In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

5 A Connecticut Childhood I was born to a poor family in one of the wealthiest towns in the nation. My earliest memory goes back to when I was three, riding my tricycle on the front porch of my house in Cos Cob, an area of Greenwich, Connecticut . The neighborhood was named after John Coe, who in the 1640s built the first cob, or sea wall, at the mouth of the Mianus River. Coe’s cob eventually became Cos Cob. Place mattered, and my childhood experiences there would profoundly shape the rest of my life. Cos Cob was on the southeastern side of Greenwich, close to Long Island Sound. Its residents were generally poor working people—some Greeks, a number of Italians, some poor Jews, Scandinavians, Germans, Irish, and a few “colored” families. The wealthy people, mostly “Yankees ” and some Jews, lived in estates surrounding Greenwich proper and abutting Long Island Sound; most were successful businessmen who commuted to Grand Central Station by train. Almost all of the less welloff women and men in Cos Cob worked directly or indirectly for the area’s wealthy families, although there were some shop owners who lived with their families above their small stores. Some of the people were kind; others were openly racist. Most were somewhere in between. Myancestryspansthreecontinents:Africa,Europe,andNorthAmerica. My grandfather, Albert Kelly, was the son of Thomas Kelly, who was born in Ireland in 1804 and migrated to New York probably during the time of the Irish Potato Famine, which sent tens of thousands of Irish to the United States, where they could get food and jobs. My grandfather was born in New York in 1852. Although we don’t know why or when, he moved south to Virginia and settled in Gloucester County, on Chesapeake Bay, about sixty miles east of Richmond. That’s where he met my grandmother, Hilda Cheatham, who was born in Virginia around 1865. She was visibly African American and had some Native American blood. Albert and Hilda owned James’s Store and Post Office, a small groChAPtEr 1 6 A Connecticut Childhood cery and hardware store at a crossroads in Gloucester County. It was tobacco country, and one of the first areas settled by the English in the early 1600s. This was where Pocahontas saved Captain John Smith’s life. It was also the birthplace of Walter Reed, for whom the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., is named, and of Rev. Jack Yates, a former slave who in 1866 founded Antioch Missionary Baptist Church, the first black church in Houston. My father, James Handy Kelly, was born on May 26, 1889, the youngest of four children. I don’t know what it was like for my biracial father and his siblings to grow up in Virginia in the 1890s. Nationally, it was a period of growing segregation, and Virginia seemed to be one of the leaders in that movement. My mother, Essie Matilda Allen, was born on March 19, 1890, in Dunn, North Carolina, about halfway between Raleigh and Fayetteville. She had one brother and two sisters, and by her early teens she had decided she wanted to become a schoolteacher. Training for black teachers in North Carolina was limited, however, and she worked as a domestic servant during the day and attended school at night. Eventually, she moved to Virginia. My parents met in church in Gloucester. My mother caught my father’s eye, so I am told, and they fell in love. They were married in 1912 and eventually had five sons, the first three born in Virginia and other two in the North: William Allen (Bill), born on May 7, 1913; John Edward Alexander, born on March 26, 1917; James Thomas Bland Kelly, born on April 16, 1920; Robert Wade Allen, or “Tot,” as we called him, born on September 23, 1923; and me. I came along on January 26, 1926. MOVING NOrth My father was an itinerant Virginia preacher who had been called to the ministry while digging a well in Gloucester County. He became pastor at Rising Valley Baptist Church and Mount Ebenezer Baptist Church, both in the county, but he became so disenchanted with the rancor at Mount Ebenezer that he moved north to Connecticut to look for other opportunities. My parents were likely influenced by the “great migration ” rhetoric of the time, when more than 500,000 blacks moved from [3.144.42.196] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 01:26...

Share