Published in 1989, the book was easy to underestimate.
Although a hardcover, it was closer in size to a paperback and only 153 pages. The author was unknown. It was his first book. It was published to no fanfare by an obscure, financially shaky publishing house in, of all places, Tulsa, a considerable distance from the nation`s literary center in New York City. The press run was 3,000 copies, nothing to write home about. It was ignored by most reviewers.
A failure? No. A sleeper. Soon to be a surprise. A minor miracle.
Today, it`s in its fifth printing. A paperback edition is planned in April. The publisher, Council Oak Books, is thriving, helped to a great measure by this unprepossessing but hardy little volume, which may turn out to be a classic.
Its title is ”Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored.” It is Clifton Taulbert`s gentle, bittersweet memoir of growing up poor and black in rural Mississippi during the days of segregation.
So far 20,000 copies have been distributed. ”We`ve only scratched the surface,” says Michael Hightower, a Council Oak co-publisher. ”It`s not Tom Clancy, but the way it`s been building is phenomenal.”
Recent books on race in the South tend to concentrate on the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Taulbert`s focus is the `40s and `50s, a period that has been widely ignored, perhaps because it is so painful for blacks and embarrassing for many whites.
In the book`s introduction, he writes: ”In our desire as black Americans to put segregation behind us, we have put ourselves in danger of forgetting our past-the good and the bad. I believe that to forget our colored past is to forget ourselves, who we are and what we`ve come from.”
Taulbert, 46, married and the father of two children, is president of a Tulsa marketing company. ”The era of segregation is like a missing piece of the puzzle,” he says. ”Without it, I don`t think we can fully understand the `60s or even today.”
His scenes and portraits are lovingly and artfully rendered, and he suffuses his recollections with poignance rather than bitterness in addressing the deprivations of segregation and the hurts of racial bigotry it engendered. ”I`m not glorifying the past but the strength of the black people who did not let the circumstances defeat them,” he says. ”Segregation was humiliating and cruel, but everyone today should know there was a sense of family and community behind that wall that the white society had erected. The people behind that wall-who were then called `colored` instead of black-nurtured and cared for each other.”
The Library Journal found the book ”important” and ”moving” and recommended it for ”major public, university and college libraries.” Yet it was going nowhere for almost a year before finally being noticed by a few of the nation`s biggest newspapers.
Their favorable reviews provided the publicity it needed to gain wider attention and prompt Publishers Weekly to observe, ”Its message has done well across the nation with all races and all classes.”
Mississippi`s Paris
Taulbert was born and grew up in Glen Allan, a small town in the cotton country of western Mississippi near the Arkansas border. (Its present population is 350.)
His mother, who would become a teacher and a leader in a Head Start program in the `60s, was abandoned by Taulbert`s father. Because of her indigence, Taulbert lived until age 5 with his great-grandparents, then with Ma Ponk, his great-aunt.
He describes his great-grandfather, Rev. Joseph Young, a Baptist preacher whom he called Poppa, as ”a black Buddha,” his shaven head ”as clean and shiny as that of an ancient Chinese god.”
He begins the book with an account of the eagerly anticipated journey he took every Saturday in Poppa`s `49 Buick to Greenville, the county seat. Although 27 miles away, Greenville might as well have been Paris, so exotic and exciting were its many stores and large, bustling crowds. Young Cliff would spend his nickels on a frozen custard cone, and Poppa would buy a fresh loaf of French bread.
Tightly grasping his great-grandson`s hand, Poppa would also step off the sidewalk to let white people pass. It was expected.
The barriers rarely went down. Mrs. Knight, a prominent white woman in town, was an exception. She hired Taulbert to rake leaves, permitted him to eat at the same table with her in her house, and encouraged him.
Taulbert relates a poignant moment when whites and blacks shared a bucket brigade to battle the fire at a black woman`s house, then quickly returned to the roles that divided the two communities.
Shut out of politics
His remembrances of black minstrel shows, Friday night baths and fishing with Ma Ponk are delightful; his insights into more serious subjects are affecting.
On the church: ”It was more than an institution, it was the very heartbeat of our lives. Our church was all our own, beyond the influence of whites, with its own societal structure.” On Sundays ”field hands were deacons and maids were ushers, mothers of the church or trustees. The church transformed the ordinary into an institution of social and economic significance.”
On politics: He tells of riding with his mother, Mary, and stepfather, Moses Taulbert, in the family pickup and seeing a presidential campaign billboard for Adlai Stevenson. He asked his mother who the man was. ”I recall her abrupt response,” he writes, ”`That`s white folks` business. We ain`t got nothing to do with it.”`
On labor: ”There was a strong work ethic when I was growing up in the South. Every colored person worked from the time he was old enough to drag a sack through the cotton fields. The work was back breaking, exhausting and sometimes degrading. It often required a mother to leave home in the morning to go prepare breakfast for a white family before her own children were fed.” Taulbert helped spread the word on his book, appearing as a headliner at the 1990 American Booksellers Association convention. In January he spoke at a library on Chicago`s South Side; last week he was featured in a lecture series at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
The book is finding a home in elementary and secondary schools throughout the U.S.-including Corliss High School on Chicago`s South Side-as part of multi-cultural and black study programs. (The hardcover is $16.95; the paperback will be $9.95.)
Publisher Hightower says several school systems, including those in Texas, North Carolina, New York, Florida and Washington, D.C., are interested, which would increase orders by the thousands.
Herman L. Reese, a consultant for the Southern Education Foundation, says he will promote Taulbert`s book on behalf of the privately endowed foundation, which was established in 1867, at a conference on school curricula this month in San Francisco.
”We`re recommending it as a supplementary text in 10th and 11th grades, but I think it`s also suitable for elementary grades,” Reese says. ”I think it puts more realism into the study of American history, just like `Glory` and `Dances With Wolves` did as movies.”
The legacy of that time, Taulbert says, is more positive than some may think. ”Many successful black Americans today owe their success to parents who lived with great courage and patience in places like Glen Allan,” he says. ”Those older people laid the foundation. They invested in our future.” He calls them silent heroes. One was Louis Fields, a sharecropper.
”There was nothing extraordinary about Mr. Fields,” Taulbert says. ”He had very little education. I would go and sit on the porch of his house. It had a rusting tin roof, and its green paint was fading and peeling. The cotton fields where he worked were no more than five feet away.
”He would be raring back in his rocking chair smoking a long cigar. He wore a felt hat that had years of sweat in the band. And he`d tell me: `Boy, you can be anything you want to be. Get your education. You can be a doctor, a lawyer, an architect.` He gave me the determination to go to college.”
Enlisting friendship
Taulbert says he has been overwhelmed by the reaction to his book.
”Black people come up to me with tears in their eyes and say, `You told our story.` It brings out things that have been sitting in their hearts for a long time,” he says.
Whites also thank him, he says. ”It allows them to talk about things they haven`t talked about before.”
The book ends with Taulbert`s high-school graduation. For four years, he had risen before dawn to be bused to a black school in Greenville, though the white school in Glen Allan was a few blocks away. He was valedictorian of his class, but there was no money for college.
He started an eight-year quest toward a university diploma, which he earned in 1971, by heading north and taking a job as a dishwasher in St. Louis. At age 19, he enlisted in the Air Force, where he became friends with a white recruit from Oregon named Paul DeMuniz, now a judge on that state`s Court of Appeals.
”We were very close,” DeMuniz says. ”Cliff was the best man in my wedding, and I was in his wedding. I had very little exposure to black people. On cold snowy nights, we talked for hours and hours. Cliff is a wonderful, humane person.
I came from a humble background, and his example showed me how you can overcome obstacles. He inspired me to go to college.”
DeMuniz was captivated by Taulbert`s tales of Glen Allan. ”I told him he should write about it.”
It was years before he did. ”Then I got rejections from every publisher in New York City,” Taulbert says.
In 1987 he met Paulette Millichap, a co-publisher of Council Oak Books, who told him if he reworked his manuscript, she`d publish it.
”Our offices are in a bungalow,” says Michael Hightower, Millichap`s partner. ”My office was in the back, and one day I heard someone come in, totally unannounced, sit down and start reading. I said, `Paulette, who is that guy?”`
Says Millichap: ”Yes, Cliff would burst in the door and start reading whatever chapter he had rewritten.
When you`re a small, struggling publisher, you can take these kinds of interruptions.
”Other people in the office would pull up their chairs, and we would all sit there and all cry. It was a lovely experience, to be a part of the book as it evolved.”
A governor`s salute
Millichap decided the book should have the feeling of a ”told” story.
”The black tradition is oral, and Cliff is a charismatic storyteller,”
she says. ”We made the book small to keep a sense of a diary.”
The first book-signing was in Greenville. ”I was scared to death no one would come,” Taulbert says. His fears were unfounded. ”There were people I hadn`t seen in years, white and black,” he says. ”We laughed and wept. It was a wonderful day.”
He and his wife, Barbara, were invited to the governor`s mansion in Jackson, the state capital. ”When I was a kid in Glen Allan, each year we would take a field trip to Jackson. They would point out the governor`s mansion, but colored students couldn`t take the tour through it. The only place they let us get out of the bus and visit was the insane asylum.”
The Taulberts dined with Mississippi Gov. Ray Mabus and his wife, Julie.
”I thought about Mr. Louis Fields and Poppa and Ma Ponk and my mother,”
Taulbert says. ”My silent heroes, the people who were responsible for me being there. They were there too. I`m sure of it.”
