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Memphis, fifty miles to the south. Blacks were disfranchised throughout Tennessee in 1889 and relegated to inferior schools and public accommodations. African Americans were often lynched in the South starting in the 1880s, with incidents near Henning in 1917 and in 1931. As far as little Palmer knew, however, blacks were not treated harshly but were just considered to be different from whites. Society “decreed everything about the two was different.”
    Bertha was not adept at either cooking or housekeeping, whereas Cynthia was master of all domestic arts and was such a tireless worker that she sometimes accompanied her friends to pick cotton in order to enjoy the sociability of the field. She considered her daughter overeducated and impractical. “You just don’t know nothing about raising a young’un,” she told Bertha, who saw herself as different from her mother. Cynthia’s family stories about slavery embarrassed her. Bertha would say, “Ma, why don’t you quit talking about that old-timey slavery mess,” to which Cynthia would retort: “If you don’t care nothin’ about who you come from, I sho’ does.” In his first years, Bertha and Simon left Palmer in Henning as Simon filled short-term appointments at various black colleges. Palmer grew up more attached to Cynthia than to Bertha.
    He entered the Palmer-Turner Grammar School, one of the youngest and smallest children in his class. The first black school in the area, it was named for both his grandfather and Carrie White Turner, its first teacher. Palmer read avidly from an early age. He loved adventure tales and the Bible stories read and told at the New Hope church. Will Palmer’s house was the only one in Henning with a library, and he made sure that it was well stocked. A black traveling bookseller would come around, especially in the fall, when people had money from the cotton harvest. Books usually cost one dollar each, except for Bibles, which were more. A local man, Lewis Young, claimed to have read a hundred books.
    In 1926, when Palmer was five, his grandfather fell gravely ill. “He real low,” visitors whispered after sitting at his bedside. Cynthia showed her stress by being unusually irritable with little Palmer. He fled outdoors and hid beneath honeysuckle vines outside the window of the sick room, wanting to be in calling distance if his grandpa needed him. Under the honeysuckle, he found a crippled cricket, for which he made a tiny splint. He hoped both the cricket and Grandpa could recover. In his hideaway Palmer also watched a hummingbird that he imagined moved like the angels he had heard described in Sunday school and that he feared might be coming for his grandfather. “Grandpa was so heroic in my world that I just equated him with God,” Palmer later said. Finally, he watched the doctor try without success to resuscitate Will, after which the boy ran to the lumber mill, shouting, “Grandpa’s dead!” His grandfather’s passing was the most momentous event of Palmer’s early life.
    With Will’s death, Bertha and Simon returned to Henning to live. Simon took over the running of the lumber company to get it ready to sell. Bertha taught at the Palmer-Turner Grammar School, where Palmer began first grade. A second son, George, had arrived, and in 1929 would come a third, Julius. Simon discovered that the lumber company had debts enough to reduce its worth below what they hoped to get to secure Cynthia’s future. Meanwhile, Cynthia’s grief was intense. She neglected cooking and housework and sat for hours on the front porch, staring outward, often with baby George in her lap. Passersby asked how she was doing. “Just settin’,” she answered. Palmer played at the edge of the porch, “feeling that I needed to stay protectively near her because Grandpa was gone now.” The family assembled after supper on the front porch,