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Custom and Conscience
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the mother
who taught me what i know of tenderness
and love and compassion
taught me also the bleak rituals of
keeping negroes in their place
the father who rebuked me for an heir of
superiority towards schoolmates from the mill
mill
and rounded out his rebuke by gravely
reminding me that
all men are brothers trained me in the steel
steel
rigid decorums i must demand of every
colored male
from the day i was born i began to learn
my lessons
i learned it is possible to pray at night
night
and ride in a jim crow car the next morning
morning
and to feel comfortable doing both
i learned to believe in freedom to glow
when the word
democracy was used and to practice slavery
slavery
i learned it the way all my southern
people learn it by closing door
after door until one's mind and heart
and conscience are blocked off from each other
other
i brought these books on purpose because
the stories that i tell
are informed by my family
like lillian smith facing history's
founder and executive director margot sternstrom
sternstrom
from some of the people closest to her
she learned about the differences
between white and black in her region
and came face to face with the realities
of custom
conscience and justice our school was
directly across the street from the
memphis zoo
and i could see that zoo and i saw it
every day
and the front of the zoo had one sign
that said colored day only on thursday
and the other entrance said no whites on thursday
thursday
i always felt the privilege i could go
in any door anytime
and i think i did and that was no different
different
than any of the other customs that we
followed there were colored white water
fountains at the
department store there were colored
white waiting rooms at greyhound
every bit of our life was influenced by
that but i do
know that whatever was happening in the
real world of the jim crow laws
and the legacy of this kind of segregation
segregation
and this inequality never entered the
doors of my school
now i know so many people who have told
me what it was like
as an african-american as once then
called a negro
to go on a trip where you couldn't find
a bathroom or you couldn't find food
or to learn about the integration of
baseball teams
ballet performers who came with someone
who was not the right color of the skin
couldn't get into the hotel
and it turns out lots of people make
made moral decisions
they wouldn't stay at the hotel that
wouldn't let someone eat there
or they would make sure that they stood
up to somebody at a gas station or a
filling station
to say let that man go to the bathroom
but those are unsung stories
and for the most part not passed down
from generation to generation in any
textbook that i had [Music]
[Music]
i think almost all memphians can look back
back
they're old enough to the buses because
one the whole
change in america over the bus boycott
by african-american maids is so
astounding because maids are the ones
who took the buses
they are the ones who got up at five in
the morning in order to be there for the
families so they could have their breakfast
breakfast
they needed those buses and i remember
as a child
so many people looking across
to see why certain people sat in the
back of the bus
because there were no rules and there
were no signs
and i do remember one day wanting
purposely to sit
where the back of the front meet and the
back of the bus was for black people it
was a smaller space
and the white space was the larger space
in the front
and i remember sitting with one leg on
either either side so i wasn't quite in
the back and i wasn't quite in the front
but i had the privilege to do whatever i
wanted as a young girl i thought
and there was a man a white man who came
from the front
to put his arms and hands on my shoulders
shoulders
and to push me up to pull me up with the
strength of his
hands because he said i was sitting in
the wrong place
and that moment
was a moment of a bit of anarchy i mean
first of all no one's going to tell me
where to sit
and two it was just so confusing and i
actually don't remember
did i confront him i doubt it did i
let him pull me up maybe because i was
little and he was big
but did i ever forget that moment no and
do i know what other people were thinking
thinking
no it was really something that happened
inside me
and has never never gone away [Music]
[Music]
i had one other story that
i'll never forget it was so humiliating
for me and i assume my empathy assumes
that it was unbelievably
humiliating for the man i was with but
as a young child there was a man who
worked for my parents
and if the car broke down wherever i was
or someone couldn't pick me up from
dancing school or art school or
whatever i would had the privilege to do
he would come
to get me and everything was fine until
one day i started to look like a 16 year
old girl
and i had always driven with him but now
i could drive
and he was in the front seat and the
police stopped us
and they stopped us because i had a
black man writing with the right woman
and i could feel his his humiliation
and my humiliation and i don't think we
spoke about it
but i don't think i've ever gotten over that
that [Music]
[Music]
you know it's occurred to me when i look
back that the faces i saw as a child
were those black women and those black
men who were my
caretakers my parents worked full time
we had someone in the house
they they were the faces that i saw of love
love
and that would be in addition to my
mother and my father my
brother and my sister but all of us have
ended up
in a major way impacted by growing up in
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