The New Yorker:
Tina Johnson accused Roy Moore of sexual assault. Then the world moved on, and left her behind.
By Alexis Okeowo
Tina Johnson never had much. She grew up in the sixties, outside of Gadsden, a hilly city in the green mountains of upper Alabama. Johnson’s mother, Katherine, couldn’t read or write, but she knew how to make money. She would leave the house with ten dollars and come back with a hundred, because she had bought a gallon of paint and painted someone’s house. She worked as an electrician—it was a mystery how she’d got her license—and drove diesel trucks. Sometimes she would go to a local warehouse and collect a truckload of potatoes that had been nicked and wouldn’t sell. She’d store them in the basement with lime on them, and the family would eat potatoes for months. “I don’t want to say it like this, baby, but I’m gonna say it—we were like the Black folks,” Johnson told me recently. “We didn’t have the opportunities that white folks had.”
Johnson was a beautiful girl, with blond hair and radiant blue-green eyes that didn’t seem God-given. And she was scrappy. She helped her mother take care of their hog, cows, and goats. The family grew crops on land they leased: one year they planted green peppers, another year sugarcane. They didn’t have farm equipment, so they cut down the cane themselves, stripped it, and took it to the mill to be turned into syrup, then used the money to go on vacation to Disney World and Yellowstone. Johnson and her siblings didn’t play sports or do extracurricular activities like other kids, so they created their own fun. They went to the lake and made mud pies, climbed trees to gather fruit, and busted open the watermelons that their neighbors grew, to eat the flesh. “We thought that if you ate it in the field, it wasn’t stealing,” Johnson said. (To this day, it’s hard for her to eat watermelon, because she ate so much back then.)
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