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Showing content with the highest reputation on 09/15/2016 in all areas

  1. The question really is what do Black women, any of us really do with this anger? Do we direct it inwards, and become self destructive to ourselves and our community; or do we take that energy and do something constructive? Anger is not the problem it is natural reaction to the real problem we confront on a daily basis.
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  2. @TroyYes, I met my maternal grandfather once during a visit to Nashville when I was about 6 years old. All I remember was that he looked like an old white man, blue eyes and all. I found out later that as a young man he had also been an excellent carpenter. I don't think he kept in touch with the people who once owned him. At a certain age, his half siblings moreorless disowned him and went about their lives as did he. He also reported in a slave narrative he dictated to people who went all over recording these recollections during the Depression, that after the civil war, the KKK had once descended upon Franklin, Tennessee, where he lived, and he and his posse ran them off and they never returned. My paternal grandfather lived with us for a while during World War 2. He was a dapper ol widower who liked gin and had an eye for the ladies. One thing I remember about him was that he always bragged about being able to read and write. My Dad always referred to his ex- slave grandmother as Granmammy and described her as being black as tar. Both of my grandfathers died before I reached my teens, and of course I wish now i had questioned them more about their past. My maternal grandmother, who I never knew, taught school for a while, something women could do back then if they had at least 2 years of high school. I learned that she set up a little room in our basement when she came to live with my mother and taught my older brother before he entered grade school providing him with what have been equivalent to kindergarten. Never knew my paternal grandmother either who died when she was young and my father would talk about him and his younger half-sister crying and running behind the cart carrying her wooden casket to be buried as soon as possible because she wasn't embalmed and the blood was running out of her nose and ears. Recounting this would always make him very sad. From the one picture I saw of her she looked very much like the half native American that she was. My Dad's father and mother weren't married and his father left town and went north to seek his fortune. After his mother's death, my dad went to live with an aunt who totally neglected him and when word got back to my grandfather, he came back to Kansas, and kidnapped my father, taking him back to Chicago with him. My Daddy loved "runnin on the road" which was how people referred to pullman porter work, but I understand my mother was glad when he lost this job because he was away from home so much. (This was all before my time, back during the 20s) My daddy also mentioned how on layovers he'd always go and visit the local tourist attractions in whatever town he was in and that was a great education for him who never got past 8th grade. BTW, I am named for an aunt named Consuelo who, herself, was named for Consuelo Vanderbilt, a famous rich debutante who was like the Jackie Kennedy of her day. From the way my mother described her reclusive sister, I think now that she was probably autistic but back then, they didn't have a name for her condition. (This was probably the case with many people in those days who were thought of as just being a little "off".) I don't think my mother ever met Madam C. J. Walker. She just attended the beauty college named after her. As for the meaning of the word, "toddlin", I would guess that it means fun loving and naughty. The song "Chicago" made famous by Frank Sinatra refers to Chicago as "a toddlin' town", and the line following this phrase is "the town that Billy Sunday could not shut down". Billy Sunday was a famous evangelist on a mission to reform sinners and abolish dens of iniquity.
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