The Foundation Was There: Growing up a Girl in the Jim Crow South

Abstract

“At twelve,” Cleaster Mitchell told an interviewer, “I knew how to take care of myself. I could work for anybody at twelve, because I was taught.” Speaking with pride and without self-pity, Mitchell explained that for black girls in the Jim Crow South childhood was training for self-reliance and preparation for adult womanhood. They learned to work and to care for the young, the old, the sick, and their future husbands. But black survival in the Jim Crow South required more, and so their second lessons were about mutuality and the necessarily close bonds of family and community. It had been—and still was—the responsibility of freedom’s first generation—“our foreparents,” Mitchell called them—to assure that freedom survived. In passing freedom dreams on to Mitchell’s generation, parents and grandparents also passed on information about freedom realities and a third set of lessons about racism: to expect and endure discrimination and yet aspire and achieve a better life than they had. A balancing act made all the more difficult by the shifting rules and practices of American apartheid, growing up a girl in the Jim Crow South required a keen sense for one’s surroundings.