She sits in her personal chair because it is the only chair in the house that provides enough support for her back. She keeps her eyes glued to my belly with a smile on her face, she has lived her seventy years and will be able to see another great grandchild bron into this world. So I begin to ask her questions. These are questions I know the answer to because my grandmother is someone I talk to quite frequently. I ask her all the time how was life when she was younger because I need to have these stories to tell to the little girl who is still developing inside my belly. So I ask her where did our ancestors originally come from. She tells me that for as long as she can remember they were in Mississippi. She knows that she was familiar with her family being sharecroppers which were what blacks did after slavery which in many ways was another form of slavery because it kept black families in debt. They worked and worked to try to repay a debt that just kept building up. She recalls that her grandmother was very fair skinned and could pass for white, which explains her light coloring. I can infer that one of her ancestors was white and who knows how my great-great grandmother came into this world and from what type of relationship. However, she says this was her background. A southern one with deep and close-knitted roots.
My grandmother got pregnant at a very young age. She was fourteen. In those days it was important for that woman to be married to the man who got her pregnant, because my great-grandfather was not one to allow his daughter to be unmarried with a baby. My grandfather and grandmother wed when my grandmother was fourteen and my grandfather was eighteen, but all this was happening in the early fifties. My grandmother already was considered a woman because her mother died at such a young age that it then became my grandmothers responsibility to take care of her 9 younger brothers and sisters. My grandfather and grandmother after some time decided to relocate to Chicago because there were more opportunities for my grandfather to make more money. In addition to that there were many of their friends doing the same thing. So they built a community of southerners in Chicago on the southwest side of Chicago which we refer to now as West Lawndale.
Unfortunately, slave records do not show where many African Americans originally came from so when I ask my grandmother did our family surname change, all she can tell me is that she came from a line of Jacksons. Jackson was more than likely either a name that a freed slave decided upon for themselves or a name that was given to them by a slave master.
Being that my grandmother was born in the thirties racial discrimination was at its peak. This was an era of lynching, leading into Jim Crow, and in Mississippi, the heart of the south racial discrimination was prevalent. "I knew I was (black) there was no question about that. From my youth there was constant conversation about the white man this, the white man that. Blacks were mainly just thought of as the white man slaves on his plantation. We couldnt even go on thier side of town. We couldnt go to the same movie, and restaurant they went to. They had the signs that said white restaurants and colored restaurants. Even the Deli. When you were born you were taught that there were certain things you couldn't do. I Knew that there was a certain place, but never paid much attention to it because all my aunties looked like they were white. One of my Aunts was a cook in one of the white houses and I would play in the white houses. It was different in my town of Pace because the slavery wasn't as deep as the other towns. My experience was different because I never lived on a plantation. My father worked for the railroad and momma and daddy did their sharecropping and we had our own small plantation and that land was where the house was built that I grew up in."
Grandma said that while she was younger she didnt have to deal much with discrimination. Her father had a car and since they couldnt do much in thier own town they would go to Cleveland to go shopping. If a black person, like my great grandfather, had money they could shop at the department stores in Cleveland. The biggest form of discrimination was not being able to go into the stores and restaurants that the whites went into. The biggest form of discrimination I noticed from my grandmothers conversation was when she started my conversation. She was telling me how her brother and her was just talking about the time that he stole a bundle of cotton from a white man's farm and had to leave the country. There was no telling what would have happened to them if they had been caught but since that was a time of lynching they could have gotten a punishment that heavy or maybe just beaten badly.
That was my grandmothers history. She was a product of the times, but she didnt really feel the negative effects as much as many of her other friends that she can remember. She said she had a '63 Ford when she was 16. Her father bought her the car while she was married to my grandfather already. She has a wealth of knowledge but these were some of the most interesting things she shared with me. Her journey is quite special because it is definitely something that I learn about when I learn about my history, but coming from someone who was actually there to witness it adds another element to it. It is definitely stories I intend to share with my baby girl.
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