Frances Beal Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Grandma Gertrude Williams

August 10, 1897-January 24, 1982

It occurred to me that I’ve written a few times about my paternal grandma Agatha Green. For instance, here and here and especially here. I am reminded that she was born 120 years ago on July 26.

I’ve written far less about my maternal grandma Gertrude Williams, born August 10, 125 years ago. I think it’s because my relationship with her was more… complicated. She was born Gertrude Elizabeth Yates, daughter of Edward Yates and Lilian Bell Archer. For the longest time, even my mother believed she was born in 1898. I always remembered it because it was the year of the Spanish-American War.

Then one day in the mid-1960s, she went to register to vote. Unwilling to lie to a government official, she confessed her true age.

I thought Gert grew up in the house my mother always lived in until mom got married. But in the 1905 New York State Census in Binghamton, NY, she lived at 53 Sherman Place, a street razed c. 1960 to build a park near 45 Carroll Street. By 1910, she lived at 13 Maple Street with her parents and her younger siblings, Edward, Ernest, and Adina, or Deana as everyone called her. Gert had an older sister who had died before she was born.

In March 1912, her father died. Yet, in July of that same year, her mother Lillian married a guy named Maurice Holland, a guy from either Texas or Mexico, depending on which subsequent Census you believe.

In the 1920 Census, the household was Harriet Archer (Lillian’s widowed mother), Lillian, Maurice, and Lillian’s four children. Gert, now 22, was working as a maid.

My mom enters the picture

Gertrude married a guy named Clarence Williams around 1927, and they had a child named Gertrude. (She will hereafter be referred to as Trudy to avoid confusion.) And they had a second child, who did not live long and died in early 1929.

In the 1930 Census, the household consisted of Lillian and Maurice; Gertrude, Edward, and Deana, Ernie having moved out; a nephew of Lillian named Edward Archer, 17; and my mother Trudy, 2. Here is a picture of Gert with her mother, sister, and daughter.

But where’s Clarence? Fuzzy gossip suggested that Lillian and maybe even Harriet (d. 1928) drove him away. I never got the real story. Gert is 32 and working as a servant.

By the 1940 Census, the residents were Maurice (Lillian d. 1938), Gert, Edward, Deana, and Trudy. Gert only had a 6th-grade education, and she was working as a housekeeper.

My sister has many undated pictures of people visiting 13 Maple Street, eating in the not-very-large backyard. So it was some sort of cultural mecca. What was THAT all about?

I’ve just seen the 1950 Census

It shows Edward, 47, as head of household, naturally(!), because he was the eldest male; he was a truck driver. Adenia, 42, was a stitcher. Gert, 52, was now listed as separated from Clarence (d. 1958) and not working outside the home. Trudy, 22, is a shipping clerk. She married Les Green, 23, on March 12, 1950; he was a cleaner doing remodeling work.

Eventually, in 1950, my parents-to-be moved into 5 Gaines Street, about six blocks away. It was owned by Gert and presumably her siblings.

I enter the picture

I was born in 1953. In 1958, when I was going to kindergarten, I was supposed to attend Oak Street School. Since my mother worked outside the home, at McLean’s department store, it was determined that 13 Maple Street would be my school address so that I could go there at lunch and after school, tended to by Gert and Deana. Ed had moved out by then.

Deana was cool. We’d play 500 rummy and Scrabble. I taught her canasta, which Grandma Green had shown me.

Gert was a pain. She would tell stories, but it was difficult following them or believing how much, if any, was true. She would indicate that we should not go near this person, who turned out to be a relative. Worse, she forbid her adult daughter and us to see her brother Ed because he was living with a woman, Edna, who was not his wife. After Ed died in 1970, my strongest memory was of Gert and Edna crying on each other’s shoulders at the funeral.

Fear

There were “bad men” lurking in the Oak Street underpass, we were told. The boogie man existed. When I washed the dishes, which I did at home regularly, she told me I shouldn’t because it wasn’t manly. This was one of the several times that Deana said to Gert, “Leave the boy alone!” When Deana died in 1966, I was devastated.

My mother was in a tug-of-war between her mother and her husband, which I alluded to here. Dad clearly did not like Gert. One time, we were having dinner, and someone asked Gert if she wanted some peas. She said, “I’ll have a couple.” My father put two peas on her plate. It was shocking and bite-your-lip funny and may explain why I can be such a literalist.

Mom’s first cousin Frances Beal, Ernie’s daughter, tells a Gert story here, in the fifth paragraph from the end.

Kidnapped

When my parents and baby sister Marcia moved to Charlotte, NC, it became clear to everyone except Gert that Gert needed to move down with her daughter and son-in-law. She had a coal stove, which required going to the basement to shovel the coal into pails and carry it up rickety steps. I did this a lot as a kid, which I oddly enjoyed.

It was the task of sister Leslie and me to take Gert to Charlotte. She railed against it. Where would she get stockings? “They sell stockings in North Carolina.”

She lived in Charlotte until she died on Super Bowl Sunday in 1982. She was cremated in Charlotte but buried at Spring Forest Cemetery in Binghamton, less than 100 meters from 13 Maple Street.

I did love Gert, I believe. But I didn’t always like her.

The Frances Beal Society, Binghamton

I was in Binghamton, NY, my hometown in October for a work-related trip. That evening, a couple of my friends get me to go to this film about Costa Rica, which I’ve written about. It was sponsored by the local Green Party and some other activist organization. The friend of an old high school buddy of mine says he’s from The Frances Beal Society. What?

I’ve known Fran Beal pretty much all my life. She was my mom’s only female cousin on her mother’s side of the family. Fran, her late mother Charlotte Yates, and her three late brothers, Raymond, Donald and Robert all lived in Binghamton or in nearby Johnson City until 1954, when her father, Ernie Yates, my maternal grandmother’s brother, died suddenly.

Charlotte moved the family to St. Albans, Queens, New York City and the Greens visited the Yates at a minimum annually. And they visited us frequently as well. I wrote up an excerpt of this 2005 interview, the early part about her growing up in our shared hometown.

Fran grew up to be a black feminist activist icon. A couple years ago, local author Barbara Smith told me how much she admired her. I told the FBS person that my cousin’s politics are so far left that she made me feel like William F. Buckley.

So what IS the Francis Beal Society? As far as I can ascertain, it’s an entity at Binghamton University that occupied the campus administration building for a couple weeks in the spring of 2017, in part over opposition to the Blue Lights Initiative. Now, community organizations have been offered a seat at the proposed Town-Gown Advisory Board by the school administration.

I think I let Fran know about the FBS via Facebook, but I don’t know if she saw the notice. For their part, the guy from the Frances Beal Society would LOVE to have contact with the organization’s namesake. I’m not feeling a desperate need to play matchmaker.

BTW, happy birthday, cousin. It’s SOMETIME this month.

Grandparents Day: my grandmas, and one of my daughter’s

Curiously, this picture triggered a memory of some kind about my OTHER grandmother.

One of those holidays I think WAS created by Hallmark is Grandparents Day. Well, technically not, but it FEELS that way.

Here’s another picture my sister Marcia found, taken at some point in the 1940s; no idea where, when or why. The woman in the top row, second from the right is my great aunt Charlotte and the guy next to her in the sweater is her husband, Ernie Yates. Ernie died while his kids Raymond (directly in front of Charlotte), Frances (sitting on the floor), and Donald (on the blonde girl’s lap) were still young, but Charlotte had grandchildren, as Fran, Donald, and Robert (either not yet born, or an infant) all had children. Fran and Donald now have grandchildren.

The woman behind the blonde girl, partially obscured, is my grandma, Gertrude Williams, Ernie’s sister. She had three grandchildren, including my two sisters. And the young woman in the back row next to Ernie is my mother. I don’t know who she was holding hands with, but it was not my father. She too had three grandchildren, as my sisters and I each had a daughter.

This picture was posted on Facebook, and a cousin suggested that it was taken on the second floor of something called the Interracial Center at 45 Carroll Street in Binghamton. The only people I recognize are my mother and her mother in the front row.

Curiously, this picture triggered a memory of some kind about my OTHER grandmother. A guy named John wrote, “I worked with your Grandmother Agatha Green in the Sunday School as a teacher at Trinity A.M.E. Zion Church Binghamton NY at the earlier location on Sherman Place & the church moved to Oak St. in 1960. Yes, I of course also recall your Mother and VERY artistic Dad, Les … A GREAT encouragement, motivation to me was knowing your Grandmother … (& I do mean “Grand”)…one fine Lady who made a HUGE difference in [my] life to the extent that she did NOT, sadly live to see. God Bless Her Soul!!!”

It would have been mom and dad’s 63rd anniversary

In the late 1960s, my mother took to wearing a red wig, which made her look even more fair-skinned.

Did I mention that I was always appreciative of the fact that my parents were wed in 1950? It was always easy to remember how long they had been married; the math was easy. I was a five-day-early third anniversary present to them, my mother used to say.

I wish I could find this particular photo of my parents on their wedding day. Actually, there are a couple of them. One is of them cutting the cake, which is nice. The other, though, was one taken in the living room of my maternal grandmother. There’s the smiling, happy couple, plus Mom’s mother Gert, her aunt Deana, her uncle Ed, and her Uncle Ernie, all looking sullen. Also in the photo, Ernie’s wife Charlotte, looking like myopic people sometimes looked in photos, and their kids, Raymond, ten years to the day younger than my mother, and Frances, looking mildly bored as tweens (a term that didn’t exist then) were wont to do.

Fran was interviewed in 2005, as I noted here in 2010. Fran believed that my grandma’s family’s resistance to my father was because of his skin color. They were rather light-skinned black people, especially Deana and my mom, who probably could have passed for white.

Fran said: “My family on my father’s side was very much impacted by the racial notion of the time, so they liked it that my father married my mother because she was white. That was, you know, really acceptable. When my cousin Gertie — Trudy [my mom], they call her now — started to date the man who eventually became her husband, Les Green [my father], he was deemed too dark for the family. And I think my father and my Uncle Ed had to intervene and say, Listen, I’m not going to be able to ever speak to you again unless you stop this nonsense.”

The Yates clan eventually lived with the marriage, especially after the children came, but there was always hostility between my father and his mother-in-law, with my mother as the uncomfortable DMZ. I thought that it was the fact that he lived in a house that she owned, and that was an affront to his manhood, and that could have been part of it. But I’ve since realized it was also the lack of her acceptance of him. My sisters and I remember this to this day, although it happened at least 45 years ago: We’re eating dinner, and somebody asks my grandma if she wanted any peas; she replied, “I’ll have a couple.” My father, seated nearest to her, and the peas, proceeded to put TWO peas on her plate. (And people call ME a literalist.)

In the late 1960s, my mother took to wearing a red wig, which made her look even more fair-skinned. My favorite story from that period: My father was on a business trip to San Francisco, and my mother went along. While the guys were doing business, the wives were at lunch chatting about the issues of the day. Eventually, something about race came up. One woman said, “What do you think, Trudy?” My mother replied, “Being a black woman…” Apparently, the next sound heard was a bunch of jaws dropping.

Even after my mother came up to Albany to see my daughter, and visited my church, at least one member thought my mother was white, even though he had abandoned the wig decades earlier. This was, of course, after my father had died.

My parents were married 50 years, and 2 days shy of 5 months.

Photo of my parents and me – great shot of the back of my head – at my 1992 graduation from library school at UAlbany; taken by either Zoe Nousiainen or Jennifer Boettcher.

Frances Beal: Voices of Feminism Oral History Project

When my cousin Gertie — Trudie, they call her now — started to date the man who eventually became her husband – my father, Les Green –, he was deemed too dark for the family.

One of my sisters discovered this March 18, 2005 interview with my mother’s first cousin, my first cousin once removed, Frances Beal this autumn, conducted by Loretta Ross. Fran is about 12 years younger than my mother and 13 years older than I am. Her kids are about a dozen years younger than my sisters and I. Her late mother, Charlotte Yates, was my beloved great aunt.

Her politics are far more liberal than mine. She, I suspect, would eschew the term “liberal” altogether, in favor of “radical”. What is truly interesting about the piece though, from my specific POV, is the retelling of her history, which invariably overlaps with mine.

Here’s a picture of Frances Beal.

The info in the italics is mine.

Frances Beal was born in Binghamton, NY, on January 13, 1940, the daughter of Ernest Yates [ my maternal grandmother’s brother- ] who was of African American and Native American ancestry, and Charlotte Berman Yates, of radical Russian Jewish immigrant roots. When Fran’s father died in 1954, her mother moved the family to St. Albans, an integrated neighborhood in Queens. In addition to observing her mother’s participation in left politics, Fran was profoundly affected by the murder of Emmett Till, as was I. After graduating from Andrew Jackson High School in 1958, she became involved in civil rights activities and socialist politics while attending the University of Wisconsin.

She married James Beal, and from 1959 to 1966, they lived in France, where they had two children and Fran became attuned to the internationalist/anti-imperialist politics of post-colonial African liberation struggles…

BEAL: OK. I was born in a relatively small city, upstate New York, called Binghamton, New York, as was I. In school they used to tell us, Bing bought a ham and it weighed a ton: that’s how to spell Binghamton…
ROSS: And your mother’s name was?
BEAL: Charlotte Berman. And she had eight brothers and sisters, and she was like the third oldest of the eight brothers and sisters. And then they went to Binghamton and —

So that’s how my parents met, actually, because my mother was working in the office of Berman’s Motor Express, the family business. My father was working for Canny’s – two blocks from the house I grew up in – … And they actually did a lot of shipping between Binghamton and New York City, whereas Berman’s used to be between Boston and Binghamton…

Well, they got married and then presented the family with the facts. And I think that happened basically because they knew. Now my father was 12 years older than my mom, so when my older brother was born, she was 24 and I think he was 36… And my brother Raymond, now deceased, was one of those seven-month babies, right? (laughs)…it was early in 1937. That’s when they got married. And then my brother, as I said, my brother was born in November 1937. And then I came along in January of 1940. And I had two other brothers, approximately three years apart: Donald, who was born in 1943; and my brother Robert, who’s just six years younger than I am, was born in 1946.

And on my father’s side, they were extremely poor, my father’s side of the family. On my dad’s side of the family there was Gertrude Yates [Williams] – my maternal grandmother, who died in 1983, she was the oldest. Then came Edward Yates, my Uncle Ed who died c 1970. Then came my father, Ernest Yates, and then Deana Yates, my father’s younger sister who died c 1965, one of the first people I knew to die.

And they lived — there again is an interesting story. My grandmother’s mother was part Indian, and when the white persons came to the Susquehanna Valley — that’s where the Susquehanna River and the Chenango River come together…cities grow up on rivers, and the Indians knew that, too, because that’s what they used as their mode of transportation. So the whites essentially pushed the native population out up into the hills. And they gave like a plot of land to the Indians, right? Now what’s interesting culturally here is that the Mohawk, or Iroquois Indian Confederacy, was matrilineal, so that meant that property and family was passed through the woman, the female, and not through the man. And that was a very, very powerful cultural tradition, that even though the whites, when they gave out the property, they gave it to my grandmother’s brother because he was the male. He turned around and gave it to Lillian, my grandmother – [my great-grandmother]- because that’s how you do things, in terms of being an Indian.

And that thing was so powerful, that that’s exactly what happened all down through when we sold the property. When my grandmother died, she died intestate, meaning no will. Therefore, all four of her children and these — there were about 16 people, really, that could have some say in this lot with a house, really more like a cabin, on it. And so they all got together. They decided they should give all of this property to Gert my grandmother, so again, [in] the second generation, it’s going to a female. And then my cousin Gertie – my mother –, who’s the oldest female, she gets the property. And when she gives it up — even though she has a son and two daughters, her son [me] is the oldest and two daughters — she turns that property over to my female cousin, Leslie Ellen Green, my sister. So I just thought that it’s a very powerful holding on to certain customs of how you do things…

A more funny story is that we used to go up and stay with my Aunt Gert on the hill, and down the street, there was another family and they [had] about four kids. And my Aunt always said to us, “You should not play with them because they are bad people and their mother is immoral.” Turns out — we didn’t know anything else like this, but when my Aunt Deana died, one of those kids came to the funeral and was talking to my mother. It turns out these are cousins of ours, that our Uncle Frederick had all these children with this Indian woman, but they never got married. So they were considered, you know…shameful. This characterization of my grandmother is absolutely accurate.

Now I have to say, my family on my father’s side was very much impacted by the racial notion of the time, so they liked it that my father married my mother because she was white. That was, you know, really acceptable. When my cousin Gertie — Trudy, they call her now — started to date the man who eventually became her husband, my father, Les Green, he was deemed too dark for the family. And I think my father and my Uncle Ed had to intervene and say, Listen, I’m not going to be able to ever speak to you again unless you stop this nonsense. But then the two of them, also — my Uncle Ed didn’t marry a white woman, but a woman who was very light-skinned, and she had quote “good hair,” you know, flowing hair. And so there was a lot of racial confusion in that family, from which, you know, my dad came.

But just to give you an idea of how this racial thing also worked, there’s many women who — I mean, I had gotten married and I had a couple kids, and like many, I didn’t know what I could do with the kids in the summertime. So I had my Aunt Gert take them for three weeks to, you know, partly look after the kids. And this was during the ’60s, right? And I was already heavily into an Afro and not putting a curling iron [in my hair]. And my kids had never even seen one. So I was at work and they were staying with their Aunt Gert, and I get this frantic phone call from my Aunt Gert, “Please, you have to speak to your elder daughter. She’s out in the street and she says she’s going to run away and she’s going to New York City, and I can’t get her to come back.”

So I had my Aunt Gert go into the back of the cabin, you know, the other room that was like a two-down, two-up cabin, type of thing. [I went to my grandmother’s house every day after school from kindergarten through 9th grade, and even lived there for a few months in 1975]. She came in and she started crying. The girls were five and four. They had never seen a curling iron in their life. And in this house, the heat, there was this big, big cast-iron stove that covered one whole length of the kitchen. And in it you had the wood-burning and coal-burning stove. So Gert had started the fire and put [in] these coal-burning things, and flames are leaping up when she takes the burner off. She sticks the comb in there. The elder one’s watching all of this, getting more horrified by the minute. And so then she takes it out, wipes it on the dish towel, right? And she says, “Come here.” “What are you going to do with that?” She said, “I’m going to straighten your hair. You look like the wild woman from Borneo.” And I was laughing, because that’s what my same Aunt Gert used to call me when my hair would get it: “You look like the wild woman from Borneo.” (laughs). The elder girl grabs her sister’s hand, runs out to the sidewalk, and bursts into tears. And she told me later, “I didn’t know which way to go!” (laughs). So this is, you know, three hundred miles [away], so of course, I’m in New York City, I have to jump into my car, drive madly three and a half hours up to Binghamton to kind of try to save the situation. [Our house was four or five blocks from my grandmother’s, so I heard this story at the time.].

My father died of cancer [when I was one year old], and then finally six months later we moved to New York City, into Queens. But it was into a house because my mother thought that with us kids coming from a town where there were big back yards and big houses — and you know, when we would get too noisy she would just put us in the back yard to run around — that we would be too much to move into an apartment. She just could not imagine living in an apartment. So we moved into St. Albans, a three-bedroom house and then she re-did the upstairs for me, so that I could have a bedroom up there… [We would visit that house several times a year when I was growing up; it seemed enormous at the time.]…

Jimmy Beal! James Beal. And he’s the father of my children… And I think part of moving back to the United States after staying [in France] six years, was to set the basis for us to dissolve the marriage — which happened within months of us returning home, literally. Fran’s kids and their cousins were, despite the distance between New York City and Binghamton, and a nearly a decade in age between her kids and my parents’ kids, our closest relatives. Jimmy Beal died in October 2010.

There’s lots of other interesting stuff in there – it’s 50+ pages long – about people she had met in her journey, but I wanted to specifically excerpt what I did because it involved people I know or knew.