When the recognition occurs exactly, I don’t recall, except that it takes place somewhere in my fourth year, maybe after she hands me a piece of candy, in an instant when at last I can respond to that look she has been giving me and reassure her with my own look— Of course I remember you, you’re my momma!
* * *
Ours was a family of secrets. Over the years, I heard only parts of my mother’s saga, told to me by a variety of sources, so that the understanding that eventually emerged was of a kind of Cinderella story—without the fairy godmother and the part at the end where she marries the prince and they all live happily ever after. The oldest and only daughter of the four surviving children born to parents Archie and Ophelia Gardner, Bettye Jean came into this world in 1928, in Little Rock, Arkansas, but was raised in Depression-era, dirt-poor, rural Louisiana—somewhere near the town of Rayville, population five hundred. With the trials of poverty and racism, life wasn’t easy for the Gardners. Bettye and her brother Archie— who cried grown-man tears when he recalled what it was like walking the long, dusty country roads to school in the thirties and forties in Rayville—had to keep their heads up as white children rode by in horse-drawn wagons or on horseback, looking down at the two of them, pointing, calling them “niggers,” and spitting on them.
Yet, in spite of hard times and hateful ignorance, Bettye’s childhood was relatively stable and very loving. Adored by her three younger brothers—Archie Jr., Willie, and Henry—she was, in fact, a golden girl of promise, a star student who finished third in her class when she graduated from Rayville Colored High School in 1946. But her dreams quickly unraveled the moment it was time to go off to college and pursue her calling as an educator, starting with the devastating sudden death of her mother. Like Cinderella, while she was still in mourning, almost overnight her father remarried, leaving Bettye to cope with a domineering stepmother—who went by the ironic nickname of Little Mama—and a new set of competitive stepsiblings. Just at a time when Bettye Jean was depending on the financial support from her father to go to college, Little Mama saw to it that the money went to her own daughter, Eddie Lee—who had graduated in the same class as Bettye but wasn’t among the top students.
Rather than giving up, even though her heart was broken by her father’s refusal to help, Bettye found work as a substitute teacher while she put herself through beauty school. But once again, when she needed financial assistance from her father to pay for her state licensing fees, he said no.
