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Like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and so many other northern cities where Southern migrants landed, Niagara Falls became a destination for thousands of black people looking for economic liberation. Black Alabamians in particular headed for the promise of good jobs and fair play Niagara Falls.
Born in 1911, near Elba, Ala., the daughter of Amanda McBride Howard and Jeff Howard, Pearl Howard arrived in Niagara Falls in 1955. It was not an easy journey.
Like many others in the backwoods of the poorest state in the Union, her family traveled all over, farming from one end of the state to the other.
The family started farming when she was nine years old, growing cotton, peanuts, corn, everything. "But those velvet beans were the worst," she says. "They had a type of fur on the bean plants that would stick to your skin and burn and sting your hands." She came down with malaria and her brother got slow fever and they could no longer work the fields.
"Back in those days everybody in the family had to work on the farms for half of the yield. The white landlords kept half of whatever we raised. They kept everybody in debt. Every year you would hope you made enough to turn a profit but every year the white man would claim you still owed him money. Of course we all knew better, but we had no way to change things. Everybody knew we were being cheated. Nobody ever got out of debt.
"Dad raised his own chickens, hogs and cows, but we had to move around a lot, so we never really got to keep much," she says.
She worked on the farms until around 1929 when she got married to a "big city boy." They had two children together, May and Lucas. But he didn't treat her right, she says, so she left and moved to Op, Ala., where she took a job and was fired for not going to work on New Year's Day.
"It was the best thing that could have happened to me at the time," she says. She then went to work in a hotel as a maid and a cook. The cook work in the kitchen was hot, too hot, but she did it. She says she preferred working as a maid so she did not have to work in that "hot, hot kitchen."
She says she never really got the chance to get very much of an education. "I went to school up to the third grade, where I learned how to read, but I did not want to go on to the next grade, although I took some fourth grade classes."
As she got older, she says, she got a reputation for being a mean fighting woman. "I'd beat up anybody who would mess with me. People today don't believe I was mean, but I was," she says. "I used to carry weapons, a knife, a stick, a board, whatever I needed to protect myself, and I would use it too, and people knew it. Black, white, man or woman, it did not matter to me. If you crossed me, I would beat you up!"
She says she went through some wild times as a young woman. "I took to drinking. At one point, I would drink so much, I'd give my money to my mother to keep so I wouldn't spend it all up in the taverns. People can't believe I was that way, that I used to drink and fight, but I did." She says God changed her. "He straightened me up when I moved back to Andalusia." She got a job there in a hotel as a cook. "That's where I really got serious about my cooking." Her made-from-scratch biscuits were known all over. She made the best pies with the best crusts that people came from miles around to enjoy.
She says, "Back in the day, I could put a hurtin' on some fried chicken and all kinds of meats, especially roasts."
In 1941 she traveled to Birmingham to stay with her brother. That's where she met and married her second husband, a serviceman. When he became sick, she says she wrote a letter to the president, asking that he be given a discharge because of his bad condition. "I was afraid after I sent the letter that I might have made matters worse for him. I never told him what I did, but I really wanted to get out of that place.
"They treated women, especially black women, terribly there, arresting them just for being out on the street, for no reason at all. The military was trying to keep the local women from getting mixed up with their men and they treated us real bad," she says. But her husband took her onto the base and introduced her to the MPs as his wife. They said no one had ever dared to do that, to be so bold as to tell the police not to mess with their woman. "They never bothered me again after that, but I still wanted to get out of there."
He eventually got his discharge and took a job with the railroad as a cook, a good job back in those days. They moved to Washington and she worked as a cook in a Philippine restaurant, cooking "their kind of food." She says she had also learned how to cook Chinese food and worked in a Chinese restaurant too. "I could cook anything once I learned how," she says proudly.
She remembers what she recalls as "the saddest day." She was at home in the kitchen. "One of our male neighbors came running in all out of breath, saying something about the president being dead. We could not believe it. President Roosevelt? Dead? We were all just devastated. President Roosevelt was such a good man. He was the only one in my lifetime who ever cared about us. It was the worst day of my life when I heard that!
"We had just barely survived Hoover, the worst president we ever had," she says. "Hoover was horrible. If we did not have our own chickens and cows, we would have all starved to death and he would not have cared one bit. Roosevelt made things better for the poor, black and white. He created jobs and raised our pay so we could survive. We all thought that might be over with when he died.
"We all went down to the train station when the train came into Washington. The streets were packed full of mourners. Everybody loved him, everybody was crying, black and white. I never saw so many people crying at the same time. It was the saddest day. You could never imagine, it was worse than when Kennedy died. Roosevelt was the best president we ever had. My husband and I left Washington the same year Roosevelt died. We moved to Cincinnati where his mother and sister lived at the time."
She took a job as a bus girl in a restaurant but it only lasted for one day, because the people were so disrespectful there, she recalls. Her husband, still working for the railroad, had begun mistreating her. It had gotten so bad, she says, his own mother and sister helped her leave him. Her brother James wired her enough money to escape to Chicago.
She worked in Chicago as a domestic, cleaning houses, ironing, doing whatever work she could find until 1955 when she came to Niagara Falls, where her daughter May and son-in-law Wilbur were living. They had married young in Andalusia and migrated to Niagara Falls, like thousands of others looking for work in the factories. "Teddy Williamson's parents had a place on Mackenna Avenue back then. It was a big house with lots of rooms. They rented space out to people who came up from Alabama. It was crowded, but it was fun. There was also a place we called 210 24th Street, next to Colucci's Jewelry Store, where lots of people stayed too. Although it was over-crowded and there were no bathtubs, people got along. We had to.
"There was a place called Little Joe's on 24th Street, where you could get a good meal for a fair price. You would see people out there on 24th Street from back home in Andalusia and all the little farming towns around there. We had good times then, talking about the days back home and how much better off we were to be up here in Niagara Falls with jobs and money, not working out on the farms for nothing, with no future, no hope. Niagara Falls gave us that. Even though there was no place to live except in close quarters with each other, it was still better than it was down South."
In 1979 she met her last husband through her pastor. "Those were the happiest days," she says. He died in 1989. She still enjoys working in the garden at her home on Grove Avenue, planting and raising greens, okra, tomatoes, red and sweet potatoes.
"I take pretty good care of myself," she says.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | April 23 2002 |