After writing about my grandparent’s house the other day, I came across this poem my cousin Dee Dee wrote. She said I could post it, so here it is.
In the collards - Pearl, Barbara, Poppy, me 1952.
POPPY’S HOUSE
By Dee Dee McNeil
Snow ice cream
from the window sill.
A kerosene stove
for the bathroom chill.
A tub with feet
like lion paws
clung to the floor
with porcelain claws.
A house that smelled
of sachet bags,
of moth cakes, greens,
and fresh bleached rags.
A house that rang
of happy things
with warmth that only love can bring.
Poppy’s house.
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. For this post I am bringing back a post I did a year ago for 52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy. The house at 6638 Theodore was my Graham grandparents house.
My maternal grandparents were Mershell and Fannie Graham. We called them Poppy and Nanny. They bought their house on Theodore Street on the East Side of Detroit in 1922 when my grandmother was pregnant with my mother, Doris. They lived there until the neighborhood became increasingly violent and they experienced home invasion and shots fired into the house. That was in the summer of 1968 when they bought a two family flat with my parents near the University of Detroit. So they lived in this house for 46 years.
When I was growing up we used to pick up my cousins on summer Saturdays and spend the day at my grandparents. We had Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners there and backyard meals for the summer holidays.
There was a front porch across the front but by the time we came along there was no porch swing and we never sat or played in the front. The front door had a full window. the window to the right of the front door was the “hall way” it was divded from the living room by wooden pillars. On the hall side there was a table that held the high school graduation photos of my mother and her sister, a lamp and underneath a brass bowl that held last years Christmas cards. Next to it was my grandmother’s rocking chair. The door to the kitchen was behind that and the stairs to the second floor were behind the table. At the foot of the stairs, beside the single window, was a table with the telephone. The telephone sat on a small table my grandfather built, on the landing. During the day, it came down to the little table and at night it went back to the landing. But wait, I think I can show you better then tell you. Downstairs on the first and upstairs below. No photos taken upstairs. There was a great basement too that included my grandfather’s workshop, a large converted coal furnace and a pantry.
When my grandparents moved in 1968, the people who owned the factory across the street bought the house and tore it down. This is what the spot looked like last time I was in Detroit taking photographs of family places.
To read more about the Brass bed and see a photograph of it – Dollhouse update.
After reading My Grandfather was an Enumerator on the blog ABT UNK, I decided to write something about my grandmother Fannie M. Turner who was an enumerator for the 1910 US Census in Montgomery, Alabama. She was 22 and lived with her mother and younger sisters in Montgomery, although not in the district she enumerated. Her grandmother Eliza Allen lived in the district. It was looking at the entry for Eliza that I first noticed that my grandmother was the enumerator. Recently I found a newspaper article online about the appointed census takers that said in part:
“Montgomery – City – Whites: Albert S. Ashley, E.F. Davis, James C. Westbrook, Leopold Loab, Thomas Robinson, R. Brownlee Centerfit, Charles S. Spann, Louis Lyons, Edgar W. Smith, Mrs. Fannie B. Wilson, Handy H. McLemore, Thomas M. Westcott, Alto Deal, Miss Gene Finch, Frank G. Browder. Negroes–To enumerate negro (sic) population only–Gertrude V. Wilson, Eli W. Buchanan, Fannie M. Turner, David R. Dorsey.”
Fannie M. Turner began work April 15, 1910 and enumerated her Aunt Abbie and her Grandmother Eliza on pg 2. She finished on April 26. Mrs. Fannie B. Wilson (white) completed the enumeration of Montgomery, Ward 4 by counting the white residents on several pages after that. As noted in the newspaper article, Negro enumerators could only count Negros. I wonder how that worked. Did my grandmother go to the door, note that they were white and tell them someone else would return to count them later? Did the neighbors alert her? Since she was already familiar with the neighborhood, did she already know where the white people lived or did all the white residences live in the same area?
My grandmother was a working woman who managed her Uncle Victor’s grocery store from the time she graduated from State Normal School until she married my grandfather in 1919. Wish I knew the stories she must have had to tell about that two weeks of counting the citizens in Ward 4.
Here are my mother’s memories of her great Aunt Abbie, who lived with my grandparents until I was twenty. Aunt Abbie became very frail and was no longer mobile. My aging grandparents were unable to care for her and she was sent to a nursing home where she died several months later.
Abigail Allen Brown
By Doris Graham Cleage
Aunt Abbie married a Mississippi Riverboat gambler, swarthy and handsome and no good, who stayed home on two visits long enough to give her two sons and then sent her trunks of fine clothes to wear or to sell to take care of herself and the boys. Whenever she talked about him she sounded like she hated him. She resented the lack of money. Said once the oldest boy Earl (named for his father) screamed for days with toothache and she could not take him to the dentist, who didn’t want any fancy clothes or jewelry. She resented raising the children alone. I got the feeling she hated them and they hated her and she resented him being off having a good time while she stayed home with the problems.
She talked about him in a completely different way than she talked about her Jewish policeman, who bought her a house on Ripley St. Spent much time there, for whom she loved to cook and keep house. She came to live with Mother to take care of Daddy(!) so Mother could come to Springfield and help me when Kris was born. In later years when they lived on Fairfield, Mother and Daddy used to argue about this and they would call me in to referee. He’d say he took Aunt Abbie in out of the goodness of his heart like all the rest of her family. And she was not supposed to stay on (!) them forever but was to go to live with Aunt Margaret. Mother would say Aunt Abbie came to take care of him because (here she would make a mouth at me) he could not take care of himself and work even though he could cook better than she and do everything else in the house too. (I think we are always angered at the way men can say this is the limit. I can’t or I won’t do this or that and we seem to have lives where you do what is to be done since you have no one who will hear you if you say you can’t or won’t. Hold my hand Charlie Brown!) And that he knew very well she was going to live with them and visit Margaret occasionally. Mother was right. He said Aunt Abbie came to have cataracts operated on and to be taken care of. He was wrong. Her eye operations came years later. He said to me once that he had always taken care of Mother’s people and she would have nothing to do with his. I know how Grandmother depended on him to fix things around their house. And he was most agreeable and I always thought he loved it. They made over him when he came with his box of tools. I was always there as helper, but he got very tired and mistreated about having both Alice and Aunt Abbie to take care of. He didn’t like either one. But I never could get him to send them to a nursing or residence home to live. He always said “What would people say if I did that?” When people talk like that I give up because they are obviously making the choice they prefer.
Back to Aunt Abbie. She loved to cook and do everything else about the house. Mother would not let her do anything except clean her own room and do her own washing and ironing…..and Mother hated everything about housekeeping except cooking; but she said her husband expected her to take care of him and his house and (she didn’t say this,) she’d be damned it she’d let anyone else do it as long; as she could. I couldn’t talk to her about it.. Aunt Abbie tried to get her sons to let her come to NY and live with them. They wouldn’t even answer her letters. Sad.
Note: I remember her son Alphonso visiting several times. Aunt Abbie was fixing him tongue because he really like it. KCW
My sister recently found a stash of old family photos that she had forgotten she had. She was nice enough to bring them over to me to add to the collection. Among those photographs were these of my maternal grandfather, Mershell C. Graham called Poppy by us. When these photos were made, he was Shell and apparently quite dapper.
In the first picture we see him perched on a fence with a tower in the background. It looks sort of like a bell tower.
In the next photo MC seems to be holding an umbrella and wearing tails. On the other hand it looks like it’s pretty big for an umbrella. In the back is a wooden fence, but not the same one as in the tower photo. There are several people walking up and down the street too.
In the third photo my grandfather is swinging in the woods. In the background there is something that could be a house or other building.
These photos were around 1916 in Montgomery, Alabama. I think.
The last photo I include because they are such a cool looking couple. I know nothing beyond they were my grandfather’s friends.
The first poem was written on the death of Howard Graham, my grandparent’s youngest son. He died in 1932 from complications of scarlet fever. You can read more about it here My Grandmother’s Loss. James McCall and my grandmother Fannie were first cousins, their mothers were sisters.
Good-night, Little Pal
Little pal, do you know how we miss you,
Since you journeyed into the West?
Once again in dreams we kid you,
And press you close to our breast.
Your hair was bright as the sunshine,
Your voice like the music of birds,
Your eyes were blue as the heavens,
And your smile too precious for words.
Goodnight, little pal; sleep sweetly
Till the dawn of the morning light;
May the angels of God watch o’er you–
Good-night, little pal, good-night.
In memory of Howard A. Graham, By his pal, J.E.M.(James Edward McCall) 3/5/32
_________________________
The second poem is transcribed from the page of poems in my grandmother’s scrapbook. She pasted one thing over another, sometimes obscuring the original items on the page. The clippings are browning and fragile.
Winter in St. Antoine by James McCall
(In The Detroit Saturday Night)
In St. Antoine the snow and sleet
Whiten and glaze the drab old street
And make the snow-clad houses gleam
Like crystal castles in a dream.
There, many swarthy people dwell;
To some, ’tis heaven, to others, hell!
To me the street seems like a movie stage
Where Negro play and stars engage.
They laugh and love and dance and sing
While waiting the return of spring.
Some drown their heart-aches deep
In winter time on St. Antoine.
There, on the gutters frozen brink
A dope-fiend lies, with eyes that blink
And from a neighboring cabaret
come sounds of song and music gay.
At windows, tapping, here and there,
Sit dusky maidens young and fair,
With painted cheeks and brazen eyes.
and silk clad legs crossed to the thigh
Upon the icy pavements wide,
Gay brown-faced children laugh and slide
While tawny men in shiny cars
Drive up and down the street like czars.
Into a church across the way
There goes a bridal party gay.
While down the street like a prairie-fire,
Dash a bandit car and a cruising flyer.
Around the corner whirls a truck,
An old coal-peddler’s horse is struck;
The horse falls on the frozen ground,
The dark blood spouting from its wound.
A motley crowd runs to the scene;
A woman old, from shoulders lean,
Unwraps a quilt her hands have pieced
And spreads it o’er the shivering beast.
Among the swarthy folk who pass
Among the slippery street of glass,
Are some in furs and some in rags;
Lovely women, wretched hags,
White-haired migrants from the South;
Some wrapped in blankets, pipes in mouth;
Some smile while others seem to shiver,
As though they long for Swanee River;
But though they dream with tear wet eyes
Of cotton-fields and sunny skies.
They much prefer the heaven and hell
On St Antoine, where free men dwell.
______________________________
Jo Mendi was a famous chimpanzee at the Detroit Zoo.
Their backyard was full of flowers, as you can see, with a bird bath in the middle. My grandfather is holding an apple off of the apple tree just off camera to the right. My grandmother made wonderful applesauce with those apples and lots of cinnamon. The vegetable garden was behind the flowers. They were married on June 11, 1919 in Montgomery Alabama and came directly to Detroit. Both were 70 years old in this photo and had been married for 39 years.
This is one of my favorite photographs of the two of them together. I like the peeling and the white out and even the scotch tape. This one was taken on the side of their house. If we could look in the basement window on the left, we would see my grandfather’s shop which smelled of machine oil and wood and basement and faintly of the pine-sol he sprinkled around. “Lizzie”, the model T Ford is behind them. It was taken 2 February 1941. I bet it was Sunday.
To read my grandfather’s proposal letter to my grandmother, click here. For other Sepia Saturday photographs of older couples and who knows what else this week, click here.
I am feeling fine today and I hope that this will find you and all at home well. I am off from my work today. No, not sick just felt like taking a bit of rest and too it has been raining all day and it was such a fine day for sleep before taking my midday nap I had to talk a little to my sweetheart, I only wish I could hear her voice and be made to feel happy. Dear I don’t know anything of interest to write about just now. Things are pretty quiet in Detroit, the factories are all getting ready for a big after war business and I think this city will get her share of it. I am sorry that your mother has been sick, I hope she is O.K. and her self again.
Miss Snow formerly of Montgomery now Mrs. Kelly of Detroit lost her husband last week, I think she will bring the body home for burial. They have him now in storage until she is ready to leave for home with him. Now dear I wrote you sometime ago and told you that I had something to tell you when I saw you, but I just can’t keep it any longer, what I want to tell you dear is this, I feel as if I have tried a single life long enough and now I am going to ask you to become my wife. Now dear, if you will commit to the above request let me know right away and I will write and ask the permission of your mother to marry you, and with her consent we will then fix the time of the wedding. Now I hope you won’t let this shock you any, and please answer me as soon as possible, if we should get married I shall want you to come to this city to live after the wedding, so dear while you are considering the questions of marriage you may also consider the question of residing in Detroit, also.
Mershell “Shell” Graham
Now dear please don’t keep me waiting too long for an answer to this letter, as I am over anxious to hear what your answer will be. Remember me kindly to your mother and sisters, with lots of love and many thousand kisses I close, looking to receive an early and favorable reply
Today while looking for old Easter pictures, I found a partial answer to the question I asked at the end of my blog post on the migration from Montgomery to points north – Did Lowndes Adams and my grandfather ever see each other again, or keep in touch? I found a photo from 1965 of Lowndes and four of his sisters. I don’t know where it was taken, not at my grandparents house for sure, but it shows they did keep in touch. From L to R we have: Jessie, Maude, Jane, Alice and Lowndes.
Here is a list of household members in the 1900 census. James M Adams 53 Ida Adams 41 Sarah Adams 18 Emaline Adams 16 Maud Adams 13 Ida Jessie Adams 12 Lowndes W Adams 9 James Russel Adams 6 Alice Adams 3
Although Jane doesn’t appear in this census, she does appear in the 1910 census as an 8 year old.
