JIM CROW IS WATCHING!
Once upon a time in the Texas Panhandle, whenever black folks woke up in the morning, they immediately reminded themselves, “Jim Crow is watching!” At least as an old white guy who left many years ago, that’s what I’m guessing they said. I was born in Amarillo in 1941 and left for California in 1971. I didn’t know it then—being born white—but during that time, Jim Crow was still ruling over blacks throughout the South, including Texas. I’d heard of him, but for me he was a boogey man, an evil leprechaun, a Halloween goblin—a non-existent gremlin, invented to scare kids. But now I know that for African Americans, he was real—he really was watching them, from the time they got up in the morning until the time they went to bed at night. In the stories of my historical romance series, Once Upon a Time in the Texas Panhandle, he—Jim Crow—is always there in the background, vigilantly watching my characters—the characters who are “people of color,” as well as the characters who are white. The only way to escape him is to leave.
A book that has helped me to understand Jim Crow is Isabel Wilkerson’s Pulitzer Prize winning history, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. It chronicles the exodus of more than six million black citizens out of the South—including Texas—from 1915 through 1970. They principally fled to Chicago in the mid-west, to New York in the east, and to California in the west. They were fleeing Jim Crow, which is short-hand for the form of slavery that existed in the states of the former Confederacy, from the decade following the end of Reconstruction after the Civil War to the initial success of the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s and 1970s.
As I said, Jim Crow was not real for me. I grew up in Amarillo’s white ghetto, totally unaware of how “coloreds” lived their lives in N-town on the other side of the tracks. I had no idea of the unofficial brutal system that completely controlled their lives, and of the horrific consequences for even the slightest violation of Jim Crow’s unwritten laws: disappearance, lynching, indefinite imprisonment, beatings, castration, gang-rape, black-listing from employment, burning down of houses, and more—much more. Even today, I find it hard to believe that this was happening in the city and the region where I grew up. … But I’m not a black, so “they didn’t come for me.”
Jim Crow is always there in the shadows behind the stories of my historical romance novels. My stories take place in the fictitious city of Mackenzie—based on Amarillo—and in my fictitious Goodnight County—based on Potter and Randall Counties, where Amarillo is located. The time-frame of my stories is the 1940s through the 1960s, when I was still living there. One of the principal reasons for my telling the stories is to make myself see what I didn’t see when I was still living there: the effects of the rule of Jim Crow over “people of color.” I’m trying to relive that period of my life … this time seeing what I was not supposed to see back then. My latest novel, Colleen and the Statue, has especially helped me see the effects of Jim Crow on blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, as well as on whites, during those years. In this novel, “the Statue” is the Confederate statue that is standing in Mackenzie’s Central Park—which is based on the Confederate statue that since the 1930s has stood guard over Amarillo’s Ellwood Park. When I was growing up and playing in that park, for me the ever-vigilant Confederate infantryman represented “the Cause,” Southern Honor, and the heroes and martyrs who gave their lives to turn back the invading Yankee hordes during the “War of Northern Aggression” (aka American Civil War). Now, I see that granite infantryman as a symbol of Jim Crow.