An Excerpt from the Introduction of "My Strange Black History: A Memoir by Bill Bradberry"
The Civil Rights Movements and the infamous Urban Renewal (Negro Removal) programs of the 1960s had the effect of virtually and entirely eradicating whole black communities across America, burying the rich history of our people beneath the rubble of our old neighborhoods. Niagara Falls was no exception. As we marched forward toward integration, we left many of our roots behind. The old storytellers are mostly gone now. They used to sit in the barbershops, corner stores, beauty salons and living rooms across the country, telling stories about their narrow escapes and conquests of years gone by. They were our grandmothers and grandfathers, uncles and aunts, who amazed us with their stories. They filled our heads with images of a strange and scary past, of lynchings and beatings, of love and caring, of churches and prayers unanswered.
There were great old stories entirely centered on our food, our cooking, the numbers games, and true stories that celebrated our heroes like Harriet Tubman, Billie Holiday and the Duke. Somebody in every family I knew either claimed to be related to them or knew them personally. We had characters like Stagger Lee and Billy, who lived in song and in the hearts of a generation of men and women who knew them from the street corners and juke joints in every place we lived.
Mom told me that Cab Calloway used to come and stay at their house when she was a little girl in Lockport. Grandma had a big, two-story house on the outskirts of the city, about 20 miles northwest of Niagara Falls, where my sisters, my cousins and I spent most of our summers creating thousands of new stories that we will pass along to our children.
Lake Ontario's waterfront was home to one of my favorite memories, Olcott Beach. We used to gather there, all 20 or 30 or more cousins, friends and neighbors used to invade the park at least once every summer. Our loud, raucous hootin' and hollerin' always ran the white folks away, so we'd have the whole place to ourselves. There was an amusement park there too. We rode the bright red, yellow and green bumper cars. I was always amazed by the sparks that fell from the ceiling in the bumper car ride and I'll never forget the smell and the loud music and the screams of my cousins, who seemed to take great joy in clobbering me with their always-faster cars. For some reason, I had a hard time steering the darn things, and that concerned me greatly, because I was getting anxious to drive a real car.
Grandpa had an old Hudson and a Packard. We used to play like we were driving that old Hudson. It didn't matter that it had been up on bricks with no wheels for years. I loved to sit in there and make driving noises. Some of the other kids used the old car as a slide. They'd climb up the front, walk across the hood, pull themselves up onto the roof, then slide down the back window and go flying over the trunk onto the gravel driveway. A lot of knees got scratched and permanently scarred out there.
If you got hurt and ran into the house crying, everybody would wind up in trouble. And that could mean the belt. That was a horrible, terrifying event worthy of a full movie by itself. The drama that led up to and followed "a wuppin'" was straight-up, Hollywood Academy Award-winning time, I swear.
I saw some performances that even today would sell millions of tickets. See, when things got to the point where somebody "had to git a wuppin'," time would just stop moving. The event would build slowly, deliberately, to a crescendo of speeches prepared long ago in faraway places by the wuppin' masters. I believe to this day that the wuppins were a vestige of slavery, a behavior learned and passed down by the generations. I know that on most plantations, it was not the master who wielded the whip. No, that nasty task was assigned to one of the slaves, to beat the hell out of the poor soul who had raised the wrath of the master or, as was usually the case, his designee.
The fruit-picking and canning business was a mainstay for many years in the tiny villages and hamlets around the city of Lockport. Later, Harrison Radiator, a division of General Motors, assembled radiators there, providing high-paying jobs for former fruit-pickers. During the '30s and '40s, even though they were huge stars, known all over the world, Calloway, his band and the others who traveled the "chitlin' circuit" couldn't stay in the white hotels or eat in the white restaurants, so people would put them up. My grandmother's house was one of those places where the band could come and stay and get a good, home-cooked meal and maybe a good night's sleep. They'd sometimes put on a jam session for the folks in the neighborhood, who would not otherwise have ever been able to see those legends. It must have been a little on the wild side at the house back then. I remember as a very young boy, during the 1950s, when we would spend our summers in Lockport, that a lot went on there at that house at 509 Park Ave.
Just about every Sunday, after Mass and a big breakfast of "cat heads" (biscuits), eggs, bacon and toast, Dad would take us on the long drive through the country, past the old barns and the shaving-cream signposts, where we'd look at the cows on the way to Grandma's house. There we'd meet up with what seemed like dozens of cousins, who'd run through the house "like wild Indians," according to Aunt Teddy or Aunt Betty. They'd holler out, "Stop all that goddam runnin' aroun' in here. Porsha, you better be watchin' them kids. Sister, is that chicken burnin'?" People would come in and sit down at the never-ending poker games that went on at the huge, mahogany dining-room table. A cast iron Franklin stove burned all the time, keeping the whole house warm on cold nights. The place always smelled like beer and tobacco. The kitchen was a fast food restaurant with pots always boiling and frying pans sizzling up the never-ending supply of fried chicken. Music poured constantly from the radio or Victaphone. The backyard was a virtual chicken farm with what seemed to my child's mind like hundreds of chickens too stupid to run for their lives. I guess they didn't know that smell that filled the air was the odor of their brothers and sisters being fried.
Why did Dad load all eight of us into the car every year, to drive all the way, non-stop, to Riviera Beach, Fla., to bond again with his sisters and brothers, who looked like rich, white people in dark red, sun-dried skin? Why did they live in little white wooden houses held up off the ground by bricks or cinder blocks? Why were they so poor, compared to what I thought I knew then, yet so rich with family culture and pride? What secrets were they whispering about after they chased us "churrins" out to play in the sand, where we climbed the mango trees and sucked on their sweet, sticky pits until they were as dry as last week's pork chop bones?
The older people would sit in those little houses all day and half the night, playing long complicated card games. Sometimes they played for pennies, but the games were really just an excuse to be together. A lot of heavy decisions were made at those card tables. They decided who was going to do what and when. They decided who was good and who was not. They created the family's social mores there at those tables. They were the drafters of our family constitutions. They made and enforced all of the rules that still dictate much of our behavior today. I always preferred to be near enough to them to hear what they were saying, but I rarely understood. That came later, much later.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | April 15 2003 |