Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored by Clifton Taulbert

First published: 1989

Type of work: Memoir

Time of work: Late 1940’s-1963

Locale: Glen Allan, Mississippi, and environs

Principal Personages:

• Clifton Lemoure Taulbert, an African American author who depicts the community of his youth
• Mozella Alexander, the author’s aunt, who has kept the family’s deeds to land
• Joe Young (Poppa), the author’s great-grandfather
• Pearl Young (Ma Pearl or Mama Pearl), the author’s great-grandmother
• Elna Peters Boose (Ma Ponk), the author’s grandaunt
• Mary Taulbert, the author’s mother
• Mr. Hilton, a white grocer
• Mrs. Knight, a white seamstress
• Cleve Mormon, the author’s uncle and Glen Allan’s ice supplier
• Joe Maxey, the deacon sent to an NAACP meeting
• Billy Jennings, a white teenager who befriends the author

Form and Content

In his introduction to Once upon a Time When We Were Colored, Clifton L. Taulbert writes about returning to his hometown of Glen Allan, Mississippi, in the 1970’s and visiting Mozella Alexander, his elderly aunt, who shows him land deeds proving the truth of stories he had heard in childhood. The deeds establish that Taulbert’s family owned a plantation, which was auctioned off during the Great Depression to pay back taxes his great-grandparents had not known were due.

Having grown up in the last years of legally enforced segregation in Mississippi and having associated land with personal worth, the author is initially bitter over the loss of this land. Nevertheless, he comes to replace this bitterness with a sense that the supposed owners of land merely hold it in trust until they return to it at their death. Taulbert decides that the important aspect of his past is not land gained or lost but the love that surrounded him as he grew up materially poor in a small, rural town. He experienced this love among the members of his extended family and his friends during a time when the people now called “African Americans” or “blacks” were, in polite speech, “colored.”

Although the author organizes this memoir of good and bad times topically rather than chronologically, he does relate a racial incident of early childhood in his first chapter and mentions in that chapter that his mother, Mary Taulbert, was unwed and had only recently left high school when he was born in the house of his great-grandfather and great-grandmother, Joe and Pearl Young, his “Poppa” and “Mama Pearl.” Because his mother later married someone other than his father, the author lived not with her but nearby, with his great-grandparents, during most of his first five years. When his great-grandmother developed a terminal illness, Taulbert moved within Glen Allan to live with his grandaunt Elna Peters Boose, his “Ma Ponk,” with whom he stayed until he graduated from high school.

After the first chapter’s introduction to the author’s beloved Poppa and to Glen Allan, Mississippi—to its people and its buildings, as well as to its racial divide—the remaining ten chapters present numerous incidents in the life of the African American community as it celebrates, fears, worships, grieves, and works, and as it interacts with the white community. Taulbert recounts his eighth-grade prom. He describes rare fish fries at Ma Ponk’s and excited gatherings to listen to a battery-powered radio and cheer as Joe Louis defends his heavyweight boxing championship. He recalls a nervous gathering on a Thursday night at Saint Mark’s Missionary Baptist Church to bless Deacon Joe Maxey, who is leaving for Baltimore to attend a meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Saint Mark’s is also the site of lively services attended by dignified members of the Mother’s Board and conducted by a vigorous preacher. Taulbert recalls such joyous services, as well as somber events: the death watch for Mama Pearl and the care afterward with which Ma Ponk combs her dead loved one’s hair.

Always—in the background, if not in the foreground of the chapters—there is work. Riding on the back of a truck, the author travels with other members of the African American community to one plantation or another to chop and later pick cotton. He also sells candy on behalf of his mother, keeps the post office floor in good condition, delivers ice with his Uncle Cleve Mormon, rakes leaves meticulously, and performs various tasks at a grocery store. Combined with his academic work—first at a one-room school, later at the new Glen Allan colored school (with flush toilets), and finally at O’Bannon High School in nearby Greenville—the long, hard work for money makes Taulbert hope for a materially better future than he could achieve by remaining in Washington County, Mississippi.

Critical Context

Taulbert would eventually settle in the southern city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and it was there that Once upon a Time When We Were Colored was published in 1989 by Council Oak Books. Despite the small size of the publishing firm, the book received favorable reviews in national periodicals, including The New York Times Book Review, and it sold well. In 1995, the big firm Penguin Books USA republished it, and early in 1996 its film adaptation, Once upon a Time . . . When We Were Colored, was released to American theaters. The film, directed by Tim Reid and written by Paul W. Cooper, received high praise from the famous critics Roger Ebert and Michael Medved. As for the book itself, Taulbert’s obvious affection for most of his rural African American community, his often vivid descriptions, and his ability to see the good within bad circumstances lent his first memoir an appeal to readers regardless of their race. Once upon a Time When We Were Colored remains a call to persons of all colors not to forget the human bonds of community.

Bibliography

Bower, Anne L., ed. Reel Food: Essays on Food and Film. New York: Routledge, 2004. Includes an essay on the representation of racial and ethnic culture through food in the film adaptation of Once upon a Time When We Were Colored.

Bray, Rosemary L. “Good Times in the Bad Times.” Review of Once upon a Time When We Were Colored, by Clifton L. Taulbert. The New York Times Book Review, February 18, 1989, 18. Acknowledges that racially segregated Mississippi appears more pleasant in Taulbert’s account than in the memory of the African American reviewer but praises the book for its charm.

Edmonds, Anthony O. Review of Once upon a Time When We Were Colored, by Clifton L. Taulbert. Library Journal 114, no. 12 (July, 1989): 88. Faults the author for a sentimental portrayal of African Americans and for incoherence in the general structure of the book but calls it emotionally powerful.

Jim Kobak’s Kirkus Reviews. Review of Once upon a Time When We Were Colored, by Clifton L. Taulbert. 57 (May 1, 1989): 682. Briefly summarizes the memoir in words of consistent praise, especially for Taulbert’s sincere portrayal of an oppressed but dignified and humane people.

Weathers, Barbara. Review of Once upon a Time When We Were Colored, by Clifton L. Taulbert. School Library Journal, December, 1989, 130. Praises Taulbert for his depiction of loving, family-oriented, hard-working persons.