IN 1901, TWENTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD WILLIAM A. PAYNE MADE his way across the marble floor of the cavernous Illinois Central Station in downtown Chicago. The son of black Tennessee farmers, he had just debarked from the storied Illinois Central Line that ran up from New Orleans. He had made the journey north in search of a better life. He was not alone. Black men and women throughout the South were beginning to drop their tools in the cotton and tobacco fields, abandon their shanties, and join a silent exodus from the feudal life to which they had been confined since emancipation from slavery. One yoke had been traded for another.
A train ticket north held the promise of freedom. But with his one-way ticket clutched in his hand, Payne was among the trailblazers. When he reached Chicago, African Americans made up less than 2 percent of the city’s population. Within a decade the vanguard, of which Payne was a member, would grow into a torrent of six million migrants entirely reshaping the social, cultural, and political landscape of Northern cities.
Well used to hard labor, Payne found work as a cooper assembling barrels in the vast stockyards that stretched over hundreds of blocks in South Side and whose stench spread for miles. The hours were long and Sunday was the only day of rest. Within a year he met and fell in love with Bessie Austin, a Hoosier who had moved to Chicago to join a brother who held a coveted job in the post office. In January 1903, the two newcomers were married.
The newlyweds faced a daunting task in finding a place in Chicago to start their new life together. Landlords and real estate agents conspired to confine African Americans to a few South Side neighborhoods. But the Paynes were blessed with good luck. Nine miles southwest of central Chicago, they came upon a set of tidy freestanding wooden houses open to them, one of the very few enclaves outside what was known as the “Black Belt” that permitted African Americans. Remarkably the four-by-six-block neighborhood, known as West Englewood, was not solidly black. White European immigrant families lived in several of the houses on each block.
At first the Paynes rented a series of places, a block apart, to accommodate their growing family. By the end of 1910, seven years into their marriage, the Paynes had three girls and one boy and Bessie was pregnant with another child. For the only time in their marriage, they left West Englewood and rented a house three miles to the east in West Woodlawn. There, on August 14, 1911, Bessie gave birth to their fifth child, whom they named Ethel Lois Payne, the name suggested by her aunt Clara Austin Williams. Her parents considered their newest progeny so winsome as to enter her into a baby contest at the local church. Ethel came in sixth out of eight contestants and brought home a one-pound box of chocolates.
IT WAS NOT LONG before the Paynes and their new baby were back in West Englewood, renting yet another in a succession of houses, this time on Loomis Boulevard and Throop Street. But their fortunes were improving.
William had left the stockyards and gone to work as a porter on the famed Pullman sleeping cars that each night carried as many as 100,000 pajama-clad travelers along the nation’s rails. Next to working in the post office, it was one of the most sought-after jobs among African Americans. Pullman porters wore suits to work, traveled the length of the land, and became leaders in their churches. The job put one atop the Negro social world in Chicago. The work, however, was hard. Porters seldom got more than a few hours of uninterrupted sleep, were gone from home for long stretches of time, and had their patience tested by wealthy white patrons who alternately called them “Uncle,” “Joe,” “Sam,” or “George” (Pullman’s first name) when not using “Boy” or even “Nigger.”
Earning a Pullman salary and tips, William was able to accomplish a rare thing among African Americans in Chicago at the time. He purchased a home. In late 1917 the Paynes moved into a twenty-five-year-old two-story white clapboard house with a basement at 6210 South Throop Street. “It was one of the very few houses that had electricity when we moved in,” remembered Thelma, the second-eldest child. “One of its wonders was that the upstairs and downstairs front hall light switches worked so that you could turn both lights on or off from either end, and our friends used to come over and play with this marvel.”
ALTHOUGH STRICT WITH their children, Bessie and William fashioned a home full of joy and affection. When he was home between train runs, William loved to take the children to ride ponies at carnivals or to see a parade, and occasionally to Gary, Indiana, where much of Bessie’s family still lived. “He was a big man, both physically and in personality possessing both temper and kindness,” said Ethel. “His temper could be as hot as the desert sands at noon one day; yet he was gentle, with a great sense of the responsibility of the strong to help the weak.”
The family’s love of a carnival enticed three-year-old Ethel to wander away from the new house. A mischievous child, she may have been providing a hint of her life to come. But in the meantime she gave her parents a scare. The family frantically launched a search, enlisting neighbors, firemen, and policemen. At last she was located at a street fair four blocks away. Bessie wanted to administer corporal punishment, according to Ethel. “But Grandpa admonished her saying, ‘Ain’t no use in fanning her. Won’t do no good. That child was just born with itching feet.’”
Bessie kept the home on a firm schedule: washday on Mondays, ironing on Tuesdays, baking on Wednesdays, and mending on Thursdays. Saturday mornings began with the children downing a dose of castor oil, followed by a couple of gingersnaps before setting off to do their assigned chores. Sundays were reserved for church.
Bessie’s family had been members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church for generations. As it happened, the Greater St. John AME Church, the oldest Negro church in Englewood, moved from its storefront home a block away and built a proper brick church directly across the street from the Paynes’ Throop Street house. In no time St. John’s became a focal point of the family. “Church, church, church,” recalled Ethel, “she was very strong on church.” Once her mother caught Ethel playing hooky from St. John’s with a boyfriend. “When Bessie Payne caught me, I was marched back to the sinner’s bench, chastised, and prayed over mightily,” Ethel said.
Bessie’s parents, who came to stay for long periods of time, often accompanied the family to services. “When Grandpa would ‘get happy’ in church,” Ethel said, “he would take out his handkerchief and wave it vigorously.” One Sunday, however, the handkerchief he pulled from his pocket was not a go-to-church linen one kept in the dresser drawer but rather one that his wife had made from old sacks with the word sugar clearly stenciled on it. “Mama, who shared his devotion to church,” Ethel said, “was mortified to see the sugar sack floating in the air.”
ETHEL, HER OLDER SISTERS Alice Wilma, Thelma Elizabeth, Alma Josephine, her older brother, Lemuel Austin, and her younger sister, Avis Ruth, were never without something to do. Outside, they played hide-and-seek or raced up and down the block with other neighborhood kids. Inside the house, Bessie maintained a serene atmosphere interrupted only by music emanating either from the Victrola or from the violin that Lemuel, the only boy in the family, reluctantly practiced. There was no shortage of games and amusement. Once, for instance, the children and young adults staged a “Billion-Dollar Wedding” at Hope Presbyterian Church, a block away. They impersonated members of the Astor, Morgan, Gould, Armour, and other millionaire families. Six-year-old Ethel served as the ring bearer.
Books and stories were a favorite source of entertainment for Ethel and her sisters. Each Saturday the family walked into the surrounding white neighborhood to a city library in Ogden Park, one of several open spaces the city created as a safety valve for the burgeoning tenement districts. Access to the well-stocked library intended for white citizens was one of several advantages the Paynes enjoyed over African Americans cooped up in the Black Belt to the east. Most black citizens were kept at bay from good schools, well-stocked libraries, and green parks by the city’s segregated housing. Rather than using laws, as in the South, housing confined blacks together and preserved the whiteness of public amenities. But in West Englewood, courageous black families such as the Paynes walked to better schools, libraries, and parks that were beyond reach for others of their race elsewhere in the city.
Ethel’s sister Alma came home with the full limit of books each week. “She would read half the night if Mama didn’t see the light was still on,” said Thelma. Leisure time was devoted to reading the scads of books borrowed from the library or procured at rummage sales. “As I look back now,” Ethel said many years later, “I see this as perhaps the greatest influence on the direction of my life.”
In particular, Ethel was drawn to Paul Laurence Dunbar, an African American poet who had become famous before his early death at age thirty-three in 1906. While his work was written mostly in conventional English, it was his poems in Negro dialect that gained him fame, much to his dismay and annoyance. His poem “Sympathy” with the line “I know why the caged bird sings” resonated with black audiences. Ethel and her siblings put on plays, acting out Dunbar’s poems, especially those about life on the plantation. They even formed a little theater company that included other children from the neighborhood.
Ethel and her siblings delighted in hearing family stories. On innumerable nights, Bessie recounted how her mother, Josephine Taylor Austin, and her family escaped from slavery in Kentucky, fleeing before daybreak at the end of a weekend. Drinking water from rain puddles, they found shelter with a courageous family of freed slaves, crossed the Ohio River on a skiff piloted by a white agent for the Underground Railroad, hid in a river cave with old cooking implements left by previous escapees, and finally boarded a boat that took them upriver to freedom.
Bessie’s father, George Washington Austin, a short, bald man with a twinkling eye, was a master storyteller. On sizzling hot Chicago summer evenings the children were sent out to lie on straw mattresses arrayed under the porch. As the youngsters drifted off to sleep, their grandfather told his tales. Unlike his wife’s family, he and his parents had not been freed from slavery in Tennessee until the end of the Civil War. He recalled vividly how, at age seven, his family was placed on the auction block on a snowy New Year’s Day. After being examined by prospective buyers for the soundness of their limbs and teeth, the family members were sold to separate plantations.
But tall tales were George Austin’s specialty. On those summer nights on the porch he would trade story after story with a neighbor. One time Ethel’s grandfather and a neighbor named Spencer tried to outdo each other with their storytelling. “Finally at midnight,” said Ethel, “Mr. Spencer rose, shook hands with Grandpa, and said, ‘You win, Brother Austin.’”
AS WITH THE OGDEN PARK LIBRARY, the family’s good fortune of living in West Englewood gave Ethel and her siblings access to schools better than those that served virtually all African Americans in Chicago. Schools here were not legally segregated. With 90 percent of the city’s African American population confined to the Black Belt, there was no need. The races remained almost entirely separate, confined to their neighborhood schools. But as a result some white schools counted African Americans among their ranks—in small numbers, to be sure.
Ethel began her school at Copernicus Elementary School, where a dozen or so black students were also allowed to enter the handsome four-story building three blocks north of the house. Although he had not gotten far in school, her father, William, shared Bessie’s dedication to obtaining a good education for their children. Once Thelma asked her father for permission to join her friends working summer jobs at an apron factory. “No,” he said, “the money will seem so good to you that you won’t want to go back to school.” It fell to Bessie, who had been trained as a Latin teacher, to keep the children on track when it came to school. “She knew the importance of regular attendance at school and did not cheat any of us by keeping us at home for her convenience,” Thelma said. “Since our father had to be away on his job so much, she ruled the roost, served as business manager, disciplinarian, cook, seamstress, teacher, and manager.”
Accompanying Ethel to Copernicus each day was her brother, Lemuel. A skinny and frail boy, he was close in age to Ethel, especially in comparison to her sisters. “I was down the ladder quite a bit, so I really didn’t have that close rapport with my older sisters,” Ethel said. “They were almost like one generation, and I constituted another one.”
Each day’s walk to Copernicus brought Ethel and Lemuel to a setting with advantages unattainable in the overcrowded, understaffed, underfunded schools that served the Black Belt. For most black children, school took place in aging buildings, many of which didn’t even have bathrooms. On the other hand, no Chicago white school could be regarded as hospitable to black students. School officials had no reservations about publicly expressing their fear about the mixing of races. “When it comes to morality, I say colored children are unmoral,” explained an assistant principal of a high school with a few black students. “The colored and white children here don’t get mixed up in immorality; they are too well segregated. Not that we segregate them: the white keeps away from the colored.”
At school and at home, Ethel came to be regarded as somewhat of a tomboy. “I didn’t bother too much with dolls,” she admitted. Lemuel, on the other hand, was a frail, skinny boy who got picked on and sometimes beat up by other boys his age. “Oh, I just hated it,” Ethel said. Coming out of Copernicus one afternoon, she heard that her brother was in a fight. “I waded into this batch of boys,” she said, “and I was just throwing them right and left.” When she reached Lemuel, he looked up at her and said, “Go on home. Girls aren’t supposed to fight. Go on home!”