“Grew Up Catholics”
We started right off talking about religion. I’d met Julia
Stateman at the AME Church and we had said the Nicene Creed that morning; I
remarked that growing up Episcopalian, I had memorized it, but I didn’t know it
now. We talked about Unitarian vs. Trinitarian and I explained that even though
I am now a Unitarian, the trinitarian theology
still is a beautiful and beloved symbol for me.
Julia’s sister was in town for the Homecoming at Holy
Rosary, which is the Black Catholic church. This church was started by the
Dominicans who were the earliest settlers of Washington County. They sponsored
schools and kept records for the Black Catholics they brought with them and
their progeny. Whether it was often discussed or not, these were the children
and grandchildren of slaves. They told me they’d been raised Catholic, and were
a part of the Holy Rosary community, even though Julia was now at the AME Zion.
They did not, however, attend the Catholic schools.
We chatted a bit about our ages, where I was from, and who
my family was. One thing I learned early in rural Kentucky was that folks
wanted to know right away where you came from and who were your “people.”
Sometimes, there’d be a remark or a bit of hesitation when they learned you
were a “Yankee” (even though we in South Jersey don’t think of our own selves
as Yankees at all), but mostly, it was just a way of starting a conversation
and establishing connections. I knew this, because in my café, I often heard
people do this, and what would happen was that they’d go through lists of names
and relations and addresses (you know the
Goatleys that live out there almost to the old covered bridge where they tore
down that tobaccey barn?) until they found someone in common. People were
looking less for something to divide them than for something to unite them.
We talked about getting old. All of us were over sixty… I
was the youngest, just sixty that year. I asked them if it didn’t feel weird to
say the word, “sixty?” It did to me.
“You feel like it was yesterday you were in your teens,”
her sister, Sharon, said.
“I know. I can accept it, but it just feels so…”
“Far-fetched.” Julia finished.
“It’s just hard to wrap your brain around,” Sharon said.
And then she pondered, “I welcome the wisdom of it and I
wouldn’t go backwards, but it’s just an odd thing to know, you’re coming to the
end, even though it’s not up for bids. It’s not a fear, but your heart and mind
starts preparing you for that. It’s amazing, frightening, and all that, all the
emotions.”
We talked about our children and grandchildren.
Julia has two children, 46 and 36 now. She has two
granddaughters and a great-grandson. Since the interview, I’ve learned that her
son Brice, has emotional problems that affect her as well.
She showed me pictures of her family; there were seven
children and they were very good-looking. They were all living except one. Her
father died young, so her mother raised them. Her sister lives in Tennessee. So
many of the interviews center around the deaths of the family members. Death is
such a constant theme and a present reality for the Black community. My way of
understanding this is that the families are large, connected (rather than
estranged) and the community itself is intertwined through church and other
institutions, especially here where there is de facto segregation. Further, there are large and intricate
funerals and wakes and much less denial of death.
We talked about little neighborhoods around Springfield
where Black people lived and where Julia and her sister grew up. As James Lane
Allen writes in his stilted and flowery essay: A
single town may have on its edges several of these settlements, which are
themselves called "towns," and bear separate names either descriptive
of some topographical peculiarity or taken from the original owners of the
lots. It is in these that a great part of the negro population of Kentucky has
packed itself since the war. Briartown
is the area around St. Rosary; the hamlet in which Julia and her family grew up
is called Field Town. It’s now called “Fairgrounds.”
“You know,” Sharon added in, “it may not have been an
address. It may have been a name made up by the peoples, by the people who live
there. Like Cisselsville, Thurman town.”
Julia: “Steve Hale mother and daddy took over an area
called the slaughter house where they slaughtered the hogs and that, and we
lived right next to that, and that was called Field Town.”
Their father did construction, janitorial, and office work.
Their mother had a job cleaning offices, including a dentist office which Julia
and her sisters took over after her mother died for about twenty years.
The sisters from St. Joe’s Cathedral brought slaves with
them, she told me, and I related to her that the sisters right here did as
well. There had been a big ceremony a
few years earlier in which the sisters had made a sort of formal apology with
the descendants of the slaves they brought.
We also discussed Louis Sansbury, a slave who, during the
cholera epidemic of 1850, had stayed behind when Springfield’s well-to-do
citizens fled, and nursed and buried its victims. We speculated about whether
the Sansbury Care Center at St. Catharine had been named after him. Louis
Sansbury was, to me, the go-to Black hero for Springfield; in my mind there
were hundreds, thousands, of heroes who never became “famous” and whose names
were never recorded, not even on tombstones. And that is, I began to realize,
what this book and project are about, at least in part.
A hanging post existed, according to Julia’s grandmother,
behind where Miss Coulter’s house is. (Could this be Graves Hill?**) Sharon
expressed a sense that maybe some of the white people actually have a
“prideful” feeling about the events of slavery. I told them my story of the
whipping post, verified in 1798. But the sisters came in 1820, so this
pre-dated them.
According
to Julia, the white people in Springfield are “strange.”
‘”You
have to know Springfield people. They are strange people. They are prideful
people and it’s like if they can’t do it any more, the hell with it. The reason
why I know it is I have worked in probably over half the homes in Lexington.”
I explained how I first started to wonder about things in
Springfield, for example, when Della worked at the Cinnamon House with me, and
she called me “ma’am,” and I saw the ways that the white people there
interacted with her… then when I talked with Pansy, and she told me of her experiences,
I began to see how there needed to be a documentation of the way things were.
She’s
noticed she said, that the library does not have much on these things, and her
cousin Beverly noticed it, too. So did her cousin, Richard. “It’s like they
just threw it out.”
She’s
done domestic work, babysitting, and elder care.
“I’ve
worked in so many homes, and I’ve experienced so many of ‘em’s mentalities,
that I’ve had to put ‘em in place, I’ve had to tell them slave days are over… I
mean, they want to treat you like they still, you know, own you.”
“They
held the Black people back and there’s a lot of white people too, been held
back.”
“I’m
jus’ going to say it, you know a few people are Uncle Toms… you know, a few of
our people are Uncle Toms. (41:46) But they can’t see that they are. You know.”
Julia
told a story about how her mother had worked for a woman in town and the
grandkids would call her mom “Virgie” even though of course the Black people
would never call the white people by their first names.
Sharon
continued to insist that the issues that Black people complain about are just
as much the fault of the Black community as the white. She agreed that people
were racist, but said it was the same everywhere. I had to disagree. No. It’s worse here. I found myself in the
position of convincing Black people how bad racism is and why something needed
to be done about it.
Eventually,
we got on the subject of President Obama and the ways in which racism has disrupted
his entire Presidency. We agreed that he has been one of, if not, the best
Presidents in history and that his success has triggered the backlash of police
shootings, racist incidents and the like we’ve seen.
I
told her that when I went back to New Jersey, I looked on Springfield and I
could see that it was a microcosm of towns all over the country. And it was
particularly interesting because it was isolated, and because such a large
percentage of the people stayed here.
Julia
said she wanted to tell a story: “I was at St. Vincent DePaul in Bardstown the
other day, and there was several Spanish ladies with some children in there and
this lady there with this German accent, she’s told me she’s German. And this
little child wanted this book bag and she’s lacking 12 cent, and I gave her a
quarter, and this other child came up with some pennies, and this lady said O you must have been out picking black
berries you have some change. Evidently this did not sit well with the
mothers. A few minutes later she came back and said, Ma’am what did you mean? Because I don’t know what black berries are. The
mothers were really perturbed and they went out and slammed out the door.”
“Then
the lady says, ‘They make me sick and they always want something for nothing.’
Now that is just racist right there.”
Her brother who died had a lot of upper
respiratory problems from working at America Tokyo Rope and he (look into
this**)
They told me that their mother told them stories of how she
was treated by white people when she was working for them, had to sit at the
back of the bus, and things like that. “It creates hurt in your heart. And
Momma talked about these things on up until she died.”
We talked a bit more about some of the ways in which the
racism manifests itself: Black people being watched at stores, for example, and
how this creates a low-level stress that wears people down day after day.
“While they’re busy watching us, their own people are
robbing them blind.”
Sharon would agree with us on the many micro-aggressions
that Black people faced, but then return to her assertion that it was up to
each individual to put the past behind them, and decide how they wished to be
treated, and how they would treat others. I continued to say, “But…” and “Yes,
but…”
I wondered: What
would you suggest to make Springfield more agreeable?
Sharon:
teach people one-on-one. Individually. Mentoring. Put white and black people
together, and you’ll make a difference. Get people together. Shared
experiences. Hope. Start in churches, schools. It’s all in understanding what’s
going on in your heart, what’s going on in your mind… how can good things not
come out of it?
Sharon believes that change comes from the self, from
within the self. I spent most of the interview trying to convince her that that
was one way of understanding it, but that another way to see it was that before
we could move forward we needed to acknowledge the past, learn from the past
and listen to and believe one another.
