My mother Doris Sewing in August 1944. Unfortunately no photo of her knitting.
In 1943, my mother was 20 years old. Excited about her first niece or nephew being born that year, she took a knitting class in college where she made some little outfits. Unfortunately, I don’t have a photo of my mother knitting, so I am sharing one of her sewing.
The Detroit Tribune Detroit, Michigan • Sat, Jun 19, 1943 Page 5
Have You Heard?
That Doris Graham is so thrilled over the prospects of becoming an aunt in the summer, that she, and not the prospective mama (Merry Vee Graham Elkins) is doing the knitting? Doris took a special course in knitting at Wayne last semester and is incorporating her learnings in an array of the dantiest, laciest tiny garments one could wish for.
May 1943 Detroit. Mershell Graham, Bud Elkins, Fannie Graham, Mary Vee Graham Elkins
“Dad – Bud – Mother – ? M Vee” “May 1943”
1943 Carrying D Dee
May 1943. “DD” on the way born 9/7/1943. Same date as Howard – his 9/7/28
Fannie Turner Graham, my grandmother, wrote this on the back of the photograph. Howard was her youngest child. He was born on the same day but 15 years earlier, as her first grandchild, Dee Dee. Howard died when he was only three. You can read about him here -> N – NINETEEN TWENTY EIGHT Howard Graham was born
From Doris Diane 1943 Xmas
I think Dee Dee is wearing a little knitted top here. Maybe from her Aunt Doris.
Click to enlarge photos from that day. Photos by my uncle Henry Cleage.My grandfather cutting the turkey. Seventeen year old me on the left. My mother on the right.
It was Thanksgiving at my Graham Grandparents house in 1963, East side Detroit. My grandfather cuts the turkey. My mother sits on the right. I am on the left, my sister next to me. I wonder where my Aunt Mary Vee and my cousins were? Usually there were four more around the table. How we all fit I do not know, but we did. The house is gone now. Everybody in this photo except my sister and I are dead. We are older than my grandparents were.
Four generations gathered around 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.
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. Did they celebrate Thanksgiving growing up? What did they have for dinner? Who was there? I’d ask Poppy, where he was in 1900? Where were his parents? and what happened to his older brothers? I wish I could hear them tell their stories tomorrow.
At the end of each summer my sister, cousins, mother, aunt and grandfather Poppy took a trip to the Detroit Zoo. We are looking at the Horace H. Rackham Memorial Fountain, located in the middle of the zoo. Every year we took photos there.
Marilyn in front. Me, Barbara, Pearl with camera, Dee Dee. Friend Connie and my mother in back.
In 1959 Dee Dee was almost 17 and too cool. I’m amazed she still accompanied us to the zoo. It must have been a very important part of our year. I was almost 13 and not at all cool. That expression on my face is one I recognize from other photos through the years, unfortunately. I would say the sun is in my eyes but it doesn’t seem to be bothering anybody else. And why am I wearing that skimpy outfit? Connie and my mother are wearing the hats my mother bought for Pearl and me. White sailor hats were the rage for awhile. Unfortunately, these were the cheap version and did not look like the popular ones. I don’t think we ever wore them. If I had, maybe I wouldn’t have been squinting at the camera.
Poppy walking on that 1959 zoo trip.
That summer of 1959 we moved from our rented flat on Calvert into our very own house on Oregon. I turned 13 on August 30 and started 8th grade at McMichael Junior High School that fall.
Portrait of Nikki Giovanni by w:Elsa Dorfman circa 1980?
The first time I ever heard of Nikki Giovanni, I was on a chartered bus headed down to Cincinnati to fellowship with another church. Nikki was going to read her poems for us and I wondered who this Italian poet was? It was May 20, 1967. I was 20 years old, a junior at Wayne State University. Nikki was 23. My sister Pearl was 18, a freshman at Howard University. She was not there because she was in DC.
I remember that the program took place in the church basement and that they fed us. I remember the feeling of camaraderie between the churches. Nikki read her poems and I was relieved to find out she was not an Italian guy. I don’t remember meeting her personally or talking with her one on one.
Excerpt from sermon given on Sunday, May 21, 1967. The day after the trip.
“I’m just looking around to see how many of you went to Cincinnati that didn’t get here this morning. Some of you didn’t quite make it. Most of you are here. We had a good time yesterday. We went to Cincinnati. We had two buses, about 70 people. We ate all the way there and all the way back. And it was a little different than our trip to Kalamazoo because when we got there we found brothers and sisters. We were in agreement. We had a good time. They were nice to be with, and we were all trying to do the same thing, and it was nice to know that the Nation is not just limited to the four walls here: that there are people out there that want to be a part of what we’re doing, so we took them into the Nation. I want you all to know. The Nation is growing every time we take a trip. We are going to take another one pretty soon, so you all can be getting your bus fare together and putting it aside.
It was a good trip. We were very happy that we were able to take some of our young people from the student organization. We just took them. We had a few extra seats there. We are going to let you help pay for those extra seats a little later on, but it was a good trip, and we think that these trips are very important. We had a message in Cincinnati and we think we made friends.
Central United Church of Christ, now Shrine of the Black Madonna, Detroit
Most of them are coming back to the Black Arts Conference that’s going to be held here, sponsored by Forum, 66, here at the church, of course, people are coming from all over the United States to the Black Arts Conference. I hope when your friends from out of town call you up or write and ask you about it, you will know what they’re talking about. Black Arts Conference is going to be sponsored by Forum ’66, held here at the church, the last two days of June and the first two days of July. Young people are coming from almost all of the colleges and universities around the country. People who are beginning to understand what the Nation is are coming from everywhere, so when your friends ask you about it, and they are going to be asking you because a lot of them are coming, looking for some place to stay when they get here.
So help Forum ’66 and help us because this a real contribution. It helps to establish Detroit as a place where whatever is going on as far as black people might be concerned, is taking place. We are at the center. The Black Arts Conference is one symbol of that fact and so for that reason, if for no other, it’s important. See what they’re thinking and let them know what we’re thinking and for that reason it’s also important.”
From a sermon delivered May 21, 1967, by Rev. Albert B. Cleage Jr. Later Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman.
-2 –
Our house 5397 Oregon
The 2nd Black Arts Conference took place from Thursday, June 29 to Sunday July 2 , at our church. Nikki Giovanni spent one night at our house during the Conference. At the end of the first day, someone, (my father?), suggested she stay with me at my mother’s house. I remember it was dark out and asking Jim to gave us a ride home. I rode in the front, Nikki rode in the back. Later, Nikki asked if Jim was my boyfriend. I said he had been but he was with someone else now. She said there still seemed to be something between us. There was and we got back together, but that’s the only conversation I remember us having. The rest of the time she stayed somewhere else. Once again, Pearl was elsewhere. I am sure of that because Nikki slept in her empty room.
The last time I saw Nikki was during the 1990s. I lived in Idlewild, Michigan with my husband Jim and six children. One evening Mable Williams, wife of Robert Williams (advocate for self defense), and I went to hear Nikki read her poetry at Ferris State University, half an hour away. After the reading Mable asked if I wanted to stay and say hello to Nikki. I looked at all the students milling around trying to get a word with her and said no. So we just left.
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 first published a version of this post ten years ago.
Click to enlarge. From babyhood until today, my hair.
I was born with a head full of black hair that could be pulled up into a little top pony tail. It soon fell out leaving me practically bald with a bit of blond hair. It slowly grew in sandy and kinky like my father’s and grandfather’s rather than wavy/straight like my mother’s and grandmother’s.
From a letter written to her in-laws by my mother, March 18, 1947. I was six and a half months old: Kris (with her 2 teeth) says any time for you all laughing at her bald head – I fear it’ll be covered all too soon with first one thing and then another. Doris
When Pearl and I were little, my mother didn’t wash our hair often. Once every two weeks? Once a month? Not very often. She used Breck shampoo, put a little olive oil in the sink full of warm water and poured it over for the final rinse. After and between washings she’d part our hair and put “Three Flowers” grease on our scalp. I remember that sometimes, when I was in elementary school, she would roll it up on tissue curlers and let me wear it “down” for one day after she washed it. I enjoyed the change from braids but it wasn’t really “down”.
Aunt Abbie, my maternal great grandmother’s sister, lived with my grandparents. She assured my mother that is was all right that Pearl and I didn’t have “good” hair because we had blue eyes. She assured my Aunt Mary V. it was okay her daughter’s didn’t have light hair or eyes because they had “good” hair. The sister’s shook their heads about it.
When I was in sixth grade, a classmate asked me during art class if I had ever had my hair straightened. I had not. She hadn’t either. Ironically, that afternoon after school, my sister and I went to the beauty shop on 12th street near Calvert recommended by Aunt Mary V. and had our hair straightened for the first time. We got pony tails in back and a pony tail down the side. Going to the beauty shop always gave me a headache. I remember listening to my beautician talking to the other women about how hot it was and how her husband was going to have to sleep on the couch because it was too hot to be all up in the bed with another hot, sweaty body.
Eventually I stopped going to the beauty shop, although my sister continued for years. There were the beauty shop headaches, plus I started taking swimming in junior high and high school. Those horrible bathing caps didn’t keep out the water and my hair soon took back it’s natural form.
My mother still straightened my hair for special occasions. She heated the comb on the stove and there were the inevitable burns on the ears. Other times I wore my hair in what a classmate described as a “shredded wheat biscuit”. Sometimes I borrowed some of my father’s Murray’s Pomade and after brushing the stiff, yellowish stuff in, it did lay down and had small waves.
During the summers when I was about nine to thirteen, I spent a week at the mostly white Camp Talahi. Some of the girl campers would ask me “Why is your hair like that?”. At first I would say because that’s the way it grows. Eventually I just responded with “Why is your hair like that?” They would look puzzled.
My last semester of high school I didn’t take swimming and discovered that if I rolled my hair up on those hard, pink curlers I could wear it in a sort of curly side wave on the side and pull the back into a barrette for a low pony tail. Sometimes I even wore it down, somewhat like those hairdos in elementary school. Once Pearl and I braided it all up into lots and lots of little braids, which reminded us of the paintings in Egyptian tombs. We thought it was great, and I would have been way ahead of the times, however my father hated it and I never wore it like that anywhere.
While visiting Pearl at Howard for Thanksgiving of 1966, I let one of her roommates straighten my hair. My mother complimented me and thought it looked lovely. When I went down to Wayne, I met Jim in the Montieth Center. He was aghast that I had straightened my hair. I went into the restroom and washed it out in the sink and that was the last time I straightened my hair. I was 20.
At one point in our lives, Pearl and I complained to each other that we had inherited our father’s kinky hair instead of our mother’s wavy hair. We reasoned that boys were supposed to get their mother’s hair so if he had gotten his mother’s wavy hair, we would have inherited that because girls (in our theory) inherited their father’s hair. Later, when natural hair came in we were so glad we had the hair we did. We didn’t have to do anything but wash and wear to have afros.
The next summer, 1967, we had the Detroit riot/rebellion. My cousins, Janis and Greta, came to visit us for the first time from Athens, TN. They were the same age as Pearl and I. Somehow, it came up that I wanted to cut my hair for an afro. Greta volunteered to do it for me and she did. It was great! I loved it. The only scary part was going to my Grandmother Cleages for the first time afterwards. We were afraid she might say something negative or even mention it during mealtime prayers, but she didn’t. I was one of the first to wear an afro on Wayne’s campus. That fall, in Miriam’s Jeffries student apartment, I cut several people’s hair for their first afros. I remember Kathy Gamble was sad to see her long hair fall on the floor. I cut Martha Prescod’s and can’t remember who else. I hadn’t cut anybody’s hair before, although I cut my own when it got too long.
I wore an afro until about 1988 when I decided to let my hair grow out and see what happened. I let it grow until 2004 or so when I cut it all off again and kept it cut until 2014 when I decided to let it grow out. It was more trouble to trim it than it would be to grow it out and have it longer. Lately a lot comes out when I comb it. Luckily I started with a LOT of hair. What’s left grows faster and strangely straighter.
I used to like making small places outside. The first one I remember was under the back porch when we lived in a two family flat on Calvert in Detroit. The porch above wasn’t high enough up for me to stand up, but it wasn’t so low I had to crawl in. I found bricks around and built a two or three brick high wall around two sides. I don’t remember doing much out there after I got it together. I was about nine years old at that time. My sister remembers playing marbles there. I did make a nice, smooth dirt floor.
Me beside my quilt tent, held up on the former chicken house with bricks.
In Poppy’s and Nanny’s yard we made tents out of quilts. We would use them for the duration of whatever game we were playing. My Quilt Tent – 1958
Later when we lived on Oregon, I built a snow house against the garage one winter. Again, I don’t remember hanging around in it. After all it was winter in the 1950s when winter was freezing and snowy for months. I also cleaned up the garage and fixed it up as a place I could go. But it was a garage and I remember the smell wasn’t that pleasant. Rats around the garbage cans? I never saw any, but I gave that one up.
Building the stick and leaf hut.
At Old Plank, I made a stick frame and wove large leaves into it. As you can see I even built a campfire circle of stones and had a fire going at least once.
Enjoying a campfire in front of the hut.
Henry holding the long snake found in the hut
One morning I came out and found a snake curled comfortably inside. It was cool and the snake was sluggish. Henry did what he always did when coming upon a snake, he killed it. I don’t remember the particulars, did he beat it to death or did he shoot it? What sort of snake was it? Above he is holding it up for the photographer, probably my mother. I do remember an incident decades later in Idlewild when Henry did kill a snake at my Aunt Barbara’s with a blow as I tried to persuade him it was a harmless snake that ate mice. He paid me no mind.
In 2001 I drove from Idlewild, Michigan down to Atlanta and across to Oceanside California with my oldest daughter and her two toddlers. I took a train up to Seattle to visit my second daughter and then took the train back to Michigan. This is an account of that last part of the trip from my journal.
Train ride through the Rockies. Photo by Kristin Cleage
Thursday June 28
leaving Seattle. Sat around with Ife and Mike waiting for 3:30 to leave for the train station. Ate leftover chili for breakfast. Watched a “thriller.” We went up on the roof for the first time and took photos of park, skyline and water. Sun got so bright we went down. Mike went and got water and tooth paste for me. Ife was nervous all day in case I missed the train. Took cab to station. Mariners game.
At the train station a girl with her mother was across from us. She was watching us. We were watching her.
Sleeper is small. – two seats, table window. Makes into lower and upper bunk. Much comfier than couch! Bathroom down hall and down stairs. Dinner – salmon, wild rice, potato, apple juice, apple crisp, veggies.
Scenery – very different on western half of Cascades, lush, green, moss and ferns, much dryer and more barren on East side. Fruit tree area on barren side. Trees must be irrigated. Food supply for U.S. long term NOT looking good! Puget sound – people clamming? Tide out. Water, water. Beautiful. This land is your land, this land is my land.
June 29, Friday
Woke up in Montana. Isolated cabins on the sides of wooded mountains. Mountain, rushing streams, line of parked cars in the middle of no where, a deer on the side of the tracks, pine trees, poplar or is it aspen? “Big Sky” low clods.
The Chinese American steward had a laugh this morning with the Irish woman across the aisle. He’d thought she’d be Chinese. Robert E. Lee wasn’t Chinese,” she pointed out, a bit peevishly. I woke around 7:30 (6:30 Seattle time) Yawn. Could have slept longer.
Mountains and feather pines. So close together. The highway right below. A stream leads up up up the mountains to a meadow. “I knew the mountains would make you well.”
Breakfast of yogurt parfait.
On closer view what appears to be meadow may be bushes. At least that’s what the one we passed was. Going through open covered tunnels? Bridges? Better then the dark holes.
Rock is gray, slate like layers, dirt was mauve this morning. Began taking photos. Why didn’t I do that all along??? what a waste Oh well. Jilo and Ife have both expressed an interest in cross country travel.
Down the corridor a couple discuss their vacations and train trips. The rocks do look like the earths bones. Are we lower or higher? Trees are smaller, fewer, more grass. Gods golf course out there?
Montana high plains. Rutted dirt roads come out of fields to the track. Several piles of dumped household trash. Irrigation. Houses, small alone. A man with orange flags. Clouds so low I could reach out the window and touch them.
Sage brush again everywhere.
June 30,2001 Saturday
We’re in the Minniapolis/St. Paul station. Midway on the N/S axis of earth.
Arrived in Chicago. Walking from the train to the waiting room passed a man hollaring a train was leaving for Grand Rapids! Asked and found it was my train. Got loaded on.
Four teachers returning from a conference in Grand Rapids. Two white and two black. Back and forth about conference.
Family of Grandma, two grown daughters and three or four kids (little) got on. The kids were tired. One little girl broke out crying, she wanted to put her pjs on right then. After awhile they put them on her. Brother fell asleep.
Almost got stuck in the bathroom. Couldn’t figure how to get it unlocked at first. When train stopped, everyone moved to the exit but the train wasn’t really ready to unload us. I sat back down and another lady sat down too. She had come on the same train I had but just from Minnesota. She was going to visit her grandkids.
Jim was waiting at the station with the van full of groceries when I got there. It was very hot and muggy. It sprinkled a little on the way, but no real rain. We cooked and ate when we got home.
I was glad to be home, but not this particular house and location.
IN 1972 James Edward Williams was arrested for driving without a license in Detroit, in March of 1972. This mugshot was included in his ‘red file’ which included local police files and FBI information from the 1970s. He was regularly arrested for driving without a license or minor traffic infractions in those days. Although he didn’t spend time in jail, there would be bail and fines to pay. Don’t ask why he didn’t keep up with his license considering he kept getting stopped. Some 50 years later, he just shakes his head when asked.
Below is a record of the police surveillance of James Williams on October 29, 1971. It happened about a year before the mugshot above was taken.
N?M = Negro Male. Most names are blacked out.
At 10:33, J. Williams and that could be my name blocked out as we went to my apartment in Brewster Projects and didn’t exit. I didn’t know they were following us, sitting down there in the parking lot in the fog, watching and waiting.
Why would they go to all this trouble. Because he was a black activist. Here is a letter sent to the Atlanta police department in 1972 as we were relocating from Detroit to Atlanta.
We got this information by sending for my husband’s Red Squad File. You can find more information at the link below.
“Editor’s Note: For more than 30 years (1944-1974), the Detroit Police Red Squad, a secret arm of the Detroit Police Department, was tracking citizens to “root out” and “expose” subversives. Their targets were political activists, Vietnam War opponents, Black nationalists, labor unionists, civil liberties advocates and many others engaged in social, cultural and other dissent activities.
Names of approximately 1.5 million people and organizations who either lived in or visited Detroit appear in secret files kept by the Detroit Police Department’s Red Squad. The Detroit files were also made available to the Michigan State Police and much of the Red Squad’s surveillance was coordinated with federal agencies, other state and local agencies and private organizations.
The Red Squad files are now being released to the public as a result of court orders issued in a lawsuit begun in 1974 by plaintiffs who argued that they were subjects of illegal political surveillance.
The case was finally resolved on April 23, 1990, when the Detroit City Council agreed to a $750,000 settlement which would cover costs to notify and deliver copies of retrievable information to those individuals and organizations who were under surveillance.”
The Boston Globe, Boston, Massachusetts Nov 04, 1947 · Page 13
We were living in Springfield, Massachusetts where my father was the pastor of St. John’s Congregational Church.
One cool day in 1950 my little sister Pearl and I were playing with our dolls and buggy in the back yard. Perhaps it was one of those in the advertisement to the left.
I was four. Pearl was about 18 months. An older girl appears on the scene. I do not remember who she was. A neighbor? The child of a church member? No idea.
Me and my doll.Pearl joins me.Showing the guest my doll.The guest looks suspicious while I explain things and Pearl looks on.Uh oh!Pearl is pointing at something in the guest’s hand. Are my fists balled up? My doll watchesLooking for …
For more posts about me and my family in 1950 go to this link- My family in 1950
Oddly enough, I do not have any personal photographs of buses. I do have an ancient journal entry chronicling a very bizarre bus ride I took in Detroit down Joy Road on the Clairmount bus in 1969. I had just graduated from Wayne State in December of 1968 and I was enjoying my freedom. I was living in my own apartment and working at the Black Star Clothing Factory. My cousin Barbara was living in New York City, the East Village. at the time and I was plotting and planning a visit with her. I did make it later that summer. I turned 23 that August.
Kristin and Barbara 1969, at her sister Dee Dee’s house.
I didn’t capitalize anything in the journal so I just left it like that.
journal entry
June 25, 1969
I don’t know what is going on, it isn’t good though. i was leaving friday for new york, but i don’t think so soon. i need a bit more time (for what?) i been listening to new leonard cohen record. two days over and over at first it was tired, but now i really like it, after the old revolution, i liked best the partisan song about coming out the shadows. i am so sleepy .
everybody is mad/crazy, and i really don’t understand at all. i need pearl’s youth card so that I can leave, go to NYC.
yesterday on the way to a photo show, I was on the clairmont bus on joy rd. the driver was crazy, he acted like he was taking a pregnant woman to the hospital, he was weaving the bus in and out between cars. that was bad enough – old ladies rocking, weaving and falling, when suddenly a red light backs up traffic, or just stops it. he pulls belligerently into the lane of oncoming traffic (which lucky for us was empty at the time) and raced two blocks in the wrong lane to pull and bully his way in front of some poor car when the light changed. I was cracking up. the people weren’t, just me. I couldn’t control myself laughing, mouth open etc. they probably thought I was crazy or something. so ridiculous, can’t even imagine a regular car doing that shit. I just don’t know, I really don’t. some lunatic jehovah’s witness knocked on the door to give me a bible study tract. says god’s kingdom is eminent. we should be so lucky.
