This post continues a series using the Alphabet to go through streets that were significant in my life as part of the Family History Through the Alphabet Challenge. Click on the link to see links to posts by other participants in this challenge. It’s too bad the streets in my life weren’t alphabetically and chronologically coordinated because the years are all out of order. Here we go back to the beginning and my first home – 210 King Street.
Past over present. My mother, Doris Graham Cleage, is standing on the proch.
My father became pastor of St. John’s Congregational Church in Springfield Massachusetts in the fall of 1945. The parsonage at 210 King Street is pictured above. This is the house I came home to when I was born in 1946. I was the first child of Rev. Albert B. Cleage and Doris Graham Cleage. We moved from King street before my sister Pearl was born in December of 1948. I was 2 years old and I don’t have clear memories of the house. I found the description below online.
I was born around 10 PM during a thunderstorm. That’s what I heard.
Me and my mother. Photo by my father.
1947 – on the steps with my mother. What is she holding that I am so excited about?
1948 – I spent a lot of time cooking. This is from the crumpling pages of an album my father kept. He wrote captions on most of the photographs. I have scanned the pages that are left. The photographs are fine but the pages are not.
My father and his congregation were involved in a church fight at this point. A former Minister had separated most of the churches property from the control of the church when he retired. My father and members of the church were trying to get it back or get the church compensated. Before my sister was born, they did sell the Parsonage and we moved into the Parish house. It was right next to the church and we lived in 4 room (plus bathroom) on the first floor, along with church offices, a big meeting room and I don’t know what else. There were roomers on the second floor. In 1948 they were trying to get $7,500 for the house. Today it is selling for $47,000. From reviews the neighborhood is crime ridden and drug infested so I don’t know if they will get that or if that is a low price for a 100+ year old house in that neighborhood of Springfield.
My parents spent $8 a week for ice before they, with help from my grandparents, were able to purchase a refrigerator.
My mother describes the purchase of the new GE refrigerator in a letter to her in-laws below. She says that I am completely recovered. In an earlier letter she described my bout with roseola.
I don’t know if these are the refrigerators my mother and I saw that day in 1948 but they were both 1948 models. The one I remember had one door, like the Philco.
The refrigerator was still working fine in 1962. My mother standing in front of it 14 years later.
Front – Pearl and me. Back – my grandmother, Pearl Cleage, uncle Henry and grandfather Albert B. Cleage sr.
We were at my uncle Louis’ cottage in Idlewild. I remember my grandmother reading to us from the book “Told Under the Red Umbrella” that summer. The electricity went off during a storm once and she read to us by the kerosene lamps until the lights came back on.
The church still stands on the corner of Linwood and Hogarth in Detroit. It has gone through several names through the years, beginning as Central Congregational Church in 1953. It became Central United Church of Christ after the merger of the Evangelical and Reformed Church and the Congregational Churches in 1957. In 1967, after a large mural of the Black Madonna was painted for the Sanctuary, it became the Shrine of the Black Madonna. My father was the minister. I am going to write about my memories from the 1960s as I was growing up.
The Shrine of the Black Madonna on Linwood at Hogarth. Detroit, Michigan.
I remember many hours spent at church. There were church suppers and political meetings. There were Christmas Eve services, Christmas caroling and my father’s annual “Little Patricia” Christmas sermon. He gave these for several years. They featured a little girl living in a cave with her family following a nuclear war. I think the last time he gave this sermon she had two heads. I remember a bazaar with booths of handmade items to buy as gifts and game booths with a shooting gallery. The year I remember best was 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis of late October. A nuclear war seemed all too possible. I was 16.
The Youth Fellowship early 1960s. That is me 4th from the right in the middle row. My sister Pearl is in the middle of the back row.
I remember Youth Fellowship meetings, where we talked about what was happening in the city, and around the country. Afterwards there was a social hour. Standing next to the coke machine and not being asked to dance, while at the same time, dreading being asked to dance, is not one of my happier memories. Social hour became less stressful once a ping pong table was added for those of us who didn’t dance much. I remember Workdays for Christ where we spent the day doing yard work to raise money for international service projects. And the “Friendship Circle” where we held hands and sang camp song like “Tell Me Why The Stars Do Shine” and “A Friend on Your Left and a Friend on Your Right”.
The Sunday crowd was not usually this big. I don’t know what the occasion was but my sister and I are in the balcony, left side, front row, sitting with the Youth Fellowship. here must have been something special going on.
The Choir.
I remember the choir director, Oscar Hand (far right above) singing and the time he held the door open for someone stealing a typewriter because he thought it was the repair man. There was a wonderful production of “South Pacific” one year. There was the tragic and shocking murder/suicide of two married choir members. They had been having a clandestine affair. Mostly though I remember the good singing Sunday after Sunday.
A church dinner. My cousin Dale is third up on the left side of the table with his eyes closed. Cousin Ernie, Uncles Winslow and Henry at the end. On the other side is Aunt Anna and I can barely see little Cousin Maria.
There were lots of church dinners. All members were organized into Area Groups that raised money and sponsored events for socializing. Sometimes Area Groups sold dinners to take out. I remember one such sale. Nobody was coming in to buy the dinners until one of the women suggested burning onion skins. They laughed about it, but someone burned some onion skins and people actually started to come.
The Church was fully involved in the movement for equal rights and black power. There were always speakers and rallies and seminars.
The sanctuary before the Black Madonna painting was installed.
My parents divorced when I was 8. We lived with my mother but often spend the weekends with my father. He would start writing his sermons Saturday night. He wrote at the kitchen table. There were piles of old mail, old sermon notes and who knows what, piled up at one end of the table. There was enough space for the three of us to eat and for him to write. He wrote late into the night, sometimes taking breaks to come in and comment about what we were watching on TV or to order some shrimp from Jags up on 12th street. He never finished the sermon on Saturday. Sunday morning he would get up early and continue writing until the last minute when we would get in the car and drive down Linwood to church. Sometimes there were slow drivers in our way or people had already parked in his usual spot so he had to park farther away. At that time, he always parked on Lamothe, which was what Hogarth was called on the other side of Linwood. Service started at 11. Sunday morning excitement – would we make it!? We always did.
My father preaching. The Black Madonna mural painted by Glanton Dowdell is behind him.
The bulletin and sermon notes below are from Sunday, July 3, 1966.
My father’s sermon notes.
His sermons always spoke to what people needed to understand about their lives in the present day. And they were always timely. Someone once asked me if he planned and wrote them maybe weeks or months ahead of time. He didn’t. And you could tell because of the current issues he always included.
Me with three of my children and four of my grandchildren on the steps of the church, 2005. Those little children are now just about as tall as I am. How quickly time passes.
My Uncle Hugh Cleage playing tennis in the alley behind their house on Scotten. Seems to be quite dressed up for alley tennis. I don’t know who he is playing with.
In the fall of 1968, Henry, my mother and her parents, Mershell and Fannie Graham, bought the flat at 16201 Fairfield. The Graham home on Theodore had been invaded, shot into and suffered an attempted armed robbery. Nobody had been hurt.
In the spring of that same year an insurance salesman was shot to death in front of our house on Oregon. The murderer cut through our backyard during his escape. Although nobody was home, my mother never felt the same about living there. They began to look for a flat to share.
I didn’t realize I signed as a witness on the deed.
I lived there from the fall of 1968 until I left home in the spring of 1969. My grandparents lived there until they died in 1973 and 1974. My mother and Henry were there until 1976, when they moved to Idlewild. My sister, Pearl, was a sophomore at Howard University when we moved and never lived there, although she came home for holidays.
16261 Fairfield, Detroit with the people who lived there in 1968.
The people in the photos are, starting upstairs and going from left to right – Henry looking firm, me the night before I left on my cross country tour, Pearl and my mother. Downstairs we have my aunt Mary Virginia who lived with her parents for some months, Alice (my grandmother’s youngest sister), my grandmother Fannie, my grandfather Mershell and my mother holding my daughter, Jilo. I got the idea for this photo house from a photograph I saw via twitter of a house in Detroit. You can see it at Detroitsees here.
The flat on Fairfield was kitty-corner from a University of Detroit field. The only thing I remember happening on that field while I lived there was a high school band rally with different bands doing routines throughout a Saturday. I remember staying up late working on art projects and catching the bus across the street to go to campus. Most of my memories are of returning to visit with my oldest daughter. I know that I didn’t spend half as much time as I could/should have spent talking with my grandparents when they were right downstairs.
This house is still standing and looking very good. You can see it on the corner in the street sign photo above. Although the hospital that used to be directly across the street is gone, the rest of the block is all there! Whooooohooooo!
You can see my mother and grandfather’s wonderful garden and read more about Poppy in “Poppy Could Fix Anything.”
My grandfather, Dr. Albert B. Cleage Sr, Uncle Atty. Henry Cleage and my father, Rev. Albert B. Cleage, Jr. (aka Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman)
Here is a photograph that has quite a bit of damage but still, it is one of my favorite pictures of my father. It was taken on the front porch of my grandparents house at 2270 Atkinson. Today would have been my father’s 101 birthday. He has been gone for 12 years.
My Grandmother Pearl Reed Cleage with a pot of tea, early 1940s.
My grandmother always had a pot of tea on the dinner table. My sister, cousins and I grew up drinking cambric tea. She made it for us by pouring a bit of tea in the cup and filling the rest with milk. The first time I had chai at an Indian restaurant, it took me right back to my grandmother’s cambric tea. When my daughters call to say they are on the way over, I put on the water for tea. Some drink cambric and some drink herbal. I still prefer cambric, without sugar.
For more Sepia Saturday offerings, click.
More information about cambric tea and how to make it. It’s not that exact but for those who want the recipe click Mr. Peacock: The Comfort of Cambric Tea. Mr. Peacock seems to be pouring his tea from a chocolate pot, I notice.
