Miss Jasmine continued.
“At this same time, my mother had been to the black school, but only for two years. She started to learn to read, but by the time she was eight she began to help her mother, who worked in people’s houses to clean, cook, and in part to raise their kids. It wasn’t like there was equality, but many white households were integrated this way. Black people worked for white people, mostly in their houses.
“People got along, and black people knew their place in society. In 1919 when my mother was twenty she had me with no husband. She did have some older brothers and sisters, but they never lived together as a family. That’s how Richard and James were my cousins, even though our family was not close.
“My mother worked for a lot of people after I was born, including the Ortegas. The Ortegas liked my mother, they liked her cooking, and they liked me. In 1926 they invited us to live at the house and my mother became their full-time housekeeper. Since they were recently married they had no children, and still no children after a few years. That was just God’s will, Mrs. Ortega would say.
“After we moved in, I helped my mother with some of the jobs and I learned to cook. I could make good biscuits and grits; I knew how to make coffee and scrambled eggs. This was the breakfast of kings in North Florida. Sam, I told you this earlier, but my mother had a condition for Sheriff Ortega about moving in. She wanted me to go to school, and not just elementary school, also high school and college. Spelman College.
“Sheriff Ortega agreed, and additionally he told my mother he would drive me to school, help me with my homework, and teach me Portuguese. In 1930, I had finished elementary school and started middle school. I could already read the Bible in Portuguese, and my mother knew about languages from church. Speaking in tongues, the Tower of Babel, and things like that. She would listen to us speak Portuguese to each other. She marveled and was proud.
“It was around 1930 that I started to read the newspaper every day, and the papers were usually at most eight to ten pages. At the time I did not know that my reading method was unusual, but I could remember every word I read. Not a photographic memory, but somehow I memorized everything even though it was not a conscious effort. I thought that was how everybody read. I didn’t know I was unique.
But Sheriff Ortega pointed out to me that when most people read something they would remember parts, but not word for word like I could. He figured out I could remember whole pages even a year after reading them. He gave me a lot of reading opportunities and would sometimes show me off. He seemed quite proud of me.
“Everybody was very polite with me; even older white ladies would call me Miss Jasmine. Some of them would ask me questions about the Bible or Shakespeare, which wasn’t always easy for me because I learned that stuff in Portuguese and wasn’t always sure how to talk about in English. By high school I was also learning Latin, and some of the ladies had parents who had sent them off to fine schools had studied it too. They were intrigued that a black person knew Latin, much less could speak Portuguese.
“My Latin teacher was a black man because they had to have black teachers at the black schools. His name was Leopold Barnes and was born in 1910. He attended Howard Divinity School until he discovered he was an atheist. Divinity Schools included Latin and Greek. Of course, black Latin teachers were impossible to find in hick towns in the 1930s, so he easily got hired at my high school and eventually got hired to teach Classics at FAMU. When I finish my story, you’ll see I married him in 1950.
“Sheriff Ortega and his wife were childless. In 1934 my mother died with Mrs. Ortega in a car crash. Mrs. Ortega had a car; they had gone to the store. Somehow, she lost control and crashed into a telephone pole. They say phone service for the whole town was out for two days. They both died and they were buried on the same day in separate cemeteries, since blacks and whites were not buried together. After that, I didn’t have anywhere to go and so here I am; a fourteen-year-old literate black girl and quite a dish, living alone with the sheriff as his housekeeper.
“Some people tried to talk maliciously about our relationship, but if Sheriff Ortega caught wind of it, he would give them a piece of his mind and humiliate them so much that they became truly sorry. I still remember what my mother had told me about hanky-panky before she died. Lord, like that stuff didn’t happen with the black help and I had heard about it. When I started to fill out, my mother gave me a life-shaking lecture about the birds and the bees and told me if any funny stuff ever started to happen with the sheriff, I had two choices. One was to run like hell, and the second was just to give it up and see if later I could use it to get some advantage.
“But Sheriff Ortega was on the up and up and never made a pass at me or my mother. He never made a rude remark and always called me Miss Jasmine. I think people talked, but they didn’t talk too loud for fear of what Sheriff Ortega might do to them.”