Survivors by Hannah Durkin

Author:Hannah Durkin [Durkin, Hannah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2024-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

13

Cocolocco

On a cool, damp morning in late October 1895, Bougier decided to go to town. She put on a warm cap, placed a chequered apron over her thick jumper and filled a hand-woven basket with long twisted sticks of sassafras root. She took in the plant’s sweet, cinnamon-like aroma as she draped the basket on her arm. She then walked briskly to the brand-new Prattville Junction railway stop next to her home to catch a train six and a half miles south to Montgomery.[1] Bougier was now nearly sixty years old. Her homeland was as far out of reach as ever, and more than three and a half decades had passed since she had last held her three lost children. But she was still determined to re-enact as closely as possible the regular trading trips to Ogbomosho that she undertook in her youth. She wanted to inhabit once again the life of a mid-nineteenth century Yoruban woman. She prepared to take her wares to market.

Bougier had been perfecting her trips to town since following her shipmate, former child cook Ella, to Elmore County along with her young daughters Amanda and Mary roughly two decades earlier.[2] Unlike the more isolated Mount Meigs, Elmore County had long been linked to Montgomery via rail and was a popular destination for affluent white tourists, who came to hunt, barbecue and swim in the nearby Jackson Lake. But the new station, which had been built to replace the little railway stop 2 miles north at Coosada, presented novel challenges to the small, dark-skinned woman. Buying a ticket meant testing out on an unfamiliar and potentially hostile white ticket inspector her English language skills, which remained a struggle throughout her life. Trains arrived not just from Nashville in the north and Louisville in the south, but also now from Prattville in the west, and Bougier had not only to locate the right train, but also work out where to stand on the platform to ensure she was in the right place to board the separate ‘Coloreds’ carriage.

The dangers and humiliations endured by Black travellers in the South were increasing rapidly in the 1890s as the region’s white elite adopted a policy of de jure segregation to cement its grip on political power. Local laws segregating railway cars first began appearing in the South in the late 1870s and 1880s and gained federal approval six months after Bougier’s first trip to Prattville Junction’s new station, when the United States’ Supreme Court shut down a challenge to Louisiana’s 1890 Separate Car Act by a light-skinned Louisiana Creole man named Homer Plessy. The Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) ruling held that segregated state facilities were acceptable, provided such facilities were equal.

But the reality of public travel for African Americans in the South was profoundly unequal. As a Black woman, Bougier was consigned to her trains’ front carriages. Front coaches were the most dangerous sections of trains as they were the most exposed in the event of a crash. They were also the most crowded, worn out and dirty.

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