by Donald Bogle
That was certainly true of Sally Anderson. As a girl, Ethel watched her grandmother travel back and forth in the area to wherever her work took her. The jobs were backbreaking and exhausting. Often Sally was a live-in servant in the homes of her white employers. A small room would be provided for her, but being a live-in meant that she was up at the crack of dawn to prepare breakfast and her workday never really ended. Live-ins were basically on duty or on call twenty-four hours a day. The pay was barely enough to live on. Sally, said Ethel, “never earned more than five or six dollars a week.”
For her, the whites who controlled everything and whose racial attitudes were readily apparent would be the “ofays,” who could never be trusted. At the same time those Negroes who had been educated and had attained a certain social position and who often had lighter complexions would be the “dictys,” who you always had to keep your eye on. Her granddaughter would feel exactly the same way.
Complicated and proud, Sally Anderson envisioned a different way of life for her grown children and stayed on their backs, fussing, berating, and arguing with them to better themselves. “Sally could fight like1 a sonafabitch,” said Ethel. “She had a fiery temper, and there was a terrible pride in her.” One time she became so angry with one of her daughters that she actually “bit a whole piece of flesh” out of the girl’s arm. Rarely did Sally Anderson feel her battles paid off. Her children would always be a disappointment for her. What sustained Sally was her religious faith. She was drawn to the Roman Catholic Church, though she never formally became a member.
Yet Sally’s religious beliefs never conflicted with her feelings about love or sex. Sally Anderson would have several lovers, yet Ethel never believed she was promiscuous. It was just another way of looking at sex. Desires didn’t have to be denied. One of Sally’s relationships led to the birth of another daughter, Edith, who was called Ching. But the main man in her life for years was a huckster, Pop Sam Perry. Often Sally referred to herself as Mrs. Perry. Young Ethel always thought of herself more as Perry’s granddaughter than John Waters’ child, and thus she was known for years as Ethel Perry.
The one person Sally despised was John Waters, the man who had raped Louise. At first, Sally had thought her daughter had been deceptive and hypocritical, a loose girl who had pretended to be pious but whose morals were no better than those of an alley cat’s. But after her daughter Vi explained that it was she who had let Waters enter the house on that fateful day, Sally confronted the Waters family, speaking to John Waters’ mother. So light-skinned that she looked white, and indeed was sometimes rumored to have been a white woman who had married a Negro, Lydia Waters was an imperial middle-class matron—a dicty—who clearly looked down on Sally and her brood. Born Lydia Timbers in 1857 in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, one of three children of James and Emily Ann Timbers, she had become the second wife of William Waters in a Methodist marriage ceremony in Philadelphia in 1877. She had not yet turned twenty. From his first marriage, to Mary Williams, William Waters fathered three children. He and Lydia had five.
Upon meeting Sally, a condescending Lydia informed her that her son John admitted to having had sex with Louise but insisted it had been consensual. Sally, however, was now convinced that her daughter had been raped and afterward had nothing more to do with the Waters family, to the point where nothing was ever asked of John Waters for Ethel’s care. Waters quickly married and fathered four sons, named Charles, Richard, John, and Carlos. Around the time Ethel was five years old, Waters died. Though she had some curiosity about her father, Ethel never knew him. His rejection of her and his early death, however, deepened Ethel’s feelings of abandonment and betrayal.
Not only had John Waters turned his back on the girl, but so had Louise. During these years, her shame was so great that she could not show Ethel any affection. Confused and, as Ethel said, “slow-thinking,” Louise seemed to have given up on Ethel and herself. Not long after Ethel’s birth, she married a man named Norman Howard and had another daughter, Genevieve Howard. Genevieve represented a kind of redemption for Louise. For Ethel, however, Genevieve, clearly favored by Louise, was another sign of her mother’s rejection.
Louise worked as a housekeeper for white families, an attendant in a hospital, and a chambermaid at a hotel. But she suffered emotional and mental problems most of her life. Her marriage to Norman Howard was rocky, with repeated arguments and separations, and accusations that she was not fulfilling her wifely (i.e., sexual) duties. The emotionally fragile Louise retreated more and more into the safety of her religious faith.
As a girl, Ethel yearned for affection but found little. She also grew quickly and was taller than other children her age, which didn’t help matters. “Seems like I was2 born too old and too tall—my mother was so young when she had me, she didn’t have much lap to hold me on,” Ethel once said. “I was always too big for laps. A child growin’ up needs laps to cuddle up in . . . that never happened to me . . . never. It’s a real tragic hurt, wantin’ to be wanted so bad.” She also said: “My close kin didn’t3 even like me. I was a gangly gal and unwanted. When you’re my size and you want to jump in somebody’s lap, they just look for the strongest chair.”
The fact that she had a large gap between her front teeth also made her an outsider. Such a gap was said to be a sign that a person was a liar and couldn’t be trusted. She endured countless comments and jokes about the gap.
The family always stayed on the move, it seemed, between various apartments and houses in Chester, Philadelphia, and Camden, New Jersey. Often lonely, Ethel was left on her own and suffered a series of childhood accidents and illnesses. One day as she was wandering through Philadelphia, she was hit by a trolley and taken to a hospital. Ethel later said that the main concern of her Aunt Ching was the amount of money the family could get from the trolley company as compensation. Another time she became ill with double pneumonia and typhoid fever. On another occasion, when she contracted diphtheria, her grandmother was so frightened that the authorities would have the home quarantined that she moved the girl out and took her to Chester. On two other occasions, she suffered burns on her hand and face.
Yet with all her feelings of isolation and alienation, she somehow had the idea that maybe, just maybe, life might hold something quite different for her than for those around her. “I was imaginative4,” she said. Her view of the world, her dreams for herself, though still unformed, set her apart from just about everyone around her. Her aunts and other family members fell victim to the disillusionment and despair of their environment. Vi drank heavily and had one man after another in her life. The most easygoing of her aunts, Ching, was also a heavy drinker who had two children and no husband. One—a boy named Tom—died when he was three. Blanche, a sweet-tempered, warmhearted cousin—“I loved her,” recalled Ethel—fell into prostitution and drugs, contracted syphilis, and died young. The drinking caused chaos in the house. “They were just girls5 . . . and they weren’t bad. But they were wild,” said Ethel. “When they were sober, they were the sweetest people on earth. But when they were high, they took a certain—almost hatred to me.” At such times, the women became abusive, shouting, screaming, walking nightmares for Ethel. Even her mother drank on occasion, but never as much as the others: Louise was too immersed in her religion and her sense of a vengeful God. No matter what home or city Ethel lived in, there were rarely peaceful, tranquil times.
But her grandmother Sally was different from everyone else. Though she too found it hard to show her emotions, Sally had other ways of letting the child know she cared. She was the one member of the household who took an interest in Ethel’s daily activities. Always concerned about the girl’s welfare and fearful of what might happen when she was not able to protect her, Sally would “park” young Ethel in the kitchens of friends in Philadelphia while she went off to do domestic work. At the homes of her white employers, she would sneak leftovers into a pocket in her apron and take them back home to her granddaughter, who would scream in delight at th
ese goodies. A stickler for cleanliness, Sally would bathe the girl and even smell her afterward to make absolutely sure she was clean. She spent time with her as well, and the traits and values she had unsuccessfully tried to instill in her children, she now sought to pass on to her grandchild.
For Ethel, Sally was the mother she longed for. She called Louise “Momweeze,” but it was Sally whom she always called Mom. Though Louise left “the bringing up to my grandmother,” she seemed resentful of the attention Sally gave the girl. “She would come and get me from Mom and make me go to Chester to be with her.” Somehow, even as a girl, Ethel understood her mother Louise’s predicament and her shame, and while Momweeze’s neglect tormented her, it never stopped the girl from loving her deeply and rather desperately. There was always a wall between the two. “I always wanted to6 break down that thing. . . . I felt if I could get to know her and she could get to know me, she’d like me better.” These two women, Sally and Louise, so different in the way they treated the young Ethel, would forever haunt her and be the most important people in her life. Throughout the years that followed, she longed to explain the lives and heartaches of these two women who were invisible to most of the world. Ultimately, she would define them most clearly to others and herself with two of her greatest performances, first in Mamba’s Daughters389, then in The Member of the Wedding.
Life for little Ethel was a hustle-and-bustle, nomadic existence. At one time, she stayed with her Aunt Ching in Philadelphia; at another, she was with her Aunt Vi in Camden, New Jersey, before she moved back to Morton Street in Chester where Momweeze lived with her husband and Genevieve. Ramshackle shanty homes or apartments were hastily rented and later hastily departed. Sometimes there might be no bathtubs in these places. Often there was no privacy. At night, there were bedbugs and rats and loud noises from outside.
The entire family only lived together one time: for about fifteen months they all occupied a house in a back alley on Clifton Street in Philadelphia. Though communities in Philadelphia were often divided along racial and class lines, the neighborhood on Clifton was racially mixed; whites, Blacks, Chinese, and Jews all lived together harmoniously, according to Ethel. The house was located in Philadelphia’s Eighth Ward in a red-light district, and Ethel quickly learned to live by her wits. She became friendly with the whores, the sporting men, the gamblers, and the no-accounts who surrounded her. To earn pennies, she ran errands for the prostitutes or served as a lookout for the pimps. Theirs could be a violent world, yet Ethel came to admire the ladies of the evening, who knew exactly what they were selling; they had no illusions or pretenses and often enough could be kind and generous, like her doomed cousin Blanche. “I’ve always had great7 respect for whores,” she said. “Whatever moral qualities I8 have, come, I’m afraid, from all the sordidness and evil I observed firsthand as a child.”
On Clifton Street, she honed her survival skills and grew tough. It was about claiming her turf, protecting herself, and not letting anyone walk over her. Like Sally and Vi, she had a temper; she could curse like a sailor and she could fight. It didn’t take much to set her off. She would have that temper for the rest of her life; it was a way of not only defending herself but going on the offensive too. It made those around her terrified of upsetting her. “I didn’t fit nowhere9,” she said, “so I made it up with a certain amount of don’t-cares till you would have said I was rough and repulsive.”
In an environment where sex in the red-light districts was always available, where attitudes about sex were quite different from those of the ofays and the dictys, her sex education began at the age of three, when she slept “in the same room10, often in the same bed, with my aunts and transient ‘uncles.’ I was fully aware of what was going on.” Though she professed to have no interest in sex, there was nothing about it that she didn’t know by the age of seven. As a young woman, she also enjoyed going to the drag shows, where female impersonators were dressed in high fashion. Throughout her life, she would always view sex rather casually and without moral judgments. At an early age, no doubt, she was exposed to same-sex relationships as much as heterosexual ones, yet she never considered one type of sexual liaison more moral than another.
Though no one thought much about it, the family was a musical one. Her aunts Vi and Ching sang around the house, often enough the blues. Ethel’s father, John Waters, was a talented pianist, as was his eldest son, Charles Elvi Waters, who died early. Her half-brother Johnny Waters became a highly skilled pianist and later performed with her. Her nephew, Junior Waters, also proved to be a talented musician, and his daughter, Crystal Waters, would become a pop diva in the early 1990s. Without formal training, Ethel learned much by observing her aunts and the people in her community or in the churches. She picked up on the sounds, the rhythms, the dramatic pauses and punches. “I never had a11 singing lesson, and I never learned to play anything or read music,” Waters said. “I could always sing a song after hearing it played or sung a couple of times. Then I would just sing it the way it made me feel.” In one home, there was an old organ, and often Ethel’s grandmother would ask her to sing a favorite song, “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” a devotional piece that offered solace and hope for the despairing. Despite the troubles of the world, the disappointments, and frustrations, there was a God who sees everything, is everywhere, and cares about everyone, including the song’s otherwise despairing narrator. That song stayed with Ethel all her life. Her musical debut occurred at the age of five when she was billed as the “baby star” and gave her first public performance in church.
But singing wasn’t her only musical outlet. “I loved to dance12. My specialty was the choreography of the body shakes . . . best shimmier in our neighborhood. . . . And my grandmother fixed it for me to go to a dancing school three times a week. I lived in the red-light section of Philadelphia, and my grandmother fixed it for a policeman to bring me home every night after school. . . . The men around there would go for anything in skirts.”
Her education was at best spotty. “I was constantly13 in and out of schools,” she said, “while my darling grandmother worked so hard to provide for her brood.” At one time, she attended the Friends School run by Quakers in Philadelphia, and later she was enrolled in the John A. Watts Grammar School and another school in north Chester. Moving about so much, she wouldn’t get far in school, but surprisingly, she learned quickly and she learned well. For much of her life, she could do a fast read whether it was a script or the lyrics of a song she was to perform. Her grammar was usually good, though she enjoyed using double negatives, as did many of those around her. She also knew when not to use a double negative and when to speak like the dictys. Her diction was perfect, and it would become one of the hallmarks of her singing style. Her writing skills were solid too. She enjoyed writing, and over the years, when she had the time, she sent off missives to friends and secretaries. There might be occasional misspellings or lapses in grammar or punctuation, but for the most part, the letters were well written and clearly expressed her ideas, her anguish, her obsessions, her fears, her frustrations, and her humor.
But the Catholic school for white and colored children in Philadelphia, in which her grandmother enrolled her, opened a door for her religious beliefs. “The only place I14 found affection was in the Catholic schools,” she said. “When I was very little I thought of the pictures of the little Jesus as my doll in my child’s mind. The schools made God so simple and so close.” “I used to be a holy terror,” she said, but the sisters, who showed patience, “were the best psychologists in the world when it comes to handling children’s minds and develop[ing] them.” She was touched by the kindness of the nuns. At lunchtime, when everyone gathered for a meal, “I didn’t have no lunch,” she remembered, “and I didn’t have no breakfast to begin with.” Often, the nuns were “nice enough and considerate enough where my feelings was concerned to find little chores I could do.” As “payment,” they shared their meals with her. For years, she considered herself a Catholic and
donated large sums to a monastery in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
But she attended Protestant churches too. Different denominations appealed to her for different reasons. There was the “inner spiritual sense” of the Methodists, then there was the “free-swinging, uninhibited” preaching style of the Baptists. A turning point came during a children’s revival in Chester. A kindly, charismatic Reverend Williams saw young Ethel’s inner confusion and—after several days—led her to open her heart to the Lord and be “saved.” Most of her life, she loved the heat of fire-and-brimstone ministers, who passionately preached the gospel and admonished their congregations about the sins of the world. No wonder. With her own quick temper, she could unleash her own brand of fire and brimstone. But she was always moved by the power of religious services for the ordinary Black men and women she saw in Chester and Philadelphia. “The beauty that came15 into the faces of the very old men and women excited me,” she said. “All week long so many of them were confused and inarticulate. But on Sunday, in the church, they had no difficulty expressing themselves both in song and talk. The emotion that had invaded them was so much bigger than they.” Later she rarely attended any denominational services, preferring to communicate privately with her Lord. “But all my life16,” she said, “I had one powerful weapon and that was prayer. Only thing that kept me going was prayer.”
