The little girl had no money. What she did have was determination. She wanted a job.

Miss Rossie emerged from her shiny blue sedan and interviewed the waif, who was named Bessie Bennett. Bessie was eight. She had no experience or education. Her mother was dead and her father was paralyzed. She wanted to earn money for food and clothes for herself and her twin sister. It was a compelling story, but did Miss Rossie really want to get involved? The choice she made in a matter of a few seconds changed everything.

On the surface, this is the story of how one white woman changed the lives of twin black girls in the days of segregation. But it is much more than that. It's a story about choices; not the simple choice people make once and then move on, but the life-altering decision to say yes many times when it would be so much easier to say no.

On that day in 1923, neither Rossie Lee nor Bessie was thinking that far ahead. Bessie needed help and Miss Rossie, as she would be called, provided it.

Back at her home at 1610 Royal Palm Avenue in Fort Myers (the house was demolished in 1975), Miss Rossie found a dress for the girl and drew her a bath. Years later, Jessie Bennett Sams, Bessie's twin, described how Miss Rossie spoke to her sister: "Mrs. Lee said, 'Here's a cloth. Rub yourself real hard so you'll be cool.' That was the way Mrs. Lee started speaking to us and it was the way she always spoke, instinctively choosing the right words. It would not have been the same if she had said: 'So you'll be clean.'"

While the girl luxuriated in what was likely her first-ever indoor bath, the outside world intruded. A nosy neighbor arrived at the door. Although she made the excuse of wanting to see Miss Rossie's newly redecorated bathroom, the neighbor really wanted to know what a black girl was doing in the bathtub. Although it is hard for us to comprehend today, the bath was a violation of the social system of segregation in the 1920s. It was an intimacy considered perverse, if not downright obscene, in a society of separate neighborhoods, schools, and hospitals. Such a breach could reduce a white family's standing in the community, lose them business, even get them run out of town. If a black person defied segregation, the ramifications could be more severe.

Though Miss Rossie understood the gravity of the situation, she made an excuse about the room not being finished, and waved the woman off. Acting as if nothing had taken place, she returned to Bessie, whose lack of experience with regular bathing left her only partially clean. "Mrs. Lee glanced at her watch, removed it and laid it on a chair. 'Sit back down, honey, and give me the cloth. Let me help you,'" Jessie later recalled.

In the coming weeks, Bessie and her twin, Jessie, alternated working at Miss Rossie's after school. Miss Rossie instructed them in the chores of a domestic employee: cooking, cleaning and sewing. But she went beyond the usual instructions from a white woman to domestic help. She also taught them lessons their mother would have taught, had she lived: about honesty, pride in one's work and self-discipline. Miss Rossie's most important lesson came one day when Bessie was holding Miss Rossie's infant daughter, Edna. Jessie later described the scene:

"[Bessie] looked at the little pink hand she held in her own. 'I wish-I wish I was white an' [Jessie] does too, so we could be your li'l girls,' she said wistfully." For weeks after, the girls mulled over her reply: "We shouldn't wish to be what we are not, honey. God made us all the way He wanted us to be.... He wanted white little girls and He wanted brown little girls too. White or dark, we can all make ourselves beautiful in His sight."

After years of abuse and neglect, Bessie and Jessie were eager for Miss Rossie's love and attention, but they had much to unlearn. One day when he woke up, their father had found himself paralyzed, and he had remained unable to move, eat or talk for years. To survive, they raided gardens and pilfered food. While lying and stealth were required in their former life, now. Miss Rossie demanded complete truthfulness. Jessie later remembered their struggle to learn these new values: "To be honest with Mrs. Lee was one thing. But to be honest all the time, everywhere, in a world where we had learned too well the self-preserving tactic of evasion, that was something else again.... However, a standard of behavior had been established, and [Bessie] and I accepted it."

The lives of Jessie and Bessie Bennett improved, thanks to Miss Rossie's loving kindness and their own willingness to learn and grow. But the world outside Miss Rossie's tidy bungalow remained dangerous. One dark night after leaving the Lees', the girls crossed the train tracks to the black section of Fort Myers, called Colored Town in those days, and heard shooting. They scrambled into the bushes as a lynch mob approached. The heavily armed white men were looking for someone. One declared, "If we don't get that black nigger tonight, we'll kill every other nigger in this country."

Soaked and shivering, the girls finally made it to their shack. They hid in a dirt hole under the shack before the mob reached their home. The men tore in and ransacked the room, and then someone yelled to look under the house. The girls froze in horror as a spotlight reached toward their hiding place. Luckily, a black cat darted out and the men moved on.

The next morning, the girls were inside the cabin when the mob again approached. They peeked through cracks in the walls. "Three crowded cars came into view," Jessie later wrote, "and then a faded-green truck. The truck was rigged with barbed wire, ropes and chains. There in the rigging, a dark form tumbled over the bumps and holes in the road. The truck wasn't moving fast; we could see too well the horribly broken thing it dragged-the quarry of the all-night search." It was the body of a black man.

As morning turned into day, no one in Colored Town left home. The girls sat nervously and waited, wondering, "What if Miss Rossie was no longer our Miss Rossie? What if she had changed, like so much else had suddenly changed?" Soon a blue sedan pulled up in front of the house. Miss Rossie stepped out and packed the frightened girls into her car. They tried to tell her what had happened, but she changed the subject. Miss Rossie's love was powerful, but there were some things even she couldn't change.

In the years that followed, Bessie married and had two sons named Tim and Ted. Then Miss Rossie had a boy everyone called Sonny Boy. From the time they were very young, Bessie's children and Sonny Boy played like brothers. So when Sonny Boy turned four, he expected his playmates to attend his birthday party. His mother tried to explain why they couldn't come, but finally relented, saying the boys could be there, but would have to stay in the kitchen with their mother.

On the day of the party, Tim and Ted stayed in the kitchen, but Sonny Boy desperately wanted them to take part in the party. When they wouldn't come out, he moved the party to them. Opening one of his gifts, he handed the boys pieces of his passenger train, and the three boys flew to the backyard. Over the protests of his mother and Jessie and Bessie Bennett, the two black boys and the white boy were soon playing side by side.

Jessie Bennett Sams later recalled: "Greatly as I loved Mrs. Lee for other things she had done for us, never did I love and admire her more than at that moment. There she stood, before her friends, in the false position of having seemed to have arranged that colored children would play with her own, and perhaps theirs, at a party to which she invited them. Of course, she hadn't planned this; she'd planned to prevent it. But she would not-and she did not-spare herself by going into explanation. She chose to spare [Bessie] and me-and [Bessie's] children."

In the years to come, Jessie graduated from high school, and with a loan from the Lees, went to college. After graduation she taught in Lee County, married, and continued to teach when she moved to California. She returned to Fort Myers only once. She was at Rossie Lee's side in 1953 when Rossie Lee died of stomach cancer. In 1957, Jessie published White Mother, dedicating the book to Rossie Lee. It received critical acclaim, and was serialized under the title of "Our Miss Rossie" in Reader's Digest. She died three years ago. For her part, Bessie became a nurse and worked at Los Angeles Hospital. She died in 1997.

The legacy of this unconventional mother-and-daughter relationship lives on not only in her book , but also in the descendants of both families. Connie Jennings of Fort Myers, a niece of Jessie Bennett Sams, was nurtured by her aunt and her aunt's twin. "They pushed me to develop talents I didn't even see in myself," she says. "They sent me care packages when I was in college. They were both wonderful people."

Sonny Boy's widow, who now lives in North Carolina, believes their impact is multi-generational. Lois Lee Smith marvels at her late husband's good fortune. "Because of his mother and the attention of the Bennetts, Sonny Boy didn't have prejudice," she says. "He was free of that burden. Thankfully, that is a blessing he passed to the next generation"

The encounter between the white woman and the black girl in that sunny Fort Myers yard in 1923 could have easily ended in failure. But the woman chose the difficult path of mothering the two girls. Jessie and Bessie Bennett opted for an equally challenging path, one that, though better traveled, remains today.

Past Preserved

To learn more about the Bennett twins and Miss Rossie, visit the Williams Academy Black History Museum at 1936 Henderson Ave. in the Dunbar neighborhood near downtown Fort Myers. Operated by the non-profit Lee County Black History Society, the museum displays items dating back to the Civil War, when black soldiers fought here to preserve the Union. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; admission is $3 for adults and $1.50 for children. For more information, call 332-8778.