Desne A. Crossley: Rolling in the Aisle

In 1950, my mother boarded a Nashville city bus. She was the young housewife of the head of Foundry Engineering at Tennessee A&I. She didn’t go to the back. She didn’t act like her place was the outermost fringe of a world ruled by whites. On this brief bus ride, she defied locals’ notion of her place.

My mother told me, “Des, I looked up and down the aisle of that almost empty bus and saw all of us huddled up together in the very back rows. I decided I wasn’t going back there. I looked the white bus driver over carefully—but not so’s he’d notice—as I paid the fare. Then I sat down right behind him. The very first row. He looked back at me, pure alarm making his body stiff as a board. Funny, he didn’t say anything. His shoulders just hunched up to his ears, and he focused on traffic, I guess, or maybe his life flashed before him.

“A white woman maybe twice my age saw me behind the driver as she climbed the steps of the bus and pumped her index finger at me angrily, probably wishing it were a gun. ‘Driver, make that–, that black thing go to the back where she belongs!’

“The driver turned to me, again without speaking. His expression held pleading in it, as if to say, ‘Lady, I don’t want any trouble now…’

“The white woman stomped over to me, her arms straight at her sides, her hands balled up into fists. She stopped dead in front of me, shifted her weight to one side to demonstrate her authority and exasperation with the likes of little black me. ‘You’re in my seat! Get back there to the back of the bus!’ she hollered with a hand on her hip, the other waving madly in my face.

“So, I said in my sweetest voice, ‘You’re most welcome to sit next to me, if you’d like.’ I patted the place beside me gently and smiled up at her.

“Except for the words between that old woman and me, there wasn’t another sound on that bus. It was so quiet it was scary. I knew not to look back to anybody—that’d make me look weak. I just smoothed my palm over the padded bench we could share and tried to look like I was somebody’s beloved child.

“‘You–, you–, you, get back there!’ she said, shaking with fury. ‘You get back there now—where you belong!’

“‘Like I said, Madam, you’re welcome to sit beside me, or anywhere else on this bus that you’d like.’

“You know what happened then, Des? That woman squeezed between the driver’s partition and me and sat right down—hard—on my lap! Right on top of me. So, guess what I did?” She paused. “I stood up!”

My mother clapped her hands with delight and went into a tickled fit of laughter.

My jaw went slack in amazement. The mother I knew could give Emily Post a run for her money on any issue of propriety. But here Mom was, dropping some white lady on her butt on the floor of a city bus.

When she saw my expression, her own grew sheepish. She shrugged and clasped her hands tightly around her knees and tried for a minute to squelch her glee.

“Dumped that old white woman off my lap, and she rolled right into the aisle in front of everybody.” Mom exploded with giggles again, and this time I couldn’t help but laugh with her. This rude stranger on the bus certainly hadn’t earned herself my mother’s respect.

“I looked down on the shocked woman, legs all up in the air, struggling to roll onto her side to pull herself together, and said—still sweet as sugar, ‘Like I said, please feel free now to sit anywhere else on this bus that suits you.’

Mom’s voice was calm. “Now that I had humiliated her in front of white and black alike, she found a seat alone in a middle row on the right and folded her arms tight across her chest. I turned in my seat a little so I could watch the driver up front and the white woman with her fury out of the corner of my eye. But she never said another word. Nothing else unusual happened until I got off at my stop. And, do you know what happened then? Every black man on that bus—there were about eight of them—got off, too. They paced themselves so they were about ten or twelve feet behind me the whole walk to that cinder block house your father and I lived in. When I got to my front door and was getting my key out, I asked, ‘Why have you followed me all this way, gentlemen?’

“They stood evenly spaced in a semicircle around my door and one of them said, ‘We wanted to make sure you actually made it home, ma’am. Put your key in the door. We’ll make sure you’re safe tonight.’

My mother would close this story with a proclamation of how positive the two years she and my father lived in Nashville were. She may not have “known her place,” but she suited herself just fine.

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Copyright 2025 Desne Crossley