We buried the last of a generation in my father's side of the family two Saturdays ago. Only one of my mother's sisters is still alive, but all of my father's sisters and brothers are gone now. All the information she had about my family's history went with her to the grave, except for the precious little I was able to gather from our much too infrequent talks in her living room, or at the annual birthday parties and family reunions we organized over the past 30 years. I doubt that I got 1 percent of what she knew. The other 99 percent is lost forever.
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My father's sister, Dollie Bradberry Paulk, was born Aug. 17, 1913, in Colquitt, Ga., to my grandparents, the late Charles and Jessie Bradberry. The family moved to West Palm Beach, Fla., in 1925. They were migrant farm workers, earning their daily bread the hardest way, with their fingers, hands, backs, arms, feet and legs. But more importantly, they used their wits to survive against the odds. They had a strong sense of family and an undying hope that one day their children would have what they themselves could not have -- an easier way, security, peace of mind, and a single slice of the American Pie.
At the eulogy, my cousin, her son Calvin, one of her 14 children, remembered that they were the people other poor people used to refer to as "poor."
"But I never knew we were poor," he said. "Mother always provided for us. She'd get up every day and walk to work to make sure that her children had what they needed, and she always got it somehow. Yes, we were poor, but we never knew it until we were older. Old enough to look back and see just how hard it must have been."
It was hard. So hard the family scattered. My father wound up in Niagara Falls in 1928, arriving here with little but a smile and the spirit that his parents had imparted to all of their children, that with hope, hard work and strong family values, you can achieve anything you desire against all the odds.
And he did.
Like millions of African-Americans who migrated from the Deep South to the North in search of a fair chance to earn a living and raise a family, my father, like all of his sisters and brothers, struck out on his own to achieve one single purpose: to earn a living and raise a family.
He did.
My parents, like all the others in our neighborhood, were in Niagara Falls because there were jobs, affordable housing, integrated schools, churches, stores, doctors, barbers, beauty salons and everything else they needed to survive. They were, for the most part, not antagonized by racism. Most of the white people in Niagara Falls at that time were here for the same things my family sought, a chance to own a single slice of the American Pie, a piece of the dream, a chance to "make it," which war-ravaged Europe and the hell of the Deep South denied them, keeping most of them, but not all, bound in ignorance and abject poverty.
They were, as Tom Brokaw has called them, "The Greatest Generation," the men and women who defined America, created the world's most powerful symbol of freedom, liberty and "justice for all." It was not an easy journey for any of them. They had arrived here in separate boats, but they realized that they were all together in the same boat then, Americans, one and all. They struggled against evil, beating back the Nazis and the darkness of Jim Crow. They conquered polio, put a man on the moon, marched for Civil Rights, stopped an unjust war in Vietnam. They made this place the envy of the world.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | Nov. 23 2004 |