Alex Haley - Roots - The Saga of an American Family

“How ’bout dat Lula Carter he gave dem flowers to?”

Astonished that Tom even knew, Irene said, “Dat more’n a year ago, Tom, an’ if you knows so much, reckon you also know she carried on like sich a fool after dat, fawnin’ roun’ ’im like a shadow, he finally quit talkin’ to her at all!”

“He done it once, he could do it agin.”

“Not to Cynthia, he ain’t, not much sense as she got, ’long wid bein’ pretty an’ well raised. She done tol’ me much as she like Will, she ain’t never let on to ’im how she feel! Mos’ she ever say is howdy an smile back when he do. Don’t care how many gals buzzin’ after ’im, you see who he buzzin’ after!”

“See you got everythin’ worked out,” said Tom.

Irene pleaded, “Aw, Tom, let ’im walk de child home. Leas’ let’em git togedder. Dey stays togedder’s up to dem.”

“An’ me!” Tom said sternly. He did not want to seem too easy to any of his daughters, his wife either. Above all, he did not want Irene aware that before now he had seen the potential, had weighed it, and thoroughly approved of Will Palmer if the time came. Having watched young Will since he had come to Henning, Tom privately had often wished that either of his two sons showed half of young Will’s gumption. In fact, the deviously serious, ambitious, highly capable Will Palmer reminded Tom of a younger himself.

No one had expected that the courtship would develop so fast. Ten months later, in the “company room” of Tom and Irene’s new four-room house, Will proposed to Cynthia, who barely could restrain her “Yes!” until he had finished speaking. The third Sunday from then, they were married in the New Hope CME Church in a ceremony attended by well over two hundred people, about half of whom had come from North Carolina on the wagon train, and their children—and who now lived on farms scattered throughout Lauderdale County.

Will with his own hands and tools built their small home where, a year later, in 1894, their first child, a son, was born, who died within a few days. By now Will Palmer never took off a weekday from work, the lumber company’s hard-drinking owner being so far gone into the bottle that Will practically was running the entire business. Going over the company’s books one stormy late Friday afternoon, Will discovered a bank payment overdue that day at People’s Bank. He rode his horse eight miles through drenching rains to knock at the bank president’s back porch.

“Mr. Vaughan,” he said, “this payment slipped Mr. James’ mind, and I know he wouldn’t want to keep you waitin’ till Monday.”

Invited inside to dry, he said, “No, thank you, sir, Cynthia’ll be wonderin’ where I am.” And wishing the banker a good night, he rode back off in the rain.

The banker, deeply impressed, told the incident all over town.

In the fall of 1893, someone came and told Will he was wanted at the bank. Puzzled throughout the few minutes’ walk there, Will found inside, waiting for him, Henning’s ten leading white businessmen, all seeming red-faced and embarrassed. Banker Vaughan explained, speaking rapidly, that the lumber company’s owner had declared bankruptcy, with plans to move elsewhere with his family. “Henning needs the lumber company,” said the banker. “All of us you see here have been weeks discussing it, and we can’t think of anyone better to run it than you, Will. We’ve agreed to cosign a note to pay off the company’s debts for you to take over as the new owner.”

Tears trickling down his cheeks, Will Palmer walked wordlessly along the line of white men. As he double-gripped and squeezed each hand, then that man hurriedly signed the note and even more quickly left with tears in his own eyes. When they had all gone, Will wrung the banker’s hand for a long moment. “Mr. Vaughan, I’ve got one more favor to ask. Would you take half of my savings and make out a check for Mr. James, without his ever knowing where it came from?”

Within a year, Will’s credo—to provide the best possible goods and service for the lowest possible price—was drawing customers even from adjoining towns, and wagonloads of people, mostly black, were coming from as far away as Memphis—forty-eight miles to the South—to see with their own eyes western Tennessee’s first black-owned business of its kind, where Cynthia had hung ruffled, starched curtains in the windows and Will had painted the sign on the front: “W. E. PALMER LUMBER COMPANY.”

Cynthia’s and Will’s prayers were answered in 1895 with the birth of the sound, healthy girl whom they named Bertha George—the “George” after Will’s father. Cynthia insisted on assembling a houseful of family before whom she told the gurgling infant the whole story back to the African, Kunta Kinte, just as Tom Murray had told it to all of his children at intervals when they had been young.

Will Palmer respected Cynthia’s devotion to her ancestors’ memory, but it irritated his own deep pride to be considered as having married into Cynthia’s family rather than the other way around. It was probably why he began to monopolize little Bertha even before she could walk. Every morning he carried her about before he left for work. Every night he tucked her into the little crib that he had made with his hands for her.

By the time Bertha was five, the rest of the family and much of the town’s black community quoted Cynthia and speaking for themselves echoed her opinion, “Will Palmer jes’ spilin’ dat gal to pieces!” He had arranged that she had credit at every Henning store that sold candy; and he paid the bill each month, though he made her keep an accounting, which he solemnly checked “to teach her business.” As her fifteenth-birthday present, when he opened a Sears, Roebuck mail-order account in her name, the people shook and wagged their heads in mingled astonishment, dismay—and pride: “All dat young’un got to do is pick what she like out’n dat pitcher catalogue, an’ write off de order blank, an’ firs’ thing you knows dem Sears, Roebuck white folks way yonder in Chicago done sent it—seen it wid dese here eyes . . . an’ her daddy pays fo’ it . . . you hearin’ what I’m tellin’ you, chile? Anythin’ dat Bertha want!’

Later that same year, Will hired a teacher to come weekly all the way from Memphis to give Bertha piano lessons. She was a gifted pupil, and before long was playing for the choir in the New Hope Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, of which Will was the senior trustee and Cynthia was the perennial president of the Stewardess Board.

When Bertha finished the local eighth grade in June of 1909, there was no question that she would be leaving Henning to attend the CME Church-supported Lane Institute thirty miles to the east in Jackson, Tennessee, which went from ninth grade through two years of college.

“Gal, jes’ no way you can know . . . what it mean, you bein’ dis fam’ly’s firs’ one headin’ fo’ a college—”

“Maw, if I can ever git you and Paw to please quit saying such as ‘ dis ’ and ‘ fo’! I keep telling you they’re pronounced ‘ this ’ and ‘ for’! Anyway, isn’t that why colleges are there? For people to go to?”

Cynthia wept when she got alone with her husband. “Lawd God he’p us wid ’er, Will, she jes’ don’t unnerstan’.”

“Maybe she best don’t,” he tried to console. “I jes’ know I’ll draw my last breath seein’ she have better chance’n us did.”

As was only expected of her, Bertha achieved consistently high grades—studying pedagogy, to become a teacher—and she both played the piano and sang in the school choir. On one of her two weekend visits back home every month, she persuaded her father to have a sign painted on both doors of his delivery truck: “Henning 121—Your Lumber Number.” Telephones recently had come to Henning; it was typical of Bertha’s ready wit, which got quoted often around town.