My Maternal Midwestern Roots

To me, the midwest signifies so much. It is the epicenter of the nation’s industrial power and mechanical strength. Bolstered by the labor of those who sought the American dream, we should always remember and honor those who fueled one of our country’s most significant regions. My maternal family are some of the people who, through the smoke and grit of industry, relentlessly pursued the American dream.

My grandmother was a part of the Great Migration, that great movement of people who fled the terror of the Jim Crow South. Refugees in their own land, six million African Americans left the south for a new beginning.  

After completing The Warmth of Other Suns by Pulitzer Prize Winning author Isabel Wilkerson, I decided to ask my grandmother to tell me about her journey north. I knew she was born in a small town in the Mississippi Delta, but that was the extent of my knowledge. She proceeded to tell me that they left Mississippi when she was a little girl to move to East Saint Louis. Although she could not recall the specific details of how her family made the journey, she could remember how life was. 

My grandmother asked me, “Calyssa, do you know the hottest place in the world?”

I responded, “No grandma, what place?”

She exclaimed, “Mississippi! That heat comes up out of the ground there. And all we did was pick pick pick.” 

This immediately piqued my interest. I asked: “What were you picking grandma?” 

She responded, “Whatever they wanted us to. Green beans and other things. But mostly cotton.” 

I was stunned. I knew America’s past was not so distant, but I didn’t realize just how close to home the past was. 

I wanted to know so many other things, but I didn’t press. I figured the details were not just difficult to recall, but also trauma-inducing. I was immediately struck by the similarities between my grandmother, Ella Mae and Ida Mae, one of the subjects of The Warmth of Other Suns. Her story helped me imagine how my grandmother’s life was back in Mississippi. Like my grandmother, Ida Mae left Mississippi to move to Illinois, albeit Chicago. In the book, Isabel Wilkerson details 16-year old Ida Mae’s life living in a small cabin on a plantation in 1929 Mississippi. She writes: 

“One hundred was the magic number. It was the benchmark for payment when day pickers took to the field, fifty cents for a hundred pounds of cotton in the 1920s, the gold standard of cotton picking. It was like picking a hundred pounds of feathers, a hundred pounds of lint dust. It was ‘one of the most backbreaking forms of stoop labor ever known,’ wrote the historian Donald Holley. It took some seventy bolls to make a single pound of cotton, which meant Ida Mae would have to pick seven thousand bolls to reach a hundred pounds. It means reaching past the branches into the cotton flower and pulling a soft lock of cotton the size of a walnut out of its pod, doing this seven thousand times and turning around and doing the same thing the next day and the day after that . . . The work was not so much hazardous as it was mind-numbing and endless, requiring them to pick from the moment the sun peeked over the tree line to the moment it fell behind the horizon and they could no longer see. After ten or twelve hours, the pickers could barely stand up straight for all the stooping.”

The book also details how families like Ida Mae’s, and by extension mine, were often not paid after a year of living and laboring on the land. The account of Ida Mae’s journey also helped me imagine how it may have been like boarding the Illinois Central Railroad:

“The legendary rail system that, for a great portion of the twentieth century, carried upward of a million colored people from the Deep South up the country’s central artery, across the Mason-Dixon Line, and into a new world called the Midwest.” 

My grandmother’s new world in the Midwest was East Saint Louis, Illinois. She remembered a cousin who was visiting from East Saint Louis, telling my great grandparents about the opportunities up north for work and a better life. My great grandparents jumped at the opportunity, deciding to uproot their lives and leave everything they had ever known. 

I learned that my grandfather got a job at an Armour Packing House, and that they lived in the basement of a family member’s home while they got on their feet. Always the researcher, I looked up the history of Armour & Company and learned that it was founded in Chicago in 1867 by two brothers. At the time, it was one of the top meat packing companies and its East Saint Louis stockyard was the largest, employing more than 4,500 people at its peak.

I am so glad I sat down and talked to my grandmother that day. Our short conversation led to a wealth of information about my roots. I look forward to conducting more research on her life and story, and when I do, I’ll be sure to share it here with you.

Until then, on this Mother’s Day I want to thank my grandmother for the life she led and for the life she eventually gave my mother and in turn me.

Here’s to my maternal midwestern lineage.