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Chapter One

Childhood and Early Adulthood

" A happy, light-hearted schoolgirl "

    The remarkable journey of Ida Wells began during the Civil War in the northern Mississippi town of Holly Springs. It was not the most auspicious place for an African American to be born, for Mississippi has been the site of horrific incidents of white racism and violence. In the antebellum period, slaves from other states feared being "sold down to Mississippi"; later, some of the bloodiest chapters of the civil rights movement would be written there. Nevertheless, Ida B. Wells was born at a time and place in Mississippi that offered African Americans cause for hope as well as discouragement. Her parents also emerged from slavery with more opportunity than many.

    Although slavery was hardly a benevolent institution, as white southerners sought to paint it, some slaves were more privileged than others. Sources of privilege included kinship with the master, acquisition of valuable skills, and the opportunity to be "hired out" in cities. Ida's father, James Wells, apparently benefited from all three. His master/father owned a plantation in Tippah County and had no children by his white wife, "Miss Polly." Like many slave owners, he had a black "family" with a slave--Peggy. Born in 1840, James Wells was their first child and was cherished by his father, who was relatively old when James was born. Such liaisons were deeply resented by most slave owners' white wives, who felt the bitterness of betrayal and the humiliation of seeing tangible, public proof of their husbands' infidelity in the skin color of the children. These wives' wrath was sometimes unleashed on the slave women who shared their husband's attention, whether or not the bondswomen were willing participants in the relationships. James Wells recalled how Miss Polly had gotten someone to strip and whip Peggy the day after her husband died.

    Before his death, James's father had taken him to Holly Springs, in northern Mississippi, to be apprenticed to a carpenter. Thus at age eighteen, James Wells gained a valuable skill and a measure of independence as a hired-out slave living in town. Masters hired out their slaves to other people for a variety of reasons--usually for compensation or for their slaves to acquire certain skills. Hired-out slaves enjoyed a wide range of freedom, and some received very little. Life in cities and towns, however, gave many hired-out slaves some freedom from supervision, and most found more autonomy than the slaves on their masters' plantations.

    In Holly Springs, Wells learned carpentry and acquired a mate at the residence of a contractor and builder named Bolling. He fell in love with Elizabeth Warrenton, the cook in the Bolling household. As slaves they could not legally marry, but they lived as man and wife and legalized their vows after emancipation--as many slaves did. Unlike James, Elizabeth (born in 1844) had not been sheltered from bondage's worst abuses. One of ten children born to slaves in Virginia, she vividly recalled receiving beatings from her masters. She also suffered one of the worst abuses of slavery: She and two of her sisters were sold and separated from their family. Such separations were painful reminders of slaves' vulnerability and cut them off from the very people who provided comfort and support to cope with the harsh realities of slavery. Like so many others, Elizabeth sent inquiries back to Virginia after emancipation in a vain attempt to find her lost family.

    Ida Bell Wells was the first child born to the couple. Her birth on 16 July 1862 was in the midst of the Civil War. At first the Union and the Confederacy carefully tried to separate the issue of slavery from their war aims, but the process of the war ultimately destroyed the system of human bondage. When Union troops arrived nearby, many slaves sought to liberate themselves by fleeing behind Union lines. After a period of confusion over the status of these fugitives (at first, slaves were often returned to their Confederate masters), the U.S. Congress directed that escaped slaves of rebel masters could be considered contraband of war and proclaimed free. Nevertheless, when Union troops moved out of a region, some of the newly freed slaves found themselves recaptured in the web of slavery. For many southerners of all shades, the transition from slavery to freedom was chaotic and confusing. Ida Wells's birthplace was the scene of more-than-average confusion.

    Holly Springs was captured and recaptured by the two armies, changing hands at least fifty-nine times during the war. Its geography and its history made the city's experiences of the war and Reconstruction both typical and atypical of most of the state. When Ida was born, Holly Springs had existed for only a few decades. In 1832 the Chickasaw ceded the region, known as the Chickasaw Cession, to the federal government. Four years later the territory was divided into counties--the largest of which was Marshall County with Holly Springs as its seat. While still carving the city from the wilderness, its settlers sought to make it a cultural center. Even before the town was incorporated, residents voted in a town meeting to establish the Holly Springs Female Institute, the first of a number of educational institutions. By 1850 the county was spending more on higher education than all the rest of the state, excluding the budget of the University of Mississippi. A history of the state noted that in 1891 Holly Springs, called the "City of Flowers," was "widely known for the hospitality and culture of its people."

    One reason for the culture and prosperity in Holly Springs was the arrival of successful cotton planters, who had moved west for more fertile soil, as well as many others who grew cotton on a smaller scale. "King Cotton" demanded slaves; the 1840 county population of 17,536 included 8,260 slaves and 8 free blacks. As a new town with many land claim cases, the city also was the home to numerous lawyers. Both lawyers and planters tended to join the Whig party, which dominated the town's early politics--until the rise of the slavery issue in national debate. The controversy destroyed the party there as elsewhere and "no compromise" Democrats rose in power.

    By 1860 the county's population had grown to almost 29,000, including 1,295 slave owners and 17,439 slaves; the free black population remained at 8. Now a minority, whites became even more determined to retain slavery as a source of control and power, and Marshall County played an integral role in Mississippi's march toward secession. One of its residents was coauthor of the state's ordinance of secession, and when it was signed on 9 January 1861, the county provided five signatories--more than any other county. Thus a year and a half before Ida Wells's birthday, her parents and the rest of Holly Springs probably waited anxiously for the outcome of the bold move toward disunion.

    Because whites were outnumbered, a constant fear of racial revolt lingered in many minds. Such fear was intensified by the uncertainties of war. Early in the hostilities planters summoned home some of their hired-out slaves. The state legislature also moved to control slaves by penalizing masters who granted their bondsmen and bondswomen too much freedom. Even so, rumors spread like epidemics, fanning the fever of fear with lurid descriptions of insurrection plots. Hysteria required no tangible evidence. The month Ida was born, the provost marshal of Natchez reported the hanging of forty African Americans during the preceding year, foreshadowing the postwar terror and murder of black men to retain white control. By the end of the century only the dominant excuse had changed--from insurrection to rape.

    At first Holly Springs seemed to have been spared the worst of the hysteria and war. Not until about two weeks before Ida's birth in July 1862 did the first significant Civil War skirmish occur near Holly Springs. A considerable number of Confederate troops remained in the area until later that fall when Union General Ulysses S. Grant began moving troops into northern Mississippi in preparation for the Vicksburg campaign. Before his army reached Holly Springs, Confederate forces partially dismantled the local foundry and retreated to a more defensible position. Grant proceeded to establish a large supply depot in the city. Weapons, ammunition, food, and other materials filled every public building as well as churches, the Masonic Temple, and even a few private homes. While he briefly made his headquarters there, the city's black population celebrated a rare degree of freedom.

    As Grant's army moved deeper into slave territory, slaves began coming in larger numbers to the Union camps. To handle the hordes, Grant asked Chaplain John Eaton to establish a camp for the "contrabands." Eaton chose Grand Junction, Tennessee, as the camp's location--just across the state line from Holly Springs. Eaton later described the scene of slaves "coming garbed in rags or silks, with feet shod or bleeding, individually or in families and larger groups,--an army of slaves and fugitives, pushing its way irresistibly toward an army of fighting men." Although the Wells family and many other slaves chose to remain in Holly Springs, the camp's nearby location had an ameliorating impact on slavery in that city.

    Late in the fall of 1862, Grant's army moved south, leaving only twenty-five hundred troops in Holly Springs. Until that time Holly Springs had suffered little damage, although the town and the surrounding countryside had changed hands frequently. On a plantation near Holly Springs, eighteen-year-old Cordelia Scales wrote letters describing the changing parade of Union and Confederate troops that camped in her yard. Both seem to have foraged--but not unduly. Some outlying plantations suffered more than others, but major destruction of the town began with the raid by Confederate General Earl Van Dorn on 20 December 1862. Van Dorn's men quickly routed the outnumbered and unsuspecting federal troops in Holly Springs. Knowing they had little time, Confederate soldiers rapidly looted the easily transportable federal supplies. Then, from early morning until 4:00 P.M., they set fire to the many buildings housing the remaining stores. Exploding ammunition caused further destruction and some deaths. J. G. Deupree, a participant, described the scene as

wild and exciting: Federals running; Confederates yelling and pursuing; tents and houses burning; torches flaming; guns popping; sabres clanking; negroes and abolitionists begging for mercy; women, in dreaming robes and with disheveled hair floating in the morning breeze, shouting encouragement to the raiders; a mass of frantic, frightened human beings.

Of all the "frantic, frightened human beings" few were more scared than the "negroes and abolitionists begging for mercy." James and Elizabeth Wells may well have feared for their six-month-old infant.

    The destruction was not yet complete. Two days later federal troops returned. One Iowa soldier watched sadly as every "portion of the fated city seemed given over to pillage and destruction and no hand was raised to save anything from the general sack and ruin ." He was especially disturbed by the sacrileges committed in a church and the "women and children standing in their homes wailing with the most piteous cries." Before Confederate forces in Mississippi surrendered on 4 May 1865, Holly Springs had witnessed more than a dozen major skirmishes. After so much chaos and confusion, the county's slaves must have wondered if freedom had actually come to stay, while whites worried about what would replace slavery. Former masters and former slaves warily sought to redefine their new relationships.

    After the war was over, James Wells accepted Bolling's invitation to continue working for him. Like most freed people, Wells sought to test and taste the varied fruits of freedom. He first exercised those rights that white southerners had grudgingly conceded--legalizing his marriage and seeking education for his family. The Wells family continued to grow in the years following the war, and eventually Ida had four brothers and three sisters. Both parents were eager for their children to go to school. Former slaves realized that education had been forbidden because it was a key to freedom and a source of white power. Most slave children had worked at an early age; their freed fathers wanted them to have childhoods more like those of their former masters' children. Ida Wells later recalled, "Our job was to go to school and learn all we could."

    She began school at such an early age that she could not remember when or where she started. Her earliest recollections were of reading the newspaper to her father and his friends and of her mother going to school with the children until she was able to read the Bible. Students of all ages clustering around a limited number of books in small schools was a common sight to the newly freed slaves during Reconstruction. Whether Ida's father learned to read is unclear. Her reading the newspaper to him and his friends could have represented a father's desire to show off the accomplishments of his offspring or his inability to read for himself. Like many freed heads of households, James Wells was undoubtedly busy and apparently did not attend school with his family. However, he may have learned to read and write from his father or as an apprentice. Regardless, Wells was deeply involved in education because he was one of the trustees of Shaw University, the school Ida attended in Holly Springs.

    In addition to exercising their rights to marriage and education, freedmen eagerly embraced the right to vote. For the entire Republican Reconstruction period in Mississippi (1867-1875), African Americans comprised a majority of the county's population and overwhelmingly supported Republicans despite white Democrats' efforts to win their votes. The Democrats used both carrots and sticks to woo black voters. Many used economic intimidation to persuade African Americans to vote for Democrats. James Wells was one victim of such tactics. When Bolling found out that Wells had not voted Democratic, he locked Wells out of his shop. Wells, however, was not easily intimidated. Without saying a word to anyone, he bought his own tools, rented a house, and moved his family out of the dwelling owned by Bolling.

    Some African Americans followed the path of James Wells, but black voters responded in a variety of ways. Like Wells, a number openly demonstrated their independence--a few attended Democratic barbecues and picnics adorned in caps with the Republican insignia. Others dissembled. One man, threatened with eviction by his white landlord if he voted Republican, won a reprieve with the explanation that he had been forced to vote for Republicans by black threats to run him out of town. Many accepted Democratic gifts and then voted Republican anyway. A few did become Democrats either out of loyalty to former masters or employers or because of economic threats and incentives. The leader of a black Democratic club was rewarded with the gift of a small house by his white fellow Democrats.

    Although a numerical minority in Marshall County, Democrats were able to get most of their candidates elected as late as the election of 1871. To do so, they utilized both intimidation and fraud. Tactics included counterfeiting Republican ballots, attempting to confuse voters by using African Americans to distribute Democratic tickets, hiding in the building to stuff ballot boxes while the election clerks were eating supper, and requiring black voters to present written proof of their age. As a result of reported electoral fraud, the state legislature refused to seat two Marshall County Democrats elected in 1871. In the next election, the Republicans swept all the county's offices. One African American served as state senator and three as representatives. However, two years later in 1875, the Democrats returned to power--permanently. Black Mississippi politician John Roy Lynch later noted, "The new order of things was then set aside and the abandoned methods of a few years back were reviewed, reinaugurated, and readopted."

    Ida recalled that her father was interested in politics and remembered the "anxious way my mother walked the floor at night when my father was out to a political meeting." Her mother had good reason to be concerned. Whites resented all black political participation but especially loathed the Loyal League, a black political organization founded and often controlled by white Republicans across the South. The Holly Springs branch of the League was established by A. C. McDonald of Shaw University and Nelson Gill of the Freedmen's Bureau. It usually met in Gill's home or in the black Baptist church. During one meeting, members of the local Ku Klux Klan hid under Gill's house listening to the proceedings and waiting for J. L. Holland, who had been chosen among them by lot, to shoot Gill. When Holland finally decided it was time and aimed his pistol, another Klansman had second thoughts and knocked the gun out of Holland's hand just as he fired it. No one was hurt, but all were scared. Afterward, pickets were posted outside during Loyal League meetings.

    Heated campaigns led to physical assaults and fights--apparently instigated by Democrats. Republican speakers were pelted with sticks and brickbats, had their coattails ripped, were "buggy-whipped," and had their legs broken. The most serious incident of violence was the fatal shooting of Tyler Williamson, an African American who was called "a very turbulent leader and exceedingly impudent to the white people." Despite that incident, Holly Springs remained more peaceful than many towns and cities during Reconstruction. Ida Wells noted in her autobiography that she could not remember any riots in the city, "although there were plenty in other parts of the state."

    Political violence and Klan activities frightened Elizabeth Wells and others, but Reconstruction also brought new hope and opportunity to Mississippi's black population. Although brief, the period of Republican ascendancy in Holly Springs had to be a source of great pride to the Wells's and other black families. Most whites, although they resented black political power, agreed that the city had been blessed with extraordinarily capable and honest black officeholders. Two were singled out for praise: James Hill, who rose from the state legislature to become Mississippi's secretary of state from 1874 to 1878, and Hiram Rhodes Revels, who moved to Holly Springs in the mid-1870s, and became the first African American U.S. senator. Both won white respect by their conciliatory attitudes. But whites also noted that although State Senator George Allbright was a "willing and eager tool in the hands of Gill," he was "a negro who was above average in intelligence." At the height of black political power in Holly Springs, Ida Wells was a child of about ten. The events she witnessed may have whetted her interest in politics, which remained strong her entire life.

    Although James Wells was known as a "race man" who was intensely interested in politics, he apparently never held office but stayed busy running a business and taking care of his growing family. As in many households, however, Ida's mother played the biggest role in the day-to-day affairs of the children. A very religious woman, Elizabeth Wells made sure that her children attended church regularly. The Wells family likely belonged to Asbury Methodist Church, where Shaw University classes were first held. Ida was baptized in that faith at the age of twelve. Ida recalled that her mother "won the prize for regular attendance at Sunday school, taking the whole brood of six to nine o'clock Sunday school the year before she died." Elizabeth Wells was a strict disciplinarian who kept close watch over her children. She regularly went to their school to check on their progress, taught them how to do household chores, and assigned each tasks around the home. Ida proudly asserted that her mother "brought us up with a strict discipline that many mothers who have had educational advantages have not exceeded."

    Like many African American families, the Wells family was part of a network of kinship. Although Elizabeth Wells had been unable to locate her parents and other siblings, her sister Belle, who had also been sold to Mississippi owners, lived out in the country near Holly Springs. James Wells's mother, Peggy, married a black man (probably named Buffer) after emancipation and also lived nearby. They apparently lived as man and wife during slavery and had a daughter named Margaret and at least one other son. The Butlers tilled a number of acres and brought their corn and cotton to sell in Holly Springs each fall. Utilizing that trip for a family visit, they usually brought gifts, some of which Ida called "souvenirs from hog-killing time." On one such visit, Ida recalled her father angrily refusing his mother's request to go see his father's widow, "Miss Polly," reminding his mother of how Miss Polly had her whipped and saying, "I am never going to see her. I guess it is all right for you to take care of her and forgive her for what she did to you, but she could have starved to death if I'd had my say-so. She certainly would have, if it hadn't been for you." In addition to those visits, Ida sometimes went to stay with her grandmother and aunt and uncle, who helped Peggy and her husband on the farm. Apparently, another uncle and his wife, Fannie Butler, had three children and lived in Memphis, Tennessee.

    When Ida reached her teens, she enrolled at Shaw University (informally called Rust College until 1890, when the name change became official), where she was greatly influenced by the missionary spirit of the school. Under the jurisdiction of the Methodist Episcopal Church, North, Rust was "strongly tinged with evangelical Christianity." Students were required to attend daily chapel, weekly prayer meetings, and church on Sunday. W. W. Hooper, who became president of Rust while Ida was a student, was remembered as a religious man who "prayed in chapel with his eyes open and would call your name when he got through if you didn't behave." Such an environment reinforced the religious training Ida received at home.

    Rust's curriculum spanned from elementary education to normal school training for teachers--a four-year high school level program. A. C. McDonald founded the school to make former slaves and their children useful, independent citizens. In 1875 he wrote the following:

It is our aim to do no hot-house work, seeking to hurry students through a college curriculum ... sending them into the battle of life only to disgrace themselves and bring reproach upon the cause of education at large, but to take the far more difficult and tedious plan of trying to lay well a foundation for a broad, thorough and practical education.

As in many schools for African Americans of that era, Rust's faculty was predominately white. Most of the teachers were northerners who saw themselves as missionaries. The white women teachers influenced Ida's concept of ideal womanhood and her acceptance of Victorian codes of propriety. At the same time, she may have been inspired by the example of black faculty member Ophelia Smith who wrote, "I love my race."

    While a student at Rust, Ida encountered the joys and sorrows of puberty. She experienced her "first love" and its painful demise. James B. Combs was a Rust student from Georgia, who boarded with a local family. Described in the 1880 U.S. census as "mulatto," Combs was about five years older than Wells and apparently was the one to end the relationship. He married someone else and remained in Holly Springs for at least ten years--his presence reminding Wells of the impermanence of love. Throughout her twenties Ida remained skittish of committing herself to just one man.

    Other relationships caused difficulties for Wells at Rust. In late 1885, she referred to her tenure at Rust as "my darkest days." Ida's fiery temper often got her in trouble, and a confrontation with President Hooper apparently led to her dismissal sometime in 1880 or 1881. For years she resented him tremendously for her expulsion, but in June 1886 she admitted to herself that her own "tempestuous, rebellious, hard headed wilfulness" was to blame. She rued her "disposition to question his authority" and asserted, "I no longer cherish feelings of resentment, nor blame him that my scholastic career was cut short."

    In 1878 Ida B. Wells encountered the next painful chapter of her life while on a visit to her grandmother. That year witnessed a devastating yellow fever epidemic in the Mississippi Valley. The region had undergone previous epidemics of yellow fever, but none was as extensive or deadly as the 1878 outbreak. An unusually mild winter, an early spring, and a blistering hot summer had allowed the mosquitoes, which served as the fever's agent of transmission, to breed prolifically and over a wide range of territory. Thus the fever spread to areas that had never experienced an epidemic; therefore, most residents of those regions had no acquired immunities to yellow fever. Compounding these factors, the strain of virus that year was particularly deadly, which caused higher mortality rates even in areas previously infected. In some regions the mortality rates exceeded 50 percent.

    Lacking a good understanding of how the fever was spread, most Holly Springs residents believed their town to be immune, so the city opened its doors to people from other infested cities. The first "refugees" were housed in a small brick building that had served as the original land office. Within a week one of the refugees had died, which was only the beginning of the terrible toll the fever would exact in Holly Springs. On 4 September 1878, the New Orleans Picayune reported fifty cases of yellow fever in Holly Springs and two deaths; an epidemic was declared and panic began, causing "a frenzied effort at flight from the unseen terror" so that streets "were jammed with every conceivable type of vehicle loaded with baggage and human beings." By the next day a different scene was described: "The hurry and confusion of panic is gone. No hurried footsteps sound along the forsaken streets unless they seek help or a doctor. Hollow echoes mock their passing." The mass exodus reduced the town's population from about thirty-five hundred to fifteen hundred, comprised of three hundred whites and twelve hundred African Americans. One who remained telegraphed on 5 September, "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." Only a few dozen of those who stayed escaped the fever; by the end of the epidemic, 215 whites and 89 African Americans had died.

    While Holly Springs was reeling from yellow fever, Ida was safe at her grandmother's house and presumed that the rest of the family had evacuated the city and gone to stay with her mother's sister Belle. When no word came from them, she assumed delivery of the mail had been disrupted. Then three men from Holly Springs brought her a letter, which she scanned until, as she later recalled, four sentences caught her eye: "Jim and Lizzie Wells have both died of the fever. They died within twenty-four hours of each other. The children are all at home and the Howard Association has put a woman there to take care of them. Send word to Ida." She immediately fainted and came to in a "house of mourning" surrounded by her grandmother, aunt, and uncle. Her father had died on 26 September and her mother the next day.

    Wells was concerned about her younger siblings in Holly Springs. Two years earlier the next oldest child, Eugenia, had developed severe scoliosis that had bent her spinal column until she became paralyzed below the waist. Next in order of birth were her brothers James, age eleven, and George, age nine. Her two youngest sisters were five-year-old Annie, and Lily, about two. The youngest sibling was a nine-month-old baby named Stanley. Another brother, Eddie, had died a number of years earlier of spinal meningitis. Wells wanted to go to the children immediately, but her relatives would not allow her to leave until they received a letter from a doctor saying that she should come.

    When Ida arrived at the house, she found out that all the children except Eugenia had been stricken with the fever. Although most had slight cases, the baby had died on 3 October, and two still remained in bed. Eugenia told her what had happened since the fever struck, recounting their father's contribution to the emergency. To protect his family while he built coffins and comforted the sick, James Wells left home but came daily as far as the gate to bring food and to check on them. Elizabeth, however, was the first of the family to be stricken. An Irish woman was sent to nurse her, and James came home to help--only to come down with the fever himself.

    James Wells had been a master Mason, which in the black community often operated as a safety net for its members and their families. Thus once the epidemic had passed, a group of Masons gathered at the Wells home to discuss what was to become of the children. After many hours of discussion, they had come to an agreement on the arrangements. They decided that Ida was old enough to take care of herself, but the others would have to be parceled out. Two of the Masons' wives each agreed to take one of the younger girls, Annie and Lily. The two boys were to be apprenticed to two different men--one of whom was a local white who was familiar with their father's work and hoped his son shared Wells's carpentry skills. The big problem was Eugenia. Because of her paralysis, no one wanted the responsibility of caring for her, so she was to be sent to a poorhouse.

    While the men were divvying up the children, Ida had sat quietly. When they finished, however, she calmly announced that her parents would "turn over in their graves to know their children had been scattered like that" and she did not intend to let it happen. She would care for them if the Masons would help her find work. Although they initially scoffed at the idea, Ida was adamant and they relented--probably relieved to be rid of the responsibility. Wells later subtly altered the past and her experiences at Rust University by recollecting, "After being a happy, light-hearted schoolgirl I suddenly found myself at the head of a family." Actually, her days there were less than idyllic, and she continued to attend Rust between school terms until her expulsion some two years later.

    At age sixteen, Ida B. Wells was able to keep her family together because her father had been industrious and frugal. He had left them a house free of debt and accumulated savings of at least three hundred dollars. That met their needs for awhile, but Ida needed to find work. On the suggestion of the Masons, she sought a teaching job in a country school. She successfully passed the examination and was assigned to a school six miles outside of Holly Springs with a salary of twenty-five dollars a month. While she waited for school to open, Wells lengthened all her skirts for the transition from schoolgirl to schoolmarm.

    Until that time, Wells had been sheltered by her parents, who were very protective. She had not been allowed to be in the presence of men unchaperoned, and her contacts with boys had been limited to what she called "children's parties." She was naive and society was suspicious of women living without the protection of a father, husband, or male relative. The result was a pattern of rumors that would plague her until she married. After she insisted on staying in the family home with her siblings, the word spread that Wells wanted the house for illicit assignations with a white man. She was dimly aware that such arrangements existed, but she was deeply shocked and hurt that people believed her capable of such action.

    Although Wells was listed as the head of the household in the 1880 U.S. census, she received help in meeting her responsibilities from her extended family and friends. Mr. and Mrs. James Hall, family friends who were in their early thirties, served as guardians. After fallacious rumors that Wells was having an affair with a white doctor, her grandmother, Peggy, came from the country to stay with them. Although she was in her seventies, she tried to help out by working during the day. However, one night Peggy collapsed with a paralytic stroke, and her daughter took her back to the country to care for her until she died?

    Once Wells started to work at the country school, she needed someone to watch the children during the week. An old friend of her mother's (probably Rachel Rather) agreed to do so. Rather was from Virginia, twenty-four years older than Elizabeth, and may have served as a surrogate mother to her. She took care of the children until Ida would come home every Friday, "riding the six miles on the back of a big mule." Before she returned on Sunday afternoon, Wells did all the laundry and housecleaning for the week. She also cooked for the children, often using eggs and butter that people near her school had given her. Fortunately, she did not have to keep up this frantic pace for too long. Gradually, she was relieved of the responsibility for some of the children. By 1880, her brother James, who the family called Jim, had left home and had become apprenticed to a carpenter. Although he was no longer under her direct supervision, Wells still worried about Jim. She later called him her problem child because he was constantly getting into minor difficulties, especially with women. He would then go to Ida, who would help him out of the trouble. George was quieter and also became a carpenter's apprentice, eventually moving to Kansas.

    Wells taught for three years in Marshall County and Tate County schools and for six months in a school in Cleveland County, Arkansas. In 1881 Wells accepted the invitation of her aunt, Fannie Wells, to come to Memphis. Fannie lived there with her three small children, having been widowed by the yellow fever epidemic. Wells brought her two youngest sisters with her to Memphis, while Eugenia went to live with their Aunt Belle on her farm. After she arrived in the city at the age of nineteen, Wells continued to teach--first in the nearby town of Woodstock, and after 1884 in the city schools of Memphis.

    Forced into an early adulthood by her parents' deaths, in Memphis Wells began to feel the pull of conflicting duties and desires that marked her entire life. As she struggled to balance her responsibilities to her family and her race, Wells also sought to fulfill her personal needs for independence and security. Her quest for self-identity was complicated by a temperament that made it difficult for her accept the gender and racial roles expected of her. After much seeking and struggling, Wells became both a woman and an activist in Memphis.