Uri – Me – Phil – Miriam – Me – Miriam – Miriam – MiriamJilo, Tyra- Shirley, Jim, Ife, Jilo & Ife – Me, Jim, Ife, Jilo, Ife – Jim, Ife, Jilo, Tyra
While looking through a box of photographs the other day, I came across some negatives from the 1970s.
The first strip was taken in 1970, when I was a revolutionary librarian at the Black Conscience Library in Detroit. I was pregnant with my first daughter, Jilo. Uri grew up to be an engineer. Phil later confessed to being a snitch, Miriam is Tyra’s mother. I was 23.
The second strip was made in 1974 in Atlanta. Shirley was visiting from Detroit, as was Tyra. Jim, my husband, was a printer with the Atlanta Voice. I was at home full time. Ife, my second daughter, was about to turn one year old. Jilo was 3. Tyra was 2. I was 26.
Although this is not a clock, which was the theme for this weeks Sepia Saturday, it does reflect time. You can see more timely entries here.
Kris ((me) and my sister, Pearl at our Cleage grandparents house with our “mashies” and Easter baskets. 1953
Memories of Easter – dying eggs in my Graham grandparent’s basement on Easter Saturday with my sister and cousins. Easter baskets with jelly beans and chocolate eggs and one big chocolate Easter bunny. Tiny fuzzy chicks. The year someone gave us 4 or 5 real chicks that died one by one in their box in the basement. Sugar eggs decorated with wavy blue, pink and yellow icing and a little scene inside. Reading the book “The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes”, new clothes, going to church. Going by the Grandmother Cleage’s after church. What I don’t remember is gathering for a big Easter meal like we did for Thanksgiving and Christmas. I wonder why?
I have some Easter hats here and although you can’t see them clearly, my sister and I are holding some stuffed bunnies. To see other Easter or bunny Sepia Saturday offerings click here.
A quilt of my life and those in it for the years 1966 through 1969 with on photo of me and my oldest daughter in 1971. It is about 23 X 23 and was done for the upcoming quilt show at Southwest Atlanta Art Center next month. The challenge was to make a quilt all in one color.
Here I am starting my one and only knitting project. When it was done the edges curled up. It was light blue, very long and wrapped around my head and face during the cold Detroit winters. I added fringe to the ends and wore it all through college. I’m wearing it below in 1969. To see other SepiaSaturday offerings click HERE.
Christmas 1968. L to R My sister Pearl, me, Nanny in the window.
I can’t find a picture from Christmas 1967 but I think we looked pretty much the same. I bought that pea jacket at the army surplus in Santa Barbara when I was there for a student conference, summer of 1967. I cut my hair that summer too, right after the Detroit riot. Not sure if Pearl had cut hers yet in 1967. I have looked at this photo many times but this was the first time I noticed my grandmother looking out of the window at us. We had moved to the flat with my grandparents that fall, so it’s a different house, but it’s Christmas time and I look the same. I had just graduated from Wayne State University with a major in Drawing and Printmaking and a minor in English. On January 2, I caught the Greyhound to San Fransisco. But that’s not today’s memory. Here is something I wrote in 1967.
Christmas 1967
It was Christmas and cold. Snow blew wet, sticking to my coat and hair. We went to the shortest corner, down Northfield, past three Junior High girls laughing and cars sliding slow on the ice. The sky was gray behind bare branches. Snow fell quiet, without any wind. My sister and I talked some about…I can’t even remember. We crossed to Pattengill Elementary, went down past the school and stopped outside the empty play field.
I got out my new movie camera and told her to walk away, down toward Colfax, and not to act silly. She started and I turned on the camera, feeling silly myself, taking pictures like a country bumpkin in the city. She started lunging to one side, sort of a half skip with some serious drag to it. I told her to be serious. She did, then walked back. I tried to keep the camera from moving. It stuck and I turned it off twice with a heavy click, jarring, blurring the picture.
We went inside the playground. I shot some more of her walking up and away. A little boy was sledging down a driveway into the street. She said, come on take some behind the trash cans. It’ll be good. I shot some more. Discovered while she was behind the garbage cans I was out of film.
Both of us bent over the camera and tried to shut it off, but we couldn’t. My hands were cold. Red, wet and cold. I put on my gloves and we unscrewed the battery door with her suitcase key to shut it off.
We walked back toward the far corner. I wrote BLACK POWER in the snow, and then PATRIA O MUERTE and VENCEREMOS. Pearl asked what else can we write but I didn’t know. We went on out of the playground and down Epworth talking about how bad somebody can be to you and you still love them. We went on down Allendale. There was a dog sleeping on a porch. Pearl said, loud, keep on sleeping! And he did.
It was getting dark and still snowing. Cold, wet, quiet snow. Grey like the inside of a shell and quiet like when your ears are stuffed up from a cold. Some girls went by across the street, talking loud. We turned back down Ironwood and went home.
I didn’t grow up around fruitcake making but there was always some around. I liked the dark kind not the light, blah type. I have been making fruitcake for years now. Sometimes I don’t get it in the mail in time and we end up eating fruitcake through the winter and into spring. You can see from the large bottle of rum that I not only soak it in spirits but add some in the mixing. People have already been requesting cakes so I should get started. Last year I started in November. This year I’m spending so much time doing posts on Christmas memories that I am not making them this year. Or maybe the memory will be 2010 – the year I did blog posts.
I’m in the front, my mother is propping up my sister Pearl. My father took the photo in our yard. He was the pastor of St. John’s Congregational Church in Springfield Massachusetts and we lived in the parsonage/community house right next to the church. We moved to my parents hometown, Detroit, when I was four where we still had plenty of snow.
These photographs are in a crumpling album that my father put together back in the 1940’s. He wrote comments on all the photographs. I have to photograph or scan them before they disappear.
