Little Sacrifices by Jamie Scott Page B

can go to our schools and use our taxis and not have to worry about having your own?’
    Dora Lee sighed, and looked sad. ‘I’m not sure we want to do that.’
    ‘But why wouldn’t you?’
    She appraised me indulgently, like she usually did when she had to break some bad news to me about my own people. ‘Honey, the way things are now, I can get along without ever talking to a white person except for you and your parents. I don’t need to be part of your world. I have my own. I’m more comfortable with it that way. I know what to expect from my people. Anyway, there aren’t enough of us registered to vote. No.’ She shook her head. ‘The polling boxes in the South are Jim Crow. That’s the way it’s always been.’ Later I did some digging and found out that Jim Crow was a character made up by an actor called Daddy Rice, who blackened his face, wrote some music and started the American minstrel tradition. The act made him a star and Jim Crow became synonymous in the South with segregation. But though we didn’t know it then, there were people quietly trying to change the system. A couple of years after our move a young black man called Westley Wallace Law would join the US Postal Service and begin slipping voter registration cards into black folks’ mailboxes along his route. WW Law was destined to play an important part in Savannah’s civil rights movement, but in those early days he took it one house at a time.
    Despite what Dora Lee said, I could hardly wait to turn twenty–one and get the chance to change things myself. That was one thing my parents and I agreed on. My own Ma was born when women didn’t yet have voting rights. We were only deemed fit to cast ballots in nineteen twenty.
    ‘Dora Lee, when were you born?’
    ‘I guess I’m somewhere over forty. I worked for the old Miss after the war and I wasn’t yet married.’
    I found the notion incredible. ‘You really don’t know how old you are?’
    ‘No particular reason, is there?’
    ‘Well, how did you know when you were old enough to get married?’
    She chuckled. ‘Child, you know, believe me, you know.’ She busied herself at the sink, humming as she rinsed the baking tray.
    ‘What about going to school? How did your parents know when you were old enough to start first grade?’
    She stopped humming and stood quiet for a second. ‘I didn’t go to school. There wasn’t any time for that when I was growing up. We children worked from the time we were this high.’ She measured a spot near her waist.
    ‘You didn’t go to school? None of you?’ I held my glass out for more milk and she filled it.
    ‘Well, some children did some learning. Most folks can do figuring and some know their letters. But I got along just fine without.’
    One of the most important things Dora Lee would teach me was that brains don’t have much to do with education. Some folks with all the schooling in the world go through life without ever really knowing a thing, and others who’ve never seen the inside of a classroom sure know a lot about the world. Education’s only a tool. Without the inclination to use it, it doesn’t do anyone much good.
    Ma interrupted from the kitchen doorway. ‘It’s different now, though, isn’t it Dora Lee? There’re the Negro schools.’
    ‘Yes ma’am, that’s true enough. There’re schools for those that can get to ‘em. And we can here in town. But the farms are different. There’s a lot to do out there. I know, that’s where I came from. No sense having every able–bodied child in school all day when there’s plowin’ and plantin’ and harvestin’ to be done. Now my Eliza was different. Being a city child, she didn’t work the fields like I did.’
    ‘Dora Lee, you have kids?’ This was an exciting development indeed.
    ‘Why yes miss. Just the one, Eliza. She’s nearly your age. She came to us late in our marriage.’
    ‘And she’s in school?’
    ‘Oh no. She’s past learning.’
    ‘How much