In the early 1900’s, shortly after R.U. Darby earned his degree from the “University of Hard Knocks,” and had determined to profit from his experience in the gold mining business, he was fortunate enough to be present to witness an incident that proved to him that “No” does not necessarily mean no.
One afternoon Darby was helping his uncle grind wheat in an old fashioned mill. The uncle operated a large farm where a number of colored sharecrop farmers lived. Quietly, the door was opened, and a small colored child, the daughter of a tenant, walked in and took her place near the door.
The uncle looked up, saw the child, and barked at her roughly, “what do you want?”
Meekly, the child replied, “My mammy say send her fifty cents.”
“I’ll not do it,” the uncle retorted, “Now you run on home.
“Yas sah,” the child replied. But she did not move.
The uncle went on working, too busy to notice that the child did not leave. When he looked up and saw her still standing there, he yelled at her, “I told you to go on home! Now go, or I’ll take a switch to you.”
The little girl said “yas sah,” but she did not budge an inch.
The uncle dropped a sack of grain he was about to pour into the mill hopper, picked up a band of wood, and started toward the child with an expression meant to drive fear into her.
Darby held his breath. He was certain he was about to witness a murder. He knew his uncle had a fierce temper. He knew that colored children were not supposed to defy white people in that part of the country.
When the uncle reached the spot where the child was standing, she quickly stepped forward one step, looked up into his eyes, and screamed at the top of her lungs, “my Mammy’s gotta have that fifty cents!”
The uncle stopped, looked at her for a minute, then slowly laid the wood on the floor. He put his hand in his pocket, took out half a dollar, and gave it to her.
The child took the money and slowly backed toward the door, never taking her eyes off the man whom she had just conquered. After she had gone, the uncle sat down on a box and stared out the window into space for more than ten minutes. He was contemplating, with awe, the whipping he had just taken.
Mr. Darby, too, was doing some thinking. That was the first time in his life he had seen a colored child deliberately master an adult white person. How did she do it? What happened to his uncle that caused him to lose his fierceness and become as docile as a lamb? What strange power did this child use that made her master over her superior? These and other similar questions flashed through Darby’s mind; but he did not find the answer until years later, when he told me the story.
Ironically, Darby told this unusual story to the author inside the old mill, on the very spot where the uncle took his whipping. Ironically, too, this story was told to the author after he had devoted nearly a quarter of a century to studying that very power--the power which enabled an ignorant, illiterate colored child to conquer an intelligent man.
As the two (the author and Darby) stood there in that musty old mill, Darby repeated the story of the unusual conquest, and finished by asking, “What can you make of it? What strange power did that child use, that so completely whipped my uncle?”
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