Collection: Directories and Documents > Tanis Thorne Glenbrook Park & Lake Olympia Collection

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Title: Black Life in the Sacramento Valley (1919-1934) Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Glenbrook Park & Lake Olympia Collection Author: Thomas C. Fleming Source(s): Sacramento Public Library # of Pages: 36 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

Date Scanned: 2024-01-08 13:14:08 OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.4.1 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 03:11:48 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 03:11:48

Original Held At: Searls Historical Library Location: 161 Nevada City Hwy, Nevada City, CA 95959

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Black Life in the Sacramento Valley Page 7 of 37 because I guess he didn't really know what to do about me. Kate and I had dinner off quite a few leftovers that Mama brought from the white folks' kitchen. They weren't going to eat it the next day anyway. It was customary all over the country for black domestics to cook enough food so that they could bring some home for their families. Refrigerators were just coming into being, and could probably be found in restaurants and soda fountains, but they weren't yet popular in homes. The ice man would traverse the streets every day. Most of the wagons were horse-drawn until about 1923, when they started to become motorized. My world was much bigger than Mama's. She read until late at night-mostly the Bible, or literature about her church. She belonged to the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Chico, but she would sometimes go to the Pentecostal Church—also called the Holy Rollers—in Oroville, about 20 miles south. I always looked at the Pentecostals with cynical eyes. When they got to that stuff about speaking in tongues, I'd be laughing out loud. The members would go to one another's homes practically every night of the week, and the only time I was forced to attend was when it was in our house. Mama never complained. She died when she was 57 from kidney failure. I always felt it was because she worked hard all her life, and was not a big person. She was very short but determined, standing at 4 feet 11 inches with high heels. 3. FIRST IMPRESSIONS The night I got off the train, I was not too impressed with Chico, from what I could see in the dark. It was simply not New York City, nor did it seem in a class with Jacksonville. Chico had 65 or 70 blacks out of a total population of about 10,000. The next morning, I looked around at the acres and acres of empty land in the neighborhood and told my mother, "I want to go back to New York." But I began to like Chico better as the time rolled by. My sister helped me identify peach, apricot and fig trees in the yard of our home, plus almond trees, gooseberry vines, raspberries and blackberries, which were all still green. My mother enrolled me in Salem Street School, which was for students from first to third grade. My father didn't send any records out with me, so I was put in the same class with my sister. My teacher's name was Virginia Wright, and we took to one another right off. I became sort of special, because in geography class, I was the only student who could talk of Florida and New York from first-hand experience. The school had an old-style bell in a dome, and Miss Wright gave me the job of ringing the bell every morning to call students to their classes. She also arranged for me to beat the drum, so that everyone would form a line in front of the door. I had to get downstairs quickly every day after ringing the assembly bell, and start drumming out the one-two cadence. While at Salem, I encountered my first experience of anti-Semitism. The Korn brothers, a pair of Jewish twins, whose father operated a dry goods store in Chico, were always thinking up pranks. Some of the http://www.cmonline.com/boson/freebies/blackhistory/fleming2.html 12/28/04