Momma Jones (Mme. Willi Posey) Faith's mother, my grandmother on the right with a bevy of her models, including Anne Porter and Aunt Barbara (Barbara Knight) in a photo op for the Amsterdam News after visiting patients at Harlem Hospital circa 1960.

Mother, Faith Ringgold, in photo layout photographed at our apartment in the Bronx, 1960. Behind her are two of her paintings.

Michele and Faith in the streets of the Bronx. 1961.

Michele on the beach with Burdette the summer of 1962 at Sunken Meadow.

Faith, Michele, Burdette and Frankie at Sunken Meadows Photo by Barbara Wallace. 1962.

Faith, Michele and Aunt Barbara at Sunken Meadow 1962.

Barbara and Michele in the Bronx at St. Mary's.

In the fall of 1959, my sister and I, and my mom moved together to our first apartment.  It was in the Bronx, just across the 149th Street Bridge, walking distance from Edgecombe Avenue and my grandmothers' houses. And many times we walked it, my sister and I.  It was an adventure in those days. Third Avenue, its department stores, movie theaters (saw Psycho in one of them with my sister one Saturday afternoon, couldn't take a shower alone for a year) and pizza places, the Grand Concourse, which was then really grand, the bridge itself, followed by Lenox, 7th, 8th Avenue, Bradhurst, Colonial Park, the hill and Edgecombe.
Our new apartment complex was called St. Mary's, Mitchell Lama, so called middle class housing although we always called it the projects when mother wasn't around, at 665 Westchester Avenue, spacious, green, benign at least at first. Madam Posey. Momma Jones until then was like a mother to me, my mother less so. With Momma jones we had lived on Edgecombe Avenue, across from Colonial Park and Yankee Stadium in the distance.

At the time my mother was 29 years old, stunningly beautiful, funny, fun and lighthearted. She had completed her Master's and graduated at Lewisohn Stadium at the City College of New York. Her degree says February so perhaps it happened in the winter and at night. I know I had a wonderful time. There's a set of pictures in which my sister and I are included. I remember a lot of running and racing that evening. Perhaps there were other children we played with.

   
I think I may have witnessed her undergrad degree as well in 1955. Where we lived on Edgecombe AVenue was walking distance from the campus of the City College of New York. I was 3. By that time she had separated from my father who lived next door on Edgecombe Avenue. He was a brilliant musician, a jazz and classical pianist I was told by everyone who had the power of speech. He had prescribed that the only kind of music we would hear from birth would be classical and jazz and other suitably musically complex compositions, which he played for me while I was in my cradle. But the one thing I wasn't told by anyone until then was that he was afflicted with drug addiction, a powerful and secret illness, which needless to say I was incapable of comprehending at 5, 6 or even 7. It may have been some time between 1957 and 1959 that I was told because I knew who he was and I was becoming more insistent in my desire to spend time in his presence, which was strictly forbidden. I needed a reason and it was given me. At the time I was just recovering from an ear infection resulting from a bout of the measles.

 My distinct recollection is walking from the subway on St Nicholas place rounding the corner of the Bailey estate (still a historic site in Harlem at this same address) and her telling me, finding the words to tell me that my father was sick with an incurable disease, something that made him more untouchable than pitiable. This was my first inkling of how unreasonable and cruel the world was, how nothing would ever really make sense if something I wanted so badly, my father, was never to be mine. and if people i knew and loved couldn't be trusted not to keep such secrets. only my mother could and would tell me. she was my mother. was this 1957, 58 or 59. my sense was she told me not a moment too soon. was i 5, 6 or 7?

Living with Momma Jones, who was deeply gregarious and kept a flock of young women around, some of whom were her mentees, others her models, babysitting was built in to the situation. My mother whose annulment had been finalized in 1956 by her attorney Flo Kennedy, a family friend, often dated or went out in the evenings all dressed up and smelling delicious. The women then wore tight, waist fitting clothes, sheer stockings and high heels sometimes with open toes regardless of the severity of the weather. Mom had gorgeous feet with fabulous legs and a high instep.

During this period Mom and Aunt Barbara as well as my sister and I frequently participated in fashion shows so there are photographs of us in the shows wearing the clothes our grand mother made for us. I can identify the time period of other photographs taken then by the clothes my sister and I are wearing because the clothes we wore in the fashion shows were the basis of our wardrobe for the year. In the beginning a particular dress and a pair of shoes would be for Sunday school and weddings. In time, the same garment would grow snug and devolve to everyday status, I can tell what part of the year it is sometimes by how the dress fits, because we were in that period of our lives during which we were out growing things. We didn't have a lot of clothes but we had beautiful clothes made to last, and everything we wore was of some special significance. If it wasn't made by Momma Jones then it was purchased lovingly at Best & Company's, the store Mom designated as ours.

 
The pictures I have of this period I believe were taking by my sister Barbara who had developed a passion for taking pictures of me and mom with her brownie. In one of these pictures Barbara sports the signature plaid coat of the period with her brownie slung around her neck. Perhaps I had a brownie too and took this one. I remember mostly being frustrated by my brownie. It took so long get the picturesfrom the drugstore, I was always forgetful that way, and the results Were not impressive in my view.

So then in 1959 we moved to the Bronx, St. Mary's with the help of Burdette Ringgold, my mother's on and off boyfriend. I can recall the day we went to see the apartment. Barbara and I were left to play the only time I can remember with a gang of children who lived in the house, including a little boy who had lost his arm in an extractor. We ran up and down the stairs and had a wild time but never again. Not sure why.

We moved as well to a new school, our Savior Lutheran School, Williamsbridge Road in a very white neighborhood then remotely located from St. Mary's, which was in the East Bronx, walkable distance from our previous neighborhood across the 149th Street bridge. There was a person mother knew, a sweet angelic person named Julie who taught at Our Savior and had a son named Nickey who went there, who recommended the school as some place small that would educate us and keep track of us while she was at work. Nickey, her son, who was also a student there and about three or four years older, was our babysitter, would take us or run us home from school.

Unfortunately his mother soon died of cancer and Nickey basically ran wild but that was later.

We became Lutherans and joined a church near our home called Bethany Lutheran Church. Barbara and I could walk there on Sundays morning, which we sometimes did. We were passionately religious and set up an altar in our bedroom so that we could worship when we couldn't get to church.  At school, the first question on Monday was whether or not we had attended church on Sunday. Barbara and I always told the truth.  I loved the Lutheran thing because of the music and getting a chance to sing in the choir. I loved the German music, in particular Bach. This was the period during which I was a singer, and often performed for an audience of my family and family friends. And sang in choirs in both school and church.

While we lived in the Bronx, our lives with my grandmother in Harlem continued in the following manner. We often went to church with her at Abyssinian Baptist Church to hear Adam Clayton Powell. Whenever we were sick, we stayed with her where she fed us fabulous concoctions such as hot milk with butter and sugar, and we were pampered. Also, our private school year was shorter than our mother's public school schedule. In the days when we were off and our mother wasn't, we were at Momma Jones' house on Edgecombe Avenue. The rules of life on Edgecombe Avenue were different. From one thing, we were allowed to play with the local children across the street where my grandmother could view our activities. We had known these children all our lives. Also, since our other grandmother, our father's mother, lived in the building next door, we were frequent visitors there. She had the same view of the street on the third floor that Momma Jones had from the fourth floor front. These were also the times when we got to see our father, Earl, whom we weren't allowed to see by my mother but Momma Jones did not observe these rules and seemed quite friendly with Momma T.

At some point, I am thinking it must have been during perhaps the second or third year of our life in the Bronx (maybe I was nine) I became very angry and disenchanted with my mother's household. Also, I had been reading books in my classroom in which little white boys would gather all their belongings in a handkerchief and tie it on a stick and run away.  So I decided that I should run away to go to live with my grandmother, Momma Jones, whose household I much preferred to our own.

 I had figured out how to travel to my grandmother's house in Harlem from school on Williamsbridge Road. Barbara and I parted tearfully and I journeyed to Edgecombe Avenue. When I got there, something happened that I hadn't anticipated. Momma Jones was not home.  Although she sometimes worked in the garment factories downtown, I hadn't anticipated that she wouldn't be there. Immediately I knew I was going to be in trouble because now I could think of no other alternative but to go to my other grandmother's house, Momma T, my father's mother, whom my mother didn't much like. Somehow it dawned on me that this wasn't going to be good. She called my mother. When Momma Jones returned from work, the two of them accompanied me back to the Bronx. I can remember a lot of crying as they begged my mother not to beat me all to no avail. My reasons for running away were of no interest to her whatsoever and were entirely overshadowed by her anger and her determination to prevent me from ever doing such a thing again.

We had a customary beating scenario. I am not entirely sure how I know this since this is actually the only beating I can clearly remember. There was an ironing cord. You had to take off all your clothes. You were beaten in the bathroom, which was a small room without a window, so that you couldn't get away.  She took me in the bathroom and beat me, not sure how long, while Momma Jones and Momma T stood outside waiting for it to be ended.