Gladys wasn’t just outspoken; she could be a bully. It was no secret that she missed her family terribly back home in the South. Milton never provided the large family closeness that she had grown accustomed to having in Kentucky. Her inability to work outside the home because she was a married woman with children was a major source of tension within her own marriage. Consequently Gladys became resentful and confrontational toward Lawrence, frequently putting him down even though he provided well for his family. Her dominant personality and persistent degrading of Lawrence, who was soft-spoken, had a negative impact on her girls.

“She would talk to him in a way that made the girls angry and resent her,” said Hope. Whether it was at the dinner table or sitting together in the parlor, Gladys would lay into Lawrence right in front of her daughters while he sat quiet and emasculated. And Gladys’s dominant, bullying behavior created bad feelings among the girls themselves, feelings that were not openly expressed but nevertheless very present in their childhood.

ELINOR WAS confident like her mother and evoked an air of self-assurance when she walked in a room. As a teenager she would grow to be six feet tall, and she was usually the tallest girl wherever she went, standing with impeccable posture and wearing well-tailored dresses. In the 1938 Milton High School yearbook, Elinor was recognized for her participation in extracurricular activities. She was the only African American student in her grade, but that had no impact on her psychologically. She, like her mother, Gladys, would join whatever group interested her, without ever letting race be a determining factor. Elinor was in the French Club, Biology Club, and Glee Club, and co-wrote the “Class Prophecy” for the graduating seniors. The essay, a cleverly composed and humorous prediction about the career path of each of her classmates, including how they would all reunite twenty years later, flowed from the hand of a free and self-assured spirit, not from someone held back by racial discrimination or isolation.

Living in Milton spared Elinor the indignities being reported in the black newspapers of the day—lynchings, poor housing, segregation, substandard schools. In her yearbook, her classmates wrote, “She injects a few raisins of conversation in the tasteless dough of existence. Elinor’s flow of ready wit has given her friends many a riotous moment in a dull study hour.”24 She was quick-witted and sociable and was able to develop a healthy sense of confidence and self-worth. And like her mother, Elinor was also ambitious and wanted a career. She dreamed of becoming a veterinarian and, in fact, predicted she would become one in the class prophecy she wrote for herself.25