This is my tenth A to Z Challenge. My first was in 2013, but I missed 2021. This April I am going through the alphabet using snippets about my family through the generations.
The only thing I ever knitted was a pale blue very long scarf that I wore for years through Detroit winters. I don’t remember why I started knitting it and why I never had an interest in knitting anything else.
This is my tenth A to Z Challenge. My first was in 2013, but I missed 2021. This April I am going through the alphabet using snippets about my family through the generations.
Fannie Mae Turner Graham was my maternal grandmother. She kept a journal and a scrap book for many years. The recipe for the birthday cake she mentions and always made for our birthdays when we grandchildren came along will appear in “N”.
Feb. 5, 1940
Dear God and Little Book: the mail has just brought us the long looked for letter from Wayne University and the Board of Education that Doris has received the yearly scholarship to Wayne… I shed tears of joy… for more reasons than one or even two and the main reason is she deserves it for being such a sweet little “trick”…even if we do say so ourselves.
February 12 – Doris’s birthday – 17 today. We had a nice dinner, cake, ice cream and gifts for her from all.
March 12, my birthday, among all a purchase certificate from JL Hudson’s from our daughters and dad
April 3 – Mary Virginia is 20 today. We had nice dinner cake and ice cream and gifts from us all – also Aunt Daisy never forgets with money.
Dad celebrates Christmas day.
Other entries from Fannie’s journal posted in 2010.
This is my tenth A to Z Challenge. My first was in 2013, but I missed 2021. This April I am going through the alphabet using snippets about my family through the generations.
My mother and grandmother in the kitchen doing the dishes and cleaning up after Thanksgiving dinner in 1963. Unlike in the everyday world, my sister and I didn’t help with the dishes at my grandmother’s house. The adults did it all
Below is something I wrote in 2012. Since then I have found the answers to many of the questions I had then. Links are to posts answering some of the questions. But I still wish I had asked.
The generations gathered around my Graham grandparents dining room table in 1963 for Thanksgiving dinner. There was turkey with cornbread dressing cooked by my grandfather. There was white rice, cranberry jelly, green beans, corn pudding and sweet potatoes. There was my grandmother’s finely chopped green salad and her homemade biscuits with butter and with a relish plate holding olives, sweet pickles and carrot sticks.
One thing there wasn’t, was talk about the old days. My grandparents were born in 1888. My grandmother was born Fannie Turner in Lowndes County, Alabama. My grandfather was born Mershell Graham in Elmore County, Alabama. They met and married in Montgomery. My great great Aunt Abbie was born in 1877 in Montgomery, Alabama and was the second to youngest child of Dock and Eliza Allen. My mother told us stories she had heard from her mother, mainly about Dock and Eliza and their children. I remember once my older cousin was trimming Aunt Abbie’s toenails when Aunt Abbie mentioned that she used to trim her grandmother’s toenails when she was a girl. And that her grandmother also had arthritis. And that they called her “The African.”I have always remembered that, but I didn’t ask any follow up questions about her grandmother, Annie Williams who was born a slave and was full grown and the mother of a fully grown woman when she was freed. And Aunt Abbie didn’t say anything else about it.
My grandfather, who we called Poppy, was a mystery. My mother only had little parts of stories she had gotten from her mother, things that just made the mystery deeper in most cases. What were his siblings names and what happened to them? Are the ones I’ve found that I think are his siblings, really his siblings? In 1900, I found these possible siblings living with a man who is listed as their father but has a name not listed on any of their death certificates, was he their father with a different name? And where was he, my grandfather, in 1900? Why wasn’t he there, or anywhere else I can find? Where was their mother? What was the name of the little white girl he was servant of when he was a boy? The one he slept on the floor outside of her bedroom door? The one who changed his name from Michele to Mershell because Michele sounded too “foreign”? How did he learn to read? Did he go to school? Did he know his grandparents and what plantation did his parents come off of? There was a photograph of his sister and her children in the album. I would like to ask him what their names were. Are they the ones I’ve found in the census?
I would like to ask my grandmother some of the same questions about her father’s family. Howard Turner died when she was 4 and her mother moved away from that community and went back to her family in Montgomery. I was able to find her father’s family because I knew his name, his age and the community he came from but I have no stories about his parents and siblings or what plantation they came off of. I only know that his father, Joseph Turner of Hayneville, Lowndes County was a farmer and owned his own land and had given his son some land which he didn’t want him to sell and the two of them argued about it.
When we went by my other grandparent’s house for desert I would ask where my grandfather’s mother, Celia Rice Cleage Sherman is buried. And why my grandmother Pearl thought her grandmother was Cherokee.
Unfortunately, I can’t go back to 1963 and sit around the table and steer the conversation around to who was where and when and how and why. I can only use the information I do have to keep looking and hope that one day some cousins from those mysterious lines will turn up and perhaps have some of the answers to my questions.
This is my tenth A to Z Challenge. My first was in 2013, but I missed 2021. This April I am going through the alphabet using snippets about my family through the generations.
Rev. Horace White was the pastor of Plymouth Congregational Church from 1936 until his death in 1958. Both of my parents were members and met at Plymouth. My father credited Rev. White with turning him to the ministry. I decided to look for information about him and the article below is one that I found. It reminded me of some of my father’s writings.
By Horace White
The Michigan Chronicle
Detroit, Michigan · Saturday, November 03, 1945
It ain’t yet – The Negroes have jumped overboard because one Negro has been assigned to get ready to play baseball in the white organized baseball fraternity. We always jump overboard at the least provocation in such matters. We make too much out of such events in our news. Of course it is an achievement to get such an assignment. But it is not any great step forward yet. The assignment of the young Negro ballplayer has in it only the fact that he is a very promising player.
Negroes are not accepted yet on the basis of their merit. It will be a long time comparatively speaking before we will be so accepted. It is no fault of the Negro players that such is the case – our American race prejudice causes this particular situation as race prejudice causes many other un-American acts on the part of Americans.
It is nothing short of pathetic to see a race of people so eager for acceptance that the least little crumb dropped to them causes so much excitement. Maybe that is the way it has to be. There is one thing sure, about giving so much importance to the ordinary and common place events of our lives, we set our sights lower than we ordinarily would. Young people accept little achievement in terms of something really important. You and I have seen how easily a whole race gets vicarious pleasure and a sense of achievement from the fact that one Negro has been given some ordinary job or position.
Many times young people are given the wrong evaluation of achievement when they see their parents making such a fuss over small things. When small things are assigned to us as a race let’s be big enough with ourselves to accept small things as small things. It is nothing short of weakness on our part when we get and give so much publicity to any little incident of acceptance.
How can we get over this seeking of approval from the majority at almost any cost? This is no easy task. We have been denied and we have looked for our satisfactions from the people who have denied us so very long. We feel sometime that approval from the majority group is worth any effort that we may make.
Of course we can understand why we seek so much approval. The reasons are not far to seek. Any people living as a minority group in all ways. The majority group does its domination through education, social mores and economic controls.
The minority groups usually succumb to these controls of the majority group. One way of succumbing to the controls of the majority is to bite for every sop that the majority group hands out. The assigning of a Negro to a berth in organized baseball is an example of what is meant here. The Negro population has been led to believe that Negroes have gained something by the very fact that the young man has been assigned to play with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Still, nothing has been gained.
The boy is good. It is good business for the team to sign him to play. More than this fact we should as Negroes take the position that the recognition of the abilities of Negro players is long overdue. Therefore, Negroes should not express so much joy over the fact that the very fine young man has been signed. We are glad for him and that is all.
This unusually overrated incident is no different than the “hell” that some Negroes are “raising” over the fact that Jane White is taking the lead in “Strange Fruit.” The protest of Negroes is so silly to say the least. Yes, it is possible for a Negro woman who has gone to college to fall in love with a no-good white man. Negro women who have gone to college fall in love with no-good Negroes. “Strange Fruit” is a real novel.
The protest over a Negro woman playing “Nonnie” in “Strange Fruit” is a sign of our total insecurity. We cannot face a situation without “tears” of wishful thinking. We always try to put our best “foot” forward even to the point of being ridiculous.
Our family life must provide the way for us to escape the basic need for acceptance. Young people must learn how to find inner emotional strength within themselves. Our families must provide a real basis for Negroes to free themselves from a need to seek acceptance from the majority group. We must seek brotherhood. Brotherhood means giving of selves equally. Anything else is subjugation.
This is my tenth A to Z Challenge. My first was in 2013, but I missed 2021. This April I am going through the alphabet using snippets about my family through the generations. On Saturdays I’ve combined my usual Sepia Saturday post with the letter of the day. A double challenge.
Several years ago I shared the photograph below from my grandmother’s scrapbook of my mother dancing at a formal dance. The other day I decided to see if I could find any more information in the newspapers. I was overjoyed to find two articles in two different Detroit papers with photos and mentions of my mother. Both were African American newspapers. The Tribune was published by my maternal grandmother’s first cousin, James McCall.
I am sharing the photo from the Michigan Chronicle and the original photograph from my grandmother’s album and the article from the Detroit Tribune, because it mentions what my mother was wearing.
In March 1939, my mother was 16 and a senior at Eastern High School. She graduated in January 1940, and entered Wayne State University.
By Sylvia Penn
The Detroit Tribune, March 18, 1939, page 4
Hello , Folk! The hour for twisting and turning our “little ole” mirror for you to catch reflections of the doings of Detroit, is at hand again. We have always heard that the weather is a safe topic of conversations at any time; so right here for a second or two, we shall discuss the weather Sunday and Monday of this week, we were tempted to think of Detroit as the “Crystal City,” instead of the Motor City for the handiwork of nature stretched before our gaze a picture of dazzling beauty with trees, houses and streets encased in ice. The sparkling beauty of it all equaled the splendor of the jewels in the King’s Crown. It was a magnificent sight, but it is all gone now, except the memory of it and in it’s stead we have warm sunlight, which reminds us that spring is just around the corner.
Yes, Folk, but there have been other scenes of beauty in Detroit other than that afforded by Dame Nature. Such was the Chesterfields ball at Wayne university last Saturday evening. The affair was as colorful as a rainbow and was distinctly an occasion for dress. The frilly crisp gowns worn by the young ladies were as beautiful and picturesque as springtime. The gowns were rampant in color, ranging from polka-dots to mulberry taffetas, sky blue satins and black and gold nets. Then there were the many lovely corsages, also orchids for two of the Chesterfieldians chose and pinned gorgeous orchids on the gowns of their company. The members of the club identified themselves by wearing green and gold ribbons in their lapel, these being Wayne’s colors. They further used the same color scheme in the. ceiling decorations. Of course, there were multi-colored balloons and a profusion of confetti. The swingy, swingy music brought forth the usual group of jitterbugs doing their number on the sideline with maybe one or two doing the “Boogey.” The Chesterfieldiana and their invited girl friends were: Bobby Douglas and Doris Graham, Doris looking very sharp in peach chiffon and corsage of sweet peas and roses, Howard Tandy and Martha Bradby, Martha very cute in black and white net, Jack Barthwell and Marjorie Cook, Marjorie being quite smart in black chiffon; Leven Weiss and Helen Nuttall, Helen very sophisticated in black taffeta striped with gold; Theodore Washington and Margaret Book, Billy Allen and Alice Tandy. Alice very ravishing in red and wearing orchids too; Tony Martin and Lorraine Porter. Louis Bray and Shirley Turner, Shirley lookin lovely in white crepe; Conklin Bray and Harriet Pate. Harriet quite charming in blue and white. Demar Solmon and Lillian Brown; John Roxvourgh and Mary L. Singleton; Robert Johnson and Veralee Fisher, Vera very stunning in her new gown of aqua-blue chiffon, embroidered with silver; Charles Diggs Jr. and Christine Smoot. …
Today I did two “G” posts, unawares. The other is G-Gardening.
This is my tenth A to Z Challenge. My first was in 2013, but I missed 2021. This April I am going through the alphabet using snippets about my family through the generations.
Kristin Cleage
Our garden this year has been great, best I’ve had in years. Jim Tulani, James and Cabral got up a fence in early June that keeps the dogs from rolling around in the beds. Jim brought several pickup loads of horse manure from a local horse owner soon after the fence went up. He also roto-tilled several planting beds that were over grown and made a large double bed for the corn.
I got it planted soon after, before weeds could take over again and mulched everything heavily…the hay was here on time. We got all of this done pretty much before I started working. The beginning of the summer was hot and dry, so I watered. It soon changed to hot and wet, wet, wet. Now it’s cooling off and raining pretty well.
We’ve been eating summer squash, plenty of green beans (freezing some too.), collards, broccoli, swiss chard. The corn is tassling and there’s enough of it this year that you can hear it rustling in the wind. The pumpkins and winter squash may make it before frost if they hurry. Lots of green tomatoes, onions and red beans. The only down side so far is that the beans I planted with the corn (I even let the corn get up good before I planted them this year.) turned out to be bush beans and not Kentucky Wonder climbers. Looks kind of strange having those bush beans growing around the bottom of the corn.
I plan to put in lettuce, mustard, turnip and transplant kale as soon as the beans give out and by putting plastic over the pipes I bent over them, to eat from the garden up until Thanksgiving.
And next year with the fence already up, maybe I’ll really get some plants started and out early and have potatoes. The tomatoes Ayanna started this year look good. I did dream we had a killing frost a few nights ago, but I hope it was just a dream, I mean, it’s only August? No killing frost in August, even in the North woods, right?
The Ruff Draft May/June 1994 page 5
Today I did two G posts, unawares. The other is G- Glimpses in Detroit’s Mirror!
This is my tenth A to Z Challenge. My first was in 2013, but I missed 2021. This April I am going through the alphabet using snippets about my family through the generations.
I managed to scan a few pages of the old album before they crumpled. My father wrote on brief descriptions. In the fall of 1948 I was two. My sister Pearl would be born in December of that year. One of my favorite activities was playing in the dirt. I remember watching the neighbor mother fuss at her little daughter, who was about my size, for playing in the dirt. Even at that time I thought that was sad. There were two sets of stairs, one on each side of the porch, so people did not have to walk through my kitchen when they came out of the back door.
This is my tenth A to Z Challenge. My first was in 2013, but I missed 2021. This April I am going through the alphabet using snippets about my family through the generations.
My 2X great grandmother Eliza Williams Allen was born into slavery on the plantation of Col. Edmund Harrison and his wife Jane Starke Irvin Harrison. Her mother was Ann Williams, a seamstress on the plantation. Who her father was is not known. When the youngest daughter of the Harrison’s, Martha James, married Milton Saffold in 1851, Eliza went with her as a wedding gift. Martha was 18 when she married. Eliza was about 12.
Martha gave birth to three sons before she died in 1856. At 16, Eliza gave birth to Saffold’s daughter in 1856. In 1857, Saffold married Georgia Whiting. Eliza was 17 when Saffold freed her and Mary. In 1860 I found them living, free, on a small farm with Nancy Wiggins and her daughters. I haven’t found a connection between Nancy and Eliza.
Later that year she met Dock Allen when he hid in the barn while escaping from a master known for cruelty and keeping vicious dogs to hunt escapees. Dock and Eliza married. They had 13 children. Eight lived to adulthood. After Freedom, Eliza’s mother, Annie Williams lived with the family until she died in 1898.
Eliza was a seamstress and Dock was a carpenter. Although neither of them were literate, they sent all of the children to school, the oldest through elementary school and the youngest completed two years of college. The family owned their own home in Montgomery’s Centennial Hill Community.
Eliza died on June 22, 1917 at 77 years of age and is buried in Oakwood Cemetery in Montgomery.
More about Eliza and her family
This is my tenth A to Z Challenge. My first was in 2013, but I missed 2021. This April I am going through the alphabet using snippets about my family through the generations.
My Uncle Henry Cleage was a twenty year old student at Wayne State University in Detroit when he kept this diary. He did eventually graduate and went on to geta law degree. He was a great thinker and during his life did a variety of things. Henry was also a printer and a publisher, publishing the Illustrated News, a radical black newsletter during the early 1960’s with family and friends. During WW2 he and his brother Hugh were conscientious objectors and spent the war farming in Avoca, Michigan. You can read the whole Diary here. Like many of us, he started off strong writing everyday, but as the year went on he petered out.
January 11
Awoke to find that I had lost 2 dollars very depressed. Wrote on theme. Played tonight at Quinn’s Lone Pine with Duke Conte, played bass, terrible night. Fingers sore. Noticed how good-looking Lene is… Ought to throw a line – Police stopped us at about 1:00AM. No permit to play until two. I was glad. Very animal acting bunch in River Rouge. Most of them seem friendly though.
January 12
Played matinee dance at Elks rest with Heckes, Toddy and Bill – Dracee’s band came in and sat in awhile (no trouble) Kenneth was there. Too tired and sleepy to study history. Get up early tomorrow (no English) Toddy is going downtown to get some books is supposed to get me ‘American Tragedy” and ‘Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations”
January 13
Haliver Greene died this morning -spinal meningitis. Didn’t get up early to study History, however there was no class – lecture tomorrow so I won’t slide, tonight. Toddy bought back two books about lives of Educators (putrid!!) only 25 cents a piece though – awfully windy out today-not so cold thought – like March. I would like to have been in the country, wrapped up good, walking into the wind at the Meadows, down the road towards the sand pile or over the hill to the creek – zest, spice, life, health, clear eye, firm step and all that sort of thing.
January 14
Cold out this morning although it became somewhat spring like after school. Went to show after school. Another big fight this morning, I think they think I skip classes because I am sleepy, nonsense. Bought ‘Bartlett’s Quotations” $1.53. Seems worthwhile. Read one of dictator books – Good – tonight as I was going to the store the weather brought memories of spring. Roller-skating in street, if not roller skating then walking. Everybody walking and friendly. The crowd at Krueger’s and the tent. Perhaps riding through Belle Isle – water, boats.
_______________
Henry’s sister Anna via my cousin Anna shared her memories of the combo: “Hi there! I had a chance to get Mom’s remembrances on Uncle Toddy’s band. This is what she recalls:
Uncle Toddy was trying to establish the business of being an agent where he would send singers and instrumentalists to different clubs etc. to perform. If he couldn’t get enough players, this is where he would ask Uncle Louis (player of drums), Henry (sax player, bass violin and vocalist), and sometime Mr. Hand (Oscar) – not really sure what he played – to fill certain jobs. Uncle Henry was a really good sax player and he had a great voice. Some group called the Vagabonds wanted him to play the sax for them. Mom thinks that Henry actually joined their band for awhile.”
This is my tenth A to Z Challenge. My first was in 2013, but I missed 2021. This April I am going through the alphabet using snippets about my family through the generations.
I recently took a survey of the family and found that all my children and grandchildren can play chess, most can also play dominoes. I was curious because we have so many photographs of the boys playing chess and hardly any of the girls. My husband and I used to play chess everyday when we first met. Unfortunately there are no photographs from those games played over 50 years ago.
Below is an article my son James wrote describing in detail his experience at the annual Optimist Chess Tournament held in Ludington, Michigan. Both he of my sons participated for several years.
by James A. Williams
I had been practicing for months, three hours a day. Hoping to bring home the first place trophy from the annual chess tournament. I had two chances to claim the first place trophy and failed both times.
Game #1: My first game was a simple one and I won it easily.
Game #2: My second game was a little harder. But my opponent was intimidated by me due to the fact that I had beat him in two previous meetings earlier that day. He resigned.
Game #3: My third opponent was not as talented as my second opponent but much more skilled than my first. I won that game.
Game #4: My fourth game was what I anticipated to be the biggest game of the tournament. I was to take on the only other undefeated player in my group. I won that game and was 4-0 to that point.
Game #5: My fifth game was the one I needed to win in order to clench a #1 place. I lost due to a terrible blunder concerning my castle. I was headed to the playoffs and a second chance at #1.
Game #6: I played my second opponent once again in a decisive game six. If I lost this game my first place hopes would vanish and the best I would be able to do would be #3, I won game 6.
Game #7: This was my last chance at #1. I was matched against the same opponent that had beat me in game five, an opponent that in my four years of tournament play I have never beaten in three meetings. I lost game 7 due to the fact that I overlooked a fork that would have stripped my opponent of his last playing piece and left him only pawns to defend against my rook, a knight and king.
Dashboard
I was forced to walk away with the second place trophy.
from The Ruff Draft March/April 1993
In 1991 my family began putting out a newsletter we called The Ruff Draft. We had recently started homeschooling. The purpose of The Ruff Draft was both to give real writing opportunities to Ayanna (15), Tulani (13), James (9) and Cabral (4), and to show extended family and friends that they were learning something.
In the beginning we used an Apple 2c. They wrote the articles and I typed them into the computer, printed them out and lay out the newsletter. Later my cousin Blair gave us a Mac and the whole newsletter could be done on the computer. There were drawings and photographs. Sometimes the readers sent in articles.
For four or five years we published bi-monthly and mailed it out all over the country to family and friends. As the writers graduated and moved on to bigger things away from home. You can see an issue of The Ruff Draft at this link The Ruff Draft – July 30, 1991.
