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Description
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In Alabama, this poor 87-year-old woman asked me to drive her to Phoenix, Arizona. She wanted to go there to die. I helped her board up the windows of her tumbledown shack just outside Notasulga – the same town where the government once performed a deadly syphilis experiment on blacks. She knew she would never return, but still she tried to prevent local blacks from moving in. Even as we drove more than 2000 miles in five days, she sat there the whole time with her pistol in her hand – terrified of my long hair and beard. She was so frail that I had to carry her whenever we left the car, and even then she clung to her gun.
She reminded me of an old lady I picked up many years later in Atlanta on one of my lecture tours. “Why are you hitchhiking?” I asked her. “Because they shut off the gas to my oven,” she said. She had tried to kill herself, but then they shut off her gas because she was too poor to pay the bills. Now she was hitchhiking 400 miles to Greensboro, where she knew her sister had a working gas oven. I always help my hitchhikers out, and so I chose to drive this almost 80-year-old woman straight to the oven.
Tuskegee St., Notasulga, AL – September 1975
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