Latest / The Art of Aging / Episode 7 - Another Way Home

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Episode 7 - Another Way Home · The Art of Aging

• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome back to the Art of Aging podcast, produced right here at Montgomery Place, where we celebrate life, honor legacy, and build a community where residents thrive at every stage of life.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: Today's episode is entitled Another Way Home.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: Today I am truly honored to be joined by Ronnie Hartfield, an accomplished author, educator, arts leader, wife, and mother.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: Ronnie's extraordinary career has included leadership roles at the Art Institution of Chicago, Urban Gateways, and the School of Art located in Chicago, as well as teaching at Northwestern University and the Illinois University in Chicago.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: Her work has helped shape conversation around education, identity, and public life for decades.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: Her memoir, Another Way Home: The Tangled Roots of Race in One Chicago Family, explores race, identity, family, and belonging through the story of her own family's history.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: The Art of Aging is hosted by Mark Millet, President and CEO, Montgomery Place, and sponsored by Trinity Rehab, Unodyme, Life Care at Home, and Plant Moran.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: So we're going to start at the beginning today of your journey.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: So if you could just share with us what is your earliest childhood memory?
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_03: I actually have very early memories.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_03: I asked my own four daughters about their earliest memory, and most of them don't go back as far as mine.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_03: And my real first one, I was two and a half years old, and I won a contest uh for the most beautiful baby.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_03: And it wasn't based on your beauty, it was based on your how many tickets your family sold.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_03: And my father had a sister who was very socially involved, and there was no question that I would win.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_03: She sold tickets at all of her resources.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_03: So I won.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_03: And um I rode on a float in the Bud Billikan parade, so the very big event on the south side of Chicago.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_03: And I there's a photograph taken at the time, but I remember distinctly riding on this float, and all these people on the streets cheering, and there were all these different people and a lot of noise and music.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_03: And my mother made me a special dress for it.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_03: And she wanted to comb my hair this certain way, and I didn't want my hair combed like that.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_03: So we had a little shuffle around, and finally she agreed I wouldn't have a bow in my hair.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_03: And when I look at that picture, I can almost smell the streets in that parade.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_03: And that was in August of 1936.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: That is a great memory to chair.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: So what was your childhood like?
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_03: Well, there are a lot of words that you can use to describe something like that.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but words that carry a lot of weight for me are words like safety.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and safety has become more important now than it was then.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_03: But when I reflect back on it, the freedom that I felt as a child.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_03: I had an two older brothers above me, and they were sort of my caretakers, and um we lived in a very small community.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_03: Uh uh when I graduated elementary school, I think there were 30 kids in my class.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_03: Think of that.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_03: Uh very small, close-knit, very diverse.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_03: Um the, you know, segregation was very powerful still in the 40s when I grew up.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_03: And so black people of many different social and professional and um backgrounds lived in the same little community.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_03: And so it was a community where I was never a child who did well with a lot of other children.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I was sort of old for my age, I think, but I had a lot of old lady friends that I visited, and um I would hear their stories.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_03: I always love people's stories.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_03: So in my childhood, I felt this huge number of people who were of interest to me, and their lives were of interest.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and I wasn't trying to sort myself out at the time, but simply um during a war, everybody was very patriotic.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_03: And um we took a lot of newspapers in our house.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_03: Information was very important, information sharing.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, my mother didn't work.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_03: Um my father was doing much better financially than he had a decade before.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_03: So there was a kind of optimism in the family, and I think in the community uh at large.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and so they had contests all the time around there.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_03: The park district had a big uh place in that life, and um older mentors were really important to me.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_03: I won a lot of contests, uh, not for selling tickets, but for being able to talk well.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_03: So um they had little debates and little things like that.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and I loved being a part of a big family.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_03: I had four siblings.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_03: Uh they were known, the roan children like that.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_03: Um my parents were both orphans, so their children were extremely important to them, and I always knew that.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so I would say I had a very positive childhood.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_03: Serene is the word I would use.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_03: I remember coming in the apartment building we lived in and smelling the food that people cooked, and there was such a secure feeling with that.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: You mentioned mentors.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: So who were those particular people or or places that really helped shape become the person that you are today?
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, definite.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_03: And uh something that I've given a lot of thought to as I've grown older, especially, uh, in part because uh once I started being a dean of students in my later life, I became an explicit mentor for a lot of young people, and they're still a part of my life, a lot of them.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_03: Uh the ones who were mentors of mine were much older.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_03: They were older than my parents, and uh they were all these old ladies who were really quite diverse.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_03: Uh one of them lived across the street from us, and she uh was apparently what we would call more today, more affluent than some people.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_03: She had a yellow Cadillac.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_03: Think of that.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_03: Whoa.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_03: Uh she had one little girl who was younger than I.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but she was always kind of, she's the word I would use now is sophisticated, and I was very drawn to her.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_03: Uh down the street was another woman.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_03: That one was Mrs.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_03: Roberts, and down the street was a woman named Mrs.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_03: McKee.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_03: And Mrs.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_03: McKee was fascinating because she collected objects.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_03: She traveled a lot, and her house was full of these amazing things.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_03: Mrs.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_03: McKee had one of those boats, ships in a jar.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_03: You've seen those as and it was so magical to me.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_03: I can't tell you how that thing stood in my memory.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_03: How did that happen?
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_03: How did they get this ship in this jar?
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_03: But she had other glass, she collected crystal things.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_03: And um that became a part of what I grew up to be too, because I like things around to look at.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_03: And I think of her.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_03: I think of her and all those things she had.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_03: She was never sort of private about you could she wouldn't say, Don't touch that or anything.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_03: She was like, Are you interested in that?
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_03: You like that?
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_03: You want to try that glass?
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_03: You don't like that?
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: What was the one thing that really sparked your passion for culture, education, and literature?
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_03: I think that I was always a reader.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_03: I started I learned to read when I was three years old, so you have to know that, because my mother was pregnant and getting ready to have her last child.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_03: And she would sit with me and hold me and try to read to me and with me.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_03: And so I learned to read in this very magical way.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_03: Um that is a long story I've written about it.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_03: Anyway, so I got to kindergarten and the teacher quickly learned that I could read.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_03: And so she decided that I would read to the children when she took her breaks.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_03: Now, teachers couldn't do that today, but in those days, who cared?
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_03: Mrs.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_03: Katz, she would leave, she would give me a little chair and put the other chairs in a circle, and she would say, Now read this story to the children, and all the children would sit like that.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_03: And I would read to them.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_03: I was perfectly fine with it all.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_03: Books were always critical.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: So so you've truly always been a teacher then?
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_03: And I didn't know think of it that way, but I think in that, again, in those days, if you finished your work fast, like in seventh grade, you were assigned to help other kids who were slower.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_03: So you were always teaching them as well.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_03: And I was little because I was already a year ahead.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_03: And that's how I graduated two years early to go to high school.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_03: Then when I got to high schools, I was mentored by some older girls in the school and went to work on the school newspaper and quickly became the editor of the newspaper because I was very literate.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_03: Literacy was a big deal in my family.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_03: Um, my father's father had started a school.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_03: Think of that.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_03: He had been a slave, and he had learned to write because he was um carriage, they called him carriage boy.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_03: He was the chauffeur, the guy who owned the plantation.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_03: And so he learned everything.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_03: And then when freedom came, he went in this church near them and started a school, a free school for newly released slaves.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_03: And so literacy was always a big deal.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so I get to high school, quickly became the editor of the newspaper, which I loved, and then the editor of our senior yearbook.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_03: So there was always the writing and the reading, and another mentor of mine, Mrs.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_03: Duster, who was the mother of children I played with, uh, was the daughter of Ida B.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_03: Wells.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_03: And we didn't know anything about Ida B.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_03: Wells in those days.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_03: But she, Mrs.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_03: Duster, always was reading and writing all the time.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_03: She had this dining room table, which was always covered with books and papers.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_03: And in my house, that wouldn't have happened.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_03: And my mother wanted everything to be cleared, cleaned off.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_03: And I was sort of fascinated by that.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_03: I thought, how do they eat?
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_03: Everything is covered up with all these books and these papers.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_03: Well, anyway, she would play that role that Mrs.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_03: Snesbitt had played, which is talking to me very seriously about what she was reading and what she would give me to read.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_03: And uh she encouraged me to go to the University of Chicago.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_03: I was thinking going to the University of Michigan because I had driven there before with some people to a football game, and that looked like the way to go.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, but I loved the campus at UFC.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_03: Again, with freedom we had, I would ride over there all the time on my bicycle, and it looked like in a book.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_03: It looked like these British novels that had read.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_03: And I thought, I think I'd like to be here, but I didn't want to stay home.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_03: And so my parents then decided that they should sacrifice and let me live in the dorms.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_03: So that's what I did.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_03: Even though they lived a few blocks away, and they had a lot of funny stories about that, which I won't have time to tell.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_03: But they just thought I should have this college life somehow.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_03: And and they did what they could to support that.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but the big thing for me was all these books.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_03: Everybody read the same books in the Hutchins College.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_03: And so your social life was not talking about TV shows or movies or anything, but books.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_03: And so I met all these fabulous kids and I just loved it.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_03: I loved the books and I loved writing about them.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: Did you always see yourself as a leader?
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_03: It was so uh de facto.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_03: I I don't know how to describe that.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_03: It's like I didn't give names to myself when I was young.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_03: Reflecting back, I would say indeed my whole family were sort of leaders in the community.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_03: And I was a leader in college.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_03: I'm a leader in one way or another.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_03: But I didn't use that term.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_03: No.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_03: From myself.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: Of all your awards and accomplishments, which ones are the most important to you?
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_03: One that was important was being honored by the University of Chicago as an alum with outstanding service or whatever.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_03: One from the Mexican Museum was very important to me.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_03: Um, because the time I got it, I don't know what years, but I would say in the 80s, there was so much racial and cultural divisiveness in the city.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_03: And uh that I got asked to work with them on the founding of that museum, the Mexican museum, and then got recognized um once a year, they recognized somebody in the community who's not Mexican.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I gave one more.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, I know, a founding one.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, things that I helped grow with no compensation were important in my life because I learned a great deal.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_03: In addition to learning something analogous to what you're calling leadership, I learned that my experience was very useful.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so when they and this sort of initiative was growing in Chicago to start a writer's museum, uh, some people asked me to be on the founding committee to think tank, and I was very pleased to do that.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_03: And I found out that I did know a lot, that I had much deeper and broader awareness of where writing had happened in Chicago and who was doing it now and where it was going.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_03: And I just had a much more, a richer um portfolio than a lot of the people on the committee.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: So you helped create opportunities for greater diversity and inclusion in the arts.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: Why was that so important to you?
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_03: It's important to everything I believe in, I guess.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_03: To uh I come from a very diverse background in some ways.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_03: It's odd to say that because on one hand, there are certain kind of people from a certain important geographic place in this country and history in this country.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_03: That uh my parents were part of what they call the first migration, as opposed to the wartime migration of people of color from the South.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_03: And uh so it was very particular.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_03: Those people had particular culture, they'd had more education than a lot of black people, they'd had more privileges than a lot of black people.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_03: So I had this awareness of diversity and um aware in some early unspoken way about the fact that some people don't have that.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_03: And that they're just shut out because they don't have it.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_03: They're shut out because of scholarships, for example, because they didn't know how to apply.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_03: My parents never went to college, but I had Mrs.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_03: Nesbitt, I had Mrs.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_03: Duster, and why they would have filled out all my forms for me, but they made me sit while they talked me through it.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_03: So I was very conscious of the privilege of information and resource.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_03: People ask me this in sometimes in interviews.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_03: One single word, how would you define your your life goals?
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_03: And I realized I didn't really have explicit goals, but the word that's most critical to me is access.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_03: And access is something very key to a whole lot of other things in life.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_03: And so what I've been doing, what I had always been doing, is trying to help create access and strengthen roads to access.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_03: And that's what I've done, I'm still doing it.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: So you're a writer, you're volunteering in your church, you've got a career, you're working, and you're also a wife and a mother.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: Did you ever sleep?
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_03: Once once a week I used to stay up all night.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_03: But uh I now I sleep, I take naps.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_03: I take a nap almost every day for an hour.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_03: If I don't always sleep, I read myself to sleep, and if I go to sleep, that's all good.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_03: I think if you're very curious about the world and fortunate enough to have avenues that take you through that, you're stimulated enormously and enriched enormously, and so you don't really need much sleep.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: How did you balance being a a wife and mother and and your career?
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_03: Balance, I never worried about missing out on a career the way some people do.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_03: And even some of my friends uh felt their children were keeping them back out of the work world.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_03: I never I never cared about going to the work world, frankly.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, but they began to grow up, and so I began to see my friends were all going back to grad school, my friends were going to work, and so I did two.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_03: And um so then I had work, and work was so gradual that again I was eased into it.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_03: First I got a job one day a week, and then two days a week, and then halftime.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_03: I always had jobs where I didn't work in the summer when my kids were home.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_03: But I think the happier years in my career were after the children were all gone to college.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_03: What still inspires you today?
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_03: I don't feel much inspiration.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_03: If I think about inspiration, having parents who had a hard life in many ways, being orphans and being black people and at the time that they were, and they inspired me because they survived it with such grace.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_03: And they never would have given any of their children a sense of of victimhood for what had happened to them.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_03: I get inspired by them and what they demonstrated in the way of of dignity and devotion to family and um recognizing the craziness of a lot of restrictions that this culture put on people like them.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: So you wrote your memoirs entitled Another Way Home.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: What was your inspiration for for writing that and what did you hope that readers would get out of that?
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_03: Um this is r uh related to that issue of inspiration.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_03: Um I was extremely inspired by my parents, and I think particularly by my mother, because she took on the a lot of the heavy lifting in our family.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_03: And um my father saw to our intellectual growth, I might say.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_03: But she took on the daily stuff of getting you through what you had to get through, with I thought, uncommon grace, uh, she did.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_03: And so one day I did I seen this movie called The Squid in the Whale.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_03: And um it's a very good movie, but there's one scene in it in which the dysfunctional family Is juggling itself, and the son hasn't has had a terrible relationship with his father.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_03: And the father is sick in the hospital, and the son's going decided he's gonna go visit his father.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_03: So he walks in the door, and the father says to him, Go get me another pillow.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_03: Before he even said, How are you?
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_03: or how have you been for a while?
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_03: Just go do something for me.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_03: And it struck me of an episode with my mother where I had gone to visit her in the hospital in the last two or three weeks of her life.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_03: And uh I had a back problem, hip problem, turned out to be a hip problem.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_03: And I walk in like this, and she says to me, Come over here and get one of these pillows from behind my back.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: Complete opposite.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_03: Just like that.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_03: And it struck me, I thought, somebody ought to write a book about her.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_03: A mother like that, who so notices, she notices her children and what's going on with them.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_03: Uh so I wanted to write her a book just to sort of say, look how people can be.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, but there was also the race stuff was going on.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_03: That um I was teaching one course at a time, some courses in black literature, and it seemed to me that almost every book in the Pantheon was about dysfunction and tragedy and violence and psychological violence.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_03: And I thought, why is nobody writing a book about normal people?
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, black people who have always accommodated multiracial stuff, and they're fine.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_03: They they work and they eat and they take their kids down south to see their grandparents.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_03: And so I thought, you know what, that maxim that says, if you can't find the book you want to read, write it.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_03: So I decided to write it.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_03: And the title came, I was going to call it Down River, Down Home, because my mother always spoke of going down south as down home.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_03: And somebody at the press said to me, that's too many downs, this South Sudan.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_03: Come up with some other idea.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_03: And so I was telling the story of her father, who it's hard to tell.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_03: I try to abbreviate a little.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_03: His wife my mother's mother had three children, and she died in childbirth with her fourth child.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_03: And her h her partner, life partner, uh, was this British guy who owned the plantation they all lived on.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_03: And she he had built a little house for her and the children, um, because uh he built a house for her mother and the children when she died, because he had nobody to take care of them, and they were all illegitimate in every way.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_03: And his mother was like, I don't want to look at them, I don't want to know anything about them, get them out of my sight.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_03: And so he built another road from the main entrance to the plantation, which is very large, it's like going from the point.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_03: And he built this road so his mother would not have to look upon his children.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_03: And my mother said, we didn't care.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_03: I mean about the way she was.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_03: She said, We had our own garden, we grew our own food, we had everything we needed up there.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_03: We had another way home.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_03: And so I thought that was so characteristic of her to say, instead of lamenting and saying he put us up in the back over here and he did this and that, she just said we had another way home.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_03: And I thought it described not just her, but many, many people of color who lived with oppression and discrimination and restriction.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_03: And they just said, Well, what are we gonna do now?
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_03: Uh so we gotta find another way.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_03: And they did.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_03: They found another way.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_03: And so that's how the book got its title.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_03: But the concept was that her experience and all of her multiple relatives was not rare.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_03: It wasn't terribly common, but I think in the first migration it was much more common than anybody writes about.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_03: Um the Reconstruction proved that when you look at the black people and the Reconstruction Congress, all but one of them were had white fathers.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_03: And their fathers saw to it that they were educated, and so when freedom came, they were at the they were in the leadership.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_03: And that's how color casts got strengthened and so forth.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_03: But it wasn't rare, is what I'm saying.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_03: And you can see that here at Montgomery.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_03: Sure.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it it's not rare.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_03: So why is it always written about in terms of people who are mixed not knowing who they are, whether they're black or white?
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_03: I look at my own four children.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_03: I can't imagine they're saying, Who am I?
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_03: Am I black or white?
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's just it's not on their screen in that way.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_03: And so I wanted to write a book that would kind of interrupt that narrative, I guess is what I'd say.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_03: And and I think it did.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I think it's in fifth printing now.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_03: And uh nobody expected it to do that well, not even the people at the press.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_03: The first printing was 10,000 books because they thought this is not gonna go on.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_03: But it hit a nerve.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: Well, your life is inspiring to many.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I know there's probably a a a lot of both uh men and women that have, you know, looked up to your education, your writing, your knowledge, your passion of making sure that arts were available for everybody, that it wasn't about what your last name was, how much money you had, or what color that you were, that that arts were to be enjoyed and experienced by everyone.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_01: And you certainly made a big difference in that, in your work and dedication and commitment to that.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: So thank you and congratulations for you know for that effort and your leadership uh in and leading leading that charge.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: So now we're gonna move into the last part of our episode.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and this is called the MP3.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_01: And at this point in our podcast, we like to ask all of our guests these three questions.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_01: So we call it the Montgomery Place 3, or for short, MP3.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: And today's MP3 is sponsored by The Art of Aging is made possible in part by Plant Moran.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_00: Plant Moran provides the expertise and guidance that helps Montgomery Place navigate the business of senior living while staying focused on what matters most, delivering an exceptional experience for residents.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_01: If you could go back and give your 20-year-old self one piece of advice, what would you tell yourself?
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_03: I think I would tell myself um not to want everything at once.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_03: Um to recognize that with a little luck life can be long and um not to uh want everything and not to want everything from your marriage or your motherhood or your job or friends, but to recognize that you can round your life with contributions from many different dimensions of it.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_03: So I would tell myself to be um to honor that, I guess.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_01: Good advice, good advice.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_01: So question number two What lesson has taken you a lifetime to learn?
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_03: These are great questions.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_03: Who thought these are these are good questions.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_03: Um I have learned that people in general um have both a deeply good potential and a deeply bad potential.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that the recent years have taught me far more about the latter than I would ever have anticipated.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_01: Last question, and this is an easier one, but but what brings you the most joy in your life today?
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_03: Well, that's not as hard to uh answer.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_03: I think the people I care about um really bring the greatest joy.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_03: I think what I'm most joyful is when I have the utter privilege of being with our children and our grandchildren, and I talk to them all the time.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_03: And when those children phone just to see how we are, it brings enormous joy.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_03: Another enormous joy is the few friends I close dear friends who are still alive.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I'm 90 years old, half my friends would be 95 or 100.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_03: The ones that I have retained connections to are extremely important to me.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_03: And um, they send me stuff that they're thinking about, clippings or poems.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_03: Um and some of the people here, and we've been here six months, have begun to do that too.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_03: And if one of them will say, I thought of you when I saw this, that that's great, amazing to me and very powerful.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_03: So it's human connections um that resonate so that one feels real.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Ronnie, thank you for joining us today and our beautiful location here on the 10th floor at Montgomery Place.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_01: We've got a great view, but more importantly, we had a great conversation.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_01: And uh just thank you for joining us, for sharing your remarkable story.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's truly been an honor to be with you today.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_01: So we do have a small token of appreciation um for you joining us today.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_01: And um, we have some parting gifts.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my god.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: And our and our gifts are sponsored by Clarence Davis, the award-winning landscape company who takes care of our garden here at Montgomery Place.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_01: So we have a nice little uh cup for you to keep things cold or hot.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_01: And a beautiful stylish art of aging jacket uh to keep you warm on a chilly morning or a cool evening.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_03: So that is so wonderful.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_03: And uh talking about unanticipated.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_03: So thank you again.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_03: Take it at night when we go to things where you sit outside and it gets cooler.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_03: This is a wonderful thing to have.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_03: So you are well.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_03: I have to say that Montgomery Place uh does this really wonderful thing for life in general, I think, which is that it understands aging in a very p positive way, without any kind of illusion about the tragedies of it and the losses and the the all the things that don't work anymore, the increasing loss.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_03: Um, because there's so much life in here.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_03: There is.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_03: And uh so I've been bringing my children and grandchildren into that.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_03: Um this is wonderful.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_00: You're welcome, you're welcome.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks again to our sponsors, Trinity Rehab, Unodyne, Life Care at Home, and Plant Moran.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_00: Until next time, keep living fully, keep aging artfully, and keep sharing those stories that matter most.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for watching and listening.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_00: We will see you next time on the Art of Aging.org.