(This is part of a series. For Table of Contents go here)
On the first
day we met to talk about Dorothy’s life story, after we got settled and made
some small talk, I just turned on the tape recorder and asked her what she
wanted to talk about. I had a micro cassette tape recorder with 90 minute tapes – 45 minutes on each side. Usually 45 minutes was about as long as
Dorothy could stay focused on the topic of her life history, and then it was
with frequent questions from me to get her to elaborate. Often she would be talking about something in
her past and suddenly think of something else she wanted tell me that happened just yesterday. Keeping her on track was
usually my main task during our sessions with the tape recorder, but not on this
first day.
Dorothy
immediately began with what was the essential story of her life as she saw it.
It defined who she was, where she came from, and what she had endured:
I lived
in Sylacauga, Alabama until I was ten years old, then I was took away. The way they got
me there [to Partlow State School] is they told me there was a big shopping mall and we could go anywhere
we wanted to and do whatever we wanted to.
When I got there they didn’t do nothin’ but lock us in. We couldn’t even
go off the premises.
My daddy was living in Sylacauga, him
and my mother. One time there was an old colored man had a little ol’ calf. My
daddy went down there and got that calf and killed it, and that colored man
didn’t know it. He brought the beef to the house but my mother wouldn’t cook it
because she knew he stole it.
The police came and took my daddy
down to the jail house and he had to own up to it. Then he had to go to court.
I told that colored man that I was sorry that my daddy did so. The colored man said, “Well it was my calf,
and Mr. Burdette got it.” Then they took him down to the jail and the next
thing I knew, they sentenced him to prison. He stayed there a good long while
then he finally got out.
In 1939 my mother died. Then my daddy
and I moved to another part of town. One
day my daddy and I went on a fishing trip. We went off down to the woods and my
daddy tried to do something I didn’t want him to do. I hit him with a limb and
I got up and ran. He cussed me and he told me if he caught me he’d kill me, so
I was really afraid. I ran up to the house and hid under the bed where he
couldn’t find me. Then I went to the police after going to a neighbor’s house. They
took me down to the police station.
They finally sentenced my daddy after
he went to court for the second time. They sent him to Kilby Prison in
Montgomery. He stayed there until he
died on July 28, 1944. I didn’t know it until ten years later. My Aunt Gladys
came and told me, when she came to see me at Partlow.
* * *
These were
the defining moments of her life as she saw it. A little girl with limited
coping skills (as we shall see as Dorothy tells more of her childhood) was born
into crushing poverty. Her mother died and her abusive father was sent to
prison. After enduring such hardship,
she was sent to live in an institution. She was far from family, far from anyone she knew.
Once when
Dorothy was visiting at our house for Thanksgiving dinner, she talked briefly
about her father. “My daddy could be real mean and hateful, I was scared of him
a lot of the time and didn’t like him, but when I think about it there was some
part of me that really loved him, somehow.”
I would
learn more about her father and her mother through our taped discussions in the
weeks ahead.
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