EVERSON, PENNSYLVANIA
1949–1967
B. is one of Everson’s best-known native daughters. Don’t take my word for it: Google the town, and up she pops. They’re proud of her there, but that pride came later. Growing up black in a white working-class town was a challenge, to say the least.
Everson was, and is, a largely Polish and Italian town, whose first immigrant settlers worked the coal mines. Of its nine hundred or so souls, perhaps fifty were African American. A lot of those were related to one another, by marriage if not by blood. B.’s father, Bill, served as a first lieutenant in the army in World War II, a trial by fire, for sure: first lieutenants led frontline troops and were killed in disproportionate numbers, black first lieutenants more so. Bill survived, and came to Everson because his bride, Florence, had grown up there, and because there was work at the U.S. Steel mill in nearby Clairton.
Every morning, Bill and a few other local men would carpool to the mill. They wore plaid shirts and jeans, even in summer, and carried more clothes with them, because they worked at the battery, and without those clothes, they might get scalded or burned to death. Once they got to the mill, they put on the extra layers, along with protective helmets and face shields, and respirators so they didn’t breathe in toxic fumes. Then they started their shifts at one of the most dangerous jobs in industrial America.
The battery was a two- or three-story structure containing lots of ovens into which crushed coal was poured. The coal’s impurities were baked out, leaving pure coke, the ingredient that makes steel as strong as it is. Bill and the other battery workers tended those fires, so close that without their extra clothes, the heat would have burned their skin. Each oven had a manhole-like cover atop the battery with four holes; if the wrong lid was lifted with an industrial hook, flames would shoot out and incinerate anyone in the immediate vicinity. When the baking was done, a heavy metal door on either side of the battery was opened, and a big industrial ram pushed the purified coke onto the so-called hot car, which then rode up a track to the quenching tower, where water cooled the coke down, and out to the railcars waiting to take the coke to market. Bill operated the hot car, too.
To compensate for the risk, battery jobs paid better than any others at the mill. Still, not many men, Polish or African American, felt the extra money was worth the risk. Bill Smith did—and spent the greater part of his working life at the Clairton battery.
Bill would come back tired and grimy, but he didn’t stay in his work clothes for long. He’d shower and change, and come into the big kitchen where Florence was cooking the family dinner. The kitchen was the heart of the Smiths’ home, where everybody gathered. Bill would pick up his guitar and start singing jazz songs to entertain them all. He had a beautiful voice, and so did B.’s mother. So, in fact, does B. The first time she broke into song, I was stunned. It was pure, a clean sweet voice like her physical presence. She was a gospel-singing church angel, she really was.
She still is.
Both Bill and Florence were frugal, and with Bill’s battery job wages, they managed to buy a two-family house at the edge of town, overlooking the railroad tracks and a pretty creek beyond. It had an ample backyard with apple and pear trees, along with a grape arbor. “It was a really big house,” B.’s cousin Randy recalls. “It still is.” Their own living space had a big eat-in kitchen, a dining room and antiques-filled living room, and two upstairs bedrooms, one for Bill and Florence, the other for B. Their three boys slept in the attic, but that was hardly a sacrifice, since Bill had made it into a dormitory with wood paneling that slid open to reveal shelves for each boy, and single beds, each with a dresser and lamp, all in a neat row.
Bill and his brother were both woodworkers: they made all the kitchen cabinets, too. Florence was the cook extraordinaire, making every meal from scratch, as her mother had done before her. She cooked classic southern dishes, from chitlins to pigs’ feet to collard greens. From the apple trees out back, B.’s mother made wonderful apple pies. They kept a vegetable garden out back, too, and a lot of the family’s food came from there. Like most small-town folk in and around the Appalachian foothills, they did a lot of canning for winter—tomatoes, especially. They’d also fill their Mason jars with apple jelly, heat the jars, and seal them tight. From their apples, they even made wine.
Decades later, B. still remembers her mother’s kitchen clear as day, how hot it was when a pie was in the oven, or corn bread baking, and dinner cooking on top. By the age of twelve or thirteen, B. cooked a lot of those dinners herself for her family of six, because that’s what children did: they pitched in. For B., the very essence of summer was sitting out on the back porch on an August evening after dinner with her family, drinking her mother’s homemade root beer while her father serenaded her mother with his strumming. Life didn’t get any better than that.
Along with cooking good dinners, B.’s mother filled the house with fresh flowers. On a Friday or Saturday night, she and Bill would dress up and head into town for a restaurant dinner. Both were stylish dressers—Bill in a dark suit, Florence in a sundress, both of them in hats. That was where B. got her first exposure to fashion.
The Smiths instilled strict church values in their four children. B.’s father was a Jehovah’s Witness, her mother a Baptist. From early on, B. went door-to-door with her father selling copies of Awake and The Watchtower. It was hard work, but it taught her what selling was about: not being afraid of the stranger inside the door, and learning how to pour on the charm. “One thing about being a Jehovah’s Witness,” B. likes to say, “you learn to talk to people.” Before long, B. was selling newspaper subscriptions and women’s magazines. She was a budding entrepreneur.
The Smiths were a poor black family, so no one went to the doctor unless there was an emergency. Mostly, they took care of themselves. B. remembers her father giving himself insulin for his diabetes. Clearly he inherited the condition: all of his seven siblings had diabetes, too. Lois Smith, who married B.’s older brother Gary, confirms that a high incidence of diabetes runs in the family, and she should know: she worked for more than forty years as a hospital technician. She came into the family in 1968 and says that Bill died in 1978, as much from the heart problems brought on by diabetes as from the diabetes itself. She doesn’t recall Bill having memory issues, but maybe that was just a function of time: Bill died at sixty, too young to enjoy his modest retirement savings from all those years working at the battery. Too young, perhaps, to get early-onset Alzheimer’s, genetic as its legacy usually is. Or possibly Bill did have early-onset Alzheimer’s, and the heart disease killed him before the Alzheimer’s could. As I would soon learn, all these factors tend to crop up with African Americans of a certain age: diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, and Alzheimer’s.
I never knew Bill, but I did spend time with B.’s mother, Florence, as sweet a soul as I have ever known, until her death in 1988. She, too, died of diabetes complications. To me, B.’s mother never seemed more than typically forgetful for a woman her age, but then, she passed young, too: seventy-four. Of B.’s three brothers, two are alive and apparently healthy, but Gary, the brother Lois Smith married, died, like his father, of diabetes, at fifty-five.
Not until B. was diagnosed did the question of how her parents died seem significant. For this poor black family from rural Pennsylvania, no paper trail exists to prove which of B.’s ancestors on either side, going back generations, had Alzheimer’s before her, but B.’s condition suggests that some did. And her parents’ stated causes of death on both sides—diabetes and heart disease—both now seem possible precursors to Alzheimer’s disease. All we know for sure is that since B. has no natural children of her own, her own inherited Alzheimer’s, if inherited it is, is a genetic pathway that stops with her.
Everson did have a few other black families, but no amount of churchgoing could sugarcoat the fact that there were social and racial ceilings. B. couldn’t be a cheerleader in high school, or join the 4-H club. Black students just weren’t welcome. Undeterred, B. started her own home economics club, and made herself president: she and her fellow club members cooked and sewed.
Everson wasn’t the Deep South. B. worked as a candy striper at the local hospital where she was born. She had both white and black friends. Yet she couldn’t be a model at the local department store, either. That was frustrating, because what B. wanted to do, above all, was model.
One day B. saw an ad in a Pittsburgh paper for the John Robert Powers modeling school. She looked into it, then went to her father, who was not only very religious, but very strict. Would he mind if she took a Saturday course there, paying her own way? Absolutely not, her father declared: modeling school sounded racy. B., her sales skills honed, was ready for that. “Actually,” she told him, “it’s also a finishing school.” Finishing school. That sounded proper. Grudgingly, her father said yes.
At first, B. took the bus home late each Saturday afternoon from Pittsburgh, a ride of twenty stops, then babysat to earn the money to pay for her modeling supplies. When she graduated from high school, she moved into an aunt’s apartment in Pittsburgh. She also started teaching modeling at the Powers school. So striking was she that she was named the city’s first black Miss Triad, Queen of the Three Rivers.
One day at the hairdresser’s—one of those hairdressers who worked from home and passed on the local gossip and news—B. heard about a family that needed a governess for their young daughter. The parents, it turned out, were caterers: they cooked passenger food for Allegheny Airlines. Under their tutelage, B. came to like catering as much as she liked modeling.
B. started going to New York City to audition for major modeling agencies. She’d wanted to live there ever since her parents brought her and her three brothers to the 1964 World’s Fair. Her brothers couldn’t have cared less about returning, but to B., New York was the shining city on the hill. She learned that the Ford Modeling Agency didn’t accept black models. But Wilhelmina Cooper might. That was enough for B. At seventeen, she left home for New York City, set on making a life for herself.