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  Equally enduring was Lizzie Wells’s anguish over her separation from her family. Proud of her family’s Native American ancestry, Lizzie, who would go on to have seven more children after Ida, often reminded her children that her father was half Indian and her grandfather a full-blood. But as much as she valued her heritage, she was only ever able to introduce her children to the two sisters who were sold with her and moved to Mississippi as well. Even after emancipation, Lizzie was never able to locate any of her other siblings or her parents. As a child, Wells used to see her mother writing letter after letter to Virginia “trying to get track of her people.” She never succeeded. In her autobiography, Ida reflected that the details of her mother’s family history died with her, as her children “were too young to realize the importance of her efforts, and I have never remembered the name of the country or people to whom they ‘belonged.’”9

  Her parents’ experiences made a sufficiently vivid impression on the young Ida that she would later regale her own children with “many stories of slavery time.”10 Wells’s enduring preoccupation with slavery is not surprising, given that she grew up in the midst of Reconstruction and was raised by adults who were themselves making the transition from slavery to freedom. Indeed, this remarkable experience was one of the sources of Ida’s lifelong belief in activism and social change. Her childhood coincided with her parents’ first years of freedom, and she grew up alongside parents who were intent on remaking themselves and their children as free people.

  The Wellses seized Reconstruction’s opportunities eagerly. Chief among them was education, which had been forbidden to blacks by law under slavery. One of the most dramatic changes of the Reconstruction era was the sudden appearance of hundreds of schools for blacks. Such schools marked the beginning of a broad system of public education in the South, which prior to the Civil War was not always available even to whites. The first black schools were established by Northern churches in collaboration with the Freedmen’s Bureau—a short-lived federal agency established by President Lincoln in 1865 to oversee the welfare of the former slaves. Holly Springs was the site of one of these early schools. Initially known as MacDonald Hall, it was established by the Freedmen’s Aid Society of the Methodist Church in 1866. An elementary school at first, it was chartered in 1870 as Shaw University in recognition of the freed people’s desire for an education that extended from grade school to college. Informally known as Rust College until 1915, when the name became official, it soon expanded to offer both elementary and higher education and is now Mississippi’s oldest historically black college.11 Despite the fact that in most black families all members had to work to make ends meet, ex-slaves sent their children to school wherever possible, and often attended night school themselves. In the Wellses’ home state, black children’s school enrollment reached 50 percent by 1875, a figure that reflects the sacrifices many hard-pressed black Southern families made to educate their children. Better off than most blacks in their region, the Wellses’ commitment to education represented less of a sacrifice, but Ida was still raised to regard her education as serious work. Of herself and her siblings, she wrote, “Our job was to go to school and learn all we could.”12

  The importance of this job was clearly impressed upon the Wells children by both parents. In addition to sending all their children to school, the Wellses were also active in the daily affairs of the school. Jim Wells was a trustee at Rust, and when Ida began school, her mother attended courses alongside her daughter. In addition to an education, Rust College provided the “deeply religious” Lizzie Wells with a thoroughly Christian environment in which to educate herself and her children.13 Students attended chapel daily and were also expected to attend weekly prayer meetings as well as Sunday church services. Pursuing religious knowledge as well as literacy, Lizzie studied with her children until she learned how to read the Bible. After that, she confined her own schooling to Sunday school, winning a prize for regular attendance, but she continued to visit Rust regularly to observe her children’s progress. She also tended to the children’s education at home, teaching them morals, manners, and housework—lessons that left an enduring impression on Ida.

  “She was not forty when she died,” Ida wrote of her mother in her autobiography, “but she had borne eight children and brought us up with strict discipline that many mothers with educational advantages could not have exceeded.”14 Among Lizzie Wells’s legacies to her daughter were her religious convictions and devotion to Bible study. Ida learned to read at a very young age, probably alongside her mother as she mastered the Scriptures at Rust College. By the time she was a teenager, Ida had “read the Bible through,” as her parents did not permit her “to read anything else on Sunday afternoons at home.” Moreover, she also imbibed its lessons: Ida would draw on the Scriptures for guidance, strength, and comfort for the rest of her life, frequently turning to Bible passages for direction in times of duress or indecision.

  Reading also gave Ida an early acquaintance with another defining feature of black life during Reconstruction: African American political participation. One of her earliest memories was of reading the newspaper to her “father and an admiring group of his friends.” Whether or not Jim Wells needed Ida as a reader is not clear. Certainly many former slaves were not literate, and Jim Wells may have been among them. Or his training as a carpenter may have given him a chance to acquire reading skills—and to encourage his daughter’s precocious reading ability. Either way, when Ida read to her father and his friends she participated in a drama that was unfolding in black communities across the South. With freedom, African Americans sought not only literacy, but also news and political information. African American readers and nonreaders alike devoured newspapers, with those who could not read gathering in homes, stores, and saloons to hear the news from anyone who could.

  Educated or otherwise, Jim Wells took an intense interest in politics. During Mississippi’s Republican Reconstruction period, from 1867 to 1875, black political participation was perilous, as Jim Wells found when he defied Mr. Bolling. Despite the fact that African Americans comprised the overwhelming majority in the Wellses’ electoral district of Marshall County, the Democrats were able to use intimidation and election fraud to hold on to power for much of Reconstruction. In addition to discouraging African Americans from voting, they stuffed ballot boxes and forged ballots. Democratic ruffians threw sticks and brickbats at Republican speakers, who were also whipped, beaten, and in one case even murdered.15 Neither the threat of violence nor the loss of his job with Bolling, however, deterred the independent-minded Jim Wells from participating. He attended political meetings, even though his wife feared for his safety. Ida learned to associate politics with danger at an early age. She “heard the words Ku Klux Klan long before I knew what they meant,” and “knew dimly that it meant something fearful, by the anxious way my mother walked the floor at night when my father was out to a political meeting.”16

  Lizzie Wells had good cause to be anxious. Founded immediately after the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan was a paramilitary terrorist organization dedicated “to serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and those who desired white supremacy.”17 As black Republicans, the Wellses and their friends were acutely conscious of Klan activities. The Klan staged at least one attack on the Holly Springs branch of the Loyal League, a Republican political group composed primarily of black members. The Klan detested the league, since it brought white and black Republicans together in a coalition government. During the late 1860s and early 1870s, Klan members plotted to destroy the group in Holly Springs by killing Nelson Gill of the Freedmen’s Bureau, a “negro lover” from Illinois who had helped organize the league. An attempt on Gill’s life took place during a Loyal League meeting held at Gill’s house, when armed Klansmen hid under the house and fired into the meeting.18 But the gunmen’s shots went off course, and the league thereafter stationed armed guards outside its meetings.

  Still, if Ida B. Wells grew
up aware of the dangers, she also grew up far more aware of the promise of politics than would later generations of African Americans. Despite local Klan activity, electoral politics were in fact less violent in Holly Springs than in many parts of the South, where Klan violence decimated many Republican organizations, and Republicans were sometimes attacked and even murdered at the polls. More important, black politics were, at least briefly, a success story both in Mississippi and Holly Springs. Mississippi sent two African American men to the U.S. Senate—Blanche K. Bruce and Hiram Rhodes Revels. And as a Holly Springs resident she must have been particularly aware of the accomplishments of Revels, who was the first African American senator in U.S. history; Revels moved to Holly Springs in the mid-1870s, shortly after his Senate term. Moreover, Holly Springs had its own political triumphs. Starting in 1873, the dogged persistence of black Republicans such as Jim Wells paid off. That year, the Republicans swept the Marshall County offices, sending three African Americans to the Mississippi state legislature. Still more impressive, one of them, James Hill, a Holly Springs resident, rose from the legislature to serve as Mississippi’s secretary of state between 1874 and 1878. Even before Hill’s term ended, the Democrats would return to power, reclaiming the state in 1875. But the brief years of Republican rule were a source of pride to black families, such as the Wellses, whose attempts to gain a voice in politics had succeeded against the odds. Moreover, they exposed young Ida to a level of black political participation and leadership that would not be seen again in the South until the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

  Ida would spend much of her adult life trying to regain the black political rights and power that as a child she had seen Mississippi freedmen hold so briefly. By 1877, Reconstruction was over, not only in Mississippi but throughout the South. The contested national election of 1876 resulted in the infamous “Compromise of 1877.” An unwritten agreement between Northern Republicans and Southern Democrats, the compromise allowed the Republicans to retain the presidency despite the fact that Democratic presidential candidate Samuel Tilden had won a plurality of the uncontested electoral votes and a majority of the popular vote. In return, Democrats claimed home rule—and an end to Reconstruction. When the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, assumed the presidency, he withdrew the troops stationed in the South to protect the freedmen, and the Republican Party abandoned any protection for black civil rights. The Democratic Party returned to power in the South, and the party’s “redemption” marked the beginning of the end of black political participation for many years to come. “The Negro,” The Nation accurately prophesized at the time, “will disappear from the field of national politics. Henceforth the nation as a nation will have nothing to do with him.”19 Free to use violence, poll taxes, and ultimately disenfranchisement to eliminate black voters, the Southern Democratic self-styled redeemers took over the region. But the end of Reconstruction in the late 1870s must have passed in a blur for the teenage Ida, for it coincided with her stormy adolescence and ended with tragic family losses that utterly transformed her life.

  Tragedy, of course, came unanticipated. The mid-1870s saw Wells advancing to college courses at Rust College. They were years that she would later describe as joyful, characterizing herself as “a happy light-hearted school girl.” She experienced the joys and sorrows of “first love,” falling hard for James B. Combs, a “mulatto” student from Georgia who boarded with a local family.20 Five years older than Wells, he evidently ended the relationship, leaving her disappointed and enduringly apprehensive about giving her heart to any one man. Other passions were less disappointing. At Rust, Ida developed a lifelong admiration for the Northern Methodist Episcopal teachers who ran the school. Considered “carpetbaggers” by white Southerners, these white teachers shared Ida’s parents’ vision of black independence and worked to prepare the freed people to be self-sufficient citizens. A. C. MacDonald, the Methodist minister who founded Rust, stressed that the school’s educational goal was not to “hurry the students through a college curriculum…but to take the far more difficult and tedious plan of trying to lay a foundation for a broad, thorough and practical education.”21 Ida would honor such ideals and appreciate the work of the devout men and women who taught at Rust. Mostly Northerners, they were despised by local whites, who did not share their commitment to educating the freed people. As a result, the Rust faculty were subject to insults, slander, and physical threats—up to and including a sexual assault on one white female teacher’s favorite student. Not surprisingly, Ida would long remember them as “consecrated teachers” and looked back on Rust as a “splendid example of Christian courage.”22 Rust also exposed Ida to another great love, books. She read all the fiction in the college library, shaping her ideals on “the best of Dickens’s stories, Louisa May Alcott’s, Mrs. A.D.T. Whitney’s, and Charlotte Brontë’s books, and Oliver Optic’s books for boys.”23

  Not even Dickens, however, could prepare Ida for the tragedy that struck next. In 1878, shortly after her sixteenth birthday, she was visiting her grandparents’ farm when a yellow fever epidemic broke out in the Mississippi Valley region. Initially hardest hit was Memphis, Tennessee, fifty miles from Holly Springs. On hearing the news from Memphis, residents of Holly Springs were not concerned. Memphis had been the site of previous epidemics, and yellow fever was widely believed to be caused by the “swamp vapor.” On relatively high ground, Holly Springs was considered safe, so much so that the town mayor refused to impose a quarantine on travelers from Memphis. As Wells put it: “Our little burg opened its doors to any one who wanted to come in.”24 When news of the epidemic finally reached her grandparents’ farm in rural Mississippi, Ida and her grandparents also remained calm. Mail arrived only intermittently at the farm, so they could expect no direct news of the Wells family, but they knew that yellow fever was nothing new in Memphis, and had never spread to Holly Springs. Moreover, should Holly Springs become dangerous, they assumed that Jim Wells would move his wife and children to the country.

  And dangerous it became. The mayor’s hospitality had disastrous consequences. People began to die shortly after the first “refugees” from Memphis arrived. A virus more common to lowlands, yellow fever is not confined to them. At the time linked to “swamp vapors,” yellow fever is transmitted by mosquitoes, and passes easily from human to human. An unseasonably mild winter followed almost immediately by a very hot summer had made conditions especially ripe for the transmission of the virus in the Mississippi Valley in 1878. The hot weather had allowed mosquitoes to breed in unprecedented numbers, expanding their territory and spreading yellow fever as their population grew. The effect was devastating, as yellow fever is more easily tolerated by people with a long history of exposure to it, and most lethal to people without any. Worse, the yellow fever of 1878 was a particularly virulent strain. It left few survivors.25

  By early September, fifty cases of fever had been reported in Holly Springs, and a mass exodus was under way. Streets “were jammed with every conceivable type of vehicle loaded with baggage and human beings,” as some two thousand people fled the city. Only fifteen hundred remained behind in a city soon utterly overcome by fever. A resident reported in an anguished telegraph: “The stores are all closed…Physicians are broken down…Many cases will die today…Gloom, despair, and death rule the hour, and the situation is simply appalling.”26

  Among those who stayed were Jim Wells and his family. Ida’s mother was nursing a nine-month-old baby, Stanley, and one of her older children also required a lot of care. Ida’s sister Eugenia, the family’s second child, had become paralyzed below the waist two years earlier after a severe case of scoliosis had deformed her spine. Stanley and Eugenia may have made it particularly difficult for the family to travel. In any case, Elisabeth Wells herself was soon too sick to travel. Although Jim Wells quarantined his family at home once the fever struck, Elisabeth was the first to get sick. Next was Jim. A hero of the epidemic, Jim Wells had spent its early days ministering to both th
e town and his family. During the final weeks of his life he nursed the sick, prayed for the dying, and built coffins for the dead, all between visits to the gate of his house, where he delivered food and monitored the health of his family. When his wife fell sick, Wells returned home to care for her and promptly fell ill himself, dying September 26, one day before his wife passed.

  Too far out in the country to receive newspapers or regular mail, Ida and her grandparents did not hear the news until October. She and her relatives were outdoors picking the first fall cotton when three men from Holly Springs arrived on horseback. Still confident that her family had left Holly Springs, Ida thought they were paying a social call. Only once the men had been greeted and seated did she ask for news of Holly Springs. One of them then handed her a letter he had received from the Wellses’ next-door neighbors, which she scanned with little expectation of reading anything of direct “personal interest.” Midway through the first page she was brought up short: “Jim and Lizzie Wells have both died of fever. They died within twenty-four hours of each other. The children are all home and the Howard Association has put a woman there to take care of them.”27

  Three days later, Ida rode home aboard a freight train. “No passenger trains were running or needed,” and the caboose that Wells rode in was draped in black to honor the recent deaths of the train’s two previous conductors. How Ida’s relatives made the difficult decision to let the sixteen-year-old brave the deadly epidemic in Holly Springs is not clear. Perhaps they, like Ida, were moved by a letter from a doctor in Holly Springs telling her that her siblings needed her care. Others, however, clearly thought that Ida’s mission was foolhardy. She traveled against the advice of everyone at the railroad station where she boarded. They told her she should stay put. No “home doctor” would have ever asked her to come, they suggested, voicing their suspicions of the visiting doctors from outside their region who had been called in to help during the epidemic.28 Their fears were clearly shared by the train’s conductor; he told Ida in no uncertain terms that traveling to Holly Springs was a mistake.