This Thing Called Love a Brother/Sister Story

By Evangeline Weiss

ABOUT THE BOOK

This book is about relationships, and about an African American family struggles to survive in the mist of adversities. It is also a testimony of how the author was able to begin identifying the spirit which propelled the writer to persevere into the victorious life she now lives. Evangeline wants her readers to understand what it was like to be caught up in all the events of each particular season of her life. How the mind boggling places that she resided in made her fill powerless. How the Eternal Gods Love somehow reached out and kept her to save her from herself and all of the other evil forces that tried to destroy her destiny. This is her story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 5, 2009
• ISBN: 9781462830367

Evangeline Weiss

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Evangeline currently resides in Orlando Florida with her devoted husband. She is an employee at The Central Florida Regional Transit Authority as a bus operator. Evangeline enjoys traveling and seeing foreign places while conversing with different people. Evangeline loves to tell others about the good news of Jesus. When she is not reading the word or praying for others she spends her time serving the community as a volunteer ambassador of the word of God at Orange County Corrections and elsewhere.

Book preview

Chapter 1

WEST SIDE

Ithought I was drowning! I just knew they were trying to kill me for sure. Hello my name is Evangeline I’m the second born of eight children unto my mother. My very first memories of life are about me getting my hair washed in our kitchen sink. It was September of 1966 turns out they were not trying to kill me. However it was the start of another school year. This was my big moment my kindergarten year. The School I was enrolled into was called Lane Elementary on the Westside of town in Akron Ohio. The building was made of red brick three floors high. It was a pretty large school that went up to sixth grade. I can remember my teacher was a very tiny old lady with snow white hair. Seems like back in those days the only thing we did at school was listen to the teacher talk. Sometimes we would have a show and tell day. I was too afraid to talk out in the class room. The teacher read us stories from the library books. Afterwards we would have a snack, and then we would lie down on the towels we brought in from home and take a short nap. My favorite time of all was recess I loved being outside and playing tag. I know you remember that game where you tap another Child and Scream you are it! Then run away as fast as you can. For me that was easy because I could run faster than most kids. I was a skinny kid who was taller than most of my classmates. Remember that really loud bell ringing? It means one or two things. It was time to go in the building or time to exit. Going home for me was a pretty easy task. I had an older brother two and a half years my senior. It was his job to walk me home from school. All I had to do was wait beside the door that I was released out of. Amos was my brother’s name. He was a good looking kid with big brown eyes, slim but not skinny. He was light skinned high yellow we called it back in those days. He had a short afro and a big pretty smile. Even with all that going for him I still would not have been able to pick him out of a crowd. And thank God I didn’t have to. The house we lived in at that time was also made of red brick. It was located on a street called Berry Avenue. There were so many people coming and going all the time that I really didn’t know who was who and what relationship they had to me. The house was my grandparents place. And we were living there with them and half of my uncles and aunties. The rest of them were adults with children of their own. Now everyone came by grandma’s house all the time with kids in tow. So as I said I didn’t know who was who.

Turns out my Grandparents were formerly from down south. In search of a better life for his family a man name Joe Amos my grandpa moved all the way from Columbus Mississippi to Akron Ohio along beside him was his beautiful wife Elizabeth Cammon-Amos and children. The names of their children in order are Sarah/ Joe Jr./ Carrie/ Annie/ Willie /Leana/ Deloris/ Elizabeth/ Alice/ Maryann/ Thelma (died as an infant) and David was the baby. Grandpa found work in the factory and grandma’s worked at City Laundry. Grandma’s work was never done 24/7 she was wife homemaker and so much more. Life in the city was very different for everyone, but they liked it better than Mississippi. Akron was known as the rubber capitol of the world. It was home to companies such as Goodyear Tire, Firestone Bridgestone and General Tire and Mohawk. It really had earned the nickname the rubber city. I can remember on hot summer days the smell of rubber lingering in the air. Now if you were alive and were older than I was. Then I know you remember the sixties as a time of constant changes. There was the Civil Rights Movement the assassinations of the Kennedy’s brothers the Vietnam War and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The evening news broadcast was full of hate and fear killings and unrest across America and abroad. Families were always gathering around the televisions sets or the radio keeping abreast of the most imperative news reports. I suppose if the adults wanted to escape from the violence they would have to do it through the sound of music. The music was tranquilizing. It was easy to drift away into the sounds of hope peace love and joy. The Temptations had a song out Ant to Proud to Beg. Dionne Warwick sang Say a Little Prayer for You and Walk on By. The Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin’s had Respect Yourself. The Godfather of Soul was on top, also the love dual Sonny and Cher. Then suddenly it was gone the life I had just begun to know. Along came the most penetrating event to happen in my life up unto that point. That was the death of my grandmother it was the spring of 1967. That day started no different than any other day. I went off to school with Amos. But when we got home grandma was gone dead of a stroke due to hypertension. Now grandma parents were already deceased. Her mother’s name was Mary Ross—Cammon and her father’s name was The Reverend Gus Cammon Sr. Remaining to grieve her sudden departure was her sister Mattie and her brother Gus Jr. and her husband Joe. Now my great aunt Mattie was the first member of my family to move up to the north.

Mattie helped my grandma and grandpa move the family to Akron. Then out of nowhere so unexpectedly my world just turned upside down. I didn’t remember my mother, and grandma had been our caretaker. What would happen to my brother and me now? We soon found out right after the funeral services were over. We went to live with a very close friend of grandma’s Mrs. Shelton. She didn’t live far from my grandma’s house. Only down the street and around the corner on a street called Wooster Avenue. Mrs. Shelton had a daughter or granddaughter that was close to my brother’s age, her name was Roberta. They were both nice enough. However that arrangement didn’t last long. It was right after Christmas I remember I had gotten a new bright red tricycle for Christmas. Something happened that had to do with Mrs. Shelton Husband. Which soon caused the county to come to our home? Summit County Children’s Service Board sent a social worker to the house. She promised we didn’t need to take my tricycle that we would be back but I never saw Mrs. Shelton or that bike again. As a matter of fact we didn’t see the family until the first of two visits at Summit County Children’s Home. It was located on Arlington Street. Amos lived upstairs with the other boys. I was staying were the girls were placed downstairs. I was only there at the home maybe one or two weeks. I was sent to stay in a foster home with the Walker family. Amos was not an easy placement so he remained in the children’s home. His age made it more difficult to find a willing foster family. The Walker’s had a daughter she was 5 years my senior. Up until now the only people who were familiar to me all had been removed from my life. I had so relied on Amos until now. I really didn’t know who my mother was or where she was at. I didn’t even know my own name. The social worker was calling me Evangela. The Walkers were new people who didn’t really know me. I never remember anyone calling me Evangela before this point. Even so after staying with the Walkers I was given the name Angela. That is the name I went by for quite a while. I didn’t like Evangela and at the time nobody I knew had strange or difficult names such as that and I didn’t like it so I was content just being called Angela.

Chapter 2

EAST SIDE

The Walker’s lived in a big twinplex style house they owned. They rented out part of the unit to an elderly widowed lady. Mrs. Nelly stayed in the down stairs part of the other side of the house. We had a triple garage. With a huge back yard plus the empty lot next door they own. We also had a brick barbeque pit. And a nice little front porch and a very large enclosed back porch. We also had a very large basement, with a nice size storage area just on the other side of the outer entrance to the basement. That was where they kept a big over size freezer. And it was always filled up with food. On the other side of that was can goods and jars of food that had been canned by my new mom. My foster dad worked for Goodyear Tire and my foster mother was a stay at home mom. It was very different from my grandma’s house and the Shelton’s house. There was plenty of space but there weren’t a lot of people coming or going. I had plenty of toys to play with and I made new friends in the neighborhood. I still missed my brother! However I would see him sometimes at school. We changed schools after they took us away from Mrs. Shelton’s. We were both living on the east side of town and the new school we went to was called Robinson Elementary School. My foster moms name was Mildred my foster fathers name was Clarence and my sister’s name was Crystal. I settled in pretty quickly with my new family. I was living a happy normal life style. I got my hair done every weekend. I would wear very nice clothes. We had plenty of food to eat. I had chores to do after school. I got an allowance weekly, and we took family vacations. My mom even drove us back and forth to school sometimes. Sometimes she would see my brother and give him a ride and money also. After a while I didn’t see Amos anymore. They had transferred him into another school district so that he wouldn’t see me. His whereabouts was unbeknown to me. I later found out that he remained in the custody of the county until he was about 14 years old. He had a love for sports and he played on different kinds of sport teams. One day a lady named Mary she worked for the children’s home. She was there at one of the games. Amos’s team was selling tickets to raise funds for a trip to cedar point. Mary told Amos to go over to this car and ask a man to buy some tickets. Mary knew who the man was. It turns out that man was Amos’s father. Within two months or so Amos was released into the custody of his father and step mother. Which is where he lived until he became an adult? As for myself I had come to love my new family. Then all of a sudden Clarence was packing his bags and moving out of the house. However that didn’t seem like a big deal to me because it didn’t seem to me like he was around that much anymore in the daytime. Well after that happened on the weekends sometimes he would pick Crystal and I up. He would take us out to fun places like the movies or shopping the circus really enjoyable children type outing. My mom started taking us somewhere that nobody else had taken me that I could remember. Mildred took us to church. We attended Bethel Baptist Church on South Arlington Street. Dr Hawkins was the senior pastor. This had become a regular routine for our family on Sundays. After sometime I noticed Mildred’s stomach looked very big and round. She spent a lot of time going back and forth to the hospital often. After a while a man started coming over our house that we called him Mr. Kay. That summer Crystal and I spent the summer at my foster grandma’s house. We were needed there to help out with her husband who