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Authors: Isabel Wilkerson
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stretched to three, and the grandmother had a problem on her hands. The daughters had gotten themselves outin that big world way up north—who knew what kind of fix they were in?—and here she was left with the little ones.
When the money got low, Annie Taylor got in her rocking chair on the porch and rocked back and forth. She hummed and sang as she rocked.
Guide me o’er, thou Great Jehovah, pilgrim to this barren land. I am weak, but thou art mighty. Guide me with thy loving hand
.
George and James and Brother heard her humming.
“Grandma humming that song again,” George told James. “Somethin’ gonna happen soon.”
The palm of her hand started to itch, or so she said. And before long, a Western Union man came rolling up the street, announcing a telegram for Miss Annie Taylor.
“Somebody would be done wired us some money,” George would say years later. “Yes, sirree.”
The waiting and hoping went on for two years, and then it was decided that it was best for George to be with his father, and he joined his father in Eustis.
Big George worked at the loading dock of a packinghouse and ran a one-room convenience store over on Bates Avenue. He sold baked goods and castor oil to the fruit pickers and day workers and the children on their lunch break from the colored high school across the street in a citrus farming town in the underdeveloped midsection of a still-isolated state.
Lake County and the rest of central Florida were far from the lights of Miami and the palm-tree version of paradise that tourists came for. This was the Florida that had entered the Union as a slave state, where a Florida slaveholder could report without apology, in 1839, that he worked his slaves “in a hurrying time till 11 or 12 o’clock at night, and have them up by four in the morning.” 54 Florida went farther than some other slave states in the creativity of its repression: Slaves could not gather together to pray. 55 They couldn’t leave their plantations, even for a walk, without written permission from their owner. If they were accused of wrongdoing, “their hands were burned with a heated iron, their ears nailed to posts,” or their backs stripped raw with seventy-five lashes from a buckskin whip. The few free blacks in the state had to register with the nearest probate court or could be automatically enslaved by any white person who stepped forward to claim possession.
As the country neared the point of collapse over the issue of a state’sright to slavery, Florida, in the early winter of 1861, became one of the first to secede from the Union in the months leading up to the Civil War. 56 Florida broke away on January 10, 1861, three weeks after the first rebel state of South Carolina, and a day after Mississippi. Florida heartily joined a new country whose cornerstone, according to the Confederacy’s vice president, Alexander Hamilton Stephens, was “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.” 57 This new government, Stephens declared, “is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
Thus began the bloodiest war on American soil, after four years of which the Confederates fell in the spring of 1865. Immediately, Florida, Mississippi, and Texas took steps to begin imposing a formal caste system, becoming the first in the South to do so. They hastened to pass laws restricting the newly freed people barely before the cannons had cooled. Florida’s 1865 law set forth, among other things, that “if any negro, mulatto or other person of color shall intrude himself into any railroad car or other public vehicle set apart for the exclusive accommodation of white people,” he would be sentenced to “stand in pillory for one hour, or be whipped, not exceeding thirty-nine stripes, or both, at the discretion of the jury.” 58
Florida was shut off
When the money got low, Annie Taylor got in her rocking chair on the porch and rocked back and forth. She hummed and sang as she rocked.
Guide me o’er, thou Great Jehovah, pilgrim to this barren land. I am weak, but thou art mighty. Guide me with thy loving hand
.
George and James and Brother heard her humming.
“Grandma humming that song again,” George told James. “Somethin’ gonna happen soon.”
The palm of her hand started to itch, or so she said. And before long, a Western Union man came rolling up the street, announcing a telegram for Miss Annie Taylor.
“Somebody would be done wired us some money,” George would say years later. “Yes, sirree.”
The waiting and hoping went on for two years, and then it was decided that it was best for George to be with his father, and he joined his father in Eustis.
Big George worked at the loading dock of a packinghouse and ran a one-room convenience store over on Bates Avenue. He sold baked goods and castor oil to the fruit pickers and day workers and the children on their lunch break from the colored high school across the street in a citrus farming town in the underdeveloped midsection of a still-isolated state.
Lake County and the rest of central Florida were far from the lights of Miami and the palm-tree version of paradise that tourists came for. This was the Florida that had entered the Union as a slave state, where a Florida slaveholder could report without apology, in 1839, that he worked his slaves “in a hurrying time till 11 or 12 o’clock at night, and have them up by four in the morning.” 54 Florida went farther than some other slave states in the creativity of its repression: Slaves could not gather together to pray. 55 They couldn’t leave their plantations, even for a walk, without written permission from their owner. If they were accused of wrongdoing, “their hands were burned with a heated iron, their ears nailed to posts,” or their backs stripped raw with seventy-five lashes from a buckskin whip. The few free blacks in the state had to register with the nearest probate court or could be automatically enslaved by any white person who stepped forward to claim possession.
As the country neared the point of collapse over the issue of a state’sright to slavery, Florida, in the early winter of 1861, became one of the first to secede from the Union in the months leading up to the Civil War. 56 Florida broke away on January 10, 1861, three weeks after the first rebel state of South Carolina, and a day after Mississippi. Florida heartily joined a new country whose cornerstone, according to the Confederacy’s vice president, Alexander Hamilton Stephens, was “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.” 57 This new government, Stephens declared, “is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
Thus began the bloodiest war on American soil, after four years of which the Confederates fell in the spring of 1865. Immediately, Florida, Mississippi, and Texas took steps to begin imposing a formal caste system, becoming the first in the South to do so. They hastened to pass laws restricting the newly freed people barely before the cannons had cooled. Florida’s 1865 law set forth, among other things, that “if any negro, mulatto or other person of color shall intrude himself into any railroad car or other public vehicle set apart for the exclusive accommodation of white people,” he would be sentenced to “stand in pillory for one hour, or be whipped, not exceeding thirty-nine stripes, or both, at the discretion of the jury.” 58
Florida was shut off
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