All the Days Past, All the Days to Come Read online

  Also by

  MILDRED D. TAYLOR

  The Land

  The Well

  Mississippi Bridge

  Song of the Trees

  The Friendship

  Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry

  Let the Circle Be Unbroken

  The Road to Memphis

  The Gold Cadillac

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

  First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2020

  Copyright © 2020 by Mildred D. Taylor

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  Ebook ISBN 9780698173194

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  ALL THE DAYS PAST, ALL THE DAYS TO COME

  is dedicated to

  The man I have loved from the writing of my first books,

  SONG OF THE TREES and ROLL OF THUNDER, HEAR MY CRY,

  And without whose love and support my books

  Would Not Have Been

  And

  To my father, the storyteller, who led the family north;

  To my mother, who made a home for all who came;

  To my sister, the activist, who raised the banner high;

  And

  To my great-grandparents who survived slavery

  and set the standard;

  To my grandparents, who bridged the generations between

  slavery and the fight for Civil Rights in the twentieth century;

  And

  To my uncles who served in World War II

  and with the thousands of African American soldiers who served

  helped change the nation;

  And

  To my aunts, all the family who came before, and whose

  lives I have chronicled;

  And

  To all my family, my cousins—brothers and sisters to me—and

  all of the younger generations who

  continue to forge ahead under guidance of more than

  a century of family teachings,

  passed from one generation to another;

  And

  To My Daughter,

  The Future

  CONTENTS

  Also by Mildred D. Taylor

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Prologue (March 1944)

  Part IToledo, the Glass City (1945–1946)

  Layoffs (1946–1947)

  Going South (1947)

  California, Here We Come! (1947)

  Cassie’s Love Story: Chapter I (1947–1948)

  Cassie’s Love Story: Chapter II (1948–1949)

  Cassie’s Love Story: Chapter III (1949)

  Cassie’s Love Story: Chapter IV (1949–1950)

  Cassie’s Love Story: Chapter V (1950)

  Cassie’s Love Story: Chapter VI (1950–1951)

  Going Home (1951–1952)

  Part IIA Different World (1959)

  Family Reunion Christmas (1959)

  Time of Change (1960–1961)

  Voter Registration Drive (1961)

  A Hundred Years (1961–1963)

  Let the Circle Be Unbroken (1963)

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I was born in Mississippi.

  When I was three weeks old, my father was involved in a racial incident and he made the abrupt decision to leave Mississippi. He left that same day. When I was three months old, he sent for my mother, my sister, and me, and we all went north. Many of my family followed, but each year we all returned to Mississippi, for that was where our roots were, where my grandparents and other family still lived. In Mississippi, I heard the “n” word often spoken. I heard it spoken late one night when our family was traveling a rural road and my father was stopped by police and taken off to jail, leaving my mother, my sister, and me parked in our new car, frightened, staring out at the blackness of the night. I heard the “n” word when I went with cousins to an ice cream parlor in Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, and we were told to go to the back of the building to be served. I heard the “n” word when my sister and I wanted to try on clothes in a department store. I heard the “n” word just in casual talk whenever white people were around.

  But it was not only in Mississippi that I heard the “n” word. I heard it in Toledo where I grew up. I heard it when I was fourteen years old and the first African American girl was elected queen of a Toledo high school and an effigy was hung on the school grounds.

  All across America I heard the “n” word: in Iowa when my family was refused lodging, in Wyoming when we were refused seating in a restaurant, but were allowed to buy food for takeout. I heard it as a young married when my husband and I were stopped by police in Los Angeles. I heard the “n” word throughout my childhood and as an adult. It is derogatory, it is demoralizing, it is foul, it is painful, and it is part of our American history.

  In the United States from the days the first Africans were brought to this country in chains, the “n” word was used. My great-grandparents who were born into slavery endured the “n” word. They hated the “n” word, but they endured it along with all else to which they were subjugated.

  In 1976 when ROLL OF THUNDER, HEAR MY CRY was published, I said that I wanted to show Black heroes and heroines in my books, men and women who were missing from books I read as a child. I also said I wanted to write a truthful history of what life was like for Black people in America. That truth includes the “n” word. It inflicted great pain, but it is a truth that needs to be told. I do not promote the word, but not to include it in my writing is to whitewash history, and that I will not do.

  When stories were told around our family fireplace or on our Mississippi front porch, my father and the other storytellers always included the “n” word when recounting the speech of a white person about whom they were speaking. Through their words I saw the characters vividly. I knew who they were. Now, just as the storytellers of old, I continue to relate the truth as I have done in all my writing. ALL THE DAYS PAST, ALL THE DAYS TO COME includes that same truth, the truth about America.

  Mildred D. Taylor, 2019

  PROLOGUE

  (MARCH 1944)

  Man and I were waiting for the bus.

  I had been visiting with Great-Aunt Callie down near McComb, and my brother Clayton Chester, whom we all called Little Man, had come from where he was based at Fort Hood in Texas and met me there. I had gone down to McComb at Big Ma’s request during a class break from Jackson College because Aunt Callie was feeling poorly and Big Ma was worried about her sister. By the time Man arrived, I had been with Aunt Callie, helping tend to her, for almost a week. Man only spent the night catching up on all the news, and the next morning t
he two of us left amidst tears as we all mourned at the thought that we might not see each other again. Miles were distant, Aunt Callie was bedridden, and now there was the war, which could separate us forever. Clayton Chester—Man—was a soldier soon to be in that war. As unbelievable as it was to all of us, he was the first in our family going to the war. Time was short, and within days, he would be overseas fighting a war in Europe that few of us cared about.

  It was late Saturday morning and the March sun was shining brightly when the bus arrived. It was a local bus coming out of Biloxi and going all the way north to Jackson. There would be numerous stops along the way. With one more round of hugs we said our final good-byes to members of Aunt Callie’s family who had taken us in their wagon to meet the bus, then we got in line. The bus driver asked where we were headed. Wallace store, we told him and gave him our fares.

  And he told us, “Go on to the back.”

  That was something we did not need to be told. We knew where we were supposed to go. We did not like it, but we knew. I led the way down the aisle, past all the white folks seated. One woman glanced up at us, then turned her attention back to her child. She knew that we were headed toward the curtain that separated the front section of the bus from the back section, the curtain that separated whites from colored. Not all buses had curtains as a line of separation, only signs, but this one did. Once we passed through the aisle and behind the curtain, there was no longer any need for us to be seen. It would be almost as if we were not even there.

  We reached the curtain. It was a tarp-like material that hung in two sections, one on either side of the aisle. The curtain was hung on a rod that, as more white people boarded, could be moved backward into the area currently set aside for colored passengers, allowing white passengers more seating on the white side of the curtain. Colored passengers were forced to move farther back. For that reason, most colored folks traveling went right to the long seat at the very tail end of the bus to avoid having to move again. I did not want to sit on that rear seat and neither did Man. Already the seat was almost full, and for us to sit back there would have made for an uncomfortable ride. All but one of the other seats were unoccupied. An elderly gentleman sat in the first row behind the curtain. Man and I chose to be more prudent and sat several rows behind the curtain on the other side of the aisle. I took the window seat; Man was on the aisle.

  “I think we’ll be okay here,” I said.

  Man only grunted his agreement, but I understood. His eyes were on the curtain. I too looked at the curtain and felt the humiliation of it. I hated that curtain. Then I looked at my brother. I knew Little Man was fuming. He had sat at the back of the bus behind a curtain all the way from Fort Hood. There he sat, forced into a segregated army to fight a white man’s war against more white folks and the Japanese too in some far-off place on the other side of the world. There he sat, the most scholarly of all my brothers and me, forced to leave school and being shipped off to the Second World War as soon as possible. There he sat in a soldier’s uniform behind a black curtain so that white folks would not have to be reminded of his existence.

  “Too bad Stacey couldn’t come get us,” I said, attempting to distract his thoughts. Our oldest brother, Stacey, lived in Jackson, along with his wife, Dee. Little Man had lived with them until he was drafted into the Army. Our other brother, Christopher-John, lived with them too, and so did I. Both Stacey and Christopher-John worked at the box factory, and even though it was a Saturday, they would be putting in a full day at the factory before leaving Jackson and heading down the rural roads to our land and family home. They knew the time the bus was expected at the Wallace store and planned to pick us up there. I glanced at Man, expecting him to say something. He did not, so I went on. “Would’ve made this trip a lot easier.”

  Little Man checked his watch.

  “It’s a long ride,” I said.

  “I just want to get home, Cassie. Could be the last time.”

  I looked at him, but did not say anything more. I did not want to admit that I was thinking the same thing.

  More people got on the bus. A family of five came through the curtain and sat in front of us. They nodded at us in greeting and we returned the nod. The bus began to move. I pulled out one of my schoolbooks. Man had a book too. As we rolled past dormant cotton fields north of McComb, the bus stopped several more times, but no one else came through the curtain. Then, halfway through the trip, the bus stopped again. The bus driver came down the aisle and stood on the colored side of the curtain. “Move on back!” he ordered. “All y’all up front here, move on back!”

  The family occupying the rows in front of Man and me got up and moved to seats several rows behind us. Little Man and I both stared at the driver without moving.

  “Y’all hear me?” questioned the driver. “I said move on back! Folks’re gettin’ on the bus.” He looked at the old gentleman seated in the first row behind the curtain. “Startin’ with you, uncle,” he said. “I said get up!”

  The old gentleman raised his head. “Suh?”

  “You deaf? You need to step quick, boy!” This time the bus driver did not use the politer form of “uncle,” which most white folks thought a respectful reference to a colored man of years. “I got a bus to move!”

  The old man seemed confused. Man immediately stood and went over to him. “Sir, may I help you?” he asked.

  The man turned to look at Clayton Chester and, seemingly recognizing another person of color, smiled wide and toothless. “You a soldier, boy?”

  “Yes, sir,” Clayton Chester quietly answered.

  “You here in this new war?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What you doin’ fightin’ in this here new war, son?” the old man asked.

  “Not my idea,” said Man.

  “Boy, you move him on back!” ordered the driver. “Then you and this gal here with ya move on back too! Got a lotta folks gettin’ on.”

  Little Man’s body seemed to freeze as he turned toward the driver. I held my breath, hoping Little Man would not do what was probably on his mind to do. But then he helped the old man up, and I got up as well. Clayton Chester, supporting the old man, walked with him to the back row, so he would not have to move again. Now there was no space for another passenger on that rear seat. As Little Man left the old gentleman in the care of the other rear seat passengers, the old man called after him. “You be careful now, son!”

  Clayton Chester turned and nodded, then he and I moved our things farther back to another seat as the bus driver took the curtain rod and moved it, slipping our former seats into the front section of the bus.

  Both Man and I stared at the curtain. “I’m not moving again,” said Man.

  I glanced over at him. “Then I guess we’ll have to get off this bus.”

  Little Man looked at me, met my eyes, and I shrugged and went back to reading. More than an hour passed as we traveled the poor dirt roads through the lush pine countryside of southern Mississippi. The bus stopped twice more and we could hear more passengers boarding, but no one came through the curtain.

  That was just as well. Too many colored folks on the bus could pose a problem for all of us if more white folks boarded and needed our seats. If they did and there was no more seating available, we would have to stand. Also, it was not unheard of for colored passengers to be ordered off a bus altogether and told to wait for the next bus when seats were needed for white passengers. Man and I well remembered when Big Ma, our grandmother, was on a bus headed to see Aunt Callie and she and all the other colored folks were ordered off because their seats were needed. Soon after putting Big Ma and the other colored passengers off the bus, the bus had plunged into the waters of the Creek Rosa Lee and many of the passengers on the bus had been killed. Big Ma and all the family had pondered on that, but we knew that retribution did not come every day. Today it was just good that the curtain was not moved ba
ck again.

  Our good fortune did not last.

  We were getting close to home. We came to a crossroads called Parson’s Corner where the bus made another stop, and the bus driver stood before us once more. Looking straight at Little Man and me, he announced, “All right, you two, y’all gotta move on back.”

  “We already moved once,” I said.

  “And y’all gonna move again and many times as I say, need be.”

  Without looking up from his book, Clayton Chester said, “We’re not moving back.”

  There was a startled pause from the bus driver. “You sassin’ me, boy?” he finally sputtered. “Nigger, I’ll put y’all off this bus!”

  I could see white passengers past the curtain turning to stare. I got up before things got out of hand. I knew we could not win this thing. “You won’t have to do that,” I said. “We already decided to get off.”

  Man too got up, looked directly into the bus driver’s eyes, then turned and got our bags from the overhead rack.

  “Y’all bought tickets to the Wallace store,” said the driver. “Y’all ain’t gettin’ yo’ money back!”

  We let him have the last say. Man waited for me to step into the aisle. Without another word I led the way past the driver and through the curtain. Man, carrying our bags, followed, past the turned heads of all the white people seated on either side of the aisle. As we stepped off the bus, whites waiting to board, unaware of what the holdup was, stepped aside to let us pass. They would board the bus and take our seats. Now Little Man and I had no recourse but to walk the miles to home. A small store was at the crossroads and probably had a telephone inside, but we couldn’t call home. It was 1944 Mississippi and there were no telephones in our community, no way to call ahead and ask Papa or Stacey or Christopher-John to come get us.

  We got started.

  * * *