Your Story!

~ Spring 2013 Series ~

Each event features two live oral history interviews and an Open Mic.  The Open Mic participants will be chosen by drawing names that interested storytellers deposit in a box at the beginning of the event.  Individuals whose names are drawn have five minutes each to share their stories on the day’s topic.

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Migration Stories: Syracuse is a city of migrants.  People with roots in the American South, the Caribbean, Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere call the city home.  Share your story of coming to Syracuse; ties to the old home; or adapting to life in your new world.

Prison Stories: The U.S. incarceration rate has been the highest in the world for over a decade.  Prison has become a common American experience.  Share your story of incarceration; ties to individuals in prison; the absence of an incarcerated family member or friend; prison visits; or adjusting to life after prison.

Learning Stories: What does it mean to learn or to be educated?  Share your story of how you learned; where you learned; what you learned; love of learning; teaching others to learn; obstacles to learning; or things you wish you had not learned.

Love Stories: “Tell me who you love, and I’ll tell you who you are.”  (Creole proverb)  Share your story of old love; hard love; sister love; unexpected love; parent’s love; lost love; looking for love; childhood love; misplaced love; brotherly love; or renewed love.

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Your Story! is a Black Syracuse Project (BSP) initiative.  The Spring 2013 series is produced in collaboration with Imagining America, La Casita Cultural Center, and the Paul Robeson Performing Arts Company.  BSP explores and documents the history of people of color in Central New York and is housed in Syracuse University’s African American Studies Department.  La Casita is a cultural, artistic, and educational center supported by Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences and the Office of the Chancellor.

My dad was, would take us out of school and we would go to Bean City, Florida. While the other children were in school, we were picking beans for our livelihood.

Weren’t you the youngest, one of the younger ones?

Yes, I was the baby and he was taking me. I wasn’t the baby, but my brother was, my brother and I. But he took me and finally my mother said, you aren’t going, she wasn’t going to let him take me anymore. And because of that, my older siblings who were there, our grades got, their grades that they were supposed to be in, they weren’t in the correct grades because we only did so much schooling. Most of the time we were migrant laborers in Florida.

How many months out of the year were you working, picking beans?

It was about three.

Wow. So say from May to?

No, September, October, November.

Was spent picking beans.

Picking beans.

And it would be your dad and then you and your brother?  So just the three of you?

No. It would be my dad, my sister Doris, my brother Aaron, my niece Bertha, and me.  My baby brother would stay home.

Now where would you sleep while you were going from farm to farm?

We had a one room house and we would pick beans from sun up to sun down. And we had to eat beans, too, that was our breakfast and our dinner.

What kind of beans?

String beans.

And how old were you?

I was five.

Five years old!  Ok, take me back to what doing that work was like. Were you on your hands and knees?

Yes, you had to crawl. You would have a dress on with some pants up under then because you had to crawl down in the field to pick the string beans.

All day.

All day. And my cousin had a sandwich wagon, they would call. And she would, you could smell the fish and the sausage and the cold drinks. But we never got to eat any of that. My dad had my older sister cook neck-bones and string beans and we would take it to the field and that would, we would eat all day out there and then when we came home, we had the same meal.

Do you eat string beans now?

No. Or neck-bones.

You will never eat those again in life?

No, no!

So at the age of five, this may be a hard question to answer, how would you describe it?  Would you say that was back breaking work or was it all you knew?

That was all my dad knew. And so he would take the money. We wouldn’t know one day from the next; never knew when a Sunday came. And then we would come back home. We wouldn’t really have that much when you come back home.

Martin Irons & Clara Brown 1956

Letitia Harris is the daughter of famed painter Falstaff Harris.  Here she is talking about her older sister, Joan Harris SouthGate, when being interviewed by Joan Bryant and Nancy Keefe Rhodes.

Yeah.  I’ll talk to my sister, see if she remembers.  She, talk about a character, that’s my sister.  My sister’s 83.  I had to go see her.  She walked to Canada.

She walked?  Did she follow the Underground Railroad?  Yes.

And she wrote a book called In Their Path.  Joan Harris.  Her married name is Southgate.  And so she might remember a lot of stuff.

But I had to go see her a few months ago because you know what she did at 83?

What?

She and some of her buddies, the youngest I think was 72, decided to get on a bicycle built for four!  And ran straight into a wall.  And blessed is she was, the only thing she broke was her nose.

Oh, still!

She’s amazing.   Just amazing.

June Dixon was born in Syracuse, New York in 1921 and has lived in Syracuse ever since.  Her mother was Mohawk and her father was Mexican.  Her maiden name, Rohadfox, is unique to her family.  Here she is being interviewed by Tasneem Grace Tewogbola.

And when’s your birthday?

My birthday will be coming up pretty soon.  We’ll hit 90!  January 27^th, 1921.

1921.  And where were you born?

Syracuse, New York, 940 and a half South State Street.  Right where the police station is now down there.

So was there a midwife at your house or something?

No.

Who delivered you?

My mother had thirteen children.  Seven boys and I was the first girl.  They were all born, everybody was born at home.

 Who helped her deliver?

Her sister.  I had one aunt.  And then a doctor, some doctor, can’t think of his name anyway, they told me later in years, came to see that she was ok.  But she had thirteen children, seven boys and then me and then the rest boys.

Wow, you’re the only girl?

No.  After me there was twins, a boy and a girl.  My sister Mary.  Pauline Mary and Paul Emmanuel.  After me.  And then the rest were girls, I have a sister Mary who has passed away. She was a twin.   Twins, boy and a girl.  Paul Emmanuel and Pauline Mary.  Both deceased.  And after that, my sister Thelma.  She passed away, of course, I have a lot of nieces under my sister Thelma.  Connie Peconic and oh, there’s so many, I’ve lost track.

Now, your mother, you said that your mother was Mohawk.

Mohawk Indian.  And my father-

What’s her name?  And what’s her name? 

Her name was Nellie Mills.

Nellie Mills. And was she raised to?

In Syracuse.  Well I don’t know, a hundred years ago ,I don’t know what Syracuse was like.  But really, yes, around here. My mother being a Mohawk Indian, I believe, they told me, they would come from New York City or around that area.  And they all migrated here, you know, around Syracuse.

And your father, what was his name?

My father was born in Silver City Mexico.

What’s his name?

Clifford.  Clifford Hayward.  He changed the name, he made up the name Rohadfox.  That’s why no one has it but the family.

He made it up?

Yes.  He told us.  He told my brothers and everything.  He made the name up because in Silver City, Mexico, this fox had crossed his path.  So where he got the Road-Fox from but he decided to put an H in there and the H is silent so it’s Rohadfox.  That’s why no one has it.  No one has the name.  He made it up.

So whoever has the name is related to you.

That name is related to me.  I’m the oldest living member right now.

Brenda Muhammad  was born and raised in Central New York but her parents are both from Arkansas.  Every other year, Brenda and her extended family participate in a family reunion.  There, they compare their new genealogical research and flesh out their heritage.  Brenda is being interviewed here by Joan Bryant and Claire Enkosky.

Every time I would go to Arkansas, if I was in Little Rock, I would go to vital records or the court house and I would take a little bit of money that I have an buy someone’s birth certificate or someone’s death certificate or a marriage license.

And I’ve been compiling them so I have my grandfather’s father’s death certificate, my great-grandmother’s death certificate, I have marriage licenses. I have all sorts of these documents.

And it’s just great. And then I find that I have cousins who are genealogists who have their line and you know, so when we come together, it’s a wonderful thing. And we’re trying to keep it going so that the younger children will remember going to family reunions and having fun and having this heritage and you know.

Because in Arkansas we have a family church, and family cemetery, you know. It’s pretty cool. And the part they live in is right outside of a city. It’s actually only 40 minutes from Memphis. But once you go into Forest City, Arkansas, and you go up the road a little bit, then it becomes dirt roads and it’s almost like Little House on the Prairie and we have relatives on their own land.

And I actually have ten acres there that was passed down from my great-grandmother to my grandmother. And it would have went to my father but he died before his mother. And so when my grandmother passed, my brothers and sister signed it over to me because they didn’t, they’re not interested in Arkansas. They didn’t care anything about that. So I have the ten acres there. One day, hopefully I’ll do something with it.

Ethel Edwards was born and raised in Syracuse, New York.  Here she is being interviewed by the Committee to Save 711 East Fayette Street.  711 East Fayette is the location of the old building of People’s AME Zion Church in Syracuse.

See I got baptized at Bethany Baptist, they had a pool right underneath the pulpit like we have one here, too.  All they had to do was just change my memory chip from one church to the other.  So I didn’t have to get baptized here.

Do it again, yeah.

And then over at Bethany, I think my father was one of the deacons.  He tried to drown me!  He just kept me under the water!  Supposed to put you down there and bring you back up.  And they said, ok, bring it back up!  Whatever they said, bring you back up.  He kept me down there and I’m like [coughs] so after we got home I said “you tried to drown me!”  He said “I wouldn’t do that to you!”

Letitia Harris is the daughter of famous Syracuse artist Falstaff Harris.  Here she is interviewed in her home by Nancy Keefe Rhodes and Joan Bryant.

My sister and I used to sit and try to, you know, remember.  She remembers more because she’s older but I remember faces.  Cab Calloway was always over.  Cab Calloway was from D.C. too.  Who else was there.  Paul Robeson was there more than once.

I remember his voice. Because I used to sit an listen to, you know, his chest.  I loved that with men, when I was a kid, to put my head and hear that vibrato.  Du Bois was here, was there in the house.  I keep saying “here.”  You know, there was a Du Bois that lived here.   I don’t know, she’s got to be dead cause she, if I’m 78.  She was a relative of W.E.B. Du Bois.  She used to live over across the street from, did somebody tell you that, from Dunbar Center?

No, no one told me that!

From the Dunbar Center on…

Townsend?

Townsend.

Lorraine & June in 1956

Jessie Grace Griffin is interviewed here by Tasneem Grace Tewogbola on July 29th, 2010.

Yes, there was a lot of people in Syracuse from the South but it was a long time before I met anybody from Georgia.

Where were a lot of people from?

Most people I met was from always Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina and Florida.  And it was after I finally found someone from Georgia, I just felt more at home.

…

Before I graduated from high school, my biology teacher or science teacher was teaching us French.  And, oh, I loved it, French.  Every day I would learn a new word.  I’d go home and speak the new language to my mother and she said “Oh, get out of here!”

Bonjour!

Yes, yes.  And when the superintendent heard of him teaching us that language, they came and took the books up.  Yes.  They took the books up so that ended the French language.

Because colored kids shouldn’t be learning it?

No.  And we always had the hand-me-down books which were torn up.

…

But my mother was living.  My mother would tell us, which she didn’t have any more than a third or fourth grade education, what you get up here no one can take away.  So try to learn some of everything and it won’t go too hard with you.  If you know how to do things for yourself, you can make it.