She did what?
I remember it, which is strange since my memory is like an elusive, wild animal with a will of its own and a teasing nature. The first home I had was in a modest Chicago suburb called Maywood, which has since sunk into something more like despair and poverty. It’s a shame, the houses were built with a sense of style and longevity, but without resources and multiple families dwelling in a space meant for one family, what does one expect?
I remember this big, clunky, wood house and nothing much of the inside of it. I’ve seen pictures, especially of Christmas, but I cannot for the life of me conjure up the inside space. When my brother was going into the 1st grade, my mother took me with them to the school, though I was 4 going on 5, and asked them to sign me up for kindergarten. They told her that usually students are 5 going on 6 and that I was too young. Bring me back next year. I’m not sure why, but my mother insisted on me being in school that year, so they relented and tested me for kindergarten. I was let in that year.
Perhaps it is better that I never knew how “exotic” I was as a light-skinned black girl in a black neighborhood. My skin color was not something that really stood out to me. I was just part of a big family and my mother didn’t seem any different than anyone else’s. Yes, we were stared at as my mother carted around her mixed-race brood, but you get used to that and since she wasn’t bothered by it, neither was I.
Each year the school would hold an end of the year pageant of sorts. Each grade would host the show and put on different skits for the audience. The year I was in first grade, it was the class’s turn. My teacher and my mother were good friends, which is unusual since my mother didn’t make many friends. However, I believe she sewed for the woman (again, unusual for her to do this outside of the family) and they seemed to like each other. Therefore, my mother was tasked to help with the pageant because it was a big undertaking for just the teachers. Between my mother and this teacher, they devised a skit for me. As a 5 year-old, I was put in a bikini and then my oldest brother’s large shirt. Elfriede practiced with me to make sure I could perform on stage; I mean, I was a small girl. I got on stage and the announcer began with how hard it is to deal with the wintery weather. I hugged my body and the enormous shirt pretending to be cold. Then the announcer talked about how wonderful it would be to have the sun out again. My young self threw off the hat I was wearing, pulled open my brother’s shirt, and posed in my bathing suit, smile plastered on my face. Yes, as a 5 year old, I did a striptease for the entire school. The only thing I can say is that my mother actually planned it and taught me how to pose!
For the rest of the time I was at the school, which wasn’t long, I was famous. The middle school kids knew who I was, and people would stop me and ask me if I was the girl on stage that one time. I was. Later, I would think about what could have been had we stayed in the neighborhood, or been zoned for a school that was majority African American and not white. At the school where I ended up, I was just another black student and mostly unwanted. The house we moved to when I was in 2nd grade was in Bellwood, a humble but clean middle class suburb right next door to Maywood. Gentrification is common in Chicago and ever shifting as certain races move to get “away” from other races, only to have those races follow and live where, shockingly, they want to live. We were one of only two families that integrated the small neighborhood, and we moved right on the borderline for schools. I ended up going to Sunnyside instead of Jefferson.
I know my mother wanted what she thought would be a good education for her children; she felt that would be in the predominantly white school. This sounds prejudice, but the reality of systemic racism (and it’s a reality for those of us who hit glass ceilings and walls and speedbumps, etc.) is that certain schools are going to have more and better resources. This shouldn’t be, but it is. Maybe she should have fought for more and better resources for all schools, but that’s not an overnight fight and when the kids are growing up fast, decisions are made as needed and without much guidance. So, I was one of two black children in my class, and then by middle school there were more, and then more, and then it was tipping the scales to be more minorities than not. This happens, but even my family was surprised that the neighborhood did change.
Sunnyside Elementary School, the attached sibling of MacArthur Middle School. I would spend nearly 7 years in these schools that sat back to back in the middle of an innocuous suburb called Berkeley, IL. I went from being a well-known little girl with a big gap in her front teeth (Oh, and someone actually asked when my tooth would grow in. No, that was a gap, not a space for a tooth) and admired for her butterscotch skin and big brown eyes, to being a black girl who was darker than the other black girl that was in my class, who liked to brag about her white grandmother. It never occurred to me to brag that my mother was actually white because I didn’t understand the contest I was in with her. Who is whiter is not a fun game to play, trust me.
I remember one day at the Maywood school I attended, I was carrying two armloads of books in the rain trying to get to the door as fast I could. Still, I was little with a load of books and it was awkward. Suddenly, the book on top went flying to the right of me and landed like 5-6 feet away. I remember looking at it, incredulously, since there was no wind or person there to knock the book out of my hands. It just went flying. I needed to get the book, so I walked to it and bent down to retrieve it and resettle my stack. At the moment I bent down, a brilliant flash rocked my head back. It took me a moment to realize that lightning had just hit the ground where I was standing a moment ago. Because I was now lower to the ground, I was less of a conductor to that powerful electricity. This would only be 1 of several times something unseen interfered with my life.
By the way
I loved the Bellwood house, and apparently I still do as every night, just about, I’m there in my dreams. The house isn’t always the bungalow on a cookie-cutter street that it is in reality. I haven’t been to that house in almost 10 years now. I hear that it underwent a renovation, which is a good thing. It’s a house with good bones that just needed a makeover into the 21st century as much as possible.
Still, as much as the Bellwood house was a home to me and my family of 7, the village tried to spit us out again. I remember times where we were walking in the neighborhood as children and adults would scream at us to get “out of their neighborhood” and how “we don’t want your kind here.” I was young and my sisters were even younger, but I never spoke back or turned around to run home. For reasons I can’t wholly explain, I just ignored them. We used to take a shortcut through a condo building’s parking lot that was clearly marked no trespassing, and, yes, people yelled at us for going on the property. But I knew that was a different anger than the fool who told children to get out of the neighborhood and called us a “kind.” The anger came from the same place, but when I went through the parking lot I knew I was wrong; I just wanted the fastest way and it was a parking lot–what was I going to do there? I was walking to the library, for heaven’s sake. (Yes, we were a family of nerds.) Both had indignation and frustration, but one had a point and the other was just pointless. It wasn’t going to change anything.
As a child, when my parents spent hard-earned money to take us on vacation, I never noticed that the pool at the hotels we stayed out would empty out when we came. It could be there were now 5 kids to share the pool with, but there was room. It never occurred to me why the people would leave until I got older and my brother looked at me like I was crazy when he claimed they left because a black family came to the pool, and I looked awed by this simple explanation. It never crossed my mind, even when some nitwit was sitting with his son in a hot tub with my mother and I came stealthily in to join them. I was always my mother’s sidekick–me, or my brother. I sat down next to her, just like the little boy sat next to his father. Poor child, he probably wanted to swim in the pool and his dad made him go to the only indoor body of water without the black people. Then here I come. Skinny thing in a bathing suit to join my mother. After a minute, the man started to get up and said clearly, “Come on, son. let’s get away from this riff raff.” He and the boy left and I turned to my mother and asked, “What’s riff raff?” Without blinking an eye or hesitation, she said clearly, “Garbage.”
I’ve always thought it was because she was so calm and steady that I didn’t react to being called garbage. She didn’t get mad so why should I? Or maybe I was just a kid with a quickly changing attention span and I really didn’t care. I didn’t associate myself with “garbage” and I don’t see why he did. Elfriede would not be so calm in other circumstances. We were at the mall when I was a young preteen girl with lots of bags, winding down our shopping trip with just the girls. I was sitting on one of the wooden benches by the food court, my sisters and my mother around me when a police officer approached me and said I was being detained on a shoplifting charge and I needed to go with him. I know I didn’t steal, my mother knew this, but what were we going to do? I followed him meekly and sadly (more than angrily–that would come later), with my mother yelling at him that I was no thief, I had been with her the entire time, and we didn’t even go into the store they were taking me to get an ID.
The distraught shopkeeper took one look at me and blew up a the police officers. I was wearing a bright yellow shirt with Bugs Bunny on it and shorts. “I said she was wearing a floral, floor length skirt,” the store employee protested as she scanned this preteen girl they’d dragged through the mall. I didn’t match ANY type of description they had of the suspect. Why would someone shoplift and sit in the middle of the mall just waiting to be questioned? Face it, I was simply a black girl in the mall they could harass. My mother asked for an apology in the rudest way she could as I stood there shaking, embarrassed and harassed. They mumbled something and walked away. It was okay to shame me, but not correct their prejudice mistake. I didn’t wear the outfit again, and Elfriede teased me it was because I remembered what happened. No, it was a bright yellow shirt with Bugs Bunny on it!
I had it bad? Not by a long shot! My experiences are minimal. My sister was a young child when our neighbor across the street blocked the sidewalk so she couldn’t walk down it. He made her cross into the street. My father had to come and have a talk with him. He didn’t block any of us again. The same sister’s 2nd grade teacher didn’t feel that black children had the same cognitive ability, and based on this bigoted opinion, without testing or permission or informing my parents, she put my sister back into the kindergarten class. I think Alex attended for a while because she is sweet and trusting and tends to keep her feelings bottled up until she can’t anymore. She came home balling and my mother finally get it out of her that she was being put back two years for no reason. Not a viable one, anyway. The school moved her back and transferred that teacher to a different school. She shouldn’t have been a teacher, and I am one to know the profession, but they just put her in a different school. I don’t think that prejudice teacher learned much that day. Too bad. My brother, Richard, was going to a party of one of his classmates and the police pulled up and asked him what he was doing in the neighborhood.
Richard isn’t flippant, he’s just too smart to suffer fools and their foolishness at all. The officer refused to believe he was there for a birthday party, and thankfully James pulled up and was able to get his son away from someone who didn’t have his best interest at heart.
My oldest brother has had bottles thrown at his car while he was driving. I’ve had store clerks insist I couldn’t be a sibling to my sister and I remember wondering why she was saying that. I’m the lightest one in my family and many assume I’m Hispanic or some other ethnicity. As my father lay dying in hospital beds, nurses have assumed my husband was his son and that I was a daughter-in-law. One nurse just turned to me and asked, “if you’re his daughter, then who is your mother?” I explained my mother was white and I’m biracial, and she relaxed some.
I got used to it. This sounds like such a benign statement and I don’t mean it as literally as that. One can get used to many things, even pain. The stares from people in stores as a white woman walked around with her black children didn’t bother me much that I can remember. I guess I noticed it since I remember dealing with it. Having to explain things to people is something that doesn’t phase one much after you’re asked so much. I grew up on the edge of everything, sliding between worlds when I felt like it, accepted or not. I was no one’s best friend, but everyone’s acquaintance. Well, I did have a best friend but I usually pick someone more marginalized than myself. I didn’t judge lest I be judged. The only people I ever picked on myself were those picking on others or those who picked at me. I’ve had people just hate me from the sight of me. They didn’t know me, it didn’t matter to them that they didn’t know me, I was an enemy on sight. That never drew my attention because it was their hang up, not mine. I took on other people’s battles because there was a core build within me that built Gatrude, Elfriede, my great-great grandmothers, and back. To go deep enough is to hit a wall of granite that is unwavering yet true to self. Love cemented it so tightly and strongly that not even love itself could reverse its work. Gatrude loved her family, even her wayward daughter. I don’t need to hear her say it know it. It’s a part of me. Elfriede loved her family and it’s this sense of loss that kept her from ever trying to go home. Some love is too strong. She loved her children with abandon. I love on for all of them, even when maybe it’s not so healthy to do so. Love doesn’t know boundaries because it is the walls, it is the center, it is the beginning without an end. Infinity.
We were never supposed to have the Bellwood house. Realtors would have two sets of books: one for white people and one for the people of color. Bellwood was not for the “everyone else”, but the realtor that showed us the Bellwood house either didn’t know this or didn’t care. My brother told me later that she got in trouble for selling us the house at the time. Of course this is an illegal practice, even back then. That didn’t seem to matter, either. I’m glad that we lived there because it’s still home to me. I don’t need someone to tell me what home is supposed to be; it’s there when you need it without the world’s interference.
BTW
And Yet...She Persisted 