Most of them were dressed in hand-me-downs or castoffs from their parents’ white employers. Everywhere she went, the kids snickered and stared.
She might as well have had on a ballroom gown.
On her first day at Hamilton High School, Parker wore her favorite outfit: a pleated floral skirt with a sleeveless, orange-and-fuchsia top-perfectly matched, as her aunt Velma had taught her. “I never really understood why the graveyards had to be segregated, because the dead get along with each other pretty well.” “Every single thing was segregated, from cradle to grave,” a local civil-rights leader later recalled. (When the city parks were finally desegregated, in 1963, the public pools shut down rather than let Black people in the water.) Even Beale Street and its blues clubs kept to one side of the line: the street ran along the southern edge of downtown, where whites could step into a club without walking through a Black neighborhood-or having Black musicians walk through theirs. Schools, bars, restaurants, buses, libraries, rest rooms, and telephone booths all had their shabbier counterparts across town, their shadow selves. Whites lived downtown and in the better houses to the east Blacks were in the poor and working-class neighborhoods to the north and south, corralled there by redlining. It was the capital of the Mississippi Delta, the home of the Cotton Exchange, where plantation owners once made their wealth.
#Lady walking a flamingo cartoon archive#
Photograph courtesy Stax Museum of American Soul Music Archive If she closed her eyes, she could almost imagine that there was no difference between them.ĭeanie Parker, shown with Al Bell, Jim Stewart, and the civil-rights leader Julian Bond, at a Stax sales conference in 1969. Churches and most social clubs were segregated, but Parker went to school with white kids and sometimes even played in their homes. In Ironton, the races were allowed to mix a little. On Sunday afternoons, her aunt would take her to church teas and teach her proper etiquette-how to fold her white gloves in her purse and set her napkin on her lap. They gave her piano lessons at a Catholic convent and elocution lessons at home. Her aunt Velma was a church secretary and a part-time college student her uncle James worked for the C. Her grandfather had sent her there after her parents divorced, hoping that she could get a better education up north. She was born in Mississippi but had spent most of her childhood with her aunt and uncle in Ironton, Ohio, a small town on the Kentucky border. She had moved to Memphis a year earlier, in 1961, to live with her mother and stepfather, and was itching to get out of school and start performing.
0 kommentar(er)
