Cherie Lynn ~ Chapter 1 ~ Birmingham 1963

The beginning of the 1960s

My Dai was reading some of my blogs about genetic genealogy and women’s empowerment and said – it was time for me to write about Birmingham in the 1960s. I don’t know that I can.

 

I am afraid of it, still. I am afraid of my own memory of it and I am afraid of remembering, and I am afraid of what I think of myself and what others think of me.

I am sure I had no idea of the meaning of left v right and integration v segregation, or Protestantism v Catholicism. I do know that in all of these issues of life, I had two families in one, and even the lefties – lied, and pretended they were right wingers, when in front of right wingers. I was a chameleon of fear much of the time.

I had family from all walks of life, there were a couple with PhDs (in-laws of course) and there were White Trash. And much of the rainbow in-between.

These folks were no joke and it was no laughing matter to have it said of you that you were “not right in the head, just not right in the head.”

I should note from the start that I was rocked until my feet drug the ground – by the paternal grandmother who reared me and her sister who also reared me and even by the African American lady who took care of me and the house (until that stopped during the events of the 60s). The lady was Lucille Brown. I credit her with any piano and singing that I might or might not be able to do depending on folks’ opinions of my lack of talent and I was sheltered and protected by her, a protection that I missed and needed long after she was gone.

I am sure Lucille would say I was the worst little white demon she ever cared for, but I thought I would die when she was gone.

 

It makes me cry to write it right now. What had I done so bad that she was gone? And soon after (great) Uncle Louie was gone and there was nothing left but me wetting the bed. (There was also another lady, but her name is lost in my memory)

 

I remember the day of the 16^th Street Baptist Church bombing, it rattled the windows of my bedroom as we got ready for church. Usually the bombs we felt in College Hills were not a lot more then thuds at our distance from Dynamite Hill, but that Sunday morning, you felt it come up through your feet, you felt it in your body. That one was big.

We were west of Center Street and I remember the first of many neighborhood men who came to the house talking to my grandfather about not selling to Blacks. Sticking together, the man was saying there would be none on our street.

People said my paternal grandfather wasn’t right in the head also, just not right in the head. If I could look at the City Directory page I could pick out the man’s name. I remember his house, just up 5^th street and across the street from ours. I remember his excited and hurried and almost breathless story of how he must help save the neighborhood.

My grandfather told him he had no intention of moving and didn’t mind the Black people moving in. Another time my paternal grandmother about fainted, but that is another blog. Of course they were not called Black People then. They certainly were not called the N word in my house, I can’t imagine how I would have been scolded had I used any bad words. And to my grandmother’s credit when the Black folks did not ride the buses for the boycott, my grandmother did drive some folks around (John Henry Brown), so it was like living on earth and in an alternative universe all at the same time just under my own roof.

Then there was my mother’s side of the family. I lived, almost from birth, with my paternal grandparents, and my mother was an outsider – from a different state, different religion and on top of it all she looked different. Read my blog for Mamma if you like – Our Colors.

At this same time in the early 60s I got a new step mother, but can’t speak of the living – (her inclusion is written and just waits for a day to share). It is also worth noting this is not the blog to talk about all my step parents – multiple – as in many, and on both sides.

For the not right in the head, I have to admit there was something going on, whatever it was occurred about 1960 or 1961 maybe. I don’t know, no attention span, grades in school tanked and wetting the bed – still. And during this time, the crying in the night springs to mind. I remember my grandmother trying to ask, in the dark from the other bed, if there was anything she could do, would I tell her?  I know I never answered.

I had several of the family feather pillows that I had slept on from my childhood, that had been washed and re-washed. I got rid of the last one just a few years ago. The feathers came from the geese my paternal grandmother’s family had in Shelby County, from a hundred years before. Great Aunt Ethel told the story of them separating the quills from the feathers to make the down for the pillows. I vaguely remember something about the quills pricking the fingers.

When I finally got rid of that pillow, I decided that cleaning it was not worth the cost. And in some ways, I wondered if it could ever really be cleaned of a hundred years of history – much of which was toxic. As a child, I used to stuff those pillows between the bed and the wall, and I do sort of remember that this might have started, because of keeping me from falling off the bed, I did some of that too, flaying around in sweaty nightmares.

In the early 60s, the cast of characters in my life was too large, my legal guardian grandparents plus every relative and half the family friends all told me what to do and none of them agreed.

I had never read newspapers (except some of the funnies), not that that would have done any good for learning the truth in Birmingham. At the time, from what I understand, both the morning and evening newspapers didn’t really cover the story of what was happening in our world, factually.

I am sure I barely learned the fifth grade, and then little after that, I was acting out and got sent to the principal for talking but I do not know what had changed, exactly – I can say I will likely never remember, and don’t need to, but life as I knew it, shifted, and this would not be the last time I saw polar shifts in my early years.

Politics were never discussed in our house, no one talked to each other very much in any case, I was an immature little girl, who lived with very old people, all of whom were busy. On occasion I would go to aunts and uncles and more often great aunt and uncle, and soon there would be the changes in school, and soon I would have a new step father (about the age of my grandfather) and a new step mother (about the age of a sister).

I did not realize the magnitude of anything going on in the world in 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama. I did not know there was a world or that I had a place in it, I lived in the little porch side room (with the piano), and the big closet I could play in, and had our yard that filled my days and my mind – I turned 11.

I can’t think of how to say what I thought about the bombs, maybe because I was told so little. I was too busy remembering what I was supposed to believe and think and say in front of whom. But I did understand that they were horrid and frightening.

The right wing bigots then were just as nasty as they are now, both male and female. I got new bigots and new liberals in my life those years because of marriages in near family and added family friends.

The bigots, those back then, and those still alive today, are like being friends and family with rattlesnakes – and I should not insult snakes, because nature wise, I love all creatures including snakes and I treasure forests and dales. But the bigots, both sides, still make it hard to speak out – I am scared of them, to this day, and do not mind saying it.

My violin playing was short lived, it began in January 1963 and ended in August 1963. It was the one thing that had calmed me down and from the time I picked it up, I did well with it. We were told we would not be in the recital that year, but I did get a place in the recital anyway in May of 1963 and played Reuben Reuben (Reuben and Rachel). The teacher had allowed me to take the violin home with me for the summer and when I had to return it, it was like when Lucille left; taking the violin away was like taking the very beat from my heart.

I choke up again to remember, like with so many things, from the time.

It was a wild time in so many ways, television cameras were just a block and a half from my house, men in pickup trucks and cars patrolled the neighborhood and even surrounded the school. I was told I could not go down there, I was not supposed to even get out of the yard, but if I just got to the corner of the sidewalk I could see a bit of Graymont School and then run back up into the yard as vehicles approached.

These patrolling men were nasty men, like the ones at the two bars down the road, (below Legion Field) where, when my father was in town he frequented. One of his wives now long dead used to wait for him at the door with a cast iron frying pan in case he came home ready for a fight and prepared to strike first. I still say if the laws had been then, as they are now, that one would have gone to jail.

Part of the yard of our house was high above the street and standing in the yard anyone could look down into the cars, and one of these cars had a man with his privates exposed in his lap and he like many of them who just cruised around the blocks, slugging whiskey from pint bottles, and washing it with warm beer. Flying those flags.

 

Those flags are something else, I tell you. I flat-out learned that flag from these men, some that would piss in the bush behind the Fig tree over at the other Knight’s house – (we never had any thoughts we were related to those Knights, but it would be nice to check and see now.)

My grandmother finally decided to walk to the school that day, that day that should have been the first day of school and before that terrible bombing. She was not taking me to the school to start first day, she was walking to see and keep me out of school.

Today, we can see the stories through newspaper archives and the many histories written by others about this day, at this school, memories much more important than my own recollections. And some of the pictures certainly match my memory and convey the tone.

I remember my grandmother was interviewed by Davenport Smith of WBRC Television and I don’t know that I said much of anything to anyone; the people standing on the street are not as much in my memory as those men ready to block two little boys from starting to school.

I guess no one ever said to me it was those types of men and their friends who were setting off those bombs, I would certainly have been terrified not just frightened, but I was frightened enough anyway of men that smelled of liquor and groped.

It wasn’t like I didn’t know some of them as neighborhood men. In the years before, before this wife, before this time, there would be various reasons to get my father out of either one of those two bars. It was me in the car with my grandfather driving to the bar and me going in to find him and tell him it was time to come home.

At other times I would be out with my dad for the day until someone would have to come to the bar to get me and take me home because my dad was waylaid and not going home for a while. During the day, the bar served as the short order restaurant and there was food at night, and there were pool tables and many of the men were union brothers, steel mill and plant co-workers and neighbors on their way home.

Those bars were just blocks from Graymont School and Dynamite Hill and the 16^th Street Baptist Church and they were nests of political planners and you did not find any left wingers in either bar. Especially those years, those men with their flags and their drunken hoots and hollers, patrolling with their flies closed and open, took over streets and their word was law.

One of my dad’s closest union brothers was in there too often also, and later his wife as well, after she took to drinking, nothing more vicious than a female white trash drunk. Well, maybe.

Trips to the drunk tank for some of those men were not uncommon, neither were fights. The fights were rarely inside as that would get you barred, so they were contrived and controlled enough as participants to ‘take it outside’.

There was another bar, where men made plans in drunken rages of who was boss and we will show those… It was not far, over the hill toward the mill in Shady Side.

 

 

I hope I share these below correctly to make Google happy with my giving them sufficient credit. If not I will remove promptly.

 

 

 

 

Addition: March 30, 2018

I reporter has passed, his legacy remains.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2n5Q8yfcoY&feature=youtu.be

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2n5Q8yfcoY&feature=youtu.be