Article published June 21, 2009 96-year-old symbolizes an era of U.S. migration Toledoan joined northward wave in 1942
Ceebee Kidd, 96, was raised in
Mississippi by her grandmother, a former slave, before coming to Toledo in search of better pay.
(
THE BLADE/JEREMY WADSWORTH
)
Ceebee Kidd surveys the gone-to-weed vegetable garden alongside her house, raising a knobby finger to point.
"Those onions, and the wild strawberries? That's the only [edible] things left. When my son had a plow, he used to plow it."
But this large rectangle of earth hasn't felt the sharp edge of a hoe in years. As Mrs. Kidd finds herself slowing down, her energies go to the narrow flowerbeds bordering her roughly century-old house and to the houseplants moved onto the porch for summer.
One plant, a waxy-leafed specimen with dense roots, is what Mrs. Kidd calls a beefsteak begonia.
Ceebee Kidd, 96, is a passionate lifelong gardener who just recently made wine from ‘possum grapes.’
(
THE BLADE/JEREMY WADSWORTH
)
"This was my mother's," she said, rubbing a thick leaf between thumb and forefinger. "I brought [a cutting] up here from Mississippi."
That massive plant on the front porch of a central-city house is a piece of American history. Just like the woman who brought it here as a memento of the home she left behind, that begonia is a living reminder of one of the most massive internal migrations in U.S. history.
Abdul Alkalimat was recently director of Africana Studies at the University of Toledo. Now a professor at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, he's finishing a book that compiles documents of local black history dating to 1787.
"The black population of Toledo at the end of the 19th century was always less than 2 percent," said Mr. Alkalimat, holder of a PhD from the University of Chicago.
"But from World War I through World War II, say until 1950, essentially you have an eightfold increase," he said. "The key to Toledo is obviously that it's part of the industrial heartland. And the key decade is from 1940 to 1950."
When Mrs. Kidd - who turned 96 on Tuesday - describes a life that began in the Mississippi Delta and then went North in search of better pay, she is telling one of America's most epic tales.
And with every passing year, fewer Americans can give such firsthand stories.
Heading north
Mrs. Kidd is no taller than an early-summer sunflower, and about as slender. She walks briskly and takes stairs so easily that her wooden cane might as well be decoration.
She has outlived both her children.
She speaks matter-of-factly of her girlhood with a beloved grandmother "who was born a slave, although I don't know if she was born in the [cotton plantation] house or not."
Her journey from Greenville, Miss., to Toledo mirrors the stories of millions of other African-Americans who cut largely rural ties in the South to forge new lives in the industrial North. Such resettlement was so vast that the legendary Delta bluesman Muddy Waters used to say the biggest city in the Mississippi Delta was Chicago.
As Nicholas Lemann's book, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration, points out, 77 percent of American blacks lived in the South in 1940, but by 1970, 5 million had gone North and only half of black Americans lived in the South.
Like so many others, Mrs. Kidd's path here followed a relative.
"I came here in 1942," she said. "My mother had been here the summer before, visiting her brother. We talked about me coming up and getting a factory job and getting out of the South."
A fleeting memory made her laugh as she recalled: "We saw everybody who came up here come back down south [to visit] wearing fur coats and speaking more properly."
Uncle Buddy had come to Toledo in the 1920s and worked for the National Supply Co. But in her first job, Mrs. Kidd said, she "worked private," as domestic help for an Ottawa Hills family.
"I came here to go to work. That's what my mind was on. I was the sole support of my family," she said, citing her children and mother. "I came alone, but in three months everyone was with me."
If you ask when her son and daughter were born, she laughs again.
"Too early! By the time I was 18, I was all through having children. I was married then to my first husband … [who] was 19, and he was so kind to me," she said, describing the man from whom she later separated and who died after she came north.
Back home
Although Mrs. Kidd has lived in Toledo 67 years, she's proud of her hometown. "Greenville is known as the Queen City of the Delta," she is careful to note, "and I just loved it."
When she arrived in Toledo by rail, the train station made a bad first impression: "Back home, the station was a big, beautiful brick building. I couldn't go in there and drink water or anything, but it was beautiful."
She also admired Greenville's public library, even though segregation meant she never set foot in a library before coming north.
Greenville is a port city and Delta blues center, and Mrs. Kidd's voice still trills when she describes the grassy levees along riverbank parkland.
"You know rousters? Those are black men who would load and unload steamships. And all of us would rush to see the unloading. It was so exciting," she said, warming to the memory of what sounds like a civic party.
"There was a steam organ on top [of the ships], and they played when the ships were coming in. So loud! You could hear it through the whole city. And the black people would come and dance, and the white people would sit up on the levee and watch us."
Mrs. Kidd is old enough to make casual references to a Mississippi relative "with a 40," shorthand for acreage given to freed blacks after the Civil War. And she's old enough to remember, after one grandmother's death and her return to her mother at age 10 or 11, pleading to work for $1.75 a day.
"Well, finally [mother] gave in. And I chopped cotton - hard. When I was growing up, there was no 'please' or 'maybe' about it. You had to work. When a boy got to be 12 or 13, he had to come out of school for the harvest or planting."
Her parents split up when she was a child; eventually Mrs. Kidd's mother remarried.
"He had an 80, and he had a car and a wagon and mules. But that was short-lived, that farm life. The Depression came and he sold his 80 to pay off his debts. Then he went to a plantation [as a] sharecropper."
In the South, Mrs. Kidd said, "I lived a segregated life, but it was all I knew, so it didn't bother me." But after coming north, she was "shocked" by segregation.
"I went into a place and ordered a hamburger. But when I asked for a napkin, they were just like" - here, she motioned a none-too-polite backhanded toss, and added slyly - "I swear to you, there was no sign that said 'whites only.'"
But if you ask Mrs. Kidd to elaborate on the differences between her Southern and Northern lives, she gives only this quick summary: "Down there you burn up. Up here, you freeze."
Not long after arriving in Toledo, egged on by Uncle Buddy, Mrs. Kidd swapped household work for the factory, doubling her weekly wages to $80.
"He was on me. 'Go out in the plant and make some money!' So I worked at [Willys] Overland during the war."
A thriving city
Greg Miller of the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library's local history department described a city that thrived in those years.
"Everything was going great guns - literally. They were making guns, airplane parts, airplanes. The economy was really booming here in the early '40s, and there weren't enough people for jobs," said Mr. Miller, who recently received a PhD in labor history from the University of Toledo.
Of Mrs. Kidd's wartime factory job, he said: "She would have been one of the early blacks to get a job at Willys-Overland. There have always been African-Americans here, but no factories would hire them before the war in anything other than custodial jobs. So they found jobs as domestic workers, or maybe foundry workers in hot, nasty jobs no one else wanted, or they worked in places like hotels and clubs."
Mr. Alkalimat's Toledo research proves the point.
"In 1936," he said, "only one firm employed more than 200 African-Americans. Most employed 20, 30 - that level. And they weren't on the assembly line. They were not in industrial jobs. Those jobs went to what's called ethnic Toledoans."
But as Rosie Riveters of all races experienced, at war's end "we got laid off [and] I went back to private, and I enjoyed it."
Then, too, she remarried, to Fred Kidd.
"I met him in the South. I came here, and he went to St. Louis. We'd write. Then he came and got a room not far from where I lived. And he got a job at Doehler-Jarvis. He retired from there, he must have been seventysomething."
They were married more than 30 years - "He was so nice to my children, and he was a good provider" - until he died of cancer in his early 80s.
Mrs. Kidd will tell you she's less energetic these days - she's missed church four times this year - but in the same conversation, you learn she recently climbed atop her two-story house to clear the gutters.
And she makes a point to say how much she still enjoys life; recently, she made eight gallons of homemade wine from a vine growing wild on a nearby parking-lot fence. It bears what she calls "possum grapes" and says turning these into wine is a snap.
"It's not hard," she laughed, "If you've got time and nothing to do, it's not hard."
Then she takes you into the kitchen for a taste of the bacon-seasoned wild greens she just made.
Roberta de Boer is a Blade columnist.
Contact her at: roberta@theblade.com or 419-724-6086. Permanent Link
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