Stories My Grandmother Told Me

Gabriela Maya Bernadett

• Publisher: City Point Press
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781947951433
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

The illuminating and deeply personal debut from Gabriela Maya Bernadett, Stories My Grandmother Told Me explores culture, race, and chosen family, set against the backdrop of the twentieth-century American Southwest. In a hilly Southern California suburb in the late twentieth century, Gabriela Maya Bernadett listens as her grandmother tells her a story. It's the true story of Esther Small, the great-granddaughter of slaves, who became one of the few Black students to graduate from NYU in the 1940s. Having grown up in Harlem, Esther couldn't imagine a better place to live; especially not somewhere in the American Southwest. But when she learns of a job teaching Native American children on a reservation, Esther decides to take a chance. She soon finds herself on a train to Fort Yuma, Arizona; unaware that each year, the Bureau of Indian Affairs kidnaps the native Tohono O'odham children from the reservation and forces them to be educated in the 'ways of the White man.' It doesn't take long for Esther to notice how Fort Yuma parallels her own grandmother's story as a slave in the South—the native children, constantly belittled by teachers and peers, are forced to perform manual labor for local farmers. One of two Black people in Fort Yuma, Esther feels isolated, never sure where she belongs in a community deeply divided between the White people and the Tohono O'odhams. John, the school bus driver and Tohono O'odham tribe member, is one of the only people she connects with. Friendship slowly grows into love, and together, Esther and John navigate a changing America. Seamlessly weaving in the present day with the past, Stories My Grandmother Told Me blends a woman's memory of her life, and that woman's granddaughter's memories of how she heard these stories growing up. Bernadett's captivating narrative explores themes of identity, tradition, and belonging, showing what it really means to exist in a multicultural America.

Chapter 1

Harlem

It was the picture that got her attention. As she left the library at 115th and Seventh Avenue, she saw it hanging right there on the bulletin board near the door. It was of an Indian family, huddled together next to a horse underneath the vast Southwestern Mountains, the desert sand beneath their feet. (Back then, in the 1940s, they were called Indians. It wasn’t until about the 1960s that the term “Native American” came into popular use.) It was a scene Esther was not used to seeing. Being a Harlem girl, she would be more familiar with a Black family huddled next to the subway entrance beneath the New York City skyline. A vibrant, multi-ethnic community of Jews, Irish, Italians, Blacks, Puerto Ricans, and West Indians was all Esther knew. Mountains, Indians, desert, the Southwest — these were all new to her, something that even the diverse borough of Harlem did not have. She was intrigued. She looked more closely at the picture and realized it was a poster for a program to teach Indians on reservations. She took down the address, some place in Washington, D.C. She would write to them, she thought, and see what this program could offer her.

It was not that Esther had any desperate need to leave Harlem. She loved it there, and couldn’t imagine a better place to live. She was born on June 4, 1925, in an apartment at 98th and Lexington, through a home birthing program sponsored by the Harlem hospital. She grew up in a three-story brownstone a few blocks uptown with Daddy, Mother, Momma Sarah (Esther’s maternal grandmother), and her two older brothers, Harold and Alfonso. Her aunts, uncles, and cousins all lived close by. Aunt Mattie would come by to chat, sometimes with a sweet potato pie in hand; cousin Lillian would periodically stop in to play with Esther; and Esther often saw Aunt Mary sitting on the stoop in front of the brownstone. This was similar to the family structure of the South, where there would be little houses close together, and the whole family took care of the kids; no one ever felt isolated or alone.

Mother and Momma Sarah had lived in Jacksonville, Florida, before they migrated up North. Esther and her brothers never asked them about it, but they would hear stories sometimes, bits and pieces of family history, lives lived in a time and place that Esther and her brothers could only imagine.

“Back in Jacksonville,” Mother would say, “I walked around without shoes. We would save our shoes for Sunday school.”

Harold and Alfonso would make a face. “No shoes!” they whispered to Esther, snickering. Esther knew what they meant. Walking around the swamps of Florida with nothing but your bare feet touching the wet ground and who knows what else? Ugh!

“One day, as I was walking back from school,” Mother continued, “I was passing by the creek and saw a baby alligator.” She pronounced the word creek like crick, a remnant of her Southern upbringing. “I said to myself, I’m gonna get me a baby alligator. So I jumped into the creek, grabbed it, held it with both hands, while the tail was whipping back and forth. It even hit me a couple times, I was surprised how strong its tail was.” Esther could just imagine Mother, a tall, lanky, 12-year-old, wrestling an alligator barefoot in the muddy creek. “I brought it home and put it in our tub that Momma used to wash clothes in. Momma came back home and saw the alligator in the tub, and she said, ‘You need to put the alligator back in the water.’ ‘But I just caught it!’ I told Momma. She said I still had to put it back. So I grabbed the alligator out of the tub and put it back in the creek.” Momma Sarah would smile every time she heard Mother recall this incident. Very few stories about the South made her smile.

Sometimes, Mother would talk to Momma Sarah about Agnes, Esther’s great-grandmother, who was born into slavery and freed when she was five years old.

“As a young girl, she remembered other slaves on the plantation telling her, ‘You’re so pretty, just like your mother Sally,’ Mother would say. “They told her, ‘You smile just like your mother.’”

Esther could only imagine little Agnes, a five-year-old child bringing water in a pail to the workers in the field, never knowing who her mother was or where she went (rumor had it she had been sold to a plantation in either the Carolinas or Georgia) but feeling connected to her, nonetheless, just as Esther felt when she heard these stories. Agnes learned to read from the Bible and eventually became a registered midwife.

Other times, Esther heard stories about Momma Sarah’s experience working in the fields, before she moved up North. Fieldwork was the best job a Black person from the South could hope for in the early 1900s, and so that’s what Momma Sarah did to survive. Mother and her sister Aunt Lovey, children at the time, would often work in the fields too, to help Momma Sarah the best they could. One day, Momma Sarah found out that the White landowners were going to pay them less than they had said. Momma Sarah wasn’t having that, so she took Mother and Lovey and tried to leave.

One of the landowners told her she couldn’t do that, and Momma Sarah said, “I’m leaving because you’re not paying me. I’m leaving and taking my children with me.”

The landowner said that it was illegal to take workers from the farm, and he had Momma Sarah thrown in jail. They left Mother and Lovey, the “workers” that Momma Sarah was illegally taking off the farm, out there in the fields by themselves. One of the other farmhands went back to tell Momma Sarah’s family that she was in jail and her kids were left out in the field with nothing. Then the other farmhands said they weren’t going to work for these land­owners anymore, because how could they be so cold as to throw these children’s mother in jail, and then just leave the children out there in the fields by themselves? Esther could picture it in her mind: dark, cold, no food, no water, out in the fields all alone.

“Remember when they put you in jail and they left us out there?” Mother would sometimes ask Momma Sarah. She would just nod.

“I just didn’t want Lovey to cry. It got dark, and I didn’t want her to cry,” Mother would say. Eventually, someone came to the jail, paid a fine, and Momma Sarah was free. But the story stayed. This was oral history, and every time Mother would say to Momma Sarah, “Remember?” Esther just listened. She learned so much just by listening.

On rare occasions, they would talk about The Incident. It happened one summer when Aunt Mattie (Momma Sarah’s sister) went with her husband, John, to do some seasonal work — Esther never quite caught what type of work it was. They lived in a camping area with all the other male workers and their wives. Every day the men would go off to work, and the women would stay back, cooking, washing clothes, taking care of children. Life seemed normal, uneventful even, but there was always the unspoken threat of an attack by the landowners.

The men knew it but tried not to think about it because knowing that their wives were vulnerable, and that they couldn’t do anything about it, was unbearable. The women knew it and tried their best to avoid it (which they were able to do for the most part) until, one day, when the men were still at work, and the women were by themselves, one of the landowners came after Aunt Mattie. She could see his sneering face coming toward her, his White hand reaching for her clothes, trying to tear them off. Aunt Mattie wasn’t afraid. She always carried a knife with her, and she took it out and cut him. He screamed and ran off. When he told all his friends what this Black woman had done, it stirred up a vengeance in people’s hearts. The local townspeople were going to hang her, Aunt Mattie knew, so she had to leave. She left Florida, somehow made it to New York (Esther never quite knew how: maybe remnants of the underground railroad?), and found John’s sister, who was living there at the time.

Safe in New York, she sent for Mother. Sixteen years old, Mother left Jacksonville and went to New York by boat. She found Aunt Mattie, and soon after she arrived her aunt took her to the local school. It was full of little kids, and she felt embarrassed because she was 5 feet 8, which was tall for a girl, and out of place. That was the last time she went to school. Shortly after Mother’s arrival, Momma Sarah also left Jacksonville and found her and the rest of the family in New York. Esther remembered Momma Sarah saying, “I knew someday I would get out of that place, I’d leave that place,” and Mother would reply, “Yes, Momma, I always heard you say that.”

As for Daddy’s family, Esther knew almost nothing about it. She knew he was from Charleston, South Carolina, and that was it. He would not talk about his family, not ever. When he caught consumption, Mother still didn’t have the heart to ask him, as he lay there dying, about his parents, his siblings, or anything related to his family. He passed away when Esther was 10 years old. Though the family was saddened by his death, they accepted it and moved forward, as all families must do when someone passes away. Being in a community with so many relatives and friends got them through. Esther never felt alone, unsafe, or in despair. Soon after her father’s death, she remembered walking downstairs one day, and Mother turned around and said, “You look just like Henry.” That made Esther smile. Her father was gone but not forgotten, and he lived on through stories, of course. Although her father died when she was so young, Esther had fond memories of her childhood and couldn’t imagine a better place to grow up than in Harlem.

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* * *

When Esther was about five or six years old, she would sit in front of the window at her family’s old house (before they moved to the brownstone), waiting for Daddy to come home. She would look out the window, waiting and waiting, until finally, she saw him. Then she’d run down the stairs to meet him. He would pick her up, put her on his shoulder, and walk up to the fifth floor, where they lived. She would take his shoes off and bring him his slippers. There was a piano in the room, so after Daddy was settled and comfortable, Esther would play one of her favorite songs, “Stormy Weather,” and sing along. The song was about a break-up, and how devasting it is not to be with the person you love anymore. Henry would laugh good-heartedly whenever Esther sang it, and when Esther was older she wondered if maybe he thought it was funny because she was just a child, playing this adult song.

After they moved to the brownstone, Esther would still sit in front of the window, this time waiting for her friends.

“Esther! Esther!” the neighborhood kids would yell. “Come down and play!”

She would grab her jacket and run down the stairs to play with the other kids until the street lights came on. That was the sign that everyone had to go home for supper. None of the adults worried about the kids being out on their own; they knew the kids were safe on the street. That was the culture of the time, to have the kids play on their own until it was time to go back home. You never went over to the other kids’ houses or apartments — that was rude — and you never even called. A window was all you needed: wave if someone was there, and out to the sidewalk they came.

The kids would play kickball, hopscotch, and jacks. Sometimes the boys, being boys, would do a Tarzan yell. They would gather on the sidewalk, pound their chests and scream, “Ahh ahh ahh!” and all the kids would come down from their houses to play. If it wasn’t too cold, they would bring their ice skates and go skating in the park. Other days, they would grab their roller-skates and skate in the street. Esther’s brothers, especially, enjoyed hanging on to trucks that were driving by, letting the truck pull them forward on their skates. On Mondays, they would go to the movies.

When the weekend came, playtime was over and religious services began. The Jewish kids would head off to temple, the Catholic ones to Mass, and Esther, being Pentecostal, would spend all of Saturday at church memorizing scripture, learning the teachings of the Bible, and listening to the congregants testify. Pentecostals, like the Jews, observed the Sabbath on Saturday, which was different from most Christian denominations. Testifying in church was also unique to Pentecostal worship. Any congregant who wanted to could stand up during the service to say what was on their mind, and the crowd would join in with a song and a few “Amens.” Some church members even played instruments in the background, such as the tambourine, the triangle, or striking a wooden block to add to the energetic mood.

When Monday came, the cycle would start again. The kids would go off to school, come home, yell to each other to come out and play, and then run back home again when it was time for supper. In the mornings, after Esther got ready for school, she would stop to pick up her friend Anna. Anna was Italian, and she lived three buildings away from Esther’s. She and Esther would walk to Fifth Avenue, and when it came time to cross the street, they would hold hands, look both ways to see if any cabs were coming, and run to the other side. They learned to cross the street quickly and carefully, timing it just right so they wouldn’t get stuck in the middle with all the cabs running by. After school, they would walk to their respective homes to check in with their parents, and then Anna would come by Esther’s house and call up to her. When Esther heard the call, she would run down the stairs to go play.

As Esther got older and entered her teen years, she explored Harlem on her own, walking down Central Park in the afternoon, going to the local fabric store to buy fabric for the dresses she was teaching herself to make, and spending hours in the libraries and bookstores that lined the Harlem streets. When she went into a library, she felt comforted by the familiar wood of the tables and people talking softly as she looked at the books lining the shelves. When she found books she liked, she would check them out and take them home. She also liked to walk down 125th Street to see the bookstores there. She remembered going into a storefront bookstore once, where she saw a group of men gathered around a table in the corner, talking about politics and race. One of the men in the group was a poet she had heard about, who had moved to Harlem from the South and was trying to make a name for himself there. She bought one of his books and asked him to sign it. He took out a pen from his pocket, opened the cover, and signed his name: “Langston Hughes.” Esther thanked him and headed back home. She wondered if he would become famous someday.

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* * *

Esther had a great life in Harlem, but when she was 24 years old she thought it was time for an adventure. Harlem would always be there. Why not leave for a couple of years and live in a place far away, among a group of Indians, no less, and see what kinds of experiences she would have? After coming home from the library that night, she took out a piece of paper and a pen. Dear Bureau of Indian Affairs, she wrote. I saw your poster earlier today and am writing to inquire about your program. I would like an application and more information about teaching Indians. Sincerely, Esther Small. She put the letter in an envelope and walked down to the post office the next day to mail it. Now all she had to do was wait. Give it a couple of weeks, she thought. Once they wrote back to her, the adventure could begin!

A couple of weeks later, a medium-sized Manila envelope arrived in the mail addressed to Esther Small. She tore it open. There was an application for her to fill out, a written exam, and a map showing the different reservations she could go to. She filled out the application, which asked basic things like her name, education, and address, and took the written exam, which was nothing more than some straightforward questions about what she would do once she arrived on the reservation. How would you set up a lunch program? they asked. What would be the objectives for the classes you would teach? Easy enough questions, especially since Esther had graduated from New York University the year before with a Bachelor of Science in Home Economics Education and was currently working as a dietitian at Seton Hospital in the Bronx. Her degree had trained her to be a teacher; in fact, during her sophomore and junior years, she had been a student-teacher at Girls High School in Brooklyn. With her B.S. degree, she was also qualified to be a dietitian or nutritionist, or to work in social services if need be. She figured these would all be useful skills on a reservation, so she hoped they would help her application stand out.

Chapter 2

New York University

“I can’t believe you met Langston Hughes!” Maya gasps. “Do you still have the book he signed?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Maya,” Esther replies. “It’s probably here at the house somewhere.”

“Tell us about your time at NYU,” Tina says. “Your guidance counselor said you didn’t have a chance of getting in. Right?”

“Well,” Esther says. “Here’s how it happened …”

When Esther was in high school, she hadn’t thought about going to NYU at all. She was going to Wadleigh High School at 115th and Seventh, a public all-girls academic school, which meant that the students were being prepared to go to college. Esther always knew she was going to college, but she seldom thought much about where. In the school library, there were bulletins from colleges all over the country, and Esther would read them simply for fun. She thought maybe she would go to Hunter College or even a business college and become an executive secretary. She had no idea the decision was about to be made for her when she sat across from her high school counselor one fall afternoon.

“Where do you want to go to college?” the counselor asked.

“NYU,” Esther replied, almost automatically. She wasn’t sure why she said it. It tumbled out of her mouth before she even had a chance to reg...

Table of contents

• Prologue
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15
• Epilogue