Read Online Certain People by Stephen; Birmingham - Free Book Online Page B

of status. We were of good stock.” She also admits that her black-skinned husband is not of as good stock. “I’m an Episcopalian,” she said. “My mother thought the Episcopalians were more liberal. He’s a Baptist, and a member of the Bethel Baptist Church. Bethel Baptist is headed up by Reverend and Mrs. Harry Brown. She’s the social arbiter of the church. He was a janitor and she was a beautician. But Brown went to the University, and took speech lessons, and they both went to a seminary and got degrees. Mrs. Brown puts on weddings. She puts on big banquets, with flaming baked Alaska. But some of those Baptists have never been outside the city, have never been to a hotel.”
    John Fleming’s father was a minister from Somerville, Tennessee, who came to Cincinnati in 1915. But when John Fleming was ten, his father departed for somewhere in the South, never to be heard from again, and his mother was left with eight children to raise. John Fleming was the only one of his brothers and sisters to go to college, walking five miles from his home in downtown Cincinnati to the city university in the suburbs, and another five miles back each night, stopping to change the sheets of cardboard in his shoes three times along the way. Lina Fleming’s background was much different.
    She was taught, as a little girl, that there were two kinds of people—“people like us,” and “those other people.” If she brought a new friend home from school, her mother would ask, “Are they people like us?” If they were not, and were “those other people,” her mother would see to it that the friendship was promptly terminated. Lina Fleming’s grandmother was equally class-conscious. “Grandmother felt that being in sports or entertainment wasn’t proper. I was horrified when I found out that I was related to Joe Louis! When Ifound out, I confronted Grandmother with it. She said, ‘I know, I’m sorry. I hoped you’d never know.’”
    On genealogical matters, Lina Fleming is almost dizzyingly well informed. “My father’s grandfather came from Jamaica with two brothers and a sister. He worked his way across Virginia. I don’t know if they were Negroes or Indians. One of my great-great-grandfathers was a white man named John Meadows, who had a lot of property. John Meadows had a mulatto daughter, and he didn’t want her to marry just anybody . My great-grandfather was Elbert, and he worked for John Meadows, not as a slave, and Elbert took the name of Meadows, and married John Meadows’s daughter. Elbert’s brother was elected to the House of Representatives under Rutherford B. Hayes, and was lynched on his way to the House. Elbert’s store, a blacksmith shop, was on the Meadows acreage—about five thousand acres, all told. Daddy’s grandmother looked white. My father’s mother was a Meadows, and the Meadowses supposedly had slaves of their own. She fell in love with a former slave boy named Wright, who shod her horses, and married him. It was considered a great mésalliance . Daddy went to Tuskegee where he met Mother. He was Nathan Wright.
    â€œMother was a Hickman. My mother’s grandparents were custodians of the Eclectic Medical School, and my grandfather practiced medicine in Paris, Kentucky. He was on the board of Berea University, which was founded for the children of white men who had mulatto wives. My great-grandmother laid the cornerstone of the Union Baptist Church. After Mother and Father were married, they lived in Louisiana. He worked in insurance. He taught the poor black farmers the importance of insurance, and made enemies among the whites. They were going to lynch him, but we were warned and my mother and I got on a train for Cincinnati, where Mother’s family had property. For a long time, we didn’t know where Daddy was.”
    The Hickman property was at Camp Denison, a