Essay: Fifth Ward, Houston, 1952 — One Girl’s Story, Part 3

PART 3

Atherton Elementary School was just four blocks from our compound. I was excited to attend a school that did not require an extended school bus ride. Though only an elementary school, it was as big as the entire kindergarten-through-high-school building of W. R. Banks School for Colored Students in Grapeland. It was also newer, fancier, and more amply supplied, and had many more activities. I was especially impressed with the festive school assemblies on special occasions, the thoughtful promotion of school spirit, and the extensive involvement of parents. Thanks to Miss Ida Mae, I arrived in Houston at second-grade level and was easily able to do the work. Going to school no longer aroused in me the excitement it had in Grapeland, but, determined to keep up with Elma, I applied myself to succeed in this new setting.

Across from Atherton Elementary on Solo Street was the Julia C. Hester House, founded in 1943 to provide character-building, athletic, and intellectual enrichment programs for Black youth in the Fifth Ward. Over time Hester House became a prominent part of my life, opening doors to opportunities that I could not have known otherwise. A modest one-level wooden structure that could barely contain the activity when many children were present, Hester House allowed us the chance to meet others our age through activities such as sports and dances. What I most loved, however, was its small library, where I could borrow books. I imagined this as my own library, where I could have access to books as often as I wished. The period, reading level, or genre did not matter; access to the wealth of words in books such as Little Women and Jane Eyre was almost as important as the stories and characters they offered. I was still on a mission to acquire as many words and meanings as possible. The festooned curtains and furnishings of the red-room described by Jane Eyre set my heart aflutter. If I could describe things with a similar precision, I could express confidently who I was and who I sought to be. I saw a way forward.

Diagonally across Lee Street from our house was a bar called the Dew Drop Inn. On weekends we could hear the noise from its drunken customers. Couples often launched into loud quarrels that I could hear late into the night. My brothers paid a visit to the Dew Drop from time to time — without Mama’s knowledge. The bar entered the annals of Houston crime one dark day when Tommy Head, whose family owned the Dew Drop, killed several members of his estranged wife’s family. But in general, by day, my area of Fifth Ward was an ordinary neighborhood where residents went to work in the morning and returned at night to quiet lives behind their unlocked doors.

My father found a job as a custodian at Bama, a maker of jellies and preserves. At the time Bama was a particularly challenging place to work because white workers frequently baited Black workers with racial comments. In Grapeland, even I had noticed Daddy’s compliant behavior toward whites. Lacking the surliness that many men adopted in the face of racial discrimination, he seemed to relish playing a subservient role and happily stepped off the sidewalk when a white man or woman passed, saying “Yas-SUH!” and grinning constantly in the presence of whites. These well-practiced strategies contributed to his adapting well to the environment at Bama. He was a popular and permanent fixture there until he retired. Honest, hardworking, and reliable, he had job stability almost immediately, an unusual circumstance for a Black man at the time.

Mama had never learned to drive, so her movements were severely circumscribed. Somehow, that suited her. When she was not working, she spent her days preparing meals and performing household duties that, with access to certain conveniences, were far less burdensome than in East Texas. No more boiling clothes in the yard, making lye soap, or curing meat in the smokehouse. Now she had to purchase everything. Peddlers traveled up and down the street selling fruits and vegetables out of their trucks and wagons. Mama would buy just enough potatoes, tomatoes, or other produce for a day. Additional essentials—insurance, shoes, knives, spices, soaps—came via traveling salesmen. Occasionally, Mama would send us to Schweikardt Street to the Chinese grocer, but most of the time my father did the grocery shopping.

My father insisted on holding on to all the income in the house. When my sisters and brothers got jobs, they had to give him all their earnings. Daddy believed that children should become responsible for themselves as soon as possible, even if it meant dropping out of school. With an eighth- grade education, he had only the most rudimentary sense of where education could lead, and he identified it as a privilege we could ill afford. Like others traumatized by the depression, he was parsimonious in the extreme. To petition him for money was a terrifying and futile act. In the city school system, students’ families were asked to provide many things: supplies, gym uniforms and sneakers, clothes for special events, and so on. We learned quickly that we would have to tell our teachers we could not get many of these things. When my sister Nora, only sixteen, went to work cleaning houses to earn money to pay for school needs, my father exacted a major part of her earnings. So she steadily increased her hours to net more income. Eventually, after the tenth grade, she asked if she could stop school to work full time. My parents agreed. Had it not been for legally enforced school attendance, most of the younger siblings would not have finished school. The lax enforcement in Grapeland meant that almost all of the older children had stopped school to work. Once we moved to Houston, all the youngest of us except Nora were able to finish high school without feeling pressure to drop out. But my father would not help us with school expenses.

Mama, however, was more attentive to our needs. She had no more education than Daddy, but she understood how embarrassing and painful it was for us to go to gym class and not be able to participate because we did not have a proper uniform.