But then, my junior year of high school, there was Riceville's Elliott, a woman who did not know me, discussing race from a perspective that seemed to understand.
I wondered how a white woman from another generation who laughs like my grandmother, was raised in the same area as my mother and does not have two children of color was more willing and able to speak thoughtfully about race than my own family.
--
Elliott was born during the Depression and raised on a 160-acre farm four miles northeast of Riceville. The middle child of seven, she was determined to be heard. "I had to fight a lot to get noticed," she says. "I suppose some psychologist will read that and say, 'She's still fighting.' "
Her father was the first to teach her about equality.
"My dad used to say, 'Never put a stone in another man's path . . . ,' " Elliott says. "These things all sound like cliches until you grow up and you realize that, damn it all, he was right."
She enrolled at a teachers college in Cedar Falls, where she met and married Darald, an assistant manager of a supermarket in a mainly black area of town.
Elliott says her eyes began to open to issues of race and discrimination when she went to the University of Northern Iowa and met black students who were smarter and more talented than she was. Somebody's been lying to me, she thought.
At the height of the civil rights movement, the couple decided to return to Riceville with their four children. Elliott took a job at the elementary school and discovered a community that did not acknowledge the changes occurring elsewhere -- or any need for them. But then King was killed, and something snapped in Elliott.
The first year of the exercise, the local paper printed essays that Elliott's students had written about discrimination, but no one outside the classroom took much notice. The next year, however, a film crew from Canada followed her and she was invited to "The Tonight Show."
After that appearance, Elliott returned home to find that she and her family had been blacklisted.
Customers stopped patronizing the hotel her parents managed. Passersby called her names and shouted insults. The bowling team that she had long played for replaced her, and she was no longer invited to play bridge. Her children were spat on and knocked down, their belongings defaced.
