Around Hyde Park, Sharon Palmer was known as “Grandma.” All afternoon and on evenings and weekends, children flowed in and out of her house looking for snacks, solace, or both. Sometimes Sharon even intervened in a child-parent dispute, and if things seemed particularly bad, she and her husband, Earl, somehow found some extra room and took a neighboring child in for a while.
It is no wonder the Palmers’ non-air-conditioned two-bedroom house often appeared to be bursting at the seams. When all six grand-kids were in residence (which sometimes happened for a year at a time), a small “shed room” in the back served as a third bedroom, and clothes hung from bars that were suspended in doorways. A television was usually on, someone was on the phone, and Earl (famous for his cooking) generally had a few pots boiling on the stove.
Sharon was used to crowded homes. One of eight children, she was born in the early 1940s to sharecropping parents in Jenkins, Georgia. She vividly remembered her hardworking childhood:
All my life was on the farm. I picked peas, I picked cotton, I picked corn. I even drove a mule. We had cows, we had hogs, we had chickens. Sure did. We would come out of school and go in the field and work. We grew butter beans, collard greens, squash, watermelon, tomatoes, okra, everything in the garden. We did all that—didn’t have to go shopping at all really.… I stayed home more than I went to school because I had to pick cotton and the dust from the cotton would get in me. I had real bad allergies.
Sharon and Earl liked to joke that they “met in the field.” Actually, they met in elementary school. At the age of nineteen, the childhood friends became sweethearts and married. They moved to Alabama, but soonafter, Earl’s grandmother fell ill, so they returned to the Augusta area. At first they lived with Sharon’s great-uncle in Hyde Park, but then the couple found the small rental house where they lived for the next thirty-eight years. Earl got a job piling bricks at Merry Brothers and then moved on to a job at Federal Paper, a local paper mill.
Meanwhile, the couple had one daughter and then another about a year later. Sharon started volunteering at Mary Utley’s day care center. A few years later, Utley helped her get a job with the Economic Opportunity Authority (EOA) cooking and cleaning at different community centers. Finally, Sharon settled at the community center on Golden Rod Street, where she worked with Mary Utley as a community developer, giving small grants to people who needed help paying their rent or power bills. Sharon’s community work was not confined to her job, though. In the late 1960s, she joined her neighbors in a battle for water, sewer, and gas lines. Then, in the 1990s, she began to connect reports of contamination in the neighborhood to illnesses in her own family. (Michelle had terrible asthma, and Michelle’s youngest daughter had arsenical keratosis.) Throughout the 1990s and on into the next decade, Sharon and her granddaughters could often be seen walking door-to-door, passing out flyers for neighborhood meetings, or helping out at community events.
By that time, though, Sharon and Earl could have used some help of their own. In 1968, Earl slipped and fell at Federal Paper and seriously injured his back, prohibiting him from doing further factory work. For a while, he did some yard work at the community center on Golden Rod Street. But after Mary Utley became too sick to work, these odd jobs dried up. The family then made do with Sharon’s salary and Earl’s workers’ compensation and whatever their daughters could contribute.
The last time I interviewed Sharon and Earl, a new landlord had not only raised their rent but also refused to make much-needed repairs. Sadly, they had moved about a mile away from Hyde Park. The new house was a vast improvement, materially. It had one and a half baths, a washing machine, a full kitchen, and a large living room. Michelle’s kids, the only two grandchildren now in residence, each had her own bedroom.
On a sunny spring day in 2003, Sharon, Earl, and I sat in their spacious new living room, catching up and leafing through photo albums. An air conditioner hummed in the background, and, as usual, pungent smells of dinner wafted in from the kitchen. After all their years of surrogate parenting, distributing flyers, and attending meetings, Sharon and Earl admitted that life in their new neighborhood seemed pretty quiet. Even though Sharon still worked at the Utley Center, the neighborhood, especially its kids, certainly missed “Grandma.” Sharon told me that one particularly troubled fifteen-year-old who lived with his alcoholic father had camped out in the old house (which remained unrented) for several weeks. One night the boy got drunk, and some neighbors caught him tearfully wielding a can of gold spray paint, decorating the house’s facade with the words “Hyde Park.”