So we have some family that's been here since
the 1910s, 1920s. They came up during the great migration out of the
South. This portion of my family came from South Carolina and,
surprisingly, they never went to Harlem. They bypassed Harlem altogether.
They settled in Brownsville on Thatford Street and they were able to buy
a home there for two reasons because
when they went to look at the homes which were just being built
at the time, someone thought that they were Jewish, not black,
because they were very fair skin, even though they had very curly hair,
and
they came from a family of landowners and it sold some of the
land so that they could start migrating North. Wow. So when you were
young, your grandparents lived here, right? And you had a relationship with
them? They did, yeah. By the time I was
born, and even my mom was born in South Carolina but came to
New York as an infant,
and she had come because she had
great grandparents... Not great grandparents, great aunts and uncles that
were living here. They were basically in Veterans Iverson. They were on
Decatur Street, some on Bainbridge. And so, yeah. My grandparents were already
here when I was born. We lived in a brownstone and we lived
on the back of the second floor, and my grandparents had the first
floor. My aunts had bedrooms at the front of the second floor and
then we had family on the third floor and fourth floor as well.
Did you also say that you had Gullah family members?
Yeah. My
grandmother,
Griselda, her
mom was from the sea coast of South Carolina. She was from Charleston.
And I remember
going down to visit with her before my grandparents migrated back South
and I could never understand anything that she said.
And at first, I kind of associated
the way that she spoke with Jamaicans that I knew here.
And at that time, there weren't too many West Indians
in Brooklyn, but that was as close a relationship as I could find
with anyone that I would hear speaking that way. And of course,
years later, we found out that it was the Gullah culture.
They of
course, they called it back then, Geechee, which we
kind of got away from that term. It was, at one point,
seemed to be a derogatory term.
Yeah, but she was 100% Gullah. She made the baskets which we
have all over the house. Wow. She made all of these?
No, she didn't make all of these.
This is the oldest one that I have. Got it. Yeah.
And she actually taught me how to do it, but I don't remember.
Yeah, so it's something that I'm trying to
reclaim. My mom never learned and even her mother never learned because
they were always working at that time, and it was something that
you had to have time to actually sit and do.
But I'm glad that she did teach me and I have memories of
canning fruits and vegetables with her, and we would sit out on the
road and sell the things that she made. My mother and grandmother would
be horrified when they came and they saw me sitting on the road
with her selling things because they had come so far. For them,
it was kind of like a step backwards to have me barefoot in
the road with little pigtails
selling baskets and
fruit. What was it like for you when your grandmother moved away?
Oh, I was devastated. I was 10 years old,
and I was absolutely devastated because I was at her house constantly.
My mom went back to graduate school when I was probably about eight
or nine, so my grandmother would come from Bedford Stuyvesant, because by
that time we moved out of her home, we were in Bensonhurst, and
my grandmother would come from Bedford Stuyvesant every day to pick me up
from school. And then when my mom got home, she would drive me
from Bedford Stuyvesant back to Bensonhurst, and we would do the whole process
all over again. On the weekends, I would basically spend
the whole weekend with her. And it's kind of the same relationship that
I have now with my grand daughter. Babysitters are hard to find,
hard to trust. So if you can find a family members to do
it, then that was the way to go. So, you also said that
you would spend summers with her, when she moved to South Carolina?
Yes. So when she finally moved back to South Carolina,
we did go down for the summers. And I actually got to spend
more time in the South than my mother did because when my mother
was growing up, her parents didn't want her in the South going through
the Jim Crow era segregation. By the time in '73 when my grandmother
moved back, it had already...
The Civil Rights Act pretty much taken effect. You could still see
some things going on. Because I remember going South and my cousins were
telling me, "Oh, we're going to school with white people next year."
And I was like, "Well, I go to school with white people all
the time." I'm like, "In fact, I am the only black person in
my class and they would ask me questions like, "Well, what do white people
like?" They knew them but they knew them from a distance,
and they knew that they had a place,
so to speak. And I didn't have that sense at all being
from Brooklyn. So yeah,
it was really strange. But I went back at a time...
Alex Haley had just written the book Roots,
and as a little girl, I remember reading this big, fat book.
And when I went down, I told my grandmother, "Well, I wanna find
the Kunta Kinte in my family." And she's like, "Well, I don't know
who Kunta Kinte is, but I can take you to cousin Cora and
see what she can tell you." And so she would take me every
morning to a different cousin's porch and sit me down, and I would
have a little pencil behind my ear and
a notepad and I'd have my recorder. And it was a little tape
player with a cassette tape, and I would record what they were saying
and I would ask them questions and I got a lot of information
about our family. I was able to get information about our family in
the South probably back to the 1790s.