A Miraculous Journey

My first recollection of myself as a distinct personality, i.e., as the person I eventually evolved into, occurred as early as the age of two.  I was being toilet trained and was sitting on the potty in my parents’ bedroom.  My mother was performing her chores while I was taking care of my ‘business.’  I must have taken longer than was acceptable for she spoke impatiently.

“Frances, would you please hurry up; you don’t need to take all day!”  To which I responded, “Mother, do I ‘worrith’ you?”  I lisped.

“No, dear, you don’t.”

“Then please,” I retorted, “don’t worrith me!”  I was way out of line and was treated accordingly when I did finish my ‘business.”  No reprimand for me – my mother said she “wore me out.”  I learned at an early age that children were to be seen and not heard and that adults tolerated no back talk or ‘sass,’ as they called it, especially in the Walker household.

Once on a train trip to Gary, Indiana with my mother there was a little curly-haired, blonde child who was seated near us with her mother.  We started talking and her mother invited me to sit with her daughter.  Well, the little girl started telling me of all the toys and dolls she had.  I took as much of this as I could before I started my “one-up-manship;” if she had one, I had two; if she had three, I had four.  My mother listened in astonishment at my “stories.”  She said she knew then and there that she would have no trouble with me – my competitive nature was already apparent.

Our household, over which my father presided with an iron hand, consisted of my mother, my mother’s brother, my grandmother, my brother, and myself.  In my family with six people there, I was criticized from all sides.  However, my uncle didn’t – we considered him as being part of the family but he wasn’t like any of us because he had dropped out of school in the fourth grade; my mother said you couldn’t get him to go to school.  He played truant constantly – no desire to learn anything more.  But he never got into any trouble.  He never drank, he never smoked, and he was very religious, talking about the Bible all the time.  He loved Reverend Harrison and his church so much that eventually he moved out of our house, down to the church to live and became sexton of the church.  We loved and respected Reverend Harrison too, but we didn’t think he was God, as my uncle did.

It was a tight-knit family ruled over firmly by my father, a self-made man who had left Kingston, Jamaica after his father died, and worked his way to the United States by steamship to look for work to help support his mother and seven brothers and sisters.  On the trip over, he was always summoned by the name “George.”  I guess they did not think a black man and certainly not a man as dark complexioned as my father, had a right to a given name.  If not ‘boy,’ why not ‘George?’  We did not find out until we were in our teens that our father’s full given name was Artmelle Theophilus Walker.  That was quite a mouthful for a woman of minimum education to give her firstborn son!  Theophilus means “love of God” and my father really did love God.