Dear Joseph

I was only fifteen years old when I experienced the greatest challenges of my life. During the Depression years of the thirties, many fifteen-year-olds were doing adult tasks, and it was not uncommon to see children working in textile mills or coal mines. It is very strange how you can grow up in a few days. One day you’re content collecting ants in a jar, and the next day you’re struggling to keep a family together.

As a child in Fayville, Kansas, I remember my mother as a small olive-colored woman with a worn and tired face. The embedded wrinkles and graceful lines that fell upon her face were like a curtain of hurt that she wore. Like most women in 1934, she had only one good dress: it was a plain blue dress, not torn or spotted, that she wore to church only on Sundays. Yet deep within my mother was kept a constant well of understanding and love from which she let us children drink.

At one time our house was filled with much love. My father worked as a Pullman Porter for the railroad. He was a tall, light-skinned, gray-haired man with a very impressive look, a mixture of Greek and Turkish characteristics. He did not fit the mold of the average colored man of the time. Perhaps he could have passed for other than Black, but his wool-like hair and broad nose were identifying characteristics that could not be hidden.

Dressed in his Pullman Porter uniform, I used to imagine him being the captain of a luxurious ocean liner. He was so proud to be a colored porter; for it was the kind of job that people in the community respected. He kept telling us that there were opportunities regardless of what color you were. He was meticulous in his job, serving the people on the trains and living as if his color did not matter. He lived in a dream world, refusing to see the signs around him that said, “Colored Only.” He walked as if discrimination was an unnoticeable fact or that it did not touch him, but the Depression was slowly eating into every fragment of society.

When he would take us to the train station, it was exciting to see so many people walking and moving about with large and small baggage or carrying great bundles in their arms–an ecstatic river of life, moving and dignified with briefcases and newspapers. Their expressions were serious and their eyes were filled with destinations as yet unseen. The great and magnificent chandeliers hung in the station like sacred lights to some ancient temple. Doors of shining, polished brass were like the entrance to a majestic, golden kingdom. Fashionably dressed people, men wearing neat pinstripe suits, women with hats decorated with peacock feathers, paraded through the station.

My father walked around the station as if he owned the whole place, pointing out the different kinds of trains, telling us stories about each train. Big and black trains came into the station, heaving like uncontrollable giants filling the loading area with white, beautiful smoke.

Those were good and happy times when we could afford a real Christmas tree and presents wrapped in silver and gold paper, awaiting us on Christmas morning.