Katherine's Days of Deliveries.

My name is Katherine James. I grew up just on the edge of Montgomery, Alabama, on America Drive. I loved the little street, just on the edge of town. It was a little secluded, behind some trees on the left and back, a field on the right, and an old dirt road along the front entry. The road winds around to the North end of Main Street. That end of Main Street consists of a small fruit and vegetable stand owned by Mr. Williams, a small church, and a bus stop that had a bus actually stop at 7:00 A.M. and 7:00 P.M. every Thursday. That bus stop would turn into my after-school office.

I was fourteen during the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 and 1956. My family was greatly effected by it, as were hundreds of others, but not for the reason you might presume. I am white, and my family was the only white family on the street. The rest of the people were elderly negroes. The youngest one was seventy-two years old.

One day, I woke up, and went downstairs for breakfast to hear that the busses were being boycotted because Rosa Parks got arrested for remaining seated in a bus seat that was supposed to be forfeited for a white man, and the negroes wanted equality all around, especially on busses. This didn't greatly effect me, because I normally walked to school and to town anyway, but it did effect my neighbors. As I said, every one of them was at least 72 years old. They all got their groceries from town on Thursdays. They rode into town on the morning bus, went to their friends' houses in the morning, went to Pedro's Diner for lunch, went to the grocery store, then got a soda pop at the gas station by the bus stop in town. Then they all gathered and talked until the bus came to take them home. The main issue here was that the bus was their only way into town, twenty minutes away, and the busses run by other negroes didn't come that far, so they couldn't go into town to get their groceries. They didn't know how they would get their groceries, medicines, anything. I was their answer, my whole family was. I suggested that we help them out.

My family owned a car, but my father used it to get to work. He was gone from 6:00 A.M. to 8:00 P.M., at least, but sometimes more. He was a doctor, actually a surgeon, so he worked odd hours. These are just the times he has to go in and out at, but it depended on if he had patients before or after. The neighbors asked my mother and I to go into town and get what they needed for them, so after my father went to work, and I left for school, my mother would go into town and get the car, then go home and see what we needed. Then she would go get it first so it wasn't so confusing getting everyone's things. Then she would go home and get a list and money for what they needed. She would go meet me at the store. We decided to go ahead and do this every Thursday, so it was consistent with their previous weekly schedules. Of course, if they needed anything during the rest of the week, I picked it on my way home from school, or my mother would pick it up if she were in town that day.

At the store, we would get cardboard boxes to organize the groceries in. The neighborhood would collect them all week, from the mail, or from the hospital, or anywhere else, but most of them would have to come from the store. We would each take half of the lists, which were stapled to envelopes of money, and a shopping cart. Then we would make rows of boxes to put the groceries in. I would start at one end of the store, and my mother would start on the other, and we would work our way across. I had a system. I took a notebook that I got from school and looked at each list before I started. I listed what I needed from each aisle, and put those items in the children's seat of the cart. Then, at the end of each aisle I put everything into their corresponding boxes. It did take a while at first to list everything, and to separate it into each box, but this way I didn't have to go backwards in the store, and I could take one aisle at a time and get everyone's things easily. I don't think my mother had a system. I think she just looked at each list individually and went up and down each aisle for every person.

After I completed each list, I went up to the check out lanes. On Thursdays during the boycotts, there weren't very many people in the stores, because of the people being unable to get there, so I let most people go before me so they didn't have to wait. Once it was my turn, I would unload each box onto the conveyor belt, and as the checker reacher the end of each box, I would get the envelope out and pay for that box. Once all of the groceries were bagged, they were put back into each box, and the person's list was put into the top of one of their bags. By then, my mother was about done, so I headed out to the car to unload. She was right behind me, so soon after, we left.

We decided to make the pick-up spot the old bus stop. We lined up the boxes on the bench, according to house number. My mother would stay at the bus stop, and I would begin to deliver the boxes. I started with the people who were unable to make it to the bus stop and carry their boxes back. Then, I would start with the person at the far end of my street, and work my way back. If I saw the person walking to pick up their things as I was delivering them, I would carry their things back to their house anyway. After they either picked up their things, or I dropped them off, they would always try to pay us, even though we kept saying it was unnecissary. They would give me a few dollars, and say, "Why don't you use this to buy something as nice as you are." I loved to read, and wanted to be a surgeon like my father, so I was saving it up to buy a model of the human body, now called a "Visible Man or Visible Woman." After I had enough for that, I decided to buy some books about the specialty I wanted to go into, Cardiology. I got books about how the heart worked, the different diseases of the heart, and similar topics. Anyway, if the weather was bad, we took the car to each house and dropped everything off. We typically didn't do this, because once we got everything into the car, it wasn't in order of houses.

We did this until the boycott ended in 1956.

A/N:

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