Speaking Truth to Power Read online

  Rushed from the car into the Rules Committee room, I had no time to prepare for what I learned would be a full day of testimony. Someone informed the Judiciary Committee of my arrival. By then Thomas had left the hearing room, and the committee had assembled in a room adjacent to the caucus room. Chairman Biden insisted that my testimony begin immediately. The Capitol policemen escorted me out of the Rules Committee room, instructing me to stand immediately behind them as they led me and my advisers down the corridor to the caucus room for my testimony.

  We walked swiftly through a gauntlet of reporters and camera operators filling the hallways. Every one of our steps echoed down the long corridor of the Russell Building, with its fifteen-foot ceiling. Senate staffers stepped out of their offices to watch the parade. As I walked down that corridor, I was certain that every journalist in the country was there. I was wrong. There were far more in the caucus room—reporters, photographers, camera operators, crew members—all waiting to capture the story.

  The scene inside the hearing room startled me momentarily. The focal point of the large room was a long table draped in a bright green cloth. At the center of the table sat a single microphone, a glass of water, and a name card: “Professor Anita Hill.” I sat down in the lone chair at the table. Immediately to my right and left were throngs of photographers; behind me were my advisers, more journalists, staffers, and other nameless observers. In front of me, facing me and the bank of journalists, was the Senate Judiciary Committee—fourteen white men dressed in dark gray suits. I questioned my decision to wear bright blue linen, though it hadn’t really been a decision; that suit was the only appropriate and clean suit in my closet when I hastily packed for Washington two days before. In any case, it offered a fitting contrast.

  Senator Biden called the hearing to order, explained the procedure the committee would follow, and swore me in. After I finished reading my statement, he gave me that smile and said, “Professor, before I begin my questioning, I notice that there are a number of people sitting behind you. Are any of them your family members you would like to introduce?”

  “Well, actually my family members have not arrived yet,” I said with regret and anxiety. Sue Ross, one of my attorneys, whispered that my family was waiting in the hallway. “Yes, they have,” I corrected myself. “They are outside the door. They were not here for my statement.”

  “We will make room for your family to be able to sit,” said the chairman.

  “It is a very large family, Senator.”

  A short time later, my relatives began filing into the hearing room. Each took a turn greeting me. My mother, who would be eighty in five days, embraced me as cameras flash-froze the moment for posterity. Chairs were shifted around and brought in from adjacent rooms.

  “We will try to get a few more chairs, if possible, but we should get this under way.” Senator Biden was beginning to sound a bit impatient.

  By now, the entire first row had been cleared, but we needed more room still. The press corps made up the next layer of spectators. Most journalists were not about to give up their seats, and Senator Biden did not request them to.

  “Fine, we can put them in the back as well,” Biden said.

  But my family did not travel across the country to sit in the back of the hearing room. And they paid little heed to Biden’s suggestion.

  “Now, there are two chairs on the end here, folks. We must get this hearing moving. There are two chairs on the end here. We will find everyone a seat but we must begin.” The instant smile had completely vanished.

  “Now, Professor Hill, at the risk of everyone behind you standing up, would you be kind enough to introduce your primary family members to us.”

  “I would like to introduce, first of all, my father, Albert Hill.”

  “Mr. Hill, welcome,” the chairman said.

  “My mother, Erma Hill.”

  “Mrs. Hill.”

  Four of my sisters were there—the eldest, Elreatha, and JoAnn, Carlene, and Joyce. I introduced them too.

  “I welcome you all. I am sorry?”

  “My brother, Ray Hill,” I interrupted, limiting my introductions to my “primary” family members, as the senator had requested. I forgot my sister Doris and deliberately omitted my nieces and nephew, Anita LaShelle, Lila, and Eric.

  I had simply said that I needed their support. Some I had expected; others I was surprised to see. With less than forty-eight hours notice, twelve of them had come to Washington, D.C., to be present on Friday morning at the opening of the hearing. My parents had arrived from Tulsa with my sisters Elreatha and JoAnn. My sisters Doris, Joyce, and Carlene and my niece Anita LaShelle had flown in from California. My niece Lila had come from New York. When I first told my family of the hearings, I did not know who would be able to make the trip to Washington on such short notice. They all had jobs and would have to take vacation time to attend.

  My family was as relieved as I had been when they were allowed into the hearing room. Like me, my family had watched Thomas’ opening statement from a hotel room. And like me, they had little information about when I would appear. As soon as they were notified, they had hailed three taxis for the trip to the Russell Building. As I greeted each of them, I felt despair and humiliation that we should be brought together under such painful and public circumstances. Even at the age of thirty-five I wanted my family to be proud of me. At the same time, I wanted to protect them—especially my parents, who were both approaching eighty at the time of the hearing. This event placed them squarely in harm’s way, and I could neither help feeling responsible nor shield them from what was happening.

  At that moment when I hugged my mother, I felt the gravity of the situation most intensely. For the first time during the ordeal I wanted to cry, but my desire to show her my strength moved me beyond the tears. As difficult as it was for me to have my family there in the midst of the turmoil, their presence gave me courage. I could read the determination on their faces.

  What I know of my family story goes back two generations on my father’s side and one on my mother’s. They came from Arkansas, North Carolina, and Texas, traveling to Indian Territory and Oklahoma to escape the racial hostility of those states. But what they and even their descendants found was merely a different, sometimes less violent, brand of inequality.

  Like my parents, my grandparents and great-grandparents were farmers. The latter group all began as slaves on farms in the South. My mother’s father, Henery Elliott, was born a slave in Arkansas in 1864. His parents, Sam and Mollie Elliott, were separated by sale, before he was born. Henery’s mother and a stepfather, Charley Taylor, were brought together by the circumstances of their status. At the end of slavery, they married and raised my grandfather. Sam Elliott remarried as well, to a woman named Alice. Alice Elliott was known to her step-grandchildren and the generation that followed as “Granny.”

  My maternal grandmother, Ida Crook Elliott, was born in Texas in 1872. Over a span of twenty-five years, she and my maternal grandfather had fourteen children—a large family even by farm standards. Amazingly, given the times and the family’s economic conditions, all but three of their children survived. I have the impression from them that my grandparents were much like my mother, their youngest daughter, quiet and determined. From the one photograph of my grandparents that exists, and a few stories my mother and her brother, my Uncle George, tell, I learned almost all I know about them. Ida Elliott was one of two children, born and raised in Texas. Her only brother, Danny, was killed when he resisted whites who were trying to drive him from his farm. My mother and her brother, my Uncle George, tell the story in a way reminiscent of the stories of loved ones killed at war.

  The story that stands out the most is the one about how my mother’s family came to Oklahoma. It begins in the fall of 1913. Henery and Ida Elliott were living and raising their children on a farm in eastern Arkansas. About that time, as a small boy “in shirttails,” my mother’s brother George recalls being “visited” by a white
neighbor on horseback. Consistent with the times, the call was work-related, social interaction between the races at that time being virtually unheard-of. Approaching the Elliott home, the neighbor cut a trail through my grandparents’ field, leaving to waste all of the cotton in his newly carved path. “My wife needs some help with her cleaning and cooking,” the neighbor said. He “asked” my grandfather if my grandmother was available to work for him. “She’s pretty busy just taking care of these children,” my grandfather responded on her behalf. But whatever care Henery Elliott took not to offend, his explanation that my grandmother was far too busy to work outside her home fell on deaf ears. “Have you forgotten who you’re talking to?” the rider demanded. Even at the turn of the century, his status as a “freeborn white man” left neither my grandfather, a former slave, nor my grandmother, a descendant of slaves, the option to say no. “I’ll be around to see you tonight,” he threatened as he rode away, cutting another path of wasted cotton through my grandfather’s field.

  During the early twentieth century in much of the United States, even a polite, reasoned rejection by a black person of a white person’s request could be viewed as “uppitiness.” My grandfather knew through tales passed along from his father and through his own experience in Arkansas that the lessons for “uppitiness” were harsh and arbitrary, ranging from threats to burned crops to lynching. And those lessons were often doled out at the hands of night riders.

  Between 1882 and 1968, Arkansas was the site of 284 reported lynchings. The incidents of lynching in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee, states with higher black populations, were fewer than in Arkansas. Higher incidents of lynching occurred only in the states of Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama, and Texas. The grimly illustrative statistics on lynching do not begin to take into account the night rides and other tactics employed by organizations and individuals. A black family’s attempts at self-preservation and protection included the telling and retelling of these stories as warnings to young blacks that the informal “system of justice” born of racism was neither just nor systematic. Racial violence and the threat of such were ever present in the collective black psyche of that time.

  Though the night visit the neighbor promised my grandfather never occurred, Henery and Ida Elliott decided that for the sake of their children they would no longer live under such threats. That night my grandfather began preparations to move his family. After the season’s crops were harvested and the Elliotts had collected their pay, they would leave. Throughout the black communities in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee rumors spread that Oklahoma provided escape from the racial tension prevalent in these more southern states. “Mama and Papa were told that things were so much better in Oklahoma,” my mother recalls with a chuckle. Like thousands of other southern rural blacks, my maternal grandparents packed their wagons and moved to farmland in Oklahoma where a number of all-black or predominantly black communities were developing.

  Farming was all my grandfather and grandmother knew. Immediately following slavery, 60 percent of the blacks in the country were employed in some type of farm labor. But between 1915 and 1940 many blacks had been encouraged by economic and social opportunities to migrate to northern urban areas, trading in the farm and farm labor for more modern living conditions and factory jobs. And for those who stayed, farmwork rarely led to farm ownership. As late as 1930, 80 percent of black farmers were working land owned by someone else. My grandparents never owned any of the land that they worked in Arkansas or in Oklahoma. But unlike many southern blacks, my grandfather with his large family chose to remain a farmer.

  In January of 1914 Ida and Henery Elliott and ten of their eleven children moved to Wewoka, Oklahoma. Their departure was tearful as they left behind family members including my Aunt Zodia and my great-grandparents, Sam and Alice, as well as Charley and Mollie Taylor. Uncle George remembers the day they left for Oklahoma as “the first time I ever saw my papa cry.” They all cried as they said good-bye to Zodia, my mother’s oldest sister. Though my grandparents wanted the promise of Oklahoma for all of their children, Zodia was a new bride whose husband wanted to remain in Arkansas. She stayed with him as much of the rest of the family made their way to Wewoka, a town with a relatively large black population, many of whom were members of the Seminole Nation or their descendants. When Henery Elliott’s father, Sam, died a few years later, he brought his stepmother, Alice Elliott, the woman my mother knew as Granny, to live with him and his family. Later, when my mother was thirteen, the family moved to a small rural community called Lone Tree in Okmulgee County.

  The only photograph of my mother’s parents, a snapshot, pictures them in an open, flat landscape that looks like it could be almost anywhere in Oklahoma. The only thing that separates Henery and Ida Elliott from this austerity created by the background and the black-and-white photography is a patch of flowers and a young boy who seems to be running to escape the camera. They are dressed in simple clothing—the clothing of farmers. Yet the clothing gives some hint that it is Sunday or some other special occasion—my grandfather wears a jacket, and my grandmother a long full dress and cotton stockings but no apron. I try to place the picture among all of the stories. To me my grandfather looks like a man who would have been a deacon in the church. A serious man who would have been approached by neighbors in the Lone Tree community about rebuilding the membership in the Lone Tree Baptist Church. A man who would have succeeded in such a challenge. The season appears to be fall, and though my grandparents appear to be in the winter of their short lives, they stand tall and straight, looking soberly into the camera. Unsmiling, they both appear to be gazing beyond the camera. I like to think that they are looking into the future—into the faces of grandchildren they would never know.

  My grandmother’s posture is stiff-backed, almost to the point of appearing uncomfortable. Her very demeanor, her serious expression, and her deliberately erect carriage remind me of my mother. In their shared demeanor, my grandmother and mother are alike in a way that my mother and I will never be. Ida Elliott did the impossible, giving birth to thirteen children and raising fourteen with none of the benefits of the modern conveniences we take for granted today. Amazingly, she lived until 1937 to the age of sixty-four, surviving my grandfather by one year, if not the Great Depression.

  Alice Elliott lived with her stepson and his wife, Henery and Ida, until the three could no longer care for each other. By that time, my mother and her siblings were adults with homes of their own. In 1932 Henery, Ida, and Alice Elliott moved to my Uncle Tutulus and Aunt Fanny Elliott’s home. There were no pension programs for aging farmers and the family chose home care rather than nursing home care partly because of cost, partly because of tradition, and partly because of love. Their step-granddaughter- and daughter-in-law, my Aunt Fanny, cooked and cared for them. My mother and her siblings helped to look after her parents and step-grandmother as first Henery, then Ida, and finally in 1939 Alice Elliott died. She was the last member of the generation that had experienced slavery firsthand. Sadly her thoughts on it and life after it are unrecorded.

  My paternal grandparents were Allen and Ollie Hill. Allen Hill was the youngest of four children. According to my father, his grandparents had come to Oklahoma “as hoboes” before the turn of the century, before Oklahoma became a state. Along with two other families of freed slaves and their children, my paternal great-grandparents, Ed and Sally Hill, hopped freight trains from North Carolina to Oklahoma when my grandfather was just a small boy. This, too, was a blended family. My great-grandfather had two children by a previous “slave” marriage. My great-grandmother had one under similar circumstances. Together they then had two children including my grandfather. In Oklahoma Ed Hill farmed and ran a junk business, scrapping spare parts from the junked equipment of the many oil fields that sprang up throughout Oklahoma Territory.

  Ollie Nelson Hill, my paternal grandmother, was born in Texas and lived there until, when she was twelve, her mother, Nellie Nelson,
died. Gus Nelson was her father. He was born Gus Simms but he’d been given the name Nelson as a slave when purchased by a man with that name and retained it throughout his life. Upon his wife’s death, Gus Nelson, a minister, brought my grandmother, Ollie, a brother, and two sisters, along with a younger sister of Nellie’s, to Oklahoma, where he raised them alone. Late in his life, after his children were adults, he remarried.

  Allen Hill and Ollie Nelson were married when they were in their late teens and served as proof to the theory that opposites attract. Though married for over thirty years, they appear to have lived separate lives. Mama Ollie, a religious woman, was a member of the fundamentalist Church of God in Christ. Musically gifted, she was quiet and reserved. She happily shared her talent with her children but allowed them to play only the music of the church. Daddy Allen, on the other hand, loved to go to dance halls and baseball games. Always outgoing and gregarious, he joined church only late in life. According to my mother, Allen Hill’s confession of his sins came when he was well past committing most of them—as he stood at death’s door.

  For a time, Allen Hill ran a taxi service with a surrey between Muskogee and Okmulgee, Oklahoma. It was the first of its kind in the area. But mostly, Allen and Ollie Hill were farmers. Unlike my maternal grandfather, Allen Hill did not work the land he leased. He had sharecroppers, his two sons, and hired help do his farming. Late in life, at my father’s suggestion, he bought land, the first in his family to do so. That, along with an adjacent parcel that my father purchased at the same time, was the beginning of the family holdings.