As a child, I didn’t understand the price Aunt Celia had paid for her wealth, living twelve years as a slave and many more continually at a White family’s beck and call. I didn’t think much about her past or that she was rich. I only knew she had a big farm where we went in the summer to play in the fields and gather vegetables and fruit to take home.
Growing up, I never thought much about our being poor. Because of Pop’s hard work, we always seemed to have what we needed. My biggest worry as a child was the fear that I would die before anything really important happened to me. As my early childhood passed, I became more preoccupied wondering what I would do and how my life would turn out. I wanted to control my own destiny, but I never seemed to move forward except in response to some outward crisis.
My parents thought I would grow up, get married, and have children. Period. But when they conveyed their image of my future to me, I felt infuriated. I knew there had to be more. I didn’t want to wait for my real life to begin. I wanted to get on with it; but what that “it” was or how and where to search, remained a mystery.
Looking back, I can see that my youth seemed to lurch restlessly forward between intervals of apparent calm. I reacted strongly only when in adverse circumstances.
Even my coming to Louisville was precipitated by a dramatic event, a tornado that hit Jimtown. One afternoon, my brother Jay (our family nickname for Joseph) and I were taking a nap on my bed. Suddenly, a whirling funnel of wind whipped through our house, flipping the bed upside down and blowing my mother and father outside. It was March 18, 1925, and we were directly in the path of the storm—one of twelve that tore through Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, and Kentucky that year. They caused record death and destruction, 740 people dead, more than 2,000 injured, and twenty million dollars worth of property damaged.
Jay and I huddled together under the bed, safe in the midst of the destruction around us. I was only seventeen months old and already in the eye of a storm, a forewarning of the tumultuous life that lay ahead of me.
My parents had never expected to leave their rural home in Springfield, but with our house gone, we had to go somewhere. My mother’s oldest sister, Mary Kaufman, lived in Louisville, fifty-seven miles away. She urged us to move there. Aunt Mary found us a small house on West Oak Street in the Limerick area and we moved in.
At that time, Louisville, like the rest of Kentucky, was totally segregated. Poor Blacks lived in an area known as “little Africa,” whose unpaved streets extended south from Virginia Avenue and west from Thirty-sixth Street. These slums circled the downtown area. It was only steps from the business district to the surrounding alleys where Blacks built their homes, raised chickens, and kept hogs in pens. The houses, made mostly of concrete block or wood, were crudely built by the people who lived in them. Professional Blacks lived on more affluent West Chestnut Street and Grand Avenue. North of Broadway, the west end was all White.
As soon as our family was settled, Pop began searching for a job. He went first to the American Radiator and Standard Sanitary Company where a crowd of men gathered each morning, desperately hoping for employment. He wasn’t among the few hired that day, but he was doubly determined the next. Each morning, from then on, he stopped at the site on his rounds. After two weeks, Pop was hired and began the first day of what would become forty-two years of hard labor, years during which he worked enameling bathtubs in the foundry. He pulled the heavy tubs in and out of the forge, working in heat that would rise to 212 degrees.
Despite our living in a Black area, most people were confused by my father’s skin color. “Is your daddy White?” kids at school would ask.
“I don’t know,” I’d shake my head. To me he was just Pop, good to us and good to Mom. I loved him with all my heart, and I didn’t think about his color. People in my family were all different shades. Pop was the lightest. Mom and two of my brothers, Jay and Phil, were darker. My own complexion was somewhere in between the two. At home we never talked about color. I can only remember one time as a child when it was mentioned. My brothers were talking about a new friend they had made.
“He’s lighter than John Albert,” one of them said. We all laughed.
“If he’s lighter than John Albert, he must be White!” another brother said, and we laughed again.
However, not everyone viewed color the same way. Once, a trip we all took downtown in the car caused an ugly stir at Pop’s work. One of his co-workers at American Standard saw him with us and went to work and reported that Ben Montgomery had a Black family. The workers created a furor, talking angrily among themselves. Pop knew something was wrong, but he didn’t know what. Finally the president of the company, who had heard the gossip, called all the workers together.
“I understand some of you don’t want to work with Ben Montgomery any longer,” he said. “Those who don’t want to work with Ben stand on the left and the others on the right. Those who go to the left can pick up their checks and keep on going.”
The men went back to work and, at the time, no more was said. What happened that day illustrated to me the importance of leadership. When a leader takes a stand for justice, whether he or she is the head of a company or an elected official, people will usually follow. It was a lesson I never forgot.
Some of the workers continued to call our neighbors and ask, “Is Ben Montgomery White or Black?” When the neighbors, in turn, asked Mom, she would answer, “You’ll have to ask him.” Of course, they didn’t have the nerve to do that.
Did it make any difference if my daddy was White? In my childish innocence, I didn’t believe it did. But looking back now, I know differently. By the time I was ten, I remember wondering why he didn’t take us places. I thought he might be ashamed to be seen with us. Where did that idea come from? How had racism slipped into my young head, and from where, to hint to me that a man who looked White would be ashamed of his wife and children who looked Black?
We didn’t go many places as a family. Later I understood that Pop was trying to protect us from racist treatment, but it was also because when I was a small child we didn’t have extra money for entertainment. I never ate in a restaurant until Pop took us to the World’s Fair in 1939. On that trip my eyes were wide with excitement because of all the wondrous sights. We stopped at a small cafe on the South side of Chicago for dinner. After everyone finished eating, my parents sat talking. Anxious to get on to the next thing, I jumped up, cleared off the table, and started carrying the dirty dishes into the kitchen.
Pop looked up amazed. “Georgia,” he called out to me. “Won’t you please sit down?”
My brothers still tease me about that meal.
While my father labored at the plant, my mother worked equally as hard, or harder, at home. Mom was an immaculate housekeeper and a talented cook. She could never rest for more than ten minutes at a time; she always found something else that needed to be done. People tell me now that I look like her. Her skin was darker than mine, warmer, almost the shade of rich, brown gravy. She was good looking, tall and graceful, with soft, shoulder length brown hair which she curled at the bottom. Her voluptuous figure was still attractive even after she put on weight from carrying children.
She provided for all our physical needs, and I always knew I could depend on her, but we never spoke of the intimate things that I, as a young girl, pondered. Neither was she a demonstrative person. Mom showed her love by working day and night to take care of us—not with hugs, kisses, or even words. As she lay dying, I said, “I love you, Mom.”
“I love you too,” she softly replied. That was the only time those words ever passed between us.
Though neither Mom nor Pop had much formal education, he had finished third and she eighth, both read