Ida and Henry

Chapter 1

New York City:1937

It was New Year’s Day 1937. Even after writing 1937 on the page several times, the 7 still looked like it didn’t yet belong there. I had such high hopes for this coming year. Everyone I knew seemed to feel that things finally were going to get better after all the miserable years of the Depression.

The restaurant where I worked was closed for the holiday, and I was back in the kitchen working on an English paper that had to be done by the next day. I was having a hard time finding anything worth a damn to put down on the blank page. I kept feeling I should be out celebrating this first day of the year. I knew when most people celebrated they took a drink, but there was nothing around. Then I remembered Pauli had a bottle, and I decided to grab a drink from it and make a toast to the New Year. Pauli, who owned the restaurant, kept a bottle of homemade gin hidden behind the icebox. My co-workers periodically stole a swig from the bottle and so far no one had gone blind from the stuff.

I poured a small amount in a glass, took a sip (which wasn’t too bad), and then held up the glass and told myself that this was going to be a great year. On June 5, I would graduate from Columbia and be handed my diploma. On the very next day, I would take that beautiful piece of paper and hand it to the editor of that little newspaper out on Long Island and say, Here I am! The editor was a Columbia grad who had seen and liked an article I wrote for the university newspaper. He told me to call him when I graduated, as he thought there could be a job for me as a reporter. I was the only one I knew with any kind of a real job offer waiting for them after they got their diploma.

These had been hard times, but I knew I had been very lucky over the past three and a half years to find enough money to stay in school. Even with Pauli often holding back on the little I earned, I was always able to scrape up enough money for tuition. Working in a restaurant also had some powerful fringe benefits. That’s where the food was, and (when Pauli wasn’t looking) there was often a little extra to go around to feed the help. At times we even appropriated for ourselves the uneaten food left on plates. On most nights, I was even able to take a little food upstairs to Mrs. Vignola. She was the old lady with the flat above the restaurant and, for what food I brought, she allowed me to sleep on her living room sofa.

Mrs. Vignola, or perhaps I should say her departed husband, offered me even more. Apparently, Mr. Vignola was one of those men who, years earlier, went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back. He had an extensive wardrobe and I didn’t. Mrs. Vignola suggested I take whatever I wanted of his and I did—I was the only 21-year old at Columbia who walked around dressed like a man of 80.

I had no difficulty existing like this because I knew it was what I had to do to get a diploma, a meaningful job, and then the start of a real life. I remember reading that, for the American Indian, the buffalo provided food, shelter, and clothing. In those days, Pauli and Mr. and Mrs. Vignola were my Italian-American buffalos.

All continued to go well and by mid-April, I was even measured for a cap and gown. But as with the Indians, my existing off the bounty of my buffalos came to an end. One evening in April, as I was washing dishes, Pauli came up to the sink, turned off the water, and fired me. I found out he had given my job to his nephew, who had just lost his own job. With my nightly food offerings now gone, Mrs. Vignola seemed genuinely sorry when she told me she would have to find someone else to rent her sofa.

After that, I didn’t have the money to pay the university what I owed for the final term and was told I wouldn’t be able to graduate. I looked everywhere for any kind of job, but there was nothing. No one was impressed when I said I would work without pay for a week so they could see what a good worker I was. Perhaps it really didn’t matter at all because within days I learned the newspaper out on Long Island had gone out of business.

I felt at a total loss. I had a dollar and a half to my name. I had nowhere to go and slept for a few nights on the floor at a friend’s place. I knew I couldn’t go back home. I came from Bedford, which is a small town outside of Boston. I would have been the first one in the family to ever graduate from college, and I didn’t have the heart to write and tell my parents what had happened. My father lost his job at the start of the Depression, and recently, when all their savings were gone, he and my mother had to move in with her brother. Aside from the fact that there was not enough room to comfortably house my parents, it was not a good situation because my father and my uncle constantly fought over politics. My father considered Roosevelt to be a saint, while my uncle thought he was the embodiment of all evil.

What helped me get through those days was going to talk to a favorite history teacher of mine, a Professor Liberman, who assured me that what had just happened was not my fault. It meant so much when he told me he thought a great deal of me and my potential. He assured me that, in time, things would be better. When I left, he shook my hand and said, Lennie, no matter what the world dishes out to you, you can always hold your head up if, after looking deep into your soul, you’ve lived honorably and lived up to your values. I walked out of his office with what I think was a smile on my face and some feeling of hope for the future.

Professor Liberman’s prediction of good things came to fruition sooner than I could have hoped. A classmate told me he’d heard of a notice on a University bulletin board announcing job openings with the government. He couldn’t remember which of the many multi-lettered Roosevelt New Deal agencies it was, but he thought it might be either the CCC or the WPA.

When we saw the notice, it was actually for the WPA, which had to do with finding jobs for the unemployed. What caught my eye was that the openings were with the WPA’s Writers’ Project and, unbelievably, the pay was $15 a week plus $1 a day for expenses. Without reading further, I quickly calculated that I could live on one dollar each day, put the rest toward tuition, and finally earn my diploma in the fall.

What caught my friend’s eye was that the jobs were all in the South. He said there was no way he’d leave New York and go down where it’s even hotter in the summer. And besides, he complained, they’re still fighting the Civil War and lynching Negroes. But I was ecstatic. The $15 a week loomed larger than the heat or all the negative things I’d always heard about the South.

As I read down the notice, I learned that the job description involved obtaining the narratives of elderly Negroes to record their experiences as slaves. As I read this, I realized how little actual contact I had with Negroes, and as good as the pay seemed, I began wondering how well I’d be able to communicate with these people.

As a kid growing up in Bedford, there were a few Negroes, but they lived in another part of town. I think the first Negro I ever saw was a shoeshine boy working at the bus depot. My parents told me when I was three years old, I saw the shoeshine boy (who actually was a grown man), and I ran up to him and started touching his black skin. He told me if I wasn’t a good boy and didn’t mind my mother, my skin would turn black like his and then I would have to be a Negro. I started crying. He laughed and my mother laughed. I apparently told the man, in all sincerity, that I would be a good boy forevermore. As I became older, I cringed whenever my mother repeated the story because it sounded so demeaning to Negroes. This incident had quite an effect on me, and I began to feel sorry for every Negro I saw because of all the negative things in life they had to put up with.

Growing up, most of what I knew about Negroes came from reading about their many problems in the newspaper. I did have an uncle in Boston who married a colored girl years earlier, and no one in the family was happy, to say the least, with what he had done. My father told me when I first saw my uncle’s wife, I wanted to know if she was his maid. Apparently life in Boston did not go well for my uncle and his wife. They decided to move to Russia, where they said one’s color didn’t matter. My father told me his brother was a communist. No one had heard from them in years.

When I came to New York to attend Columbia, there were only a few Negro students in my classes, but, as time went on, most of them had to drop out because of the tuition. The year before, one of these fellows, named Richard, came up to me in class and asked me to join in a rally downtown in front of the German Consulate. It was during the 1936 Olympics, and we were going there to protest Hitler’s refusal to present Jesse Owens with his track medals. I agreed and ended up carrying a big sign on which I wrote, A Negro is a Human Being. I felt good doing that, especially since I thought up the slogan. I got a kick out of seeing the Germans in the building pull down the window shades so they wouldn’t have to look at us as we marched by. Not too many people came to the rally, and Richard was upset that there weren’t any newspaper reporters there to cover it. I never saw him again after that day.

I was always struck by anti-Negro remarks coming from students. It didn’t amaze me to hear such talk from the type of people who came to the restaurant, but I wasn’t expecting this from someone who was educated and attending a university. Eventually, I wouldn’t let their remarks pass without calling them on what they had said. Sometimes when I did, these people looked at me as if I was the one who should feel ashamed for being some kind of do-gooder. I even stopped going out with a girl after she kept making prejudiced remarks because I didn’t want to be around anyone like that. I remember she somewhat angrily informed me that I was the kind of hypocrite who always looked down on people who looked down on other people.

The interview for the Writers’ Project job was held at one of the federal buildings in lower Manhattan. When I arrived, I saw a long line of men in front of the building, and at first glance, I thought this was another Depression-era breadline. When I looked closer, I saw the men were too well dressed, and I realized I was one of several hundred applicants for only five Writers’ Project positions.

Toward the end of the line, I recognized a literature professor I had during my first year at Columbia. Seeing a man of his stature trying for this job made me wonder why someone like me even bothered to apply. When I asked him why he was there, he said the school didn’t have the money to rehire him in the fall. Totally discouraged, I was about to leave when he said we should at least apply, and after we were both rejected, we could discuss our dismal prospects and bleak futures over coffee that he would buy.

After two hours of waiting, my name was called for a very brief interview that included where I was from and if I had ever been in the South. The man behind the desk seemed nice enough. I left the space blank for the date I received a college degree, and, mercifully, he didn’t question me about this. I handed the interviewer a copy of the article I‘d written for the school newspaper, but he barely glanced at it and handed it back. As I left, he said the names of the men picked for the job would be announced later that afternoon.

When we returned to the building, a government official entered the crowded lobby and the room became totally quiet. He went through all the usual pleasantries about there being so many fine applicants for unfortunately so few positions. He then announced five names, and unbelievably, mine was one of them. I asked my literature professor if he too had heard my name called, and with a surprised look, he said he had.

The official sent me back to the same little room where I had my interview, but this time there was a different man sitting behind the desk. He was looking over some papers I assumed was my file. I knew there had to be something in those papers that made them choose me, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what it might be.

Finally, he glanced up and smiled. It’s your lucky day, he said. The man in charge of this department thinks he has a real sense of humor. Is your name really Leonard Ross Sherman? I told him it was. Then he asked if I was related to the famous Union General William Sherman from the Civil War. I told him I wasn’t and my family hadn’t even arrived in this country until long after that war.

Well, he said, my boss happens to be a real southerner, and it just tickled him to think of you going down South and introducing yourself to everybody with the name of Sherman. You know the last time a Sherman came through the South, it was that Union general, and he and all his Yankee soldiers burned and pillaged and raised all kinds of hell. My boss says they’re still cursing your namesake and all the damage he caused, and if they don’t tar and feather you on sight, you might do just fine.

He handed me an envelope with details of the program and walked me to the door. Then, in a slightly worried tone, he asked, Now, I do hope you know something about interviewing the colored. Even with my misgivings, I assured him I did, and as I left, I heard him laugh and yell out, Good luck, General Sherman!

I opened the envelope as soon as I was out of the office. According to the letter, I would conduct my initial interviews in the first part of June—only several weeks away—in and around a small town called Brighton in South Carolina. That evening, I went through an atlas that listed Brighton as the seat of Devon County. It was situated between Charleston and Columbia, the state capital.

The people at the Writers’ Project provided two weeks of intensive training to prepare us for the trip. They emphasized the importance of the program because, with the advancing age of the former Negro slaves, this would probably be one of the last chances to record the histories of people who had personally known slavery.

The other four men were all much older, and each of them had impressive backgrounds. Before losing their jobs, two had been newspaper reporters—one with the Times and the other with the Post. Another had been a professor of history at City College, and the last was a former social worker who helped Negroes in Harlem. They had all been involved in Negro causes and were enthusiastic about the project. They seemed very friendly and accepting of me. I heard one suggest that it made sense the WPA would want to see how a college-age man would relate to old Negroes. He wondered if a younger person might appear less threatening than older white men and get the Negroes to be more open mouthed. Needless to say, I told them nothing about the criteria used in my selection.

Chapter 2

A Journey to Brighton: June 1937

The WPA gave me round trip rail tickets from New York to Columbia, South Carolina. As the train passed through New Jersey, I realized that this was the furthest south I’d ever been. When I finally arrived in Columbia, I went to the government office and met with a man who, along with Rural Electrification and Social Security, was also responsible for the WPA Writers’ Project. He laughed when he heard my last name was Sherman and suggested that if I changed it to either Grant or Lincoln, I might be better received in the South.

He handed me a list with the names of eight Negroes I was to interview in the Brighton area. When I finished with them, I was told to report to the Charleston WPA office to receive more names and salary. He advanced me one week’s pay of fifteen dollars and seven dollars to cover daily expenses. He suggested I go to the general store in Brighton to find the name of someone who could provide me with room and board.

Apparently six months earlier, the Writers’ Project sent a young fellow from Atlanta to Brighton to interview the same group of Negroes. According to the government man, He couldn’t get much in the way of answers to his questions and one day he wasn’t around any more. He didn’t know if he gave up and went home or if the Writers’ Project people fired him because he wasn’t getting the job done. This was the very first I’d heard about the possibility of losing this job. The thought of not having money for school gave me a sudden sickening feeling.

I looked over the list of names and there were hand written comments by each of them. The most frequent notations were dead or could not find. One entry read refused to talk and something about the person being old and forgetful. Perhaps the most encouraging note, if you could call it that, was unreliable—said he was freed by President Lincoln himself, which is impossible—will not interview him further.

Later that afternoon, I took the bus to Brighton, and there were only a handful of people on board. They were all white, except, sitting in the rear, was a Negro family. They had a little boy who was apparently hard to handle because over the noise of the bus, I kept hearing the parents talking to him in an almost frantic manner trying to get him to sit still.

It was stifling hot even with the air blowing in through the open windows. I noticed an older man sitting across the aisle from me. I heard the driver call him Dr. Jeffords. We had been on the road for about a half hour when I leaned across the aisle and asked the man if there was a heat wave going on. He didn’t answer my question, but he stood up and held out his hand and said, Jeffords, Dr. William Jeffords.

It dawned on me that perhaps in the South, you introduced yourself first before you began talking. I got up, shook his hand, and found myself saying, Leonard, avoiding any mention of my last name.

He said, Well, Mr. Leonard. You just happen to be in South Carolina in the summer and this is how it always is.

He obviously knew I was from elsewhere, but couldn’t place my accent until I told him I was brought up in the Boston area.

Dr. Jeffords thought the current population of Brighton was only about 300 people. With the Depression and the farms failing, he said, Many folks had just packed up and gone off to try their luck in the cities. According to him, Brighton had never returned to what it was before the war. I soon learned that down here the word war meant the Civil War and not the Great War or any other war. He said General Sherman’s men burned all the cotton warehouses in Brighton, and sparks from the fires went flying all over and soon most of the town was ablaze: The Yankees tore up the railroad tracks and heated the rails in fires until they were red hot. Then they bent the rails around tree trunks to make what they called ‘General Sherman’s bowties’. He said if the town hadn’t been the county seat, he doubted if they would ever have bothered to rebuild it.

In the course of our conversation, I told him why the WPA had sent me here. He listened patiently but looked a little perplexed. He asked why the government, in hard times like these, wanted to spend its money on such a thing as listening to the stories of the colored people.

I started to answer him when suddenly a commotion came from the rear of the bus. When I looked around, I saw that the little Negro boy had broken free of his parents and was running down the aisle. He soon stood between the doctor and me. The boy was laughing and seemed to be the happiest being on Earth. The doctor gave him a big smile. In an instant, the little boy’s older brother arrived and dragged him back to his parents. Dr. Jeffords turned and said, You’ll find down here that our colored are very appealing when they’re young, but as they get older, they get far less so.

This surprised me because I didn’t expect such a remark to come from a man who was a physician and obviously well educated.

A few moments later, Dr. Jeffords called out to the bus driver that he wanted to be let out at his son’s place just this side of Brighton. When the bus began to slow down, he stood up, held out his hand, and said, It was good to meet you, Mr. Leonard.

As I rose to shake his hand, I said, Leonard is actually my first name. I paused for a moment and found myself substituting my middle name Ross for my last name. He apologized for his error.

I said, Please think nothing of it.

He waved to me as he got off the bus. I repeated my new name to myself several times and thought Leonard Ross didn’t sound that bad. I decided it was best to put the name Sherman away for the duration of my time in the South.

My first impression of Brighton was that it was nothing more than a collection of storefronts, many of them boarded up, on either side of a dirt-covered main street. The bus stopped at a small general store with a solitary gas pump out in front. An older white man clutching a little dog got off the bus with me, followed by the Negro family. The mother and her two older children were huddled behind the father, a large man in overalls and a sweat-stained hat. He held the little boy securely by the collar and took him over to the driver, who was standing in front of the bus drinking a bottle of Coke. The father kept apologizing to the driver for all the ruckus the little boy had caused. The driver, looking hot, tired, and bored, turned away from the man and paid no attention to him or what he said.

The father then came over to me and said, He’s just a little boy. He don’t mean no harm. He just don’t know how to be yet.

I tried to tell him the boy wasn’t bothering me and was just acting like a child. When the boy laughed, the father gave him a good hit to his rear end. I repeated that his son was causing no trouble, but he kept hitting the child.

The father muttered something about the boy now being old enough and he got to know how to be around the white folks. Then he hit the boy again until the laughing stopped and the child began to cry. The father tipped his hat to me, and he and his family walked away. The little boy looked back and I smiled and waved to him, but he continued crying. Then the bus pulled away.

I couldn’t get the picture of that crying child out of my mind, and I kept thinking about this father having to teach his child how to exist around white people. I remembered how, at about the same age, my own father first started teaching me how to play catch and bat a ball.

It was so hot I didn’t feel like taking another step. There was a water pump in front of the general store, and on a post next to the pump, hanging by a nail, was a gray metal cup. I pumped some water into the cup and it tasted wonderfully cold.

I sat on a bench for a while, drinking another cup of water, when I realized someone was yelling at me. It was a white boy who appeared to be in his teens. Mister, he said, do you know what you just did? You just drank out of the nigger cup, and that’s for them and none of us would ever drink out of that.

He then showed me where the metal cup meant for the white people was hanging on the other side of the same post. It was a similar cup in size but was white and it had fewer chips. When I looked up, the boy was gone.

I just sat there for a moment. I knew being a Negro in the North was difficult, and I’d read how bad things were for them in the South, but nothing prepared me for what had happened on the bus and now with the commotion over the cups.

I continued to sit on the bench. It was hot as hell. I was still thirsty and I said to myself that if I was to drink, it was going to be from whatever cup I damn well pleased. I reached again for the colored cup and pumped some water into it. I raised the cup up to my mouth, but as hard as I tried, my hand wouldn’t bring it to my lips. I couldn’t believe what was happening. I lowered the cup and looked up and down the street, but there wasn’t a soul to be seen anywhere. I lifted the cup again but my hand still wouldn’t bring it all the way to my mouth. I ended up slowly pouring the water on the ground and then put the cup back on its nail. I sat there smoking a cigarette and wondered what the hell was going on inside of me and what kind of person I really was.

I reached around the post and grabbed the white cup and pumped some water into it. I held the cup in my hand with the pathetic hope I wouldn’t be able to bring it up to my mouth. But the rim of the cup easily reached my lips and the water flowed into my mouth. Before I knew it, I had drunk the entire cup.

I took the colored cup once more, but I couldn’t make myself drink from it. I sat there looking down at the water that filled the chipped gray metal cup. For a second I thought I saw my reflection in the water. I was glad I couldn’t see myself clearly because it occurred to me that, deep down, I was no better than the people I’d come across here. I thought about my old girlfriend who berated me for looking down on people who looked down on others. It turned out she was a better judge of my character than I had given her credit for. I was once again looking down on someone but now that person was me.

I thought of my favorite professor and his uplifting words, which I hoped would guide me through a lifetime of trying times. After what had just happened, I looked deep into my soul and wondered if I had any decent values left to further compromise. The man was a poorer judge of my character then I had given him credit for.

I looked around the deserted street and saw, tied to a lamppost, a horse hitched to a wagon. The horse stood there staring at me. Now and then, he’d stomp his back leg into the dirt. It was as if he were tapping out Morse code and sending a message to the people of Brighton that my name was really Sherman, and deep down I was no better a human being than the worst of them.

It had been the worst of days. It was also June 5, the day I should have graduated from Columbia. I wondered if I should get on the next bus and go back to New York, but I already knew how bad the job situation was in the city. I also knew I couldn’t go back home to Bedford. I never felt so lonely in my life. I had nowhere else to go, but, for the time being at least, I did have a job in Brighton. Then, after pondering it some more, I realized that perhaps Brighton was where someone like me was meant to be.

I had no further desire to continue sitting next to that water pump. I got up and went into the general store. The man behind the counter had a moustache like Adolf Hitler, and it seemed totally fitting to encounter someone looking like him in a place like this. After conversing for a few moments, I found the man surprisingly friendly and helpful. And later on in my stay, he proved to be a godsend.

I mentioned I’d been told that someone in town would have a room to rent. He answered that the person was Judge Hopkins. He lived in what was known as the Early House, one of the few buildings to survive the Yankees’ burning of Brighton. Somewhat bitterly, he said that during the war, some of General Sherman’s officers decided to live in the house while they occupied the town.

I followed his directions and found the Early House, a white, two-story Georgian-style home I later learned was built in the