🇿🇲Beatrice Benson

I was born in Jacksonville, Texas in 1933. It was a little country town. There was just me and my sister in our immediate family, but we had cousins close by — all boys — who came over often. Across the creek behind our house lived another neighbor where we used to go for milk. There were boys in that family too, and their sister was our schoolteacher.

I didn't have a good life growing up as a young woman. Everyone said I was pretty, and everyone wanted to misuse me. It didn't matter who it was. These things happened.

When I was seven we moved to Dallas, and the same things kept happening. In Dallas we also had a lot of contact with white people. On the bus we had to sit behind a sign that said "colored" on one side, and "white" on the other. So things went from one extreme to the next.

I could be standing at a bus stop and a white person would walk up and talk to me — but the moment another white person came along, they'd stop, as if they'd never spoken to me. I always said: they may feel that way about me, but I know God created all of us. They didn't come into this world any differently than I did. Whatever was going on, that was their problem.

When I was fifteen I wrote my mother a letter telling her what was going on, and asked my aunt — the one I was named after — if I could come live with her. She said yes, so I went. While I was there I'd help her husband fix fences, and do other work around the property. One day he told me he wanted to divorce my aunt and marry me. I couldn't understand it. I'd left one house full of craziness, only to land in another where someone was talking about leaving my aunt and marrying me. I never would have married him.

I kept thinking: I have to get out of this. So at seventeen, I told myself the first person who came along and asked me to marry them, I would marry. And that's what I did. It was the wrong thing to do, but I did it. We were together about a year, and then…