Nana Biography

He found out about this, and called me in, and where she could really hear him, and he said, “Nancy, the servants place is in the kitchen, and your place is in the house, and you are not to go in the kitchen and play checkers with Rachael . “And with that I begin to be very defiant. And so then I sneaked. Rachael said, “you all gonna get killed, you know. Your father is gonna get mad at you. “But that didn’t matter to me. I could hear when the car was coming and run up.

The kitchen was separate from the house.

No, it was right there in the house, but I, you know, when they would go out at night, I was sort of alone and I thought that was stupid, and I told him so. So I was disrespectful many times, and I began to worry about this black situation because I lived in the country and when they would go off for a weekend or something , and Christine was one of the cooks. 

Christine was allowed to take me to the movies on Saturday, and we had to ride on an interurban street car, which was about a mile and a half away. That’s not very far by today’s standards, but then we were in the country, and we got on the interurban, and it was a divided one, with colored in the back and white in the front. I mean it was in the segregated era. And I would always go back with her in the colored section and the conductor would always stop the interurban and come back and asked me to go upfront. It always angered me, but I did it. And other people in the car would stare. So we got to the movies, she had to sit in the balcony and I had to sit downstairs. Well, I came home and began to question, why is it that I have to do this, and my father said these people are different, and have to be treated differently, and you can’t let them come down there, and this that and the other, and then on and on and on. He would give his old clothes to the people, and Robert, no matter who it was, would put them on, and they see them going out on Sunday morning on their Sunday off looking like $1 million, they were evidently handsome people, which I was not aware of at that time, now I know how beautiful black people are, but at that time – and my father would say to my mother, “you know, it doesn’t matter what size you give them, they can put them on and look nice in them. they have something about them, they have style in the way they wear their clothes. “

-72-