Gabriela Maya Bernadett - Stories My Grandmother Told Me: A multicultural journey from Harlem to Tohono Odham

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 wasnt 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 couldnt 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 (Esthers 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, Im 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, Esthers 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, Youre so pretty, just like your mother Sally, Mother would say. They told her, You smile just like your mother.