"I'll Have Watermelon"

“When you go out on the town, wear red and sit in the middle of the room.”  Hettie Abbott

 

left, Hettie in 1920

right, Aggie Bailey in 1960s by Robert Long

Eleanor Bailey related a story told to her by her Aunt Hettie. In 1928, when she was just eight years old and living on a farm in Lincoln Township near Roselawn, Indiana, Hettie’s father, Perry Bailey, had driven the family to the Gateway Inn restaurant in Gary, as guests of the owner, J.R. Charter:

    Mr. Charter was a customer who drove every week in the summer to buy watermelons and other produce from the 40-acre Bailey's truck farm. There the Baileys grew strawberries, a variety of vegetables, and an acre of melons.  After being seated, Perry ordered a steak and wife Aggie ordered a bowl of soup. The three children; Paul, Pauline, and Hettie, were told by their parents that they could each have one hot dog.

    The children who rarely ate away from home noticed everything. The wall calendar had a photo of Charles Lindbergh and his plane. Lindbergh had flown non-stop from New York to Paris in 1927. When it came time for dessert, Mr. Charter joined them and told the children, “You can have anything you want.” They looked at all of the beautiful and tempting desserts on display, looked at each other, and in unison, three voices said, “I’ll have watermelon!”  After dessert, Mr. Charter gave them a calendar to take home with the name of his restaurant below the photo of Charles Lindbergh. The calendar hung on the kitchen wall for several years.

left, Perry Bailey in 1960s 

Stella and Hettie, 1924

In 1929 the stock market crashed, marking the onset of the Great Depression.  In 2011, Hettie told Post-Tribune columnist Jeff Manes, “We lived off the land.  There were 12 of us kids – two died.  We were poor, but we didn’t know that we were poor.” For a Friday treat they’d order fish at Luke’s Restaurant. During Prohibition Hettie recalled that Annie Duchler ran a bootleg joint near Indiana 10 and 41. In 1938 Hettie graduated from Morocco High School. Her dad was a Republican, and Hettie, a Democrat, told Manes that the two of them “never saw eye to eye.” 

 

In 1960, the year John F. Kennedy was elected president, Hettie first ran for local office, ultimately serving as county chairman, district secretary, and justice of the peace.  One night she levied fines against two “waitresses” and 29 truckers for visiting a “house of ill fame” - a notorious Roselawn nudist colony.  In 1964 Hettie and second husband Bill Abbott opened a mom-and-pop store, The Farmer’s Market, in Sumava Resorts on Route 41.  Jeff Manes wrote:

    The Farmer’s Market was a place where you could buy a quart of blueberries, a can of yellow wax beans or a box of red worms.  And every riparian ragamuffin who stepped foot in that store always received a free piece of gum or candy from Hettie Abbott.  Later, when we got to be in our teens, The Farmer’s Market was where we’d pay our speeding tickets.  Most of the time, Hettie would let us off the hook.

 

Hettie told Manes of meeting future President Bill Clinton:

    My sister and I used to go down to Arkansas every year and bet the horses.  We had a lady friend who tended bar in the hotel.  She invited us for a couple of beers after the races.  It was Election Day.  All of a sudden about 15 men came in through the back door and ordered drinks.  Soon after, the Feds came in and asked what we were doing in the bar on Election Day.  I told them we were thirsty.  One of the Feds said, “I’m going to have to haul you all in.”  Well, one of those 15 guys drinking at the bar said, “I don’t think so; I’m running for governor of this state.  These are my friends and we’re going to have a few drinks.”  The Fed said, “What about these two women” Soon to be Governor Bill Clinton said, “They’re with us.”

Debbie and Ronnie Hammond recalled: “Hettie Abbott married us on September 5, 1970 in her living room. I saw her a few years ago, told her yes, we were still married, and she said, “I only marry people that I know will stay together.”  Then we all had a good laugh.

 

    “People in Stamps used to say that the whites in our town were so prejudiced that a Negro couldn’t buy vanilla ice cream. Except on July Fourth. Other days he had to be satisfied with chocolate. “ Maya Angelou, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”

Meant as grim joke, some writers have taken Maya Anglou’s statement literally that Southern Blacks were banned from eating vanilla ice cream during the Jim Crow era, except on the 4th of July, including a writer for The Guardian.  Segregation was horrifying enough without adding assertions that stretch credulity.  Just the other day, the hundredth anniversary of ratification of the Susan B. Anthony women’s suffrage amendment, I read an article about how it didn’t guarantee black women the vote because, it was alleged, that Southern statutes forbade the grandchildren of slaves from voting.  In truth, what the so-called ‘Grandfather Clause” did was exempt the grandchildren of whites from being bound by literacy test or poll tax laws intended to disfranchise African Americans.  It is true, however, as the article pointed out, that some suffragettes were racists and that black feminists wishing to participate in a 1913 suffragette march were relegated to the rear ranks.

 

Cicely Tyson as Jane Pittman

Misleading myths and harmful stereotypes are of special interest to historians.  In 1974, after the made-for-TV movie “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” aired, a poll revealed that Jane Pittman was better known than most real-life black women and that many viewers in fact did not realize that she was a composite, a fictional character.  I grew up hearing that black kids loved watermelon, a stereotype rooted in the fact that melons were one of the few treats available to poor rural folk.  When I worked summers at Boys Village of Maryland, a plantation-like setting for so-called teen delinquents, a common afternoon treat was freshly harvested watermelon, a thirst quencher that I thoroughly enjoyed probably more than the kids from Baltimore under my charge.

 

IU Northwest finally is open, though for how long is hard to predict. Being a commuter campus, the university is offering a flexible array of courses, most involving some degree of online learning. Several colleges, including Notre Dame, Michigan State, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, have reversed course and halted classroom gatherings just days after students moved into dorms, blaming students for ignoring social distance guidelines when the original motivation for having students on campus was largely economic.