I Shared the Dream. Georgia Davis Powers
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Because of the events which followed, I tend to believe that Hal Muir was my grandfather. After Joseph Montgomery died, Grandma Annie couldn’t support her children alone, so she placed them around wherever she could. It tore Grandma Annie apart to give up her children, but poor people, then as now, do what they have to in order to survive.
Pop was seven at the time. He was sent to live with Hal Muir in the Muir’s large, red brick home which sat on acres of land. Pop’s room was in the basement; he lived there until he married my mother.
By the time Pop was twelve, he had learned to fix an automobile and to drive the Muir’s big black sedan. For the next seven years, he drove the Muirs and their four daughters around Bloomfield, where people gossiped that he was Hal Muir’s son.
Though they never lived together as a family again, there was a strong bond of love between Pop and his mother, and he didn’t lose touch with her even though he was living with the Muirs. When I knew Grandma Annie, she was a cook at the old Talbott Tavern Hotel in Bardstown. She wore a white-bibbed apron all the time, at work and on the streets. When we came for a visit, we often found her rocking in her worn mahogany chair on the porch of her little house. Of course, when we went to look for her at the hotel, Pop would go to the back door. Blacks didn’t go through the lobby, and even though other people thought he was White, Pop always knew what he was.
Although Grandma’s own life was hard, her sister, Celia Mudd, was prosperous. Aunt Celia had been a slave owned by the Lankester family. When the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves, Aunt Celia was only twelve years old. She stayed with the Lankesters and worked for them until they all died. The last person in the family she cared for left everything to her, creating quite a stir in the White community. Not long afterward, a distant relative of the Lankesters sued Celia for the property and she lost five hundred of the original one thousand acres in the lawsuit settlement. Even so, with the remaining five hundred acres of farmland, farm equipment, buggies, money in the bank, and a thirteen-room house filled with antiques, she was well off. After she came into her inheritance, Aunt Celia, who had waited on White people all her life, hired others to cook and clean.
As a child, I didn’t understand the price Aunt Celia had paid for her wealth, living twelve years as a slave and many more continually at a White family’s beck and call. I didn’t think much about her past or that she was rich. I only knew she had a big farm where we went in the summer to play in the fields and gather vegetables and fruit to take home.
Growing up, I never thought much about our being poor. Because of Pop’s hard work, we always seemed to have what we needed. My biggest worry as a child was the fear that I would die before anything really important happened to me. As my early childhood passed, I became more preoccupied wondering what I would do and how my life would turn out. I wanted to control my own destiny, but I never seemed to move forward except in response to some outward crisis.
My parents thought I would grow up, get married, and have children. Period. But when they conveyed their image of my future to me, I felt infuriated. I knew there had to be more. I didn’t want to wait for my real life to begin. I wanted to get on with it; but what that “it” was or how and where to search, remained a mystery.
Looking back, I can see that my youth seemed to lurch restlessly forward between intervals of apparent calm. I reacted strongly only when in adverse circumstances.
Even my coming to Louisville was precipitated by a dramatic event, a tornado that hit Jimtown. One afternoon, my brother Jay (our family nickname for Joseph) and I were taking a nap on my bed. Suddenly, a whirling funnel of wind whipped through our house, flipping the bed upside down and blowing my mother and father outside. It was March 18, 1925, and we were directly in the path of the storm—one of twelve that tore through Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, and Kentucky that year. They caused record death and destruction, 740 people dead, more than 2,000 injured, and twenty million dollars worth of property damaged.
Jay and I huddled together under the bed, safe in the midst of the destruction around us. I was only seventeen months old and already in the eye of a storm, a forewarning of the tumultuous life that lay ahead of me.
My parents had never expected to leave their rural home in Springfield, but with our house gone, we had to go somewhere. My mother’s oldest sister, Mary Kaufman, lived in Louisville, fifty-seven miles away. She urged us to move there. Aunt Mary found us a small house on West Oak Street in the Limerick area and we moved in.
At that time, Louisville, like the rest of Kentucky, was totally segregated. Poor Blacks lived in an area known as “little Africa,” whose unpaved streets extended south from Virginia Avenue and west from Thirty-sixth Street. These slums circled the downtown area. It was only steps from the business district to the surrounding alleys where Blacks built their homes, raised chickens, and kept hogs in pens. The houses, made mostly of concrete block or wood, were crudely built by the people who lived in them. Professional Blacks lived on more affluent West Chestnut Street and Grand Avenue. North of Broadway, the west end was all White.
As soon as our family was settled, Pop began searching for a job. He went first to the American Radiator and Standard Sanitary Company where a crowd of men gathered each morning, desperately hoping for employment. He wasn’t among the few hired that day, but he was doubly determined the next. Each morning, from then on, he stopped at the site on his rounds. After two weeks, Pop was hired and began the first day of what would become forty-two years of hard labor, years during which he worked enameling bathtubs in the foundry. He pulled the heavy tubs in and out of the forge, working in heat that would rise to 212 degrees.
Despite our living in a Black area, most people were confused by my father’s skin color. “Is your daddy White?” kids at school would ask.
“I don’t know,” I’d shake my head. To me he was just Pop, good to us and good to Mom. I loved him with all my heart, and I didn’t think about his color. People in my family were all different shades. Pop was the lightest. Mom and two of my brothers, Jay and Phil, were darker. My own complexion was somewhere in between the two. At home we never talked about color. I can only remember one time as a child when it was mentioned. My brothers were talking about a new friend they had made.
“He’s lighter than John Albert,” one of them said. We all laughed.
“If he’s lighter than John Albert, he must be White!” another brother said, and we laughed again.
However, not everyone viewed color the same way. Once, a trip we all took downtown in the car caused an ugly stir at Pop’s work. One of his co-workers at American Standard saw him with us and went to work and reported that Ben Montgomery had a Black family. The workers created a furor, talking angrily among themselves. Pop knew something was wrong, but he didn’t know what. Finally the president of the company, who had heard the gossip, called all the workers together.
“I understand some of you don’t want to work with Ben Montgomery any longer,” he said. “Those who don’t want to work with Ben stand on the left and the others on the right. Those who go to the left can pick up their checks and keep on going.”
The men went back to work and, at the time, no more was said. What happened that day illustrated to me the importance of leadership. When a leader takes a stand for justice, whether he or she is the head of a company or an elected official, people will usually follow. It was a lesson I never forgot.
Some of the workers continued to call our neighbors and ask, “Is Ben Montgomery White or Black?” When the neighbors, in turn, asked Mom, she would answer, “You’ll have to ask him.” Of course, they didn’t have the nerve to do that.
Did it