A large part of their history had been denied them-until now. The boys’ teachers never talked of such stories, of the most painful part of American history. They listened to stories about President Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, and how that law meant freedom and jubilation. They listened to sweet stories that told of weddings, slave weddings, in which a man and a woman would jump over a broom, an act cementing their union. Their maternal grandmother, Cynthia Palmer, who had been born a slave, captivated them with stories of her history: stories about men who owned other men, who owned whole families stories about escape attempts from slave plantations. The Haley boys greatly enjoyed the rural landscape, where they could roam and fish.
Growing up, the boys would spend their summer vacations with grandparents in Henning, Tennessee, 50 miles from Memphis, with a population of fewer than 600 citizens. The Haleys had three sons, Alex, Julius, and George. In 1929, Simon Haley began teaching agriculture, moving from Black college to Black college in the South. He was in graduate school at Cornell, studying agriculture she was studying music at the Ithaca Conservatory of Music. Simon Haley and Bertha Palmer, two Ithaca Blacks, stood out in the community. Inside its pages were mentions of weddings and births and social goings-on throughout the Black community.
When those Black citizens sought news about other Blacks, they often turned to The Monitor, a local Black newspaper. A good many Blacks of Ithaca, New York, in the 1920s worked as domestic servants in the fraternity houses near Cornell University.
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