Pride of Family: Four Generations of American Women of Color (Harlem Moon Classics) - Softcover

Ione, Carole

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9780767918442: Pride of Family: Four Generations of American Women of Color (Harlem Moon Classics)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0767918444 ISBN 13: 9780767918442

Publisher: Harlem Moon, 2004

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“From the moment I read the words [my great-grandmother] Frances Anne Rollin wrote in Boston on January 1, 1868—“The year renews its birth today with all its hopes and sorrows”—she became my beacon, the foremother who would finally share with me our collective past . . . —From the Preface

Originally published to rave reviews, Pride of Family is the dazzling true story of an upper middle-class African American clan—and four generations of extraordinary women. Carole Ione, rebel daughter from a long line of rebel daughters, traces her heritage from her mother, Leighla, a sad and lovely journalist, actress, and composer; to glamorous grandmother Be-Be, the popular restaurateur and former showgirl; to upright great-aunt Sistonie, one of Washington’s first black female physicians; and, finally, to great-grandmother Frances Anne Rollin, the indomitable feminist-abolitionist. It is through her great-grandmother’s brilliant diaries that Ione finds enlightenment—a deep connection to the women she cherishes and the proud, glorious history they share.

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About the Author:

CAROLE IONE, also known simply as “Ione,” is a writer and counselor specializing in heritage and women’s issues. She is also a playwright and director who travels extensively throughout the world teaching and lecturing and encouraging others in the exploration of self and family. She resides in New York’s Hudson Valley.

One

The Women in the House

511 Florida Avenue. The address conjures tropical colors and ocean views, but there was actually a certain austerity about the narrow three-story row house in Washington, D.C. In the thirties, its front windows opened to the screech of metal against metal as the streetcars lurched and sparked their way down the sooty avenue. Its rear windows looked out on a tangle of faded back-alley porches and stairways-a landscape that seemed to me even as a child to contain all the unexpressed sadness of the neighborhood. And darkness reigned in between, accentuated by my great-aunt's insistence on painting the interior walls of the house brown. We, too, were varying shades of brown, and I can still see and feel us there, each with a certain weight and substance, yet somehow suspended in the murky interior.

In 1937, there were three women in the house, four with my arrival. A litany of resentments and grudges between my grandmother and my great-aunt had been placed on hold-my birth was, after all, a joyous occasion. We women, it seems in retrospect, constituted an inner sanctum, despite the presence of my father.

My great-aunt, Dr. Ionia Rollin Whipper-a staunch figure in Washington's black haute bourgeoisie-was Sister Onie to my mother and to the St. Luke's Episcopal Church Club women. She was Tant'Onie to my father (his shortened version of the Tante Onie she suggested) and just plain Onie to her brother, Leigh, and her closest women friends. But she was always Sistonie to me. More than just an aunt, she was a great-aunt, a force to be reckoned with.

My grandmother, Virginia Wheeler, by contrast, was a breezy VA or Ginnie or even Ginger to her show-business friends. My father began calling her VV, which became Be-Be to my child's tongue. Be-Be was ideally suited to a career in show business. Five feet one, she had the compressed energy, the tight, lithe body, and the shapely legs of a dancer. Her fine curly hair was cut provocatively short, setting off her aquiline nose and high cheekbones, her pointy chin and almond-shaped eyes. She loved to gamble and drink beer, and had been dismayed to find that Sistonie, having long before taken an oath that alcohol would never pass her lips, had issued a decree forbidding any form of it in her house.

My mother, Leighla Frances Whipper Lewis, was by this time a graduate student in English at Howard University, drawn to the poetry of Byron and Milton, and president of the Stylus Literary Club. A small, delicate-looking woman in her early twenties, she had prominent eyes, a heart-shaped face, and skin called caf� au lait by her many admirers. There is a picture of her taken around the time of her marriage in which she looks so vulnerable that I cannot bear to look at it for very long. I see in her face the dreams she had, and in retrospect I fear for her. Yet I know that my mother is tough, tenacious, a survivor.

My father was Hylan Garnet Lewis, a young instructor of economics at Howard who switched to sociology after meeting E. Franklin Frazier there in 1935. He was a handsome man, with light chestnut-gray eyes inherited from his mother. Named after the black educator Henry Highland Garnet, he shortened his name to Hylan in high school. He would sometimes say that his initials, H.G.L., stood for "Happy Go Lucky." An excellent student-and with a talent, since childhood, for what were called "declamations"-he was a champion debater and orator at Virginia Union University. It was as a research assistant at Howard that he spotted my mother on campus.

After courting Leighla for two years, my father got up the courage to ask Sistonie for her adopted daughter's hand. By that time, though, my father knew that the formidable Dr. Whipper was well disposed toward him-once she had come upon the young couple embracing in the vestibule and, to my father's amazement, discreetly turned away.

The fact that Sistonie knew my father's family helped. My father's father, Harry Wythe Lewis, had been principal of the Garfield School in Washington. His grandfather on his mother's side, William A. Wells, Sr., had worked his way from being a porter on the Pullman cars to an appointment as private secretary to George D. Meiklejohn, assistant secretary of war under President Wilson, the first person of color to hold such an office. His son, William junior, was a colleague of Sistonie's, holding degrees in medicine, pharmacy, and law from Howard.

Gratified that Leighla was joining forces not only with a personable young man but with a well-thought-of Washington family, Sistonie gave her blessings.

After a St. Luke's wedding in the fall of 1935, my father continued to teach and my mother to work toward her master's. They lived frugally so they could attend shows at the nearby Howard Theater, where they listened to the music of Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Fletcher Henderson, and Jelly Roll Morton. My mother got a job as a reporter with the Washington Afro-American and once landed an interview with Mary Pickford, in town to promote a film. Eventually Dr. Whipper invited my parents to live with her, both to keep her company and to help them make ends meet.

By 1937, the year of my birth, the worst of the Great Depression was over, but its aftermath lingered cloudlike over Washington and the house on Florida Avenue. It seemed to express itself in the shapes of buttons and the drape of fabrics worn by the women in the house. It seemed to lurk in the linoleum that lay beneath the rugs, and in the cheaper cuts of meat that made their way from the butcher's to the kitchen. Yet among some politically active blacks, including my mother and father, there was a sense of cautious optimism. President Roosevelt's New Deal was gathering momentum, and there was informal representation to policy makers via the so-called Black Cabinet, which operated through the influence of Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary McLeod Bethune. It was the first time since Reconstruction that such a feeling of possibility existed for blacks in America.
Mine was an easy birth-my mother wrote me years later-because of her "good hips." She named me Carole because Carol meant "song of joy," and the added e evoked Carole Lombard, the glamorous blond movie star. My middle name, Ione, was a concession to family, a simpler, more modern version of Sistonie's "Ionia."

In the hectic mornings after my arrival, my grandmother would watch in astonishment, yet with a certain amount of respect, as my great-aunt made her descent from the upper floor in a mist of powder and perfume. She would be magnificently dressed and coiffed, her hat poised at a stylish angle, gloves in hand, her pocketbook containing the requisite white handkerchief, her ample bosom replete with pearls.

This daily vision was all the more distressing to Be-Be since she was doing all of the washing, cleaning, cooking, and caring for my mother and me. "Your aunt was never dressed for any kind of housework," Be-Be told me, adding with a touch of pride, "I was used to it." And Sistonie seemed to expect it of her, even though there was a hired girl who helped with the housekeeping.

My great-aunt's imperious manner with my grandmother may have owed something to the fact that she was a doctor accustomed to giving orders and seeing them carried out by a staff of nurses. She was, in fact, on her way to Freedman's Hospital on those regal mornings. She had even taken a pediatrics refresher course in order to be prepared for any eventuality concerning me. (My mother, wanting to preserve her independence, had opted not to have her aunt deliver me, but Sistonie and Be-Be were both present at my birth at nearby Carson's Hospital, and my great-aunt was the first to cradle me in her arms.) Be-Be resented the fact that Sistonie's pronouncements about my welfare seemed to come down from on high. The source of my "six-week colic" was declared to be the richness of my mother's milk, and I was put on formula. Small doses of bicarbonate of soda and cod-liver oil were dispensed with precision, according to Sistonie's instructions.

Perhaps Sistonie could not help but treat my grandmother as a wayward girl; she was used to working with unmarried mothers who didn't know how to take care of their children or themselves and who had no access to public assistance in the segregated Washington system. (The Florence Crittenden Home was limited to white women only.) Sistonie had taken some of them into her own home to teach them cooking and hygiene; the girls often did housework as repayment. Her manner with them was stern, yet her compassion was real.

Sistonie had difficulty extending the professional compassion she showed strangers to personal warmth for my grandmother. Perhaps she considered her commanding manner therapeutic. After all, even though Sistonie's beloved brother Leigh had had an equal part in the matter, Be-Be-like Leigh-had been in the theater.

Sistonie was very much a product of her times. Many middle- and upper-class blacks, emulating the Victorian mores of prosperous whites, looked askance at what they considered the immoral world of the theater. And for blacks bent on disproving whites' myths about our race-that blacks are loose, immoral, uncivilized, even animals-such distinctions were that much more important. It seemed necessary to be even more conscious of propriety than whites in order to prove good social standing-a propriety that often became confused with skin color or free birth. Many Washington professional and social organizations fostered a class snobbery based more on lightness of skin than on any particular merit. And many-Sistonie among them-spoke proudly of having descended from free families of color, families who had never been slaves.

Be-Be made it clear to me many years later that she was more bitter about the discrimination she and her fellow actors had received at the hands of other colored people than that which she had experienced from white...

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