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You can’t go home again

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Mom, mid-1960s
Mom, mid-1960s

Hi Mommy,

It’s been awhile since I’ve written, although you know I’ve been talking to you every day. I have everything else in the world to think about this time of year, but my mind ventures back to 626 Pine Street in Camden – the neighborhood, our lives together there in the early 1960s. How many times did we talk and laugh about that narrow first-floor apartment with the big backyard in that rowhouse  that seemed so big to me.

You know I drove down there one a day off in 1990, parked across the street and just looked at that tiny little row house. There were workmen rehabbing the building and one of them,  seeing me with a nice car, professionally attired. struck up a conversation about how they were fixing things up, trying to bring the neighborhood back, and maybe I wanted to buy a nice investment property? Maybe so, I smiled. I used to live here when I was little, I volunteered. Then, you should come back and invest in the neighborhood, he said. Yes, I said, perhaps I should.

And I knew I wouldn’t. I had come back there for a glimpse of a world that no longer existed. I remember the sidewalk were I crouched and scratched at the dirt between the concrete slabs with a popsicle stick, trying to dig my way to China. I remember summer afternoons where people came out, swept and scrubbed their steps with a broom dipped in hot sudsy pine cleaner.  The step-scrubbing came only after the insides of our homes had been scrubbed, dusted, and tidied to a fare-thee-well, of course. And all of that might have come on top of a day’s work, or a night shift at the Campbell soup factory.

And here in an evening, or on a Saturday afternoon, the kids would play and the adults would sit on the steps and watch us. We were especially close to the Bennetts – Cheryl and Butch were a few years older than me, but they let me tag along behind them.  They had an older relative we knew as Aunt Sug, a wizened woman with ebony skin, care-worn hands and the kindest eyes. She sat in her lawn chair and regarded us with amusement. Occasionally, she’d share a clump of  her Argo starch with me. (Apparently, this starch-eating phenomenon surprised and distressed Northern physicians, who believed that it contributed to anemia and folic acid deficiency in pregnant women. This 1967 Time magazine article reported:

To their astonishment, Northern doctors have lately discovered that eating laundry starch is all the rage among Negro women—especially pregnant women—in many Northern-city slums. At D.C. General Hospital, Chief Obstetrician Dr. Earnest Lowe estimates that up to one-fourth of his patients are starch addicts. At Los Angeles County Hospital, three or four patients a week are diagnosed as having anemia apparently caused by starch binges.

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Aunt Sug also dispensed discipline.  Her favorite admonition was, “You better be good or I’ll shoot you!” Actually, she was always threatening to shoot me. The last time I saw her, I was leaving with Dad for the weekend and she said, “You’d better come back and see me, or I’m gonna shoot you!”  Years passed before I stopped being afraid that she really would come get me for not visiting her.

The neighbors congregated around the Bennetts’ steps to play checkers, drink Coca-Cola, and talk about the issues of the day. It was there that they debated whether the 1963 March on Washington would do any good. I have a couple of distinct memories of that time. One is the day that a bunch of men with fezzes marched down our street. I don’t know why. Another was the Saturday afternoon that someone shouted out, “Colored boy on American Bandstand!” and everybody ran in the house, turned on the TV and saw:

When the song ended, we ran back outside, excited.  The older kids knew all about him. “You know he blind?” “I’m gonna get that record!””What’s his name?””Little Stevie Wonder!”

I locked my car and walked down to the drugstore on the corner. That corner and that building fascinated me because both were triangle shaped:

The drug store, of course, was tiny compared to my memory. When you entered, the counter ran along the left side and the back wall, where the prescription counter stood. I remembered the two white men in white pharmacist’s jackets who worked there. There were shelves filled with merchandise in front of me. I don’t think that in the early 60s, the store had such an array of rat and roach killers: borax and Raid and those big-barreled pump-action insecticide spray guns. Rat traps. Bait. Mousetraps. I walked back to my car and looked my old house one more time.

Our apartment door was immediately on the right when you entered the house. A flight of stairs directly in front of you led to the upstairs apartment. There were also steps that went to the basement, where I occasionally went to visit toys that were stashed there, or to squash waterbugs. I don’t recall our upstairs neighbors. Open the door to our apartment and you are in a small living room. A couch is directly across from you. To the right of the couch, there’s a small bookcase that holds some volumes of children’s stories, a Bible, and a few odds and ends. A small black and white television is on the same wall as the door.

To the right of the living room area, there is the front room where you had her bedroom furniture. We slept there, except for when I slept on the couch. To the left was the kitchen, and behind that, a short hall that led to the back door. The  bathroom was tucked behind the kitchen, on your left as you went out to the backyard.

I remember the routines. How I would come home from kindergarten at the Broadway School and ask for permission to have a slice of bread and butter. It was my favorite treat. How you used to wash our clothes with a big old pink old wringer washer you’d been given, warning me not to ever go near it.

How, on Saturday morning, you would dress me in my itchy crinoline, vaseline on my legs,  anklet socks and patent leather shoes and we would walk to our storefront church. (I was always confused by that church, not only because we went on Saturday, but also because when you got to the front door, you would raise your hand in salute and say, “Hail!”) A woman at the door would do the same gesture, and we would go in for the service, where I was frequently pressed to sing, “Yes, Jesus Loves Me.” Other than that and the memory of you singing with the a cappella choir, I only remember that the other kids in the church were two boys. Sometimes we were allowed to leave the service and sit in the kitchen. The boys got me to play this game where we took one of the pennies we had for the collection plate, licked it, and stuck it to our forehead. I think the object was to make your penny stick the longest. It was great fun until one of the boys swallowed his penny. They made him eat a lot of bread. It took a couple of years before I realized how that was supposed to make the penny come out.

I think I was about six when the Pastor of that church, Evangelist Crowdy, died in a car accident. John Facenda announced it on the news. I didn’t tell you. I don’t think I understood what death was. Eventually, a church member told you and you came and told me. When I told you I had seen it on the news, you were shocked. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I didn’t have an answer. I do recall filing past his coffin with you. I think I touched his hand. It felt funny.

I remember the special times, too. Two moments stand out for me. There was my fifth birthday, when you threw me a party and Cousin Ralphie and I danced the Twist.

Ralphie and I did the up and down part, to the floor and back, while the adults cheered us on:

You gave me a tricycle, which was my favorite of favorite toys until I got a two-wheeler three years later. Here we are, cutting the cake as Ralphie looks on:

Cutting the cake

The other was from being the flower girl in your best friend’s wedding. I never felt so pretty as I did that day. My first time having my hair straightened and curled, so it looked more like yours.

I was the flower girl, Mom was the bridesmaid
I was the flower girl, Mom was the bridesmaid

I know. You want me to talk about the coat. How it was a blazing hot day, and we’d walked to Broadway.It was a big and busy street, then, prosperous enough that there was actually a Tiffany’s jewelry store. Not our destination, though. We went to the Goodwill. I needed clothes. While you were browsing the short sets, I saw a red ski jacket. I had to have it. You said no. I whined. You said no, again. I whined louder. This went a couple of rounds until you got frustrated and said, “Fine!” You bought the coat and insisted that I wear it home. I whined about being hot. Suddenly, you seemed to have gone deaf.

You laughed about that for years afterward.

And of course, an account of Pine Street wouldn’t be complete without a mention of the time I walked into a brick wall. It’s not as stupid as it sounds. Well, it is, but I keep in mind that i was about five. I was playing Space Monsters in the backyard with my friends. The narrow lane on the side of the house was the safe area; the backyard was where the space monsters could grab you and make you blind. We would run out, be “blinded,” and have to find our way back into the alley. That was how I walked into the wall – my eyes were closed. Mom they’re laughing. Hey, I was five. Give me a break!

I remember the gush of blood from my forehead. I remember walking into the kitchen where you were cooking. I was trailing blood on the hall floor. I remember saying, “Mommy,” and I remember your horrified face. I must have looked a bloody mess – you know how they say face wounds look worse than they are. I remember you getting a washcloth and my face turning it bloody red. Somehow, Uncle Sonny was summoned, and he carried me to the ER in his arms.

It occurs to me now that you were only about 22 when this happened, and he was even younger.

Since then, I have carried a small dent on my forehead.

Sleepytime, Mommy. I missed you at Thanksgiving. I love you very much.

Kim

New fantasy app: GIGO for public databases and websites

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Eva Martin, ex-slaveOne of the most important and powerful features of computational journalism is the ability to pull information from multiple databases and remix them in a variety of ways. Of course, that means that errors in those databases will be compounded and remixed as well. I wrote a bit about this problem in an October 27, 2009 post for Blogher:

“Last April, Amy Gahran blogged a Los Angeles Times story revealing that a crime map featured on the Los Angeles police department website was producing faulty data because of an error in the software that plotted the locations of specific crimes. Thus, crime clusters were showing up in low-crime neighborhoods, and some high-crime areas appeared deceptively safe. The error was particularly vexing for the high-profile news aggregator, Everyblock.com, which relied on the maps and as part of its coverage.”

The thing is, that kind of error is relatively easy to solve, compared to other kinds of errors that crop up in public records.

For example,  sometimes we learn that database information is erroneous long after it is created.  For example, police corruption scandals can throw years of crime data into doubt. In Philadelphia in the 1990s, revelations of drug dealing, and other criminal acts by officers in the city’s 39th precinct cast doubt on 1400 prior criminal convictions.  However, if I obtain records from the Philadelphia courts or district attorney’s office for that period, can I necessarily be sure that the appropriate asterisks have been retroactively applied to those cases?

Here’s a more challenging example — not about errors in a database, but potential errors in data interpretation. About 10 years ago, I taught an interdisciplinary humanities course for which I used the University of Virginia’s online exhibit drawn from the WPA slave narratives. It’s an invaluable collection that includes transcripts and even some audio recordings from the late 1930s. The collection has an equally invaluable disclaimer designed to help contemporary readers place the narratives in appropriate historical context:

Often the full meanings of the narratives will remain unclear, but the ambiguities themselves bear careful consideration. When Emma Crockett spoke about whippings, she said that “All I knowed, ’twas bad times and folks got whupped, but I kain’t say who was to blame; some was good and some was bad.” We might discern a number of reasons for her inability or unwillingness to name names, to be more specific about brutalities suffered under slavery. She admitted that her memory was failing her, not unreasonable for an eighty-year-old. She also told her interviewer that under slavery she lived on the “plantation right over yander,”and it is likely that the children or grandchildren of her former masters, or her former overseers, still lived nearby; the threat of retribution could have made her hold her tongue.

Even with the disclaimers, I found some students concluded that the slaves interviewed had not suffered that much in captivity. I had to help them to read the documents in historical and cultural context. As more primary documents become accessible to people who aren’t experts in the subject matter, the opportunity for misreading and missing the context of those documents multiply.

So I was thinking, what is there was a kind of wiki for collecting errors in public databases, enhanced with a widget that could be embedded in any website? Call it GIGO: Garbage In Garbage Out. Create an online form that would allow people to submit errors – with appropriate documentation, of course. Perhaps use the kind of vetting process, Hakia.com uses to come up with a list of credible sites in response to a given search request. (Here’s an example of a Hakia search on global warming.)  What do you think?

Who is a journalist and what are a journalist’s rights?

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New Press Shield Law Won’t Clarify Blogger’s Rights

For decades, press freedom advocates have pushed for a national law to protect journalists’ rights to withhold confidential sources and data from government authorities. A bill wending its way through Congress, the Free Flow of Information Act of 2009, has come closer to passage than ever, with the blessing of the Obama administration, according to a postfrom the Reporters’ Committee on Freedom of the Press.

Journalist Josh Wolf Freed From Prison However, if the bill passes, it won’t apply to many of the people who are  increasingly responsible for reporting the news.  That’s because the bill defines a journalist as a person who gathers and disseminates information as a paid employee of a news organization.  That means freelance bloggers and reporters will continue to operate in the legal limbo created by inconsistent state laws and judicial precedents.

For example, in a  case reported by Damon Kiesow for Poynter.org,  the New Hampshire Supreme court is considering whether a mortgage blogger who published a confidential document containing damaging information about a lender is  entitled to the protections accorded journalists under that state’s shield law.  The defendant describes himself as an online journalist: someone who, as his attorney put it operates with the intention to “gather, analyze and disseminate.”

That’s the standard advanced by former Society of Professional Journalists president Christine Tatum when I interviewed her in 2006 about the jailing of videoblogger Josh Wolf, who set a record for serving federal time for refusing to surrender outtakes from footage she shot of a 2005 demonstration. Ironically, Tatum and the other experts I interviewed for that story said Wolf’s case was a prime example of the need for a Federal shield law.

The Good Mother, Part 3: And so the girl marries

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Hi Mommy,

You and my father married in a double wedding ceremony with his brother and your cousin. It was an outdoor wedding, and from the one picture I have seen of you and your fellow bride, it was pretty and summer-casual.  Your sister showed me the picture; she said there weren’t many. I have never seen a picture of you and Dad together when you were a couple.

Dad comes from a big family that was as well known in that part of South Jersey as yours. He’s the 7th of 12 kids born to parents who had left sharecropping in Georgia to come to New Jersey. His parents’ parents had been slaves, and his maternal grandparents had also come to Jersey, along with several members of their generation. So Dad had grown up in the bosom of a huge extended family that stretched across Camden County to Philadelphia and as far out as Pottstown and Phoenixville. They were their own village — not much need to spend time with strangers, until it came time to do business or find a suitable mate.

This is what you and Dad had in common: a belief in the value of work, and a desire to make the best of whatever you were given.  Dad’s family had come through the Depression logging the Jersey pines,  becoming trusted caretakers for local  businesses owned by merchants who lived in the big city. doing day work, or whatever came along. Your family, too, was good at finding whatever work there was to be had.  Both families took pride in rejecting welfare, no matter how tough the times got. (Not that welfare was all that easy for black families to get in those days, but that is another story.)

So you had those things in common. Also, among your peers, you were unique in having been Someplace Else. Well you were unique among the girls. Dad had been to Kentucky when he was in the Army. His brothers had been to the Pacific theater during and after the Big War.  Living someplace else let you know something else was out there. But how to get to it? And what kind of dreams could a young Negro couple have anyway? Especially one where the husband was clearly too dark to pass for anything else?

This last point made your father-in-law skeptical, you told me.  Then again, Grandpop Jesse was a tough man.  Thirty-five years of hard work and no-nonsense family leadership had made it possible for him to own his own home and enough land to allow the family to grow much of its own food. I think you must have looked a little soft to him.  Jesse Albert Pearson came from field slaves; your olive skin and curly hair told him that your family had worked in the Big House. And as far as you knew, he was right. You told me about forbears who had been cooks and chauffeurs in Virginia and Maryland and more recently, among the big houses on Philadelphia’s Main Line.  Slavery was not part of your family’s story, as far as you knew.

You and my Dad shared a house with your cousin and her husband. The two brothers worked construction, until eventually Daddy got on at the Post Office.  There were arguments about things like muddy boots being left on clean kitchen floors.  Before long, both brides were pregnant, and the little house could not contain all the hopes and fears and tears and excitement and anguish.

Which is to say that neither marriage worked out, but babies were born and they were  much loved.  The second of those babies was me.

The earliest picture of me, aged 3
The earliest picture of me, aged 3. I'm on the left.

Here is what you told me about me before I was born.

First, I made you sick. You puked for seven months. Sorry about that. Scary thing for the girl that you were,  no doubt.  Perhaps a midwife could have told you that trick about eating plain yogurt before meals to dampen the nausea. In any event, with so many of the women around you seeming to have an easier time being pregnant, I got the impression that your sickness made you feel even more alone – a loneliness your husband was at a loss to understand.

Second, you didn’t have a nice maternity wardrobe. On TV, a pregnant Lucy Ricardo got to wear cute smocks — with big Peter Pan collars and dainty bows that matched the bows she would wear in her hair — while a bewildered but adoring Ricky tried to respond to her cravings and mood swings. In Chesilhurst, pregnant women wore their husbands’ pants and shirts used pots to boil their baby bottles, not expensive sterilizers. You tried to adjust.

Your father-in-law tested your mettle.  You told me that on one Sunday visit while you were pregnant, he called you to the backyard for a chat.  You don’t remember what it was about, but in those days, when an elder called you, you came.  He had a freshly-killed hog hanging from a tree, and he was just beginning to butcher it.  While he chatted amiably, he plunged a big knife into the hog’s belly and dragged it down to expose the entrails. Nauseous already, the hog’s reeking innards were about to make you swoon. As you fought to look attentive and keep from puking, your mother-in-law bustled out, alarmed! “Jesse!” she cried. “You can’t talk to Anna while you do that! The baby will have the face of a hog!”

When I was born, you told me Grandmom Mattie inspected my face to assure herself that it was quite human.  (When you told me this story I was in my 30s and Grandmom Mattie had been dead for a while. I took some comfort in remembering that she had told me I was pretty.)

The only other thing I know about the circumstances of my birth was that I came at 6:30 in the morning, and my father had already gone to work.  I tried to come out while you were in the hospital elevator, and a nurse put a hand on my emerging head to try to hold me back. She yelled , “Stop that! It’s not time yet!” And you said,  “I can’t!” and soon after, when you reached the delivery room, I was born.  Six pounds, three ounces, but the lungs weren’t in such good shape and you said one foot was curled into a club, but I think you must have been mistaken about that, because no one else remembers it and that just doesn’t go away from wearing orthopedic shoes.

The important part is that I was here, and eventually my lungs got better, but your marriage didn’t.

My mother at work
My mother at work

The two of you split and I was moved around between Dad’s relatives and yours while you each saved up money to make separate homes for me.  Eventually, you got an apartment in a Camden rowhouse and an office job, most likely because they thought you were Italian and not Negro.  I came to live with you, visiting Daddy and his new wife in Philadelphia on the weekends.

The thing that I want to thank you for the most is that you never talked badly about each other in front of me.  And although there were many rocky times in the half-century to come,  the two of you managed to support me through the triumphs and tragedies of my life.  For this, I will always be grateful.

I love you, Mommy. Talk to you again soon.

Love,

Kim