks for Red Mound were in horrible shape. The used books were years out of date, pages always were missing, and sometimes the white students who had previously used them had scrawled “nigger” and “jungle monkey” and other epithets inside. After that contentious meeting, Tommy Jr., a member of the board, told his brother it was time for him to leave town. And that evening, Tommy Jr. sat on the porch of the rented house where his brother and his wife lived. The white man had a shotgun across his lap, in case one of the members of the board had friends among the Franklins.
After Uncle Root and Aunt Olivia left Chicasetta, they decided it was time to teach on the college level. Of course, they couldn’t find employment at white universities. White colleges didn’t hire Negroes in those days, and though Uncle Root could pass, his dark brown wife could not. But at each Negro college where the couple taught, Uncle Root had a habit of arguing with his department chair and then quitting his job on a dime. There had been Hampton Institute in Virginia, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and the Elizabeth City State Colored Normal School in North Carolina. At that rate, they were going to run out of Negro institutions.
When the joint offer came from Routledge College in 1938, Aunt Olivia was thrilled, but barely a month in, her man began grumbling. That time was different, however. The morning he told Aunt Olivia he was planning to quit his teaching job, and she warned him she wasn’t going to pack up again. Her husband didn’t believe her. He performed his tried-and-true maneuver of persuasion, leaning in to kiss that place on her neck—nudging her crinkly hair to the side—but she shoved him away.
“Don’t you dare touch me.”
In case he didn’t get the hint, Aunt Olivia locked him out of their bedroom in their two-room campus apartment. This was a sobering moment for her young husband. After four days of his sleeping on the hard settee in their front room and his desperate knocking on their bedroom door in the wee hours, his wife served her husband breakfast. There was the excellent bread that the cooks in the campus refectory baked each day, and the home-cured ham and peach preserves her sister-in-law had given them on their last trip to Chicasetta.
She poured Uncle Root’s coffee, and then she asked, had he heard about the materials in the college archives? But her husband sulked; he was feeling neglected and lonely.
“Such as?” he asked, finally.
“You’re not acting very nice. I don’t know if I should tell you what I found.”
“Olivia, please don’t toy with my affections.”
“Just go over there and see.”
She let Uncle Root back in their bedroom, but she made him do his own research. It took months of almost daily visits to Mr. Temple, the college librarian, for Uncle Root to gain access to the college archives. And it was another two weeks before he found a letter, sent in 1901, back when Dr. Du Bois had taught at Atlanta University. In those years, the great scholar’s travels through the sometimes-dangerous southern countryside had landed him at the Georgia Institute for Colored Girls—the original name of Routledge College.