A Fifty Cent Lesson In Persistence

A FIFTY-CENT LESSON IN PERSISTENCE
Shortly after Mr. Darby received his degree from the
‘University of Hard Knocks,’ and had decided to
profit by his experience in the gold mining business,
he had the good fortune to be present on an occasion
that proved to him that ‘No’ does not necessarily
mean no.
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.
Mr. Darby, too, was doing some thinking. That was the
first time in all his experience that he had seen a
colored child deliberately master an adult white
person. How did she do it? What happened to his uncle
that caused him to lose his fierceness and become as
docile as a lamb? What strange power did this child
use that made her master over her superior? These and
other similar questions flashed into Darby's mind,
but he did not find the answer until years later,
when he told me the story.
Strangely, the story of this unusual experience was
told to the author in the old mill, on the very spot
where the uncle took his whipping. Strangely, too, I
had devoted nearly a quarter of a century to the
study of the power which enabled an ignorant,
illiterate colored child to conquer an intelligent
man.
As we stood there in that musty old mill, Mr. Darby
repeated the story of the unusual conquest, and
finished by asking, ‘What can you make of it? What
strange power did that child use, that so completely
whipped my uncle?’
The answer to his question will be found in the
principles described in the Free book, "The Magic Of Persistence."