And So, My Son...

By Janet Johnson-Smith

No one should be afraid of the dark or afraid to go to the bathroom late at night. Then the doctor said, “Pregnant,” and the stars completely disappeared from the sky, and there was nothing but darkness all around me. I was fifteen, a child with a child. And So, My Son… tells the story of how it happened and why.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662443077

Book preview

Childhood

In My Younger Years

The most difficult thing in my life is to put pen to paper, trying to write a story about my life. I find myself getting caught up in the misery of thinking that no one really cares about what I have to say, but speaking my truth is not only therapeutic to me, but hopefully it also helps someone else in a similar situation to speak theirs. The main point for telling my story is that I want my son to know exactly what happened in his life that was beyond my control and his. I want him to know that I love him, and that bond, though different, will never be broken. And so, my son, here I am starting my story, as my wife says, from when the shit hit the fan.

It was summer time, and I was standing on the ground outside the house holding my baby chick. We lived on the cape where my foster family raised chickens and worked on the cranberry bogs. My foster mom was standing up on the side porch, looking down at me. She was of Portuguese descent I think, but I might have only thought that because she lived on the cape. I vaguely recall her straight hair and chiseled face, although her face stood out like an outline that was missing the important features. I remember her being tall, but that could have been because she was up on the porch while I was standing on the ground. Anyway, she was saying something to me, although I don’t remember what. What I do remember was the man sitting in the front seat on the driver’s side of the car, while the woman, the one they said was my mother, came around the side of it and took my hand and placed me, along with my baby chick, in the back seat and drove away. I guess she read my mind as I wondered where we were going because without looking back at me, I heard her say to the man whom she called Bobby that we were going home. I learned later that Bobby was Ma’s boyfriend. I don’t remember my mother and my foster mother having a conversation before she took me. I just remember that I didn’t even get a chance to kiss my foster mom goodbye!

I learned through the years that I was in foster care because my mother gave birth to me when she was in her late teens. My grandfather frowned on having a baby out of wedlock and had her sent to Lancaster School for Girls, a juvenile center. My mother delivered me in March of 1944 at the Tewksbury State Hospital, and I was put in foster care right after. Often, I find myself wondering what my life would have been like if I had remained with my foster mom. Mom, I called her that because she told me to. However, I learned through the years that not everyone who called themselves a mother really knew or understood what a mother’s role was about. Don’t get me wrong, trial and error is often a softer way to describe an experience, but in my case, it wasn’t to be that way. But before I go on, let me give you the history of who my mother was.

Marion was my mother’s name. Her mothers’ name was Dora, my grandmother. She was a dark-skinned African American who was also said to be part Blackfoot Indian. Although we never had true confirmation of this and like some, I failed to think about the importance of knowing our family history as I was growing up. Anyway, her features showed high cheekbones and long, straight black hair that could have been contributed to that assumption. Grandma, born in Virginia, had survived slavery, although she brought with her a couple of interesting stories about the way she was treated and what she did to cope including marrying what they called back in the day a high yellow man, who was from South Carolina. He had also survived slavery. Together they moved to Boston. It was said that Grandma was sort of a docile, submissive woman to her husband with whom she bore eleven children, five boys and six girls; three of the girls died in a house fire in Roxbury in 1913. I’m not sure of the natural order of what children came next, but of the girls, my aunt Ruth was first, my mother Marion was next, and my aunt Dorine came last. I never knew where the girls fit in next to their brothers.

My uncles were Calvin, Harold, Jacob, Robert, and Earl. I’m not sure of that order either. Earl died before I was born. Each of my uncles had a character that I either hated or loved. For example, I hated the fact that my uncle Harold would always say hello to me by slapping me upside my head. Boy did I sometimes wish he’d lose his hand! He was divorced, so I never met his wife, but his children remained in his care. I believe there were five of them. My uncle Robert’s house (we called him Uncle Bobby) was where I loved to go. He lived in the South End in the Cathedral Projects. He was married to my aunt Helen, a quiet and patient woman who always made me feel welcome. Aunt Helen hardly talked above a whisper, a factor that I admired about her. I would spend almost every weekend there including nights, running outside and playing in the courtyards with my cousins having fun.

My uncle Calvin was a merchant seaman who married an African woman who was from the Zulu Tribe whose father, my family said, was some kind of notable. They lived in Philadelphia, so I never got to know her. Over the years, my uncle would come visit my family here in Boston. I thought it was strange that he brought her to visit right after their marriage but never brought her again. Later, my uncle divided our family after shooting my sister while she was in Philadelphia visiting him and his family when she was around twenty-one. According to the police report, my uncle suffered a breakdown, and my sister happened to be in the way of it. My sister barely survived. My mother was in turmoil and declared my uncle dead to her. My uncle went to prison, but our family was traumatized over it, with some feeling he should have been treated in a hospital and some feeling he got what he deserved.

My favorite was Jacob, or as we called him, Uncle Jack. I thought he was the smartest of the men in our family since he married my aunt Maria, a Mexican, who could cook her butt off! She, like my aunt Helen, was also quiet speaking. They lived in the Ruggles Street Projects. Almost every Sunday, I would hurry to their house just in time for dinner. That seemed to be the time when she would cook her favorite Mexican dishes, and with no questions asked, she would fill my plate with whatever it was she cooked. I didn’t question whether I would like it or not. I just gulped it down. I was never disappointed.

I loved being with all my cousins, although it was my cousin Julie, my aunt Ruth’s daughter who was older than me, that seemed to be my mother’s favorite. Ma was always yelling at me when she got mad, saying that I should be like my cousin Julie. She obviously thought that Julie could do no wrong. Amazingly, I found myself taking after my uncle Jack’s daughter Lorraine. She went on to college and became a registered nurse who specialized in taking care of prominent patients and/or their families from across the world at Mass General Hospital. It was the knowledge that she went to college and made it that kept me dreaming about college but afraid to think that I could make it.

Like so many said that they have favorites in the family, I won’t single out who mine were, as they say, just because, so I’ll just leave it at that. Our family was close-knit while I was growing up, and like me, our parents used to love coming together on the weekends to play cards. My mother used to march me down to my uncle Jack’s who at that time lived on Washington Street next to Dudley Station, where she played cards with my uncles and my aunts every Friday night. There were about thirty-three nieces and nephews that belonged to all my uncles and aunts, with my aunt Ruth having been the only one with two children, a boy and a girl, and my mother having the title of bearing three girls with no boys. There would usually be only a handful of us kids who would actually come together when our parents were playing cards. The remainder of kids were older and had the choice to stay home.

Whist was the game traditionally played. There would be some alcohol involved, but mainly beer was the choice. I am proud to say that I can’t recall any of my aunts or uncles drunk in all my years. There was also plenty of food. Spareribs and collard greens were the main staples of the soul-food dish, but the one I loved the most was the hot sausages. You could smell the heat steaming out of them a mile away as they cooked, and that would bring us running to the top of the stairs first to get our plates. But the main thing we wanted was the hot sausages. Try and try again, each time they played cards, we would always ask for a hot sausage and always they would turn us down. My uncles would say hot sausages where not for children and they would make up reasons, like saying they would burn your stomach lining out. I secretly made a vow to myself that when I became old enough, I would buy my own hot sausages and to hell with burning my stomach lining out!

For the most part, I had fun with my cousins. We would go in the back alley between my uncle’s apartment building and another empty building and play dodgeball with some of the neighborhood children. My family would play cards till late into the night, and there never seemed to be a curfew for any of the kids at that time. I don’t think people back then thought about stranger danger. Washington Street was lined with apartment buildings three to four floors up. Looking at it back then, you could tell you weren’t in the swanky part of the city. There were no beautiful rows of green grass or flowers blooming, just dusty old buildings with pothole streets and uneven sidewalks all showing signs of wear and tear that suggested that there was once a different race and class of people who lived there. Surely the area could have been considered as a place where stranger danger could have thrived.

It was also a noisy street due to the overhead train that ran from Forest Hills Station in Jamaica Plain down Washington Street to Dudley Station in Roxbury. The noise was even more accented with the constant engines starting and buses moving in and out of the bus yard located directly across the street from my uncle. Past my uncle’s building was a bend in the street that led to a very busy, run-down hotel on the corner. Noise from there carried far especially on the weekends when most of the drunks that lived there came outside and claimed that particular corner to, as they used to say, shoot the shit. Winding the corner from the hotel led to the main entrance of where you caught the bus or train, which is still called Dudley Station. Past the station was the black folks’ shopping area located at the bottom of Warren Street, circling around to meet up with the other side of Washington Street and proceeding up to Mass Ave where Roxbury ended and the opposite side of Mass Ave where the South End began. There were stores on Washington Street catering to our needs, like Woolworths Department Store, Blair’s Market, a movie theatre, and a drugstore, to name a few. We were definitely locked into our place and not confused about where white folks thought our place should be.

Washington Street was a dark area at night, but a stream of streetlamps up and down the area kept the alleyways in between the buildings somewhat lit. It was just enough to light up where we played. We had a lot of fun for the most part, but one day in particular, I’m not sure who started it, a fight broke out between all of us. One of the boys we were playing with hit me hard in the face. I ran to my uncle screaming and crying, assuming I would get pity from Ma, when all of a sudden one of my uncles grabbed me by the shoulders and, like they said, stopped me dead. His voice rang out as he said, What did you do to him when he hit you?

Nothing I said.

Nothing? he responded.

In rapid words, I tried to explain how we were all fighting, although at this writing, I don’t remember why. My uncle asked me again what I did when he hit me. I again answered, Nothing. I didn’t get the word all the way out of my mouth before my mother snatched me and, yelling, demanded that I better get back out there and kick his ass because if I didn’t, she would kick mine. As I started across the alley to where my enemy was, I picked up a piece of wood. My ass would not be kicked that night!

I don’t know about you, but memories have a way of sometimes flooding my brain with ah-ha moments or moments that you wonder why they come up and show so much importance when they didn’t seem that way at the time. So when I say the earliest days of my memory that affected me were centered on my mother having all her teeth pulled, on our going to Boston City Hospital, and on walking down into a dark, dingy-looking corridor that showed no sign of being part of a sterile environment to a door and going through it where the dentist was waiting. I was probably six or seven at the time.

As Ma was being escorted to the dentist chair, she told me to have a seat and to not move. I knew she meant business; she always did. I slumped down in a chair across the room where I could get a good look at what was about to happen. You know how they describe the towel being placed around the neck to catch the blood while the doctors go to work? Well, all I could remember were those long, ugly, plier-looking black things moving toward her mouth and a voice saying Open up! I remember my mother in pain, her mouth hanging open, and her eyes rolling around in her head like she was in the throes of dying while the man in the white coat, one hand trying to hold her head tight and her mouth open while the other hand gripping those plier-looking things, was determined to yank every tooth out of her mouth! I tried to look away, but I was drawn to her face again. I wondered why she needed her teeth pulled out, but I just couldn’t remember anything beyond her smile.

The screaming had finally stopped, and I was brought back to that dimly lit hallway where they sat my mother and told her to wait until the doctor said she could leave; by the way, that hallway did nothing for the concept of hospitals being hygienically clean either. Ma was kind of laid over, her head leaning against a wall, a beautiful face that reminded me of how Helen of Troy must have looked shortly before her name was etched in history. Her mouth was now sunken in where teeth had the honor of keeping her mouth sensuously beautiful. Her eyes closed tightly now gave the impression that pain was still the dominating factor on her brain. Finally, the doctor emerged from the area where Ma had been tortured and told her what to do and discharged her. Back home offered no relief from the pain; in fact, it just served to let her release the rest of her anger at having been almost slaughtered. I watched her writhing on the bed we shared in our very small one-room apartment. I think they called them studios back then. You know, with a hot plate sitting on top of a cabinet across the room, just big enough to boil water. The toilet and bathtub were located outside our room at the end of the hallway next to the stairs going down.

We lived on Tremont Street close to Mass Ave. Tremont Street boasted a large array of three- to four-story high-rise brick buildings, which housed an array of studio apartments on either side of the street known as brownstones. Today, they say brownstones with dignity because of the flood of affluent whites who work in the downtown Boston area and live only blocks away from it. Yes, in the brownstones! Tracks went down the middle of the street to support the famous trolley cars that ran from one end of Tremont Street, down under, and into a tunnel that stopped at Park Street at the downtown commons. The boys in our community used to love jumping on the back of the trolleys and holding on to the long silver pole that connected the trolley to the wires that ran the full length of the street and provided the power for which the train moved. They would ride a few blocks, then jump off, laughing so hard you’d think that they did something wrong way out there and got away with it. For the more daring, they would ride the full length down into the tunnel and get off without being seen at Park Street. Anyway, the brownstones weren’t so bad. My mother couldn’t afford better, but at that time, I didn’t know what better was aside from the farm I was on while in foster care. But even then, I was starting to forget it and the woman who took good care of me. I don’t remember how we came to live at the brownstones other than we went from my foster mom’s house on the cape to an apartment off Humboldt Avenue in Roxbury to the brownstone on Tremont Street in Boston. Wow! Memories!

Ma was still feeling no relief, but this time, in between her pain, she was asking for soup because she thought it would make her feel better. It snapped me back, and once again, I was back in that room taking care of my mother. It took me a while before I realized that I was always trying to do things to make her happy, hoping that she would love me and want me around. I never felt loved by her and was never really sure why she took me out of foster care; but back then, at that time, I was more focused on pleasing her, so I quickly jumped up, ran to the hot plate, and plugged it in. Next, the chicken noodle soup in the pot on the hot plate. Boy was I shinning! I then gathered a towel to wipe the sweat from her head and tried to make her comfortable. Soon Ma was back to normal and doing her usual thing, seeing her boyfriend Bobby especially at night when they would go across Tremont Street, up Mass Ave, to Columbus Ave., and into Wally’s Café. The black scene was located there on all four corners of Columbus and Mass—the Blue Moon, Wally’s Café, the High Hat, and the Big M. If you couldn’t find the folks home playing cards, you better believe you’d find them in one of those clubs. Many celebrities came to Boston on the weekends and, as they used to say, turned the place out.

Bobby was what you’d call a good-look’n ladies’ man, tall, with what they called high yellow skin and somewhat curly hair and a great smile when he would smile. He complimented Ma’s good looks. I don’t know what he did for a living, but he must have had some kind of work because he had his own apartment where he often took Ma, sometimes leaving me alone in our apartment for a few hours. Anyway, things weren’t going too smoothly for Ma and Bobby, as their arguments were increasing and they were seeing each other less and less. After a while, I stopped paying attention to their relationship and more to my own.

I had two things I was becoming fixated on. One was school and the other was church. I had the convenience of attending school directly around the corner and at the end of the block from my house and church, which took up the opposite side of that same street and down the block. It was at school that I met Edith. Edie, as I called her, was an only child. Today we would call her a latchkey kid. Both Edie’s parents worked, so Edie was pretty much trusted to come home from school, let herself in with her key, and remain in the house until her parents came home. Sometimes she would ask me to come over on the way from school. I liked doing that because it meant we would act like grown-ups, with Edie making different meat sandwiches and milk. We would sit at the kitchen table with our knees crossed laughing at something one of us said and acting out our parents’ behavior. What was really funny was that I never met her family. I was always gone before they got home.

Aside from going to Edie’s house, Sunday mornings were my other favorite days. Ebenezer Baptist Church took up two streets: West Springfield and Rutland Streets. Each morning, Ma would get me up, dress me, comb and brush my hair, give me some change, march me down to the front stairs of our building, and send me off to church with a strict warning to go directly there and to not stop at the drugstore on the corner to buy candy because that change was for the Lord to be put in the offering plate. Ma never accompanied me to church. I used to wonder if she felt guilty about something and thought God would punish her if she went. I also thought that she wanted me to be a good girl, and sending me to church would make that happen. I don’t know what it was. I just knew she never went with me, so I knew that after going around the corner, if I waited a few minutes, she would go back into our building, and I could come back around the corner, slip into the store, and buy something but leave just enough to have some change to put in the offering plate.

I enjoyed sitting in church, listening to the choir sing and wishing I could sing with them. The pews, which were made of dark wood, seemed to gleam from the polish applied to them before the services and red drapes hung off shiny and gold-looking circular pipes that stretched across the whole altar and attached to the sidewalls just above its floor. Flowers were at both ends, just in front of the drapes. A podium made of the same wood as the pews stood in the middle separating the drapes. It held a clear distinction because it