Alex Haley Read Free Page A

petted him. “Even when she was grumbling something,” Palmer later said, “like ‘Boy, you’ve gotten all dirty,’ her fingers would still be moving lightly and deliberately as if she were saying with them, ‘I care for you; I love you.’” Palmer was a grandma’s boy, and the fundamental security of his psyche was rooted in their relationship.
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    About a year after Will Palmer’s death, Palmer began to live most of the time with his parents, outside Henning. As he grew, he resembled Bertha, with his brown, fleshy face, as opposed to Simon’s narrow, light-complected one. Simon, an extrovert and a performer, showed Palmer that storytelling was not just a feminine art. He loved to spin yarns that featured his own prowess. His sons would prompt him to tell about when General Black Jack Pershing sent for Sergeant Haley to save the day at the Western Front or when Simon scored the winning touchdown in a college football game. In time, the boys joked about the likely exaggerations, but they never doubted Simon’s strong character.
    With the sale of the lumber company, Simon embarked on a peripatetic life through black colleges in the South. The jobs he found paid poorly, and there was scant security at the often-unstable little colleges, which were mostly dependent on meager state funding and, sometimes, Christian denominational support. Simon taught first at Lane College, just forty-seven miles from Henning. The family returned to Cynthia and Aunt Liz most weekends. It felt to Palmer as if they never really left Henning. But in 1929, they moved more than five hundred miles to Oklahoma Colored Agricultural and Normal University in the all-black town of Langston, Oklahoma, where Simon was appointed to a better position in the school’s Department of Agriculture. Palmer recalled the strangeness of living where no one knew his family but also the fun of making new friends in Oklahoma. The hard, snowy winters, when jackrabbits froze to death under their house, also made a strong impression on him. The Great Depression descended so heavily there in 1930 that Simon was paid not in cash but in state-issued coupons. “I don’t think my mother was very well adjusted to it,” Palmer remembered. Not far into their time in Langston, Bertha fell seriously ill, and Simon had to hire a woman to help tend to the children.
    People had started to wander the roads in Oklahoma. One evening a white man knocked on their door and asked if Bertha had any work for him. No, she answered, but she could give him a plate of food. Sometime later, the Haleys were driving eastward through Oklahoma on their way to Tennessee when Bertha got very sick. Simon drove to a strange house in the dark and asked for a place for his wife to rest. The man of the house was the same man Bertha had fed. Palmer later remembered that evening as “being a very warm, almost religious experience.” Palmer often returned to that story as evidence of the inherently caring human relations of the South of his childhood. 3
    In 1931 Simon accepted a significantly better position as dean of agriculture at Alabama Agricultural & Mechanical College, the state’s black land grant college, near Huntsville, Alabama. The campus sat on a wooded area that the school claimed presented “a beautiful picture” to passengers traveling past it on the tracks of the Southern Railway. “Large limestone boulders, wooded areas of cedar, hickory, walnut and poplar, and sparkling water” from a mountain spring lent a “charm and picturesqueness surpassed by few school locations.” Local whites tagged it “Nigger Normal”— normal was the term used to designate a teacher’s college.
    Conditions at the school were not good when the Haleys arrived. Simon’s annual salary was $1,800, about $26,000 today, but Simon was told that the financial situation in Alabama “may render it