Dark Side of Hopkinsville

Ted Poston

Publication Year: 1991

<DIV>Preserving an engaging, little-known slice of American life, The Dark Side of Hopkinsville is a collection of ten picaresque tales bearing witness to a black child's life in a southern town at the turn of the century.Born and reared in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, Ted Poston (1906-1974) became the first black career-long reporter for a major metropolitan daily (the New York Post) and served as a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Negro Cabinet" in Washington in 1940. After thirty-five years at the Post, Poston was without question the "Dean of Black Journalists." Acquainted with the major figures of the Harlem Renaissance, Poston regaled his associates with tales of his childhood. These memories resulted in the stories collected in The Dark Side of Hopkinsville. Told from the vantage point of "Ted," a bright, high-spirited student at Booker T. Washington Colored Grammar School, the stories focus on a coterie of imaginative children, their entertainments and games, ties to the church, and relations with immediate and extended families. The memorable, recurring characters in the stories are based on individuals Poston knew: Cousin Blind Mary, a fortune teller who can see into someone's future only after consulting with the servants of the family in question; Ted's father, Ephraim, "the only Negro Democrat in our Hopkinsville, Kentucky, or in the whole state of Kentucky for that matter"; Fertilizer Ferguson, whom Ted credits with coining the phrase "eating higher up on the hog"; and Ted's schoolmate Knee Baby Watkins, the "catalytic agent who precipitated the most disasterous social feud in the history of Hopkinsville." Though the presence of prejudice--both within and outside the race--is acknowledged throughout the stories, that social reality does not lessen the characters' exuberant enjoyment of being young. After watching Bronco Billy and his black sidekick, Pistol Pete, at the nickel movie on Saturdays, Ted and his friends make Pistol Pete the hero and Bronco Billy the sidekick of their games in "The Werewolf of Woolworth's." In "The Revolt of the Evil Fairies," Ted uses Palmer's Skin Success ("guaranteed to give you a light complexion in just seven days") so that he can play Prince Charming opposite his fair-skinned sweetheart in the school play. Kathleen A. Hauke has annotated the stories with recollections of the author's family and friends, who are often major characters in the stories. An extended biographical and critical introduction offers background information on the life and work of Ted Poston, and on old Hopkinsville and its residents. </div>

Published by: University of Georgia Press

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Cover

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pp. vii-

Acknowledgments

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pp. ix-xi

The search for Ted Poston began in 1980. Trudier Harris and Thadious Davis sent mimeographed letters to members of the College Language Association, stating that they were editing the Afro- American volumes of The Dictionary of Literary Biography and still needed critical essays on certain writers, including Ted Poston. I remembered a sprightly, vivid, action-packed article Poston had written on Langston Hughes for the New York Post. A...

List of Hopkinsville Informants

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pp. xiii-

Introduction

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pp. xv-xxx

Ted Poston traveled far from his early twentieth-century childhood home in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, to become the first career-long black reporter for a major white metropolitan newspaper, a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Negro Cabinet" in Washington in 1940 and, after thirty-five years at the New York Post, America's "Dean of Black Journalists." Poston proved the lesson instilled by his older brother, Robert Lincoln Poston: "You are just as good as anyone." He helped change public opinion...

1. Mr. Jack Johnson and Me

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pp. 1-8

I don't know who was really to blame, unless it was Mr. Jack Johnson or B'Rob (my brother Robert Abraham Lincoln Poston). Surely it wasn't me. And if you doubt it, you can ask Knee Baby Watkins; because, as Grandma Hettie would put it, I sure learned him after it was all over. It all started that summer...

2. The Werewolf of Woolworth's

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pp. 9-17

The old Mays house, across the street from us in Hopkinsville, was empty for years because, folks said, it was haunted. I heard my sister Roberta tell some of her visiting classmates from Kentucky State Industrial College for Negroes that Mrs. Mays had come up missing one morning, and that her husband, one of our colored railroad brakemen, told everybody that she had run off with...

3. Knee Baby Watkins

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pp. 18-30

You couldn't exactly say that Knee Baby Watkins was sneaky. But we young tads who grew up with him had our own ideas about Knee Baby long before we all first entered the Booker T. Washington Colored Grammar School. And there is no doubt that Knee Baby was the catalytic agent who precipitated the most disastrous social feud in the history of Hopkinsville, Kentucky....

4. Cousin Blind Mary

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pp. 31-40

I had never paid the matter much mind myself, for I had just assumed that we Postons were pretty well-off colored people in Hopkinsville—what with Papa being Dean of Men at the Kentucky State Industrial College for Negroes, and Mama still Director of Domestic Science for Colored for the whole state of Kentucky. So I was a bit surprised one day at the Booker T. Washington Colored Grammar School to hear Rat Joiner refer to us as "poor relations of Miss Blind Mary." Rat must...

E-ISBN-13: 9780820342382
E-ISBN-10: 0820342386
Print-ISBN-13: 9780820313023
Print-ISBN-10: 0820313025

Page Count: 144
Publication Year: 1991