When the young family left the South, they most likely boarded a train on the Texas & Pacific Railway in Mansfield, which connected to the Illinois Central Railroad in Shreveport, thirty-seven miles north. From there they would have traveled to New Orleans and caught the Illinois Central’s most famous train, the Panama Limited—a hulking hunk of steel spewing smoke high into the sky. Annie Bell used the same train, renamed the City of New Orleans, to visit Louisiana with her grandchildren later in life. The Panama Limited was state-of-the-art—an all-Pullman consist featuring luxurious cars, though Annie Bell’s skin likely barred her from being allowed to enjoy most of the luxuries.
The Panama Limited crawled from the muddy mouth of the Mississippi Delta up through the waving cotton fields, all the way to Chicago near the cool, blue shores of Lake Michigan. Along the way it deposited untold thousands of Negroes in new, exciting places. The trip took a full day and night and part of the next day, which left Annie Bell ample time to think about the world ahead and the one just left behind. She never talked much about her feelings, but it isn’t hard to imagine what she must have felt sitting on that train with two fidgety little ones at her side. Perhaps she dreamed of how life would change for her, and her children, and their children as she dozed off in the train car, one sleep from Chicago.
After twenty-five jostling hours, the train steamed into Chicago’s Central Station, at Roosevelt Road and Michigan Avenue. Annie Bell collected her luggage and her children and stepped onto northern ground. The city she saw around her might as well have been a different planet. The station itself was jaw dropping compared to Mansfield’s ramshackle huts. Its brooding brick building towered nine stories above the tracks and connected to a thirteen-story clock tower topped with a Romanesque spire.
The streets stretched on as far as the eye could see, dotted here and there with Model T Fords. People—millions of them, it seemed—rushed from place to place, always in a hurry. Women, in thrall to the flapper craze, wore straight-line chemises with cloche hats covering their bobbed hair. Men wore sporty suits, Oxford shoes, and fedoras, homburgs, trilbys, or straw boaters. The city buzzed with kinetic energy. It was a thrilling spectacle for a country girl used to outhouses and cotton fields.
Chicago in the late ’20s was embroiled in an era of heavy tensions and epic capers. Prohibition had brought the scarred face of organized crime, as Al Capone’s notorious Chicago Outfit put the city in a choke-hold through a toxic mixture of bribery and murder. Frank Lloyd Wright had brought architecture with Prairie School designs, all horizontal lines and overhanging eaves, including his legendary light court in the Rookery building, commissioned in 1905. Steel had brought industry to construct those designs, providing work for thousands of men.
When Annie Bell arrived, steelworkers plodded to work each morning in a city still reeling from the race riots that had exploded near the stockyards less than a decade before. In the summer of 1919, Eugene Williams, a Negro teenager swimming in Lake Michigan, crossed an informal line of segregation between the Twenty-Ninth Street Negro beach and the Twenty-Fifth Street white beach. As a mob of white beachgoers pelted him with stones, he became disoriented and drowned. Their bloodlust awakened, whites and Irish immigrants unleashed a flood of aggression upon Negroes in Chicago. Violence ruled for thirteen agonizing days, as roving white gangs scoured the streets around the Black Belt looking for buildings to burn, possessions to loot, and Negroes to kill.
It was the worst race riot in Chicago’s history, and it formed part of the infamous Red Summer. During that summer, some twenty-five riots busted through Washington, DC, Omaha, Knoxville, and several other cities. Most of the violence was white on black, although that would change in coming decades. One thing wouldn’t change, though, and it would exact a massive toll during my father’s life: summer always remained a good time for riots.
Dazzling as it was, Annie Bell learned her new city imposed limitations almost as severe as the ones she had left in Louisiana. Upon her arrival, almost all Chicago Negroes were crammed into the South Side, with some overflowing into parts of the West Side. In a sliver of land measuring seven miles long and one-and-a-half miles wide, a quarter-million people lived, breathed, worked, slept, ate, made love, fought, showered, shaved, bought groceries, cooked, cleaned, got drunk. People called it the Black Belt, also known as Bronzeville, also known as “North Mississippi.” As Great Migration historian Isabel Wilkerson wrote:
Up and down Indiana and Wabash and Prairie and South Parkway, across Twenty-second Street and down to Thirty-first and Thirty-ninth and into the low Forties, a colored world, a city within a city, rolled out from the sidewalk, the streets aflutter with grocers and undertakers, dressmakers and barbershops, tailors and pressers, dealers of coals and sellers of firewood, insurance agents and real estate men, pharmacists and newspapers, a YMCA and the Urban League, high-steepled churches—Baptist, Holiness, African Methodist Episcopal churches practically transported from Mississippi and Arkansas—and stacked-heeled harlots stumbling out of call houses and buffet flats. The living conditions [were] not much better than those back home and, in some cases, worse … Front doors hung on single hinges. The sun peeked through cracks in the outer walls. Many rooms sat airless and windowless, packed with so many people that some roomers had to sleep in shifts.
This was Annie Bell’s new home, and it came with a dizzying array of new experiences. She got her first chilling taste of the Hawk, the not-so-loving nickname given to Chicago’s bitter winter wind. Years later, Chicago native Lou Rawls painted a gripping picture of life as a poor Negro trying to survive the Hawk: “There was nothing to block or buffer the wind, the elements / Keep them from knocking my pad down,” he raps on the song “Dead End Street.” “The boiler would bust and the heat was gone / I would have to get fully dressed before I could go to bed.”
At some point during that first year, Annie Bell met a man named Walter Mayfield, or “Wal” to friends. She and Wal didn’t get married, but they moved into a small apartment together and lived with Mannish and Mercedes in a situation that would be known today as common law. Marriage certificate or not, Annie Bell changed her last name to Mayfield, and her children became Mayfields too.
Grim job prospects confronted the Mayfields. In Chicago, three out of four Negro men toiled at unskilled, semiskilled, or servant jobs. These jobs locked them in constant poverty. To earn a full month’s salary as a Pullman porter, for instance, a Negro had to work four hundred hours or log eleven thousand miles—either way required more than ten hours of work, seven days a week. Annie Bell saw those porters as she left Louisiana on the Panama Limited, giving her a glimpse of what Negroes had to do to survive in the North.
For many Negro women, the best they could hope for was to land a servant’s job with a wealthy white family. Worse still, the stock market shattered like sugar glass a year after Annie Bell’s arrival, making jobs a scarce commodity even for white people. But she brought something from Louisiana that set her apart, something that kept her in money for most of her life—Spiritualism.
A thousand miles from home, she had a captive audience of fellow migrants who trusted the word of a Spiritualist seer in a place where such attuned people were hard to find. She began attending a church on Division Street on the near West Side, where she’d soon find a nice little house. There, she made friends with the congregants, people who missed the close touch of a down-home church and might not have received the kind of spiritual guidance they needed from stuffy northern preachers.
Annie Bell knew these people. She knew how they talked, where they came from, what they believed. She also had her spirit guide. She told her new friends she was clairaudient, which meant she could hear things in other dimensions, as well as clairvoyant, which meant she could see them. Then she went to Madame Mary Overa, who ordained her as a reverend, and she set up shop in the tiny apartment she shared with Wal, Mannish, and Mercedes. She filled the parlor with plaster statues, pungent incense, mysterious potions, and spe
cial roots, all lit by the flitting flames of yellow, black, and red candles. It cast an eerie vibe, but soon people packed in every day to get a reading, a healing, or advice from the spirit guide through their medium—the Reverend A. B. Mayfield.
Even as the 1930s slogged on and the Great War gave way to the Great Depression, the Great Migration continued, which meant Annie Bell could count on a steady income from Louisiana migrants searching for a piece of home in the big city. While lines of languid men with hollow, frightened eyes stood downtown for hours waiting on a few pieces of bread, Annie Bell worked. Outside her cramped apartment, the city and nation grew desolate. Inside, with the incense snaking, candles flickering, and spirits reaching across the void, bread stayed on the table.
As the 1930s limped to their end, Mercedes began dating a tall older man with dark brown skin named Charles Hawkins Jr. Their marriage started the way many do, with a pregnancy followed by a ceremony. They didn’t have enough money to set out on their own, so Charles moved in with Mercedes and her family. With the addition of another man to the apartment, Annie Bell—the only one with money—began looking for a bigger place.
Meanwhile, Mannish met Marion Washington, a scholarly, bookish girl, at school. Marion stayed mostly to herself, nose buried in a volume of Paul Laurence Dunbar, one of the most famous Negro poets, and she was a self-proclaimed ugly duckling. Mannish showed her some attention, and soon the two became involved.
Six months younger than Mannish, Marion was a Chicago native. Her father, Kenneth “Joe” Washington journeyed to the city from Oklahoma roughly a decade before Annie Bell. He worked hard painting and wallpapering houses. After arriving in Chicago, he met and married another transplant, Sadie Ann Gillard, in 1922. Sadie came from Knoxville, Tennessee, in the first wave of migrants. She did everything from domestic work, to factory jobs, to homemaking, and she was a superb cook.
When high school ended, Marion earned a scholarship to college, but she never got the chance to use it. Sometime near the end of 1941 her life took an unexpected turn, and six months before her eighteenth birthday she went with Mannish to see Reverend Horace Hayden at his church on 1250 Wabash Avenue. On February 7, 1942—two months to the day after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor—Marion and Mannish married, her belly already full with his boy child.
2
My Mama Borned Me in a Ghetto
“My mama borned me in a ghetto!
There was no mattress for my head.
But, No! She couldn’t call me ‘Jesus.’
‘I wasn’t white enough,’ she said.”
—“KUNG Fu”
Chicago, June 3, 1942—The baby came. Marion named my father Curtis Lee, after his father. His life would put Annie Bell’s gamble to the test. He’d never suffer the indignity of “colored” signs barring him from bathrooms, or watch his dreams wither under the foul cloud of Jim Crow, or fear the hangman’s noose.
Yet, even in Chicago the invisible lines of race still bound my father. While most white children of his generation dreamed of soaring through the sky like Superman or swinging vine to vine like Tarzan, Curtis knew from an early age he’d never be quite like them. No hero looked like he looked or lived where he lived—he was black and poor in a world that wouldn’t let him forget it. If those prospects seemed glum, just across the ocean a maniac goose-stepped through Europe, hell-bent on conquering the Earth to assert the primacy of the white race.
While Marion adjusted to the rhythms of her newborn boy, she became pregnant again, this time with a girl. A mere nine months and eight days after Curtis’s birth, Judith arrived prematurely. Now my grandmother had two lives to protect with the same money that often couldn’t cover one. Even though Annie Bell’s finances allowed her to take special care of her only son, her largesse didn’t extend to Marion and Mannish’s family, so Marion had to go on relief—known today as welfare. She lived hand to mouth, never sure she’d have enough to feed her babies or that her husband would provide support.
When Mannish came home, which wasn’t often, his belligerence ruled. He had a temper like his mother and fought Marion constantly. He wasn’t even twenty years old and couldn’t provide for his family, which often brings the worst out of a man. Still, he’d soon desert his wife and children, leaving Marion to do the hard work the best she could.
The second Great War opened opportunities for Negroes the same way the first one had, so Mannish joined the service and was stationed in California, giving him a steady salary. The money helped, but Marion now had to negotiate the internal anguish of watching her husband leave without knowing when, or if, he’d come back. He shipped out for duty as millions of Negroes shipped in from the South, the Great Migration still flooding forth.
As the new arrivals sought jobs, food, and shelter, racial passions ran high. In June, roughly three months after my aunt Judy’s birth, race riots rocked Detroit. Unlike the Chicago riots of 1919, Detroit in 1943 represented a turning point. As Wilkerson wrote:
Until the 1943 uprising in Detroit, most riots in the United States … had been white attacks on colored people often resulting in the burning of entire colored sections or towns. This was the first major riot in which blacks fought back as earnestly as the whites and in which black residents, having become established in the city but still relegated to rundown ghettos, began attacking and looting perceived symbols of exploitation, the stores and laundries run by whites and other outsiders that blacks felt were cheating them. It was only after Detroit that riots became known as primarily urban phenomena, ultimately centered on inner-city blacks venting their frustrations on the ghettos that confined them.
This subtle shift in the nature of riots would have massive and destructive repercussions in the coming years, but at the time it only caused Marion to worry for her children.
Two thousand miles away from the riots, Mannish had plenty of room to live wild and free, leaving his marriage behind on the cold banks of Lake Michigan. At some point, Marion decided to visit him. She dropped Curtis at her mother’s house—he loved Grandma Sadie’s sweet potato pies—and left Judy with Annie Bell, perhaps because Judy had also been born severely nearsighted. Whatever her reasoning, when Marion returned to pick up Judy, Annie Bell refused to give her back.
Marion found a way to get along with just about everybody, but losing her daughter strained her gentle soul until it almost burst. Worse still, Annie Bell had money, which meant no government agency was likely to force little Judy to return to live with her mother in abject poverty. So, in a bizarre way, Judy was stolen. No one talked much about it. Judy grew up calling Annie Bell “Mom,” and although she had some inkling her real mother was the woman who visited on weekends, it would take many years and a bit of snooping to figure out what had happened.
My father didn’t have to wait long for new siblings, though. After Mannish went AWOL from his military duty, changing his name to Kenneth Washington to avoid trouble, he returned home and fathered three more children with Marion—Carolyn Mercedes in ’45, Gary Kirby in ’46, and Kenneth in ’47. Time apart had done nothing to help the couple, and their fighting grew worse as responsibilities piled up. Soon after Kenny’s birth, Mannish left for good. His children didn’t miss him; he had no presence in their lives, and as Muddy Waters once sang, “You can’t lose what you ain’t never had.” But for Marion, life only got harder. Deserted, dejected, emotionally battered by her husband and his family, powerless to reclaim her first daughter, she began battling a new foe—depression.
Fortune hadn’t finished dealing her fresh blows, either. Soon after his birth, Gary—whom everyone called Kirby—contracted measles, which led to acute encephalitis. He slept straight through a week or two as though in a coma, Marion sitting by his bedside in anxious agony the whole time. When he awoke, she noticed his movements had changed. The sickness had left Kirby mentally challenged. My grandmother would have to watch him like a baby his entire life, which meant she couldn’t take a job until one of the other kids got old enough to
handle the responsibility. From an early age, Curtis helped with the small things—Marion remembered that by three years old, he could diaper Carolyn as well as she could. Still, she was the only adult and had to handle the big things. With government aid now her only possible source of income, she stared desperation dead in the eye.
Hunger hounded the family, but my grandmother kept them alive any way she could, stretching every dollar until the eagle grinned. Most times they ate rice, or beans, or anything that cheaply filled a grumbling belly. Meat was a delicacy enjoyed maybe one weekend of every month, and it consisted of chicken necks, or backs, or any other part of the animal that people with money wouldn’t eat. “Mom had this great big pot and she would cook beans and neck bones,” Aunt Carolyn recalls. “She’d cook it on Monday, and we’d eat all the meat out on Monday, but it was always on the table until we ate up all the beans. I just now learned how to eat beans again, because I swore when I got grown, I would never eat beans.”
The family lived on the run, chased by creditors and landlords from one seedy flophouse to the next. Being a poor Negro in Chicago meant you rarely got a sense of belonging anywhere. After Mannish deserted the family, they lived in a dingy apartment on South Washtenaw Avenue, where Marion began dating a man named Eddie who abused her. One of Aunt Carolyn’s earliest memories is scrambling up the fire escape to Grandma Sadie’s apartment, which was just above theirs, and begging her to come down and stop Eddie from hitting Marion. “Mama was kind of on the timid side, and Grandma was just very boisterous,” Aunt Carolyn says. “Mama wasn’t a fighter, but Grandma was. And [Eddie] didn’t mess with Grandma. Grandma ended up putting him out.”
Traveling Soul Page 2
