1
Life in the Bottom
Let us look at Jim Crow for the criminal he is and what he had done to one life multiplied millions of times over these United States and the world. He walks us on a tightrope from birth.
—Rosa Parks1
Our neighbor had a peach tree in his yard. A vegetable garden, too. I loved fruit. So did my cousin, Kenneth Booker. We craved juicy flavors created by sinking our teeth into tree-ripe Georgia peaches.
We felt the fuzz on the fruit and checked our chins to see if we were growing any. Neither Kenneth nor I were yet ten years old. No fuzz.
Our neighbor was—who knew how old? Thirty? Fifty? One hundred twenty? In the early 1950s, kids didn’t know the ages of adults. They were adults. They were old. We were kids—young, full of fun, and hungry.
The sun was hot. Summers in Atlanta can be sweltering. Swelter builds thirst. Thirst builds temptation. Temptation yields to naughty.
Some days Kenneth and I pretended we were marines fighting in Korea in the bitter cold of the recent disaster at Chosin Reservoir. This day we were the US army attacking Nazi Germany as my father had when we were toddlers. We stuck sticks out our sleeves and small twigs out our pant cuffs to camouflage our assault. We crawled on our bellies, then climbed the neighbor’s fence to penetrate the “German” perimeter.
The tree had no chance; the garden, no protection. We plucked peaches. We stole vegetables. We escaped. We crawled back. Our bellies hugged the earth until reaching the fence. Our heads moved back and forth keeping watch for the enemy. Our Raid on Peach Tree succeeded.
The plan was to tell Mom we had saved our pennies, walked to the grocery store, and purchased the food so she could make us vegetable soup and peach pie. That made sense to us. So, as we filled Mom’s ears with fibs, our mouths dripped peach juice. We were proud. We were happy. We were stupid.
Mom marched us over to the neighbor and made us knock on his door. Hinges creaked. It might have been the old man’s joints. The huge door opened. Mom stood behind me. Her eyes bore down on my head. I felt them. Being nine and two years older than Kenneth, I knew she would make me do the talking. I started stuttering.
“We…” I paused.
“Go on,” Mom commanded in a voice both soft and steel.
“We stole peaches and vegetables from your garden.”
I don’t know if my quivering voice made my knees knock or my shaking knees made my words tremble.
“Keep going.” Mom was not going to make this easy. Her quiet voice echoed enforcement more than volume would have.
Words stumbled out.
“We can repay you for what we’ve eaten. Here’s the rest of what we took.”
“Took?” Mom’s voice challenged.
“Stole.” She made me say the word a second time.
I tilted my head back so my eyes could meet the neighbor’s eyes. Mom insisted we make eye contact with people as we spoke. Adding a second offense to stealing would not go well. I knew that. I kept my head tilted.
The neighbor’s face was so far up. When you are caught in your guilt, it is a stretch to see beyond your shame. But there he was looking down on me. I didn’t like it when people looked down on me.
His face looked stern. Then a miracle happened.
“Boys, thank you. That was the right thing to do. You can keep what you have as a gift. Next time, ask. I might come out and help you pick.”
Back home, Mom made us the best peach pie and vegetable soup I can remember eating. Kenneth and I felt as if we had dodged death.
Then Death came home from work.
My dad, Hugh Person, strode through the door in a hurry to get to his second job on time.
“We have a situation that needs … attention,” Mom said.
She told him what we had done, what she had done, and what the neighbor had done.
Then we found out what Dad was going to do.
“Ruby, I’ll take care of it.” Dad was a man of few words.
Moments later, as Dad rushed out the door, our shame lingered on our tearstained faces and our sore rear ends. We got our butts spanked. Sometimes I can still feel it today, though I can laugh about it now in a way I could not in 1951.
The Raid on Peach Tree defines the kind of trouble I got into as a youth—the kind of troublemaker I was. That is to say, I wasn’t. Mischievous? Misbehaving? Of course. Every youngster is. But troublemaking? I am not built that way. It is not in my DNA.
Strange, then, that a lifetime later—at age eighteen—Atlanta city police locked up me and hundreds of others for the troublemakers we were. Stranger, still, that I could be an “outside agitator” in my native South because I boarded a bus in Washington, D.C., and rode it home.
That is what a segregationist mind can convince itself of: a bus rider is a troublemaker; a native son is an outside agitator. That is what Jim Crow teaches people to believe: that people’s “disorderly conduct”—one of the offenses Freedom Riders were charged with—is worthy of their being jailed, beaten, or killed to “teach them a lesson.”
Jim Crow. Segregation. These are aberrations from human dignity no one should live under. They should never have existed, but since they did, they should be anachronisms of eras long past. Instead, they are realities conceived from our nation’s original sin of slavery, and they continue today in the hearts of those who act to ensure whites remain in charge.
As a young child in 1940s Atlanta, I did not know the existence of segregation any more than a fish knows water. Or a bird air. Or a white child knows whiteness. In my childhood awareness, I wasn’t growing up in segregation. I was growing up on Bradley Street—21 Bradley Street.
I was growing up in a community of folks like me in an area of Atlanta called Buttermilk Bottom. Buttermilk because many families there survived on buttermilk and corn bread. Bottom because Heights doesn’t make a lot of sense when life lands you in the lows.
In the Bottom, life was simple. I thought my family was wealthy. We weren’t. Wealthy in time, food, people, and love? Sure. I had Mom and Dad, my siblings, my cousin Kenneth, and my grandparents Papa and Grandma Booker and Mama Arlena. I had abundance in everything that mattered to me.
It’s hard to imagine being richer in food than we were at 21 Bradley. Our relatives lived out in the country, and that gave us access to farm food. Pigs alone gave us delicacies in four seasons. We had bacon all year round but much more than that. Mom used pigs’ ears, tails, and feet to make food ranging from meals to snacks. She cooked pigs’ ears, put them between two pieces of bread, slapped mustard and hot sauce on them, and I had the best sandwich I ever ate. She cooked pigs’ tails down till they were so tender the meat fell off easier than the softest puff of wind disperses dandelion seeds. They were better than dark meat on a chicken drumstick. Mom pickled pigs’ feet in vinegar, salt, and pickling spice and let them cure in a canning jar for a month. We had a hard time waiting for what was on the other side of those thirty days.
Mom cured hams in a smokehouse for months preparing for the holidays. The same ham that provided Christmas dinner gave us leftovers for sandwiches and food for breakfast. It also gave us redeye gravy. Mmm, mmm. Mom placed pieces of ham in her cast-iron skillet and browned them on both sides. I watched with “Is it ready yet?” eagerness as she turned the ham over, careful not to burn it, but turn it into a beautiful rich brown. Mom’s self-control outmatched my eagerness. After placing the ham on a plate, and sometimes slapping my hand to keep me away from it, she poured leftover coffee into the skillet. The coffee loosened the residue from the pan to make pure magic. My nose knew before my eyes did—breakfast was ready. And I was ready for breakfast. I rushed to my seat, pushed my spoon into my grits, and dug a reservoir for Mom’s gravy. She would say, “Tony”—Mom sometimes called me Tony from my middle name, Anthony—“Tony, slow down. Be patient.” It was hard for me to be patient. I wanted what I wanted, and I wanted it now. She poured the steaming sauce into the basin I’d created in my bowl and … slapped my hand to keep me away from it. I grabbed one of her piping hot homemade biscuits and placed a piece of the ham inside. Biscuits. Grits. Redeye gravy. Ham. Me. It was Christmas Day all over again every day for a week.
Had I enjoyed an abundance of awareness of the physical world around me, I might have noticed the Bottom reeked. Decay permeated nostrils. I did not smell it. Coal-burning trains spewed black sewage skyward. I did not detect it. Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills billowed clouds of cumulous gray. I never noticed it. The black soot climbing into the blue had to fall somewhere. It fell on us—on me. I did not feel it. The smell of chitlins cooking and the smell of collard, turnip, and mustard greens with ham hocks jarred our sense of smell, but they tasted good. Drunken old men smelled of liquor and urine. They smelled of whiskers and wrinkles, too. They, like us kids, lived oblivious of the obvious—the Bottom offended human senses if you were aware enough to notice.
Wide, unpainted, rotting clapboard houses hugged Bradley Street. Slatted-wood porches held rickety chairs. Rickety people sat in those chairs. At least that’s what Kenneth and I thought. Rusted tin roofs repelled the rain except where holes had worn through. In the Bottom, it rained inside and outside.
Unpaved streets meant that the few cars in the Bottom bounced and bumbled at speeds kids could outrun because speed raised dust. The dust of clouds was one more thing to fall on us. We didn’t need anything more falling on us.
In the Bottom, everyone had exquisite dark skin—shades that ranged from light brown to dark chocolate—except for a small minority. The milkman was white. The laundry owners, Asian. The owners of the ice cream shop, Greek. The insurance man stood out to Kenneth and me because he had chalky-white skin, straight hair, thin lips, and a thinner nose. We made fun of that.
“Press your nostrils together and inhale,” I coaxed Kenneth.
He did, but it didn’t last.
“You do it,” Kenneth said.
“I’d rather look like Satchmo.” I flared my nostrils out.
That didn’t last either. We laughed longer than either of our nose contortions lasted. I guess we learned we have the noses we’re born with.
Years later a man I did not know and would never meet again decided to reshape my nose for me because he did not care for where I chose to sit on a bus. Why my nose and the rest of me mattered so much to him I do not know, but it did.
On Bradley Street we lived in a two-room, second-story apartment in an eight-apartment wooden building. Six small upstairs apartments sat atop two large apartments at ground level. This was the one time in my early life I got to be on top. To get home, we climbed an outside staircase and proceeded down a street-facing balcony past other apartments till we reached 5B.
The words apartment building are accurate, but they do not capture 21 Bradley. Warped planks formed the floors, the walls, the ceilings. I remember the balcony felt solid, but its railing looked more like rolling waves than leveled wood. Most windows in the apartments were glass. A few were holes in the walls boarded up with nailed, horizontal slats of pine. Gaps in the slats allowed daylight in and kept most rain out. No foundation existed. Every eight feet or so, blocks of stacked bricks propped the building three feet off the ground. A lot of brick was missing from those supports that held up 21 Bradley, but the building still stood. It tilted a little, but stood.
The front door of our home opened to a combined living room and bedroom. That’s where Mom and Dad and my younger sisters Norma Jean and Carole slept. The second room was a combined kitchen, dining room, and bedroom for Mama Arlena (we called her Malena), my brother Jimmy Dale, and me. My younger three siblings had not yet come along, so there was plenty of room for the seven of us in the two rooms of 5B. Our toilet was outside on the back balcony. We shared it with the other families in the upstairs units of our building.
Today, I know life was small on Bradley Street, but a few blocks away life was big. Ebenezer Baptist Church. Bethel AME Church. Wheat Street Baptist Church. Big sanctuaries. Big steeples. Big congregations. Big voices from the pulpits and choirs. Preachers with big personalities.
Martin Luther King, Jr., grew up on Auburn Avenue all of four hundred steps from my home. Auburn was known as “the richest Negro street in the world.” But today I know “richest Negro street” meant poor and undesirable by white standards.
A half mile down Auburn Avenue from the King home, the Royal Peacock nightclub brought national talent to “Sweet Auburn Avenue.” Muddy Waters, Fats Domino, Dizzy Gillespie, Big Mama Thornton transformed that lounge into a volcanic celebration of music. In our young teens, Kenneth and I sneaked there at night. We crouched outside and heard the music, felt the vibrations, and imagined what we were missing. Every kid we knew wanted to be old enough to enter the Royal Peacock.
This was our world.
Men worked jobs paying $40 to $50 a week. Women worked as domestics. That brought another $5 a day. It’s hard when a woman is mother to two sets of children—her own four kids (eventually seven) and her white family’s children. Ruby Person hid the hardness. My siblings and I were not aware of Mom’s world—a world where Jim Crow sat on her as she and Dad tried to make it up from the Bottom.
After a long day of working for someone else’s family and a long evening of tending to her own, Mom gathered Jimmy Dale, Norma Jean, Carole, and me to her bedside. She sat on the bed. We sat on the living room floor next to the bed and listened to the Bible reading. Sometimes, we got to pick the story.
“Tell us about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego,” we said in chorus. Like most kids, we wanted to hear the same story over and over.
“Here’s a story of brave people just like the four of you,” she said.
Copyright © 2021 by Charles Person and Richard Rooker
