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He found it hard to acknowledge his son’s dedication to something creative, because he had no way of understanding it. and selling newspapers on the corner of Chelten and Germantown Ave.īut as I grew older, Dad’s attention to my desire to draw waned. Later, I earned money to buy my own supplies by shining shoes on Germantown Ave. My dad supplied me with the simplest tools and materials to make art: pencils, scraps of wallpaper, and sketchpads. I have loved to draw as far back as I can remember, and my parents nurtured this passion. To escape this hard reality, I turned to artwork. Growing up, feeling like someone who is Other can add a lot of weight to your shoulders, making your body feel much heavier than it is.
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Why didn’t some white people want to serve us? Why shouldn’t we go into that store, or visit that place? But there were never any answers to my questions, and we children looked for clues about what was safe and how to behave in the adults that surrounded us. How confusing and scary not to know where I could freely go! I was always on guard for a possible rejection. I never knew if that “welcome” sign included my parents, uncles, aunts, and the black adults who were our neighbors, teachers, and pastors - those very individuals who tried their best to instill a sense of self worth in us. Stores did not have any “whites only” signs posted, but the “open” sign on the door didn’t always mean that my friends and I really could enter and be served. In the 1940s, Philly was not as plainly segregated as many of the Southern states, but there was still often an implied separation of the races - limitations on where we could go, things we could do, who we could talk to. That criminal part of our country’s history had a wide reach, and it touched my small, African-American community, all of us living on one city block on a dead-end street in Philadelphia. However, what was much closer to my daily life was the shadow of Jim Crow laws and the effect that they had on black people. WHYY thanks our sponsors - become a WHYY sponsor The closest the war had come to us was Pearl Harbor, and that was still all the way in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I tried to remind myself that all of this was happening far away, with oceans separating these events from me and my family at 51 East Earlham Street in Philadelphia. They would often surface during our school air raid drills, and on nights when I found it difficult to sleep, I would imagine plumes of smoke, drawn faces, and frail bodies. It was hard to return to my immediate world - to schoolwork, or to the lunch my mother had left out for me - and even after I closed the drawer, the horrific pictures stuck with me. They stowed them in a large wardrobe at the end of the second floor landing of our home, and when I was left alone, I would sneak up there, sit cross-legged in front of the wardrobe, and retrieve the forbidden magazines from the bottom drawer.įlipping through the pages, I stared at photographs of figures lying face down in murky waters on a beach in Burma, the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor, burned out planes, running soldiers and sailors, and lines of bone-thin people in raggedy clothing - victims who had been liberated from the concentration camps in Europe. I remember my parents quickly putting away their copies of Life magazine that featured articles about the country’s war efforts, wins, and losses. As for the war, they tried to shelter us from the gruesome reality. The Great Depression had certainly touched and challenged my parents, but whatever fears and trepidation they harbored about the future, they did a pretty good job of hiding them from us kids.
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I learned most of what I knew about these events through short news clips they used to show at the movies - my buddies and I liked westerns best - right before the cartoons and the feature film. Our country was still recovering from the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression was finally ending, and World War II was just beginning. Growing up in the 1940s, I was also smack in the middle of another turbulent era in American history. I was born in 1939, smack in the middle of a family of eight.