You Must Be A Jones: A Family Memoir

By Lydia Jones Cole

A story of an ideal American family to rival The Waltons...

You Must Be A Jones, A Family Memoir is a heartwarming story of an African American family persevering during some of the country's most significant periods of change. The story highlights how Cole's parents, a committed and hardworking African American coupl

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Dec 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781636762616

Book preview

Lydia-Jones-Cole-Amazon-Ebook-Cover.jpg

You Must Be a Jones

A Family Memoir

You Must Be a Jones

A Family Memoir

Lydia Jones Cole

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2020 Lydia Jones Cole

All rights reserved.

You Must Be a Jones

A Family Memoir

ISBN

978-1-63676-602-7 Paperback

978-1-63676-260-9 Kindle Ebook

978-1-63676-261-6 Ebook

Dedication

For my parents, Idabel Greene Jones and George Mason Jones, Sr., who gave me life, love and showed me how to navigate life’s journey by connecting me to a power greater than myself. Because of you, Dad, I know what a great father looks like, and Mom, each day, I look to your example as the mother I aspire to be.

Author’s Note

When I was twenty-six and just beginning my television career in the late seventies, I lived in a small apartment in the Northwest section of Washington, DC. I became friendly with a beautiful and gregarious African American woman whom I’ll call Bridgette. As our friendship grew, we would often hang out at her apartment laughing—she loved to laugh—talking, listening to music, and enjoying a glass of wine. As we got to know each other, I realized some things I naively had never considered. Everyone didn’t grow up the same way I did. Getting to know my new friend was the first time I had a personal encounter with someone who grew up with very different influences at home from me.

Most of the time, when we got together, she did the majority of the talking, especially when the discussion was about family. She often shared stories about her mother that I found surprising. Bridgette’s mother was a very attractive woman, but different from the image I had of a mother. Her mother performed in local plays that would sometimes go on the road, leaving her husband to raise their two young children.

It was something I couldn’t imagine. Those conversations made me think about my life growing up and how different it might have been from some of my peers. Each time I heard these stories, I just listened.

One day when we were hanging out, Bridgette asked, Why don’t you ever talk about your family?

My response was, There isn’t much to say. Talking about my family would be like hearing about the Waltons—boring.

It may sound like an oxymoron to compare growing up as a child in an all-Black neighborhood in the 1950s and 1960s in Arlington, Virginia, and the Walton family from the popular 1970s television show. But that’s what it felt like. How could I envision my family being anything like the Waltons? I grew up in Virginia when the state and most of the country was segregated and would continue to be until the mid-60s. Could African Americans in the early part of the twentieth century truly live a wholesome, positive home life even with all the institutional constraints imposed upon us in the first part of the twentieth century?

Growing up on Hall’s Hill until the early 60s, we didn’t have full access to Arlington’s hospitals, we couldn’t sit at the lunch counter in the local drugstore or attend movie theaters in Arlington, and segregation separated our schools. The restrictions imposed on African Americans, shaped by racist policies and reinforced by media, were meant to limit and stifle our community, literally and figuratively.

The white communities that surrounded Hall’s Hill mounted intentional efforts to move African Americans out of our neighborhoods. We were seen as undesirable people, living on highly sought-after property. But our homes had less value as long as we occupied them. And we were automatically considered to be poor.

But we didn’t feel poor, we didn’t feel less smart, less interesting, or less of anything. And, there was no yearning to crossover—to be white. In fact, those thoughts never entered my mind growing up.

The limitations created by segregation were burdensome, but they did not define us, and we did not allow them to limit us.

The comparison of my family to the Waltons wasn’t about a white family living in the mountains of Virginia. It was the wholesomeness of their lives and their large, close-knit family that reminded me of my own. My family had the same Waltons energy, camaraderie, and healthy bit of rivalry among sisters and brothers. And our closeness and unity extended beyond our immediate family to grandparents, aunts, and uncles—all who lived within walking distance of our home. We ate dinner as a family on Sundays, went to church together, we helped each other with homework, and we all felt a sense of accomplishment when our oldest brother was the first in our immediate family to go to college.

When I thought about my mother, it wasn’t her looks that made her different. She was a pretty woman, simple yet classic, with little interest in baubles and adornment, not inclined to wear makeup other than a classic but understated red lipstick. Her attire was traditional, and she had little interest in entertainment other than television. Her focus was her kids and husband, her home, her faith, and her community.

Years after those conversations with Bridgette, I conducted genealogical and historical research on my community, and I came across a blog post about Hall’s Hill. I was surprised to see a blog about my neighborhood, written by a white woman. The narrative was offensive, racist, and a searing reminder of how white people in Arlington viewed Black people.

An excerpt from her blog described our community like this:

And Hall’s Hill was just around the corner, down Lee Highway. Hall’s Hill was where we kept all of our colored folk in Arlington, Virginia in the fifties. Al’s Bar and Grill was at the top end where you could see it and there was never any reason to go down any of the other streets. Northern Virginia is more cosmopolitan than the rest of Virginia: I don’t remember seeing any helpful signs on the drinking fountains to let you know what color water you were dealing with. Mostly, we did without that sort of thing, because we had all the colored people bunched up in Hall’s Hill all neat and tidy, and all we had to do then was zone things around it. So there was a colored school, and there were Regular schools, and that was that. You were assigned based on your address alone, and it worked out just fine without anybody having to spell it out. Sometimes there were slipups. I do remember we couldn’t get into the Overlee swimming pool because our house was stuck like a scab on the edge of Hall’s Hill and we were zoned out. . . . Anyway, I did some checking, and it turns out Hall’s Hill was the first place they established for freed slaves at the end of the Civil War, and their descendants stayed put for a good hundred years. They didn’t start leaking out until just about the time I went away to college, and I haven’t been back.

After reading this abhorrent description of Hall’s Hill, I knew I needed to tell my family’s story.

The blogger claims her writings are satirical. But I knew they were, for the most part, an actual reflection of what she and her family thought of our community and everyone who lived there. Her joking reference to zoning was not some made-up thing; it was real. Arlington County instituted zoning regulations that limited residents of Hall’s Hill.

Private homeowners created barriers to segregate their property from ours, limiting entrances and access to our neighborhood. In the 1930s, white homeowners built one continuous wall on the southern and eastern ends of Hall’s Hill. The eastern portion of the wall separated all Black homes on Culpepper and Buchannan Streets from white homes. On the southern, the wall separated Black families from whites on Culpepper, Cameron, and Dinwiddie Streets, eliminating all southern exits from our neighborhood.¹

My story is not the narrative often shared about Black folk’s lives in historically African American communities all across this country. It deviates from those written about the Great Migration of African Americans moving to the North in search of a better life. Hall’s Hill is where many free Black people and newly freed slaves put down roots in the late 1800s, and generations stayed for more than a century.

The sense of home and familiarity among us may have emanated from multiple generations of families remaining in Hall’s Hill. Neighbors depended on each other and supported each other. In some small way, the entire community contributed to our upbringing, making the African proverb, It takes a village to raise a child, our reality.

Growing up on Hall’s Hill felt safe, you felt loved, and you knew you mattered.

Inside the Jones household, our parents seemed strict and rigid. Still, as adults, we all recognize the priceless rewards we gained: learning what real love looks and feels like and being accepted as an individual while learning how to get along. We learned to appreciate diverse personalities, understand the importance of a spiritual relationship, the value of education, perseverance, and the benefits of a strong work ethic.

You Must Be A Jones shines a light on the real-life ups and downs of Black family life that rarely are told. My family life was not an anomaly. There were communities just like ours all over the country. All African American children don’t grow up in homes where parents are absent, on drugs, living in poverty, or dealing with the hardships of social challenges. But we rarely hear those stories.

My parents were my protectors, my confidence builders, my examples of how to live a happy and fulfilled life, never having to prove my worth to anyone. Sadly, in the twenty-first century, this look-back through my family’s life may be more vital than anticipated. America was literally built upon devaluing African Americans as a people, and in 2020 we again recognize that some Americans still cling to that belief and want nothing more than to turn back the hands of time.

If you feel like America has become a place you no longer recognize, reading You Must Be A Jones, takes you back in time and shares my family’s story on how we lived through some of America’s darker periods. Despite that reality, we experienced an ideal childhood and became confident, happy, and successful adults who are intent on repeating that history with our children and grandchildren.

Chapter 1

Giving Thanks

Thanksgiving 2018 was the first time our family gathered for a holiday without Mom or Dad. It was also my year to host our family dinner. Typically, this was a responsibility I eagerly took on. I really enjoy cooking. It doesn’t get any better than preparing great food on Thanksgiving for people you love. I enjoy shopping for the best foods and ingredients and blending them to create one incredible meal that our family can’t get enough of. There’s nothing about it that I don’t like—finding the best recipes, cooking, and buying flowers to make the house bright and cheerful.

That year, without Mom and Dad to dote on, to cater to, to be with us, well, I didn’t know how it would feel. Would there be an air of sadness? Would the typical kinetic energy of our family’s most important get-together be gone? Would being together without our parents’ physical presence be enough to make Thanksgiving as memorable as always? Only time would tell.

Our Jones family Thanksgiving dinners were never stuffy or formal. There was no air of pretense, no matter who was hosting dinner. You could count on all the little cousins finding a corner to gather in or making their way to the basement to laugh and play games. As long as no one got hurt, they were free to play and revel in just being together again.

For the adults, it was a chance to catch up on what we had been up to since we last saw each other. There were rarely earthshaking conversations. In between helping the host with any last-minute tasks, generally, we talked about our kids, our jobs, and congratulated nieces and nephews on their accomplishments. If anyone happened to be miffed with anyone else—which didn’t happen very often—they knew not to bring it to Thanksgiving. It just wasn’t the kind of thing our family did. Whatever the issue, we found a way to work it out amicably. That’s how Mom and Dad raised us.

Our family is big, so there were always lots of people and lots of activity. There are seven children in our immediate family, most have spouses, grown children, and some of us have grandchildren. A typical Thanksgiving dinner for the past twenty years meant twenty-five to thirty people of all ages. Six of us rotated who would host, a practice we have been following since we outgrew the 900-square-foot house in which we grew up.

Either my siblings George Mason, Michael, Rosalind, Audrey, Wilma, or I hosted dinner on Thanksgiving. And the seventh sibling, my twin brother Lynwood and his wife Jacqueline, always drove up from North Carolina to Washington, Maryland, or Northern Virginia for the Thanksgiving holiday.

The year before, in 2017, we had dinner at my sister Wilma’s house in Arlington. Before we sat down to eat, and as some of us were still arriving, our mother became ill and was rushed to the hospital. It was frightening and unthinkable all at once.

Twenty-five family members had gathered at Wilma’s house for Thanksgiving. When we realized Mom would not be leaving the hospital, the doctor gave her medication to relieve her pain. She went into a deep sleep before being moved to a room where all the family members gathered. My mother’s children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren surrounded her in her last hours. Twenty-five of us stayed with her to say our final goodbyes. It’s unlikely that there would have been any other day where we were all together like we were every Thanksgiving.

Just six months earlier, on May 6, we had celebrated Mom’s ninety-fifth birthday with a surprise luncheon at RT’s in Alexandria, Virginia. RT’s was a popular local restaurant with great Cajun and Creole food. The backroom at RT’s made it a perfect location for Mom’s birthday. The front of the restaurant was quaint and filled with booths and a large bar. There was a separate seating area with plenty of space for us all and a few extra tables along the sides to the right of the front door. It was sufficiently private, so the little kids could walk around the room without disturbing any other tables or customers. We needed the space. It was a full house.

Almost everyone came—all of my brothers and sisters, along with our significant others. Most of Mom’s grandchildren and most of her great-grandchildren were there. There were almost as many of us at Mom’s ninety-fifth birthday as there were at our traditional Thanksgiving Day celebration.

Special doesn’t aptly describe the day. Dad had died on January 17, 2014, sixteen days before his ninety-fifth birthday. Mom’s celebration would have been important no matter what, but the day was even more memorable because we didn’t get to celebrate that milestone with Dad. This was time to savor—time to show Mom how important she was to each of us. To say thank you in the most personal way, over a meal with people you love and those who love you back.

I don’t recall if Mom was completely surprised by the luncheon, but I could see the happiness in her face as she looked around the room. Her smile conveyed it all. And Roz’s husband, an excellent photographer, captured that moment with a group photo of everyone. Michael Harris had been cataloging our family gatherings for more than thirty years. That day, he took the most amazing picture. Later he had it blown up, framed, and gave it to my mother to hang on the wall in her living room. It was impossible not to be drawn to it.

After my mother passed, I asked Roz if Michael could have a copy of the picture made for me. Several of my siblings already had one, so Roz told me to take the photo from Mom’s house. It’s a captivating picture. Whenever someone sees it hanging on the wall in my house, they ask, Who is this? We’re all smiling from ear to ear, gathered around Mom, who has Aliya, one of her great-grandchildren, on her lap. At ninety-five, you could still see life in her smile. Despite arthritis in her legs and her mild case of high blood pressure, she rarely complained about any ache or pain.

It was one reason Roz knew something had to be very wrong the night Mom fell ill. She was in a lot of pain, and she told the doctor who examined her that Thanksgiving night. Before I fainted, I was not in any pain, Mom said to the emergency room physician.

Mom had delivered seven children, including a set of twins, and never had an epidural or any pain medication.

Roz would always say, Mom has a high tolerance for pain.

My mother’s aorta, her main artery had ruptured, and within a few hours after she arrived at the hospital, she had passed.

This year, our first without Mom and Dad needed to be extra special. I wasn’t sure how to do that. In the weeks leading up to the holiday, I felt a sense of trepidation. I wondered to myself, Why did I agree to host Thanksgiving this year? Would I disappoint my family? Would I disappoint myself? I shared my feelings with my husband, Reg.

He assured, It will be fine. Just do what you always do, and it will work out fine.

Would the memory of our last Thanksgiving make the day difficult? How could it not? I was hoping, somehow, to create an atmosphere where everyone felt happiness, and a sense of belonging, like every other Thanksgiving we had shared. But I didn’t know. All I could do was pray and ask God to give us the strength to find