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Johnson grew up on a rural Minnesota farm in the early days of the century and went on to rub shoulders with such major historical figures as Hubert Humphrey (who she mentored on civil rights early in his political career), Thurgood Marshall, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Opinionated and outspoken, she is as entertaining as she is informative.
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| Bibliography | 233 |
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Chapter One
Family History
I have not gotten along with some writers who tried to work with me before because they always wanted to turn my story into something amazing to fit their preconceptions, like we had to overcome prejudice every day. The truth is, growing up, we were a normal family, a hardworking bunch, and we were treated like a normal family. No one these days wants to believe a black family could ever be ordinary. I told someone who wanted me to do this book, that's what it's all about--that you don't have to be Superman or Superwoman to accomplish things. You can be a regular person just like everyone else.
When I talk about normalcy, it was like the Lundquists, Our neighbors when we were growing up. They went through the same shenanigans about blessing their family, told their kids to be there at the dinner table, paid attention to their kids, their cleanliness. We were normal that way.
The other thing these writers wanted to do is pigeonhole me as something they wanted me to be--black activist this, feminist that. The truth is, a lot of how I think of myself comes from the farm, a farm gal from Minnesota. One thing you need to know about my background is, it's almost all on the farm. Even people who know me tend to forget that because I've been in the city so long.
The farms in my family's history were for the most part pretty successful, and my relatives that I know about were all free people; no slaves among the relatives that I know of. I know that disappoints the people who think they know all about every black person's history.
My father's father always had land, though I don't know the regulations and conditions. That part of the family, the Allens, they were all born in Missouri. My great-grandfather Allen had five hundred acres, but I don't know how they got land. They farmed lots of corn and therefore had lots of pigs, bacon, and ham. They had some cotton and tobacco.
Some of my mother's people--the Travises--originally came from Rising Sun, Indiana, where my mother was born in the early 1880s. One of my mother's brothers farmed in Rising Sun. They raised corn, and I heard references to cotton. There were certain parts of Indiana with no roads, and they blazed the trail through. It was like when we moved to Pine County in 1913, when I was eight. You have to cut out a lot of brush. The meaning of a trail then was really a road.
The other thing you need to know about my family is that while some people know me as the first black this, the first black that, the truth is, both sides of my family were mixed-race, tremendously mixed. I don't think people always know just how much of that there was in history.
On my father's side, the Allens, it was German and black. My grandfather Allen was black, and my grandmother Allen, she was second-generation German, from the Dresden area, where I'm told they made fine china. There's a smattering of Cherokee--two of my father's brothers even settled in Oklahoma with the Indians. Herbert and Roscoe were the ones that married Indians.
On my mother's side, there had to be a lot of French, Irish, and Seminole. My grandmother's husband came from the Everglades--he was Seminole and black. Those couples, blacks and Indians, mixed all the time. The Irish is where the red streaks in my hair come from--almost all of my brothers and sisters have it, too. One of my sisters, every one of her kids had a band of freckles--that's from grandparents on my mother's side, the Irish influence. I remember once, when I was seventeen and living with my aunt in north Minneapolis, she was washing my hair, and she just turned and yelled to her husband, "Hey Roscoe, she's got all these red streaks"--meaning me. I thought, haven't you ever seen that in a black person before? But she married into the family, and I guess didn't know all the stuff on my mother's side.
As for the French, I do know that Foree was my mother's mother's name. It was originally La Foree somewhere along the line, but they dropped the La because it was a burden to most Americans.
I was born Nellie Saunders Allen in 1905, and my name came about because Grandma Foree had been married once before, to a man named Saunders. He was a racehorse breeder named Nelson Saunders. I suppose that might have had something to do with me being so close to horses all my life, I don't know. But I'll tell you all about that when we get to my farm life.
My grandmother Foree was always talking about history. Her background had to be farm, fields of cotton. She died after Mother married Dad in 1904, I think. Because of the Civil War, most all of that generation, most of her people, could read and write, including the black ones. A lot of them, as I get it, associated with the white kids. Only one member of my family didn't read so well--my grandfather on my father's side.
Education was big on both sides of my family, too. My mother was trained as a teacher, which was how she got to Minnesota, and my grandmother Allen on my father's side, well, she was a force when it came to learning. Grandma Allen was born around Dawson, Missouri, near Cape Girardeau, and she became a teacher. She made sure that all her kids went to high school. Out of the eight boys and one girl that she had, all got to the tenth grade. That was higher education at that time, in the mid to late 1800s.
Grandma Allen was quite heavy--it seemed like she ate all the time. She was a big, stern, German woman, and that's another thing that made her such a force.
Now, Grandma Allen said she came out of the very conservative side of German Lutheranism--I think maybe they were Missouri Synod Lutherans. Her husband, my grandfather, was definitely black--a good-looking man from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, a big town in Mark Twain's books. A lot of Grandfather Allen's people were from around Hannibal, in the tracks of the James brothers. Down there, everyone black and white wasn't allowed to get together--except for blacks to work for whites, or vice versa: whites could work for blacks--which did happen.
My grandfather Allen was also a black Baptist. So it was a pretty natural question: how did they ever get together? Once, when I was a teenager, I asked Grandma Allen point-blank, "How did you get together, the conservative German Lutheran and the Baptist?" I said it just like that.
She said that first, it was those beautiful horses that he rode--that's really how she fell in love. She said, "Oh, those horses, the saddles and the bridles." They were very romantic.
Grandfather Allen was an admirer of horses. There was a group called the Chautauqua, who were entertainers and widespread around the country at that time. They'd go from one small town to the other, like the Barnum and Bailey circuses, but with a serious side. I can see her saying, "Oh, those mustachios." They were the Chautauqua riders, but she was also talking about Grandpa Allen. He had a moustache that came on down--what do you call it?--a handlebar.
I never heard the gory details about Grandpa and Grandma Allen overcoming prejudice in their lives. I heard the families tolerated each other through the church, even though one was Baptist and the other Lutheran.
Someplace along the line, the family that Grandma Allen came out of believed in education for all people. I think the Bible had a lot to do with it. I think she believed the part about us all being God's children. I'll bet you anything she was closer to the Quakers, and that's where a lot of antislavery stuff came from, the Quakers. Grandma Allen had a passion for education, and when I knew her, she just read all the time. What I picked up on there is that you can become bigger than yourself, go beyond your limited experiences, if you read.
She had white skin, and some of her children had very light skin. Uncle Walter, the oldest, he had red hair and freckles, but he was darker. My father, the second child in the family--he was born in 1880--was very light, almost red in the summer. My dad was one of eight boys--the family only had one girl, one sister; I don't know how she survived.
My dad, William Allen, had curls, great big waves in the middle of his head. I thought that was great, so beautiful. When his hair got sweaty, he had these great big ringlets, curls, right in the middle of his head. He grew to be a big man, about six feet, which was certainly big for those times. He loved the physical work, the outdoors.
I do know that a big influence on him educationally, aside from his mother, was growing up listening to speakers from the Freedmen's Bureau, which was big in that part of Missouri where he grew up.
This was part of the antislavery movement that remained after they got rid of slavery, at the religious level, I think. The Freedmen were a group designed to teach the families of former slaves about education and equality, the great values of owning property and raising crops. I think my dad went to every conference they would hold every August. They were in Moberly, Dalton, five or six other country towns in Missouri.
All I know is that Dad said when the Freedmen caravans arrived, the family would load all these kids into the wagon with fried chicken and French bread, and they'd go off to meet. It was like a church get-together, and some of the talk was about freeing each other from slavery's legacy. See, they knew how important history was. Even though they weren't slaves, they knew that the slave mind-set had power in history, and they would have to work hard to overcome it, both to get it out of their own heads and to overcome others who believed it. Today, when people ask me why I am such a demon on knowing the past, I think of how my dad knowing history must have helped him.
When the family talked about this, I was still pretty young, not into organizational things myself yet. But the Freedmen had these agendas--people going into politics, more education, and the right to vote were always on the agenda.
I think it was his mother, Grandma Allen, that pushed him that kind of way, even though she was a white Lutheran. Grandpa, even though he was black, was no factor. He did whatever Grandma told him to do. Dad was there because he worked, and he loved to work. He was as much an entrepreneur as anyone you call that today. I also think it also showed another side of him, the need to reach out to people--just like what I do with my scholarship. Several families that received scholarship money have since contributed to it--people who have been helped helping others. The Freedmen were all about self-help, and that made a big impression. Education again.
With all that in his mind, Dad wanted to leave Dalton to work and own property, and to build up some savings. He went as far as the Montana wheat fields, and he also went to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. Wherever there was a barn. He always traveled, but he settled down not too far from the Minnesota River.
What got Dad here was my uncle Walter. Dad was the second oldest to Walter. Walter came to Minneapolis first, then Dad followed him in. Now my dad, he did his little boxcar thing. He was an adventurous, independent man; he literally rode the boxcars from St. Joseph to Minneapolis. Walter, on the other hand, was such a proper gentleman, he'd never think of riding the rails like my dad. Walter was quite a churchman--I think he came here by following a minister up here. He had a job with the linseed oil mills.
They were a little church family, and Walter gave Dad a room to bunk in. He came here just in time for a Minnesota winter, after helping with the harvest in Saskatchewan. Dad did some work at Waiter's workplace, the linseed oil company, and he also worked at a gun club. That was a private gun club on the Minnesota River in Lakeville, and he made some money helping out the shooting men. But he made quite a bit more on the side, trapping on the river in Lakeville. I don't know if his bosses knew that trapping became a side income for him, but he bought horses and a wagon with the money. Like I said, he was quite an entrepreneur.
My mother, Gladys Foree, grew up in Carrollton, Kentucky. I don't know how my mom came to read so readily, because I couldn't tell there was anyone quite like Grandma Allen in her family. Most of that encouragement, I think, was done through the churches. Even the white women there taught black kids to read and write, not just in Indiana, but Kentucky, too. My grandmother Allen said that was also true in Missouri. A lot of good things came from the churches.
Mom ended up going to a teachers college in Louisville, Kentucky--Louisville Teachers Normal. All the teachers colleges were called "normals" back then. It wasn't hard for Mother to go to college, because the money was there--from racehorses!
Remember Nelson Saunders, the man I was named after? He was a horse trainer, a breeder. A lot of people who owned horses, if they found a black person who knew horses, they would turn theirs over to him immediately. This came from slavery days, the feeling of security white people had when blacks worked the stables.
My mother told me that my uncle Nelson served more than one family's horses. He also raced, although he drove a sulky, for harness racing. His money allowed her to go to school, that was basically it!
She graduated in 1902. It was quite rare for a black woman to graduate, but apparently everybody at this Louisville Normal Teachers College was of some kind of freedom or equal opportunity persuasion, even though the majority had to be white women. One of their regular speakers was Ida B. Wells, kind of a hefty black women who made the rounds for the [antilynching movement]. When you put those things together philosophically, people at that school had to be thinking about the equality of all races. Otherwise, the likes of Ida B. Wells would never get a chance to speak.
My mom came to Minnesota by way of New York and Chicago--she had two aunts in Chicago who ran a great big old boardinghouse. Mom stayed with them, filled in as a teacher on the south side of Chicago, teaching mostly Mexican kids. That's what the black teachers did. Even though she couldn't speak the language, she worked out some way to communicate with them.
She came here to get a job teaching in Minneapolis. She never told me exactly why she came, but I think it was those two aunts. A lot of people passed through the boardinghouse, and some of 'em had to be going to Minneapolis-St. Paul. She heard it was a good place to be a teacher, and she wanted her kids to be schooled in such a place, even though she wasn't even married then.
After arriving, both my parents made their way to Bethesda Church, Eleventh Avenue South and Eighth Street in Minneapolis. They were both pretty good singers, and they volunteered for the choir.
Here's something else they had in common: they both came out of pretty religious families, but they were also independent thinkers, which allowed them to question the justness of God--how would God allow enslavement? A just God wouldn't allow it. My mother was a Baptist, she sang in the choir. My dad was a Lutheran, but it didn't take him long to become a Baptist--women are strong influences, and his father had been a Baptist before my grandmother Allen married him.
They knew each other a long time--two years--but not by today's standards. When Dad met Mom, he was not quite a farmer yet. He already had a house and a team of horses. Dad married my mother at Bethesda in 1904, then they got the first farm in Lakeville, Minnesota, just south of the Twin Cities. Their honeymoon was driving from Minneapolis to Lakeville, about twenty-five miles. They moved to this house a stone's throw from what became our first farm.
He met the owner of the house when he was sashaying to the gun club, and rented the place. Their house was pretty ancient. There was development out there even then. The west eighty acres was always developed to Orchard Lake. There were wheat fields, diary farms. It was very fertile land, and we had a pretty view of it. That's where I was born.
Copyright © 2000 Nellie Stone Johnson. All rights reserved.
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