Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Tales from a Family Album: The Justices

2007; University of Iowa; Volume: 37; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.17077/0021-065x.6272

2330-0361

Jean Ross Justice,

Race, History, and American Society

The Justices "The family tree a simple chinaberry..."In August of 1925 it was, as always, hot in Miami. Ethel CookJustice was pregnant, which made her even hotter, and she spent a good deal of time sitting around in her underwear." Vascoe"?her husband?"was so ashamed of me!"I doubt that he was deeply ashamed; he loved her, and she was the town girl, and he the country boy.He'd been born in Pansy, Alabama, the son of Alfred Union and Nancy Holland Justice.Pansy was a hamlet that later disappeared; Don and I looked for it in the 1980s, and it was gone.The family moved to a farm near Tifton, in south Georgia.Vascoe?he usu ally signed his name "V.J.," and his siblings sometimes called him Coe?was one of five children.Both of his grandfathers had died in the Civil War.When he was grown, he enlisted in the Army and was sent down to the Mexican border, then overseas in the first World War; in the Army he worked as a cook.He and Ethel began to cor respond, her name having come to him through a mutual friend.After the war he went to see her.He was a good-looking young man; she said she was attracted to him because of his pretty teeth.He was working here and there.Either before or after his Army ser vice, he worked in a town on the Gulf Coast and came down with typhoid fever; his father went down to care for him.Eventually he made his way down the east coast of Florida.He remembered that in Fort Pierce the mosquitoes were so thick that the women wore newspaper under their stockings.In Miami he found steady work as a carpenter and went back to marry Ethel and bring her to Miami, which she said seemed to her to be "the jumping-off place."She'd grown up in Boston, Georgia, the daughter of Joseph Lee and Mary Wilson Cook.Her parents were members of large and relatively prosperous families.Boston was a town of perhaps seven or eight hundred people.Curiously, it had a swimming pool, out near the cemetery.