Jenniemae and James by Brooke Newman -- excerpt

8/9/2019 Jenniemae and James by Brooke Newman -- excerpt

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jenniemae & james


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a l s o b y B r o o k e N e w m a n

The Little Tern


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Jenniemae &Jamesa m e m o i r i n b l a c k & w h i t e

Brooke Newman

H a r m o n y B o o k s / N e w Yo r k


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Copyright 2010 by Brooke Newman

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Harmony Books, an imprint of the

Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

Harmony Books is a registered trademark and the Harmony Books colophon is a

trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Newman, Brooke.

Jenniemae & James / Brooke Newman.1st ed.

p. cm.

1. Harrington, Jenniemae. 2. Newman, James Roy, 1907-1966. 3. Newman,

BrookeFamily. 4. Washington (D.C.)Race relationsHistory20th

century. 5. Men, WhiteWashington (D.C.)Biography. 6. African American

womenWashington (D.C.)Biography. 7. MathematiciansWashington(D.C.)Biography. 8. Women domesticsWashington (D.C.)Biography.

9. FriendshipUnited StatesCase studies. 10. United StatesRace

relationsCase studies. I. Title. II. Title: Jenniemae and James.

F205.A1N49 2010

975.3'0410922dc22 2009029721

ISBN 978-0-307-46299-2

Printed in the United States of America

Design by Leonard W. Henderson

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First Edition


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For

Nikos, Samantha, Blue, Joey,

and for Mark


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These numbers gonna sing

These numbers gonna cry

These numbers gonna dance

These numbers tell no lie

J e n n i e m a e H a r r i n g t o n , s o n g , 1 9 4 8

To count is to talk the language of numbers. To count

to a googol, or to count to ten is part of the same

process; the googol is simply harder to pronounce. The

essential thing to realize is that the googol and ten are

kin, like the giant stars and the electron. Arithmetic

this counting languagemakes the whole world kin,

both in space and in time. Mathematics may well be a

science of austere logical propositions in precise canon-

ical form, but in its countless applications it serves as a

tool and a language, the language of description, of

number and size.

J a m e s R . N e w m a n ,

M a t h e m a t i c s a n d t h e I m a g i n a t i o n , 1 9 4 0 ;

w h e r e i n t h e t e r m g o o g o l , a k a

g o o g l e w a s f i r s t d e s c r i b e d


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a u t h o r s n o t e

This book is a family memoir; it is a true story based on my best

recollections of the events and times, and the recollections of my

family who shared those events and times with me. In some in-

stances, I rearranged and/or compressed events and time peri-ods in service of the narrative, and due to the limitations of my

perspective as a child, I was compelled at times to create what I

believed was plausible and likely dialogue to bring the actual

scenes to life and to match the best available recollections of

those events and exchanges.


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jenniemae & james


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c h a p t e r o n e

Get up with the sun,

get to work by the gun,

go to bed when youre done.

Jenniemae Harrington was an underestimated, underappreci-

ated, extremely overweight woman who was very religious, dirt

poor, and illiterate. She was uneducated, self taught, clever, and

quietly cunning. Born on an unknown day of an unknownmonth during the harvest season of 1923 on a small sharecrop-

per farm near Hissop, Alabama, Jenniemae picked October 18 as

her birth date because on that date, at the age of four years, she

had for the very first time been permitted to wear flowers in her

hair to church. It was as memorable a day as any, and a very

good day in a long line of difficult days. There were not many

simple pleasures for the Harrington family, but at least on Sun-

days everyone tried hard to greet the Lords Day with a smile,

and wearing flowers in ones hair was a special way to celebrate

church day.

Home was the farm. The farm, like most sharecroppers

farms, was located on the least arable land in the worst loca-

tionit was land unlikely to produce more than a barely

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sustainable crop even if all the atmospheric conditions were

perfect. The Harringtons lived in a one-room shanty with

enough holes in the roof to collect rain even if there was only athin mist during the night. Jenniemae was born to Molly and

Jefferson Harrington in 1923, one of twelve children. Hissop is a

small town not far from Equality, Alabama, which Jenniemae

said was exactly what the people who lived there meant to call it

when they named it that, because equality down there was a

thing for white folks and not at all meant for black folks. As Jen-niemae said, That e-quality aint nothin more than a white

word, jus a wordnothin more, nothin less, and surely not

meant nor tended for a colored man. And she was right. The

laws there were meant to protect white folk, and all the rest just

came to the table when and how they were told.

Hissop was home because it was where Jenniemaes familyended up, not because it was a chosen home site. And Jenniemae

told me that if it hadnt been for her fathers ill-willed nature,

they never would have left.

Now, if n it hadn been for my daddy bein to who he was, I

wouldn be standin here right now and takin care of you chil-

drn. If we had had us a nice and kind daddy . . . well, then, we

would best be livin down there in Hissop still, to this very day.

So what I am sayin is that a person cant always tell when a bad

thing is the cause of a good thing to come, or if a bad thing is

jus always goin to be a bad thing forever and on.

What do you mean? I asked.

I mean that it was all the cause of the evilness inside my

daddys veins that his blood turned dark and then the blood

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Jenniemae & James

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darkness made him one bad-angry man. Some said his blood

went bad from one too many humiliations, which will do it to a

man. One too many humiliations can turn a good man into anevil devil. Which is why one night when he was out with his

liquor, my mama packed us up and we ran away.

Jenniemaes mother fled their drunk and abusive father and

Hissop, Alabama, when Jenniemae was six years old. Of the

twelve children born to Molly and Jefferson, Jenniemae was the

sixth, which is why the number 6 became her most important,standin tall and walkin out number. Six played a major role in

Jenniemaes life and therefore played a role in our familys lives,

because whatever affected Jenniemae affected us. For instance,

Jenniemae wore six hair pins to tie back her hair in a bun; she

always set rows of six cookies on the cookie plate, rows of six

carrots on the carrot plate, and rows of six celery slices on thecelery plate; she set up six clotheslines outside to dry the

washed wet clothes, and when it was possible, she hung six

pieces of clothing on each line. She sang six verses of each song,

dusted each bookshelf six times, every book spine six times, and

secretly tapped the banister six times as she ascended and

descended the staircase.

When Jenniemaes mother left Alabama, she headed north

and just kept going. She had nothing more than what she

neededher children and the clothing each one had on his or

her back. They planned to live with a cousin who had settled in

Washington, D.C. When one of us would ask about those years

in Alabama, Jenniemae had little to say. She would tell bits and

pieces about the long, hard, hot, and humid days she had spent


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in the fields picking from the time she could stand up until the

time they headed north. Pickin cotton, pickin berries, pickin

beets, pickin bo-weevils, ants, spiders, chiggers, skeeters, andany other crawlin and itchin ugly insect you ever laid your eyes

upon. Nope, nothin to talk bout in those times. Nothin but

bent-over, achin backs and hotness.

We went up north cause. Just cause. If a person was to go

away to some other place than where they lived, well, then, that

person was goin to go north, she told me. Jenniemae said thather people went to Washington, D.C., because they figured if the

president lived there, life for a colored person would be better.

In Washington, D.C., they all hoped they could get decent jobs.

Little did they know, she said, and most over, little didnt they

know.

Once they got to D.C. by the back of anything that movedBack o the train, back o the truck, back o the backthe

extended Harrington family lived in a run-down, two-room bad

excuse for a house located in Foggy Bottom, which today is

home to the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, the

State Department, the Department of Interior, and the George

Washington University campus. In those days it was an area

mostly occupied by the working poor. Since 1860 Foggy Bottom

had been a neighborhood where Negroes, as we called African-

Americans back then, settled after they fled from slavery and

where German and Irish immigrants settled upon arriving in

this country. By 1920 the area was the home to the largest

Negro business and residential community in the United States.

It also became known as the home to Negro jazz and blues

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Jenniemae & James

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entertainers, and Negro intellectuals and artists. It was where

Jenniemae grew up and spent most of her childhood.

Fancy automobiles driven almost entirely by white men andwomen ran along the paved D.C. streets while horse-drawn

buggies, driven almost entirely by Negro men, pulled both

cargo and people through the bumpy, stone-cobbled roads of

Foggy Bottom. When the United States went to war in 1941,

everyday life changed for most white people in the country as a

result of gas rationing, soaring rents, and rising food prices. Butfor the black people of Foggy Bottom, life didnt change much at

all. As Jenniemae said, Get up with the sun, get to work by the

gun, go to bed when youre done.


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Jenniemae & James

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Jenniemae and James by Brooke Newman -- excerpt