The power which enabled an ignorant, illiterate colored child to conquer an intelligent man…
One afternoon he was helping his uncle grind wheat in an old
fashioned mill. The uncle operated a large farm on which a number
of colored sharecrop farmers lived. Quietly, the door was opened,
and a small colored child, the daughter of a tenant, walked in and took her place near the door.
The uncle looked up, saw the child, and barked at her roughly,
“what do you want?”
Meekly, the child replied, “My mammy say send her fifty cents.”
“I’ll not do it,” the uncle retorted, “Now you run on home.”
“Yas sah,” the child replied. But she did not move.
The uncle went ahead with his work, so busily engaged that he
did not pay enough attention to the child to observe that she did
not leave. When he looked up and saw her still standing there, he
yelled at her, “I told you to go on home! Now go, or I’ll take a switch
to you.”
The little girl said “yas sah,” but she did not budge an inch.
The uncle dropped a sack of grain he was about to pour into
the mill hopper, picked up a barrel stave, and started toward the
child with an expression on his face that indicated trouble.
Darby held his breath. He was certain he was about to witness
a murder. He knew his uncle had a fierce temper. He knew that
colored children were not supposed to defy white people in that part
of the country.
When the uncle reached the spot where the child was
standing, she quickly stepped forward one step, looked up into his
eyes, and screamed at the top of her shrill voice,
“MY MAMMY’S GOTTA HAVE THAT FIFTY CENTS!”
The uncle stopped, looked at her for a minute, then slowly laid
the barrel stave on the floor, put his hand in his pocket, took out
half a dollar, and gave it to her.
The child took the money and slowly backed toward the door,
never taking her eyes off the man whom she had just conquered.
After she had gone, the uncle sat down on a box and looked out the
window into space for more than ten minutes. He was pondering,
with awe, over the whipping he had just taken.
Excerpt from Think and Grow Rich Book by Napoleon Hill
