The Sweeter the Juice

Book by Shirlee Taylor Haizlip

Chapter One

It is his life and no mere abstraction in someone's head. He must live it and try consciously to grasp its complexity until he can change it; must live it as he changes it.

Ralph Ellison

Shadow and Act

On a January day so achingly cold the streets of Manhattan were almost empty, Julian Taylor, a man the color of fresh-baked ginger cake, married Margaret Morris, a woman the color of eggnog. Emerging from the judge's chambers at City Hall, the bride nearly slipped on a sidewalk covered with black ice. Crystalline slivers were beginning to fall.

As they made their way carefully to the car, the groom checked his inside coat pocket several times to make certain the future he had planned was still there. Carefully folded in a small white envelope was the handwritten letter he had received days before.

Rev. Julian Taylor

In our regular church meeting, we the First Baptist Church of Stratford do hereby extend to you a call to serve beginning the first Sunday and lasting as long as satisfaction is given. We are yours in Christ.

Done by order of the Church.

In payment for his leadership, Rev. Taylor's weekly salary was set at twenty-five dollars. And so it came to pass that Julian took his mostly white bride, Margaret, to the poor white town of Stratford in the rich white state of Connecticut.

In 1933, Stratford was a sleepy coastal village that had once been known for its shipyards and oyster beds. It was not a place of rolling hills, large estates or English gardens like its sister towns, Southport and Greens Farms. Although there were a number of large, well-preserved homes, for the most part the houses were small and painted white or gray. A few adventurous souls chose yellow or barn red. Overall it was a nondescript town with a few colored residents. For them, there was one church, First Baptist, a tiny wooden house of worship with a little more than one hundred members.

The church's congregation lived mainly in the neighboring city of Bridgeport. As in many New England towns and cities during that era, it consisted of two groups. There were families whose relatives had been in the town since either colonial times or shortly after the Emancipation. Many had the cultured mannerisms of those who work around the very rich -- which, in fact, they did, in places like Westport, Fairfield, New Canaan and Darien. The other group was the majority, uneducated through no fault of their own, hard-working and respectable; they were the first trickle of the streams of Negroes who migrated from the South to find new jobs and new dreams.

The installation of a new minister is a time of celebration, renewal and optimism. Old quarrels are put aside and new ambitions are revealed. Julian's first order of business was a proper introduction to the church. His father, his four brothers and his stepmother journeyed from Washington in a shiny LaSalle. With their elegant attire and big city airs they dazzled the congregation. A few hours after the service, however, Julian's stepmother, Miss Alice, had a heart attack and was put to bed. The next day they managed to get her into the car for the return journey. Miss Alice would die a few weeks later.

For the new pastor and his wife, that first year in Connecticut included the expected weddings, funerals and christenings. Julian's diary also recorded "lawn fetes," garden parties, a baby contest, "smokers," chicken suppers, theater, chitterling dinners, bingo parties, a bus ride to Coney Island and "intertainments," as Julian called them, at various members' homes. In his spiritual ledger, the titles of his sermons that year suggested high drama or deep intrigue: "Influence," "Fatal Decision," "The Blood Taken," "Palace of Happiness," "The Rich Fool," "Contrary Winds," "Bitter Water Sweetened," "The Sublimest Theme."

It had been a full year and at its end, on an unusually warm November day, Margaret felt the first contractions of labor. She claims she was not unduly upset that her doctor would not give up the Yale-Princeton football game at Yale Bowl to be at her bedside. Margaret's "sister," Thelma Lazenberry, and a neighbor, Matiel Robinson, served as midwives. Once the real work was done, Julian took charge and named the infant Jewelle.

Two more Taylor children were born in the Stratford bungalow. First came Julian, Jr., in 1935. After his birth, homesick and frequently ill, Margaret was often depressed and showed little interest in the business of running a household. It was clear that she needed someone else in the house full-time to bolster her spirits and help with the two young babies. Through a minister's wife who was a social worker, Julian heard of a nine-year-old girl in an orphanage who needed a home. Memories of her own childhood gave Margaret a deep cushion of empathy for children who had no relatives to take them in. She was eager to meet the little girl. Her name was Margaret Jackson, the first in a long line of additional "daughters" in the family. "Little Margaret," as she would thereafter be known, quickly became a conscientious older sister to Jewelle, Julian and, later, me. On occasions when they were out with the family, the young minister and his wife introduced Little Margaret as their daughter. Because she was dark like Julian, people said she looked like him, a comparison she cherished.

My own birth was duly recorded by my father on September 3, 1937. Like many other mothers that year, my mother named me after the reigning child star, Shirley Temple. Margaret found no dissonance in giving to her infant Negro daughter the name of an apple-cheeked Hollywood princess. But when I reached high school I would drop the "y" and add an "e" to my name to distinguish it from all those other Shirley Temples. I took more solace that one of my middle names, Anne, was from my paternal great-grandmother, an Indian. Her Native American name was White Cloud, and in my own fanciful process of deduction, I figured I could claim it too.

The year I was born, five young men were freed from the Alabama prison where they had been incarcerated since 1931. They were part of the group that became known as the Scottsboro boys, the name given to nine young Negro men who had been falsely accused of raping two white girls while traveling in boxcars on a train in Alabama. In a series of trials starting in Scottsboro, Alabama, the boys were convicted, and some of them sentenced to death. Subsequently an Alabama judge set aside the verdict. Three more were freed in the 1940s, and in 1948 the fourth escaped from jail to Michigan, which refused to return him to Alabama. But I would not read that tale until 1950, when it would deepen my adolescent awareness of what it means to be black in America.

To help care for me, my father hired Mrs. Arrington, a widow from his church who needed a place to live. The expanded family remained for more than four years in the cozy house on Stratford Avenue. It had a lawn many times its size, with trees and a brook at one end that was inhabited by frogs and minnows. It was also said to be haunted by a child who at the turn of the century had drowned in the swollen stream after a week of steady rain. At night the moonlight's phosphorescence revealed an insubstantial childlike form running and jumping through the trees and along the water's edge. For my parents, the image held no fear. They were accustomed to ghosts.

In the new house a new tradition established itself. Julian's young teenage daughters by his first marriage, Mauryne and Doris, came from Washington to stay for the summers. Mauryne was only nine years younger than my mother, and the presence of two adolescents befuddled by divorce added to the strains on the growing household.

It was during those years that Mauryne and my father began to sing duets in concert. Mauryne had a well-developed singing voice and a mature stage presence. The handsome dark father and his beautiful egg shell-colored daughter performed the light classics and the popular love songs of the day, in churches and at the gingerbread bandshell in Seaside Park in Bridgeport. In addition to expanding his reputation, extra money from these concerts was a much needed supplement to Julian's meager income.

In those Depression years, collecting his full salary was a challenge. Each Sunday, beside the title of his sermon in his diary, he recorded what the church owed him. One such entry was typical: "Balance owed, $287.63. Received, $8.45." There was no way he could support his family on his church earnings alone and he constantly sought other sources of income.

When Franklin Roosevelt was elected president in 1932, politics began to capture Julian's attention. From his father he had learned that having political power could help him change the laws of the country and the lives of his people and, equally important, would give him access and clout that he could translate into financial gain. Most of the members of the Stratford church were Republicans, but admiring Roosevelt and his New Deal, Stratford's new minister decided to throw his lot in with the Democrats. It was a break not only with the church's congregation, but with his father's Abe Lincoln Republicanism.

Julian also began to look for other flocks. His father, then a vice president of the New England Baptist Convention, wrote to Julian about a church in Providence that needed a minister and offered his support. But the light-complected congregation privately agreed he was too dark and, besides, he was divorced. The elder Taylor wrote to his son, cushioning the blow. "Funny about Providence," he mused. "Maybe they are not anxious about having a pastor." He offered to scout for another position.

Julian would not have his father's help for long. I was born the year my grandfather died. That same year my father got the "call" to lead Macedonia Baptist Church, the largest and by far the most influential of the three black churches in the small town of Ansonia, Connecticut.

Macedonia had been founded in 1888 by freedmen and former slaves. The church stood on the west side of town, at the head of the major bridge that joined the two sides of the city. The church did not, however, own a parsonage. The church's trustees and deacons made it known that they wanted their new minister to find a residence suitable to his position and encouraged him to look wherever such housing might be available. But housing discrimination was formidable, and Julian had almost given up looking when he found and rented a three-story furnished home in rural Shelton, a factory town two miles from Ansonia.

The town had two or three black families, who could trace their ancestors to the Civil War. Otherwise the population was white and poor, except for the Andersons, a family who claimed both Negro and white heritage. Not by chance, it was the Andersons who owned the house my father rented, an unpretentious, comfortable New England gray frame structure not far from the main street. It especially pleased my mother, who found it more like the homes she had known in Washington, with space for retreat and privacy. But unbeknownst to my parents, everyone in town considered the house to be inhabited by the spirit of the previous owner.

At first my mother was the only one who nightly heard footsteps on the stairs and felt strong, intimidating, nonhuman presences. They were everywhere and nowhere, the air of the rooms growing thick with restless inhabitants. Then my father and Mrs. Arrington and Little Margaret felt them too. They never saw a physical manifestation, but each night at two o'clock, everyone in the house, adults and finally the children, would be awakened simultaneously, jolted into an uneasy consciousness. The menace increased, and after only a year's tenancy, my parents decided to leave the house and to look again in Ansonia.

My mother's state of body and mind echoed the condition she'd been in after the birth of my brother. She suffered from a then indefinable malady for which there seemed to be no balm. "I weighed ninety-five pounds for months after you were born," she recalls. I believe it is likely that after the birth of each of her children, my mother experienced that special sadness known medically as post-partum disorder.

The sight of Ansonia did little to cheer her up. A town of few graces, Ansonia was -- and is -- a blue-collar valley community in southeastern Connecticut. Compared to the grandiose beauty of the District of Columbia and the Victorian primness of Stratford, it seemed dreary, bleak and unattractive. There were no tree-lined boulevards, no leafy parks, no elegant neighborhoods, no zoos, no department stores. There was little to please the eye, occupy the mind or nourish the soul.

In the days when entrepreneurs saw rivers and people first as sources of power, Anson Phelps had erected factories beside the railroad tracks that followed the curving Naugatuck River as it drifted down from the Berkshires. In Ansonia, at least, it was a dead river, which glittered with rainbow ribbons of oil and gave off a slightly metallic smell. As children we knew that if no creatures lived in the water, we couldn't either. No one was tempted to swim in the shallow stream.

As in Stratford and Shelton, a handful of black families had been in Ansonia as freedmen or runaway slaves, or arrived there shortly after the Emancipation, bearing names like Boone, Green, Tinney, Austin, Rogers and Mayo. Their small number had made them unthreatening, and good fortune and industry had allowed them to purchase homes away from the middle of the town. Most of them had a high school education.

Later, the mills attracted the bulk of Ansonia's Negroes, who came in family groups during the great migrations from the South to the North in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Most of them came from North and South Carolina hamlets with names like Society Hill, Bennettsville, Hartsville and Darlington. Fewer than half a dozen family names covered the entire population. You were either an Antrum, a Gatison, a Thomas, or a Douglas or a cousin thereof. For lack of opportunity, few of Ansonia's newest residents had more than a third-grade education -- the age when, in the South, they were required to leave school and play and take on adult-size jobs in the cotton or tobacco fields. They were clustered in small, poorly maintained, poorly heated wooden tenements in easy walking distance of the mills.

My father canvassed the town and located another large, rundown Victorian house on Locke Street on the east side of town, in a neighborhood of Irish, Italians and Polish. It was owned by a white family who were willing to rent to Julian and Margaret for one year. Next door lived an Irish family named Maher. For at least six months, the Mahers acted as if the Negroes who lived next to them did not exist.

The rambling Locke Street Victorian with its spacious sunny rooms and generous yard became my mother's enchanted castle. My parents repainted the outside, which brought a thaw in their relationship with their neighbors but left them little money to furnish the inside. But the sparseness enabled Margaret to dream of rooms filled with mahogany tables, velvet loveseats and silk-upholstered chairs. Twelve months after they had moved in, however, the owner sold the house. Margaret was heartbroken. She was also pregnant again, and still with no place that she and her husband could call their own. Julian was unsuccessful in finding another Ansonia residence and they moved to Waterbury, eighteen miles away.

One of Connecticut's largest, oldest cities, Waterbury is a town of steep streets and mean houses, most of them dating back to the turn of the century. As i...