When the Ghetto Was Good

Age 5

The thing that I remember most about my childhood is the block that I grew up on and the house in which my family lived.  I grew up in Baltimore in the 1950's and 60's at a time when the city was legally segregated.  Black folks lived in separate neighborhoods; we had our own schools, our own movie theaters, and even our own radio station.  When I was five years old, my parents moved out of a row house owned by my grandparents (where my two aunts, two cousins, and uncle also lived) and took the bold step of buying a house on the seemingly all white block of Calverton Heights.  Actually, another black family had moved in just before we did in a house across the street from us.  Like my mother, that couple was very light and may have been passing.

My parents Louise and Robert Parker

Although my mother is light-skinned, my father was a rich brown color.  I later would wonder if our white neighbors had seen my father until after we moved in.  Soon after we joined the neighborhood a For Sale sign went up next door.  Another light-skinned couple moved into the middle of the block, and after that there seemed to be For Sale signs up everywhere.  The first black families that moved in were all very light-skinned-what might be called passe blanc in another section of the country.  The real estate agents were sneaking us in!  Nevertheless, as the number of black families on the block increased, so did the number of darker skinned ones.   For some reason, the lighter families were all at the top of the block and the further down the block you went the darker the families became.

2502 Calverton Heights Today

In probably less than a year the 2500 block of Calverton Heights went from being an all white block to being an almost all black one.  A single Jewish woman remained in the house next door to us until she died. Because there were folks of every complexion in my neighborhood, it was a long time before I had any concept of race. I thought that folks just came in different colors.  I didn't know that I was black until I went to an integrated middle-school and heard teachers complaining about the "Negroes bringing the school down."

Christmas in Calverton Heights

I remember my childhood fondly.  Early mornings in the summer the kids on the block would gather to decide if we were going to ride bikes or roller skate.  Sometimes the girls would push around their doll carriages, and after my sister was born I sometimes got to push her around in mine, which made me very popular. I remember a few busted lips and badly scraped knees from falls I had, but unless you were bleeding badly no one wanted to go inside because your mother might keep you there!  At lunch time, everyone went inside and did not come back out until after dinner. I was required to take a nap (“close your eyes and pretend” my mother would tell me if I told her I wan’t sleepy…I thought that was magic).  After nap time I would wash up and change my clothes.  In the evenings, the grownups would sit on the porch and kids would gather on someone’s stoop.  We’d sit around and talk, eat candy from the corner store, and drink Grape or Orange Nehi sodas with Vanilla ice cream.

When we moved to Calverton Heights my parents owned an old green Nash motor car.  My mother learned to drive in that car.  We would sit in it and say “go car, go” because sometimes it wouldn’t start right away.  After that, the only cars they bought were Buicks.  Sometimes on weekends my father would hook up the hose and he and I would wash and wax the car.  I could tell when my father came home by the sound of his car.

My parents rented out the top floor of the house.  The first renter was my mother’s youngest sister, Aunt Babyday, who moved in when she first got married.  It was somewhat of a “honeymoon suite.”  Newly married couples would rent an apartment until the wife became pregnant and/or until they could afford to buy their own house.  There was a big record player on the main floor and I remember how my mother would play Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, and early Harry Belafonte in the mornings when she cleaned.  On the bottom floor my parents had great parties, with cans of Utz potato chips, plenty of food, and lots of hard liquor.  Nobody drank wine in those days.   Since places they could go were limited, house parties were the main means of socializing, especially in the winter. My job was to take the coats and put them in the bedroom. 

Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, and Harry Belafonte 

There was lots music, loud talking, and laughter (Years later when my kids were around for one of these parties, they got frightened because it was so boisterous that they thought folks were downstairs hurting each other). There was also lots of dancing; sand would be poured all over the floor to make it slippery. They did swing dancing, what I guess is now called ballroom dancing, and the first line dance, which originated in Baltimore, The Madison.  The Madison was the Electric Slide of its day.  The next morning I would go down and run and slide on the sand.  

In the fall there were football parties when the Colts had away games.  Although the men would be in one room and the women in another, there would be televisions in both rooms.  Everybody-- men women and children-- loved the Colts and football in those days.  It’s good to see the same kind of sports fever for the Ravens.

When my husband and I bought a house in Harlem, I felt like I had come full circle.  I felt like I was home.  I felt a real comfort living in, what was then, an all black neighborhood.

\

The Year I Became a Butterfly (Almost)

By Roberta Cardwell

Growing up in the 1950s and 60s, I was a chubby light-skinned girl with glasses.  I don’t remember being especially shy when I was little.  I had my girlfriends Mimi and Rita and was included in most things on the block simply because I was a member of the neighborhood.

Age 7

As I got older and approached adolescence my glasses became thicker and thicker and eventually I became the girl with coke bottle glasses.  When the other kids were allowed to venture outside of the neighborhood, I could not hang out anywhere my parents couldn't see from the front door.  My parents had to be able to look out of the front door and see me.  I have no recollection of where the other kids were going, but I do remember looking out of the living room window as they gathered under the street light on the corner and wishing that I could join them. Now I know that my parents, especially my mother, were frightened of what could happen to a girl in the outside world when I was living in a segregated society.

I became extremely shy.  More than anything else this shyness defined my adolescence and adulthood. Actually, “shy” doesn’t adequately describe it.  I had a real fear of what people would think of what I said and did, and that I would be judged and come up lacking.  I found it hard even to talk to people and could not perform in front of anyone.  At that time, the telephone was becoming the way to socialize, but the few times someone called me I was in a panic about what to say; I didn’t know how to just chat.  

Back then every black teenager was expected to know how to dance.  Nobody just got up and did their own thing.  You had to know the dances. Indeed, your popularity could rise and fall based on how expert of a dancer you were.  I was never able to get up and dance, even in my own home with family when everyone was doing the Madison.  My mother would urge me to get up and join the line, but I just couldn’t- I was frozen in place. 

I remember sitting in a classroom in school and feeling as if I were viewing the world with just my mind, which was completely disconnected from my body (decades later when my father was near death he said he did not feel like himself because so much of what he had been was associated with his body, a body that he no longer had use of; all that was left was his mind.  I completely understood what he meant).  So I read.  I turned to, and got lost in, books.  The Enoch Pratt Free Library on North Avenue became my place to be.

The Enoch Free Library on North Avenue today

Today, I think that I have social anxiety disorder, but growing up there was no such diagnosis.

So here I was, by now a 15 year old teenager, with thick glasses, without social skills or friends, and gaining weight every year because I spent most of my time inside reading.  But  that summer my parents did a really amazing thing – they got me contact lenses!  I had never even heard of contacts, but my parents had found out about them through a friend. They were very new, and probably very expensive.

That was the year I was suppose to bust out of my cocoon and become a butterfly.   I not only lost the glasses, but lost a lot of weight too.    That September, waiting at the bus stop on the first day of school I heard a boy say “Isn’t that the fat girl who used to wear those thick glasses? She sure looks different.”  Unfortunately, what I didn’t lose was the shyness.  My looks changed, and I began to face new challenges now that I was no longer invisible.