He continued, “She took Christianity to mean for someone to be Christ-like if they were a Christian. And I joke with my students that there are people who go to the church, to the mosque, to the temple, and there are those that follow their religion. And those are not necessarily the same people.”
One of the many women’s clubs Clara belonged to passed a resolution after her death that read: “Resolved, that we sincerely mourn the loss of this noble woman whose many acts of benevolence made her presence like an angel’s visit, and may Heaven amply reward her in the unknown land beyond the range.”[19]
When people were at their most vulnerable—sick, poor, about to give birth, desperately lonely—Clara Brown could be trusted. A woman with hands and feet that embodied what it meant to be just, peaceful, good, and free. A woman with a kindly face, tall and strong, who lived out the American virtues perhaps better than any president or founding father, perhaps better than anyone whose bust is preserved in the marble statuary of a namesake library. A woman, too, who saw opportunity for herself and for others and had the fortitude to forge ahead, not knowing where the path would lead.
The Next Needed Thing
Four
Virginia RandolphVirginia, 1890
Virginia stood at the back of the church, her serious, spectacled face staring at the preacher in the pulpit.
“If you’re with me, then sign this petition!” the preacher roared.
“Amen!” someone in the crowd responded.
Sweat dripped from the preacher’s brow. “Our children are not going to be taught how to be slaves any longer! They are not any less than any of the children sitting in the white schools!”
Virginia’s heartbeat was loud in her ears.
“I’ll sign it!” one man cried, leaping out of his seat. The church thrummed with anger, parents eager to attach their names to the petition to save their children, to rescue them from the clutches of a caste system that shut African Americans out of opportunity and equal justice.
Virginia looked around nervously and slowly raised her hand: “Wait,” she said. “Wait a second.” She caught the preacher’s eye.
Shhhhh, she heard the women of the church signal. Shhhhh.
Virginia knew she was a double agent at this meeting. Not a spy, but a person forced, by necessity, to serve two masters. And everyone here hated her for it.
Twenty years prior to that meeting in the country church, Virginia was born in Richmond, Virginia, to parents who had been enslaved.[1] The streets she played on as a girl straddled an invisible chasm between the Union and the Confederacy, between bondage and freedom, between the blue and the gray.
Virginia’s father, Edward, was a bricklayer, and when he died, he left his wife with four young daughters to raise. Virginia’s baby sister was but a month old, and her mother went into shock from grief and disbelief. Mama Sarah barely slept, tending to her new baby, devoting every spare moment to taking in laundry, to knitting and sewing and cooking, to make sure that her four daughters—born not into the clutches of enslavement like she was, but into the hands of liberty—had what she never did. An education.
But Virginia did poorly in school when she began at age six. “I couldn’t learn my alphabet,” Virginia recalled in her later years. Her teacher was so frustrated by Virginia’s inability to memorize and repeat ABCDEFG that she eventually gave up and just gave her a book to read, and found that she could. “By the end of the term, I received a medal for the highest honor.”[2]
At eight, Virginia was forced to get a job to help make ends meet. She walked to her neighbor Mrs. Powell’s house in the predawn hours, and started the fire, swept the floors, washed the dishes. When it was time for school, she left to attend third grade, and then fourth and then fifth, returning to Mrs. Powell’s each afternoon after completing her lessons to resume her housework.
Mama Sarah worked outside the home, but she also washed and ironed clothes for five white families, sometimes staying up all night to make sure the dresses and work shirts were done on time. “Cleanliness is next to Godliness,” Sarah often repeated to her passel of growing daughters. “Just do the next needed thing,” she reminded herself when her feet throbbed and her back refused to straighten. Make sure your children have better than you did.
Imagine, then, the pride that swelled in Sarah’s chest when Virginia attended Richmond Colored Normal School and became a qualified teacher at age sixteen.[3]
It was technically illegal for Virginia to get a job as a teacher at sixteen. But she found a school in Goochland County desperate for a warm body in the classroom, and she talked her uncle into vouching for her. He promised the school he would keep an eye on the teenage Virginia.
Virginia believed that she was born in 1874. Her parents were emancipated as adults, and it’s probable they didn’t know their own legal birthdays, and highly likely they were illiterate. Remembering the precise birth year of their children may not have been a priority or a possibility. But county records show baby Virginia was probably born in 1870, and that, later, she died in 1958.[4]
Richmond was a city that just years before Virginia’s birth had served as the capital of the Confederate States of America and had been home to its president, Jefferson Davis. Richmond was the city in which Patrick Henry, the founding father known as the “lion of liberty,” said, “I will not, I cannot, justify owning slaves,” but who never freed any of the human beings under his control. Richmond was where he launched the phrase “Give me liberty or give me death!” in an impassioned speech in 1775, while never offering liberty to the people he enslaved. Liberty was apparently only for me, but not for thee.
Virginia’s last name, Randolph, was one she shared with Virginia royalty. Her ancestors were likely enslaved by one of the prominent first families of Virginia, and the people in the pews of that country church signing the petition probably knew it. For more than one hundred years before the North American colonies broke with Great Britain, the name Randolph meant something. The Randolphs of Virginia owned eleven large plantations and more than ten thousand acres of land. Their quasicorporate conglomerate solidified their interests in shipping, farming, politics, and the law.[5] The people who could trace their enslaved ancestry directly back to a Randolph property formed an association, and held periodic reunions after manumission.
When the preacher called for people to sign a petition to get rid of Virginia Randolph, when the folks in that country church tried to rise up, Virginia felt betrayed. She was one of them. Her parents had been enslaved just like their parents had been enslaved. She was poor just like they were poor. She worked just like they worked. She wanted what they wanted: for their children to have everything they never did. Freedom. Justice. Opportunity. The fact that the congregants couldn’t see it yet just meant she had more work to do.
Virginia stared into the preacher’s eyes and saw into his soul. Hers was a practical, no-nonsense manner, her mouth set in a purse, one eyebrow slightly raised. Her expression said that said she did not suffer fools.
She waited until the crowd was quiet, watchful, and then spoke with a measured voice: “We are here to help each other.” The room was still. “I have been appointed by the School Board as a teacher, and the church and school should be helping each other. If we are teaching right religion, we should be helping each other.” She paused, feeling dozens of eyes boring into her. “Insinuations don’t help.”[6] She turned purposefully on her heel and walked out of the church, head high, without stopping to see how the crowd reacted.
Virginia received a note of apology from the minister. Written neatly on a folded sheet, it read, Sorry for the trouble, Miss. God bless you. But Pandora’s box had been opened, and the congregants marched the petition calling for her expulsion down to the county office. They didn’t want Miss Randolph as teacher anymore—she wasn’t providing the kind of education they thought their children should have. They wanted their young ones to receive exactly the same education as the white children.
The secretary accepted the petition with a shrug, likely saying, “We’ll look into it,” and “Thanks for dropping this off,” but she chuckled after they left. She knew that there was no one to replace Miss Randolph, and that the white powers that be loved her. No one was going anywhere.
After her beginnings as a teenage teacher in Goochland County, Virginia Randolph took a job at the Mountain Road School in Henrico County when she was only twenty, and it was there that the trouble began and the petition to get rid of her was filed.[7] Some parents kept their children home from school, believing the young Miss Randolph to be serving the wrong master.
The parents worried that her teaching methods were preparing their children for a lifetime of labor, not of learning. Harvesting wild honeysuckle vines and weaving them into baskets? Building chairs out of scrap wood she foraged from the white schools? Cooking lessons? Who was this benefiting, the parents thought. Surely only the white folks, who wanted cheap labor.
Virginia was skating on perilously thin ice.
Only a few children were attending school regularly, and she had recently scolded one of them for getting into a scuffle with another boy. The morning after the altercation, she heard her students, squirrelly after their arrival, call out, “Someone’s here, Miss Randolph! There’s a lady outside!”[8]
On the front steps of the one room school, she discovered the mother of the boy she had admonished the day before, and Virginia was blanketed with a sense of dread. This mother had personally whipped every teacher her children ever had. Her reputation preceded her, and here she stood, inches from Virginia, holding a stick that was taller than her body. Virginia hid her fear, nodding a polite “Good morning.”
“I need to speak to you,” the mother said sharply, motioning for her to come outside.
“Walk right in,” said Virginia, her hand indicating that she was in control here, not the mother. “I’ll speak with you in a moment.” Her steady voice belied the terror in her throat. “Wait until we have devotions.” Virginia began the class with Scripture verses, her eyes fixed on the Bible alone so she wouldn’t have to look at the mother who was there to whip her. Virginia chose I Corinthians 13:1: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.”
Virginia’s eyes darted across the page. “And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing….”
The children recited the verses aloud as the woman waited impatiently in the back of the room. Virginia didn’t allow for even a moment’s break in the action. “Children,” she said quickly, “I am going to pray.”
“Lord,” Virginia continued, frightened that this woman was about to beat her in front of her students, “Have mercy on this dear mother that has come to the school. We are so glad to see her here today.” She knew the mother was waiting for a moment to seize, and Virginia wasn’t going to give it to her.
