What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [120]
Mammá Leontine, who became the family matriarch, spoke only French, rarely wore shoes, and, having grown up a slave, never had the privilege of learning to read or write. “She was the midwife in her village. There was a white doctor who was a circuit rider, who came through on horseback every three months. And it was her job to go out and drop a white towel over the gatepost wherever he was needed,” said Betty, who has done extensive research of her family tree and has, since 2003, written an engrossing blog documenting her family and life. “And this is what blew my mind when I learned that. I realized that I, too, had spent my whole life dropping white towels over fences. I never ran for public office. I never sought a position anyplace I’ve been. I was always going around showing people where things needed to be changed. I spent my life doing that, and I’m still doing it.”
Betty grew up in East Oakland, California, with little conscious awareness of race. There were then fewer than twenty thousand African-Americans living between Sacramento and Monterey, and only about fifteen black families in the East Bay, most of whom were Betty’s cousins. “We thought we were together because we liked the company. My life was surrounded by Creole pride and Catholicism,” said Betty, who knew next to nothing then about African-American culture.
During her youth, the only experience she had with racism occurred when an English teacher told Betty that, though she deserved it, she could not give her the lead part in a play because the other students’ parents would never allow it. “For the first time, I understood for a fact that I wasn’t white,” she said. Besides her light skin color, one of the reasons she never thought of herself as any different from her white classmates was that her father, whom she adored, never considered himself black. He spoke of African-Americans as “American Negroes” and, without apology, treated dark-skinned people as underlings. As well, her parents, who spoke French patois at home in their ethnically mixed and working-class neighborhood, worried mostly that Betty would “marry black.” No one considered what she might do with her life other than marry, and, she said, “My mother set the bar pretty low. She mostly wanted her daughters to marry handsome men and to get married before they became pregnant.”
A date in 1940 with a former UCLA gridiron star named Jackie Robinson, seven years before the future Hall of Famer broke Major League baseball’s color line, sparked her racial awareness as had nothing before. Betty’s father was peeking from a doorway when Robinson, wearing a tuxedo and carrying a corsage, arrived to escort the beautiful and sought-after nineteen-year-old to a postgame party at the International House, on the University of California Berkeley campus. “The look of horror on my father’s face was enough to ruin my evening,” Betty said, adding, with a smile, “But I braved it out.” Still, her father’s behavior prompted her to cut off communications with him for a while and planted the seeds of a powerful consciousness about race.
Her alienation from her family ended when Betty married Mel Reid on May 24, 1942. Her parents considered the chisel-faced, caféau-lait star athlete at San Francisco State “a good catch.” He was, after all, the descendant of a pioneering African-American family that arrived in California before the Civil War. In a wedding photograph, taken in Betty’s parents’ backyard, the slim-waisted bride and the dimple-chinned groom looked like fashion models. Six months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, it betrays nothing of the ways World War II was about to change the context of their lives.
Like millions of other women who answered the call to “make history, working for victory” by replacing men who were joining the fight, Betty took a job. Hers was as a filing clerk in the basement of the Civil Service Commission in San Francisco. The job was