A Voices of Minnesota segment feature. MPR’s Beth Friend speaks with Evelyn Fairbanks, author of "Days of Rondo." Fairbanks talks of her memoir, an interpretive account of events in the life of a black family from the South struggling for survival and meaning in a northern city. Rondo was a St. Paul black neighborhood that vanished with the coming of the freeways in the 1960s. This is part 2 of discussion.
EVELYN FAIRBANKS: I heard the stories about slavery. I heard the story about sharecropping. I understood all of those things. Those were all told to me. But had nothing to do with the kids in school when I went to school with. I didn't know it was real until I was getting ready to train for a job.
SPEAKER: And then what happened?
EVELYN FAIRBANKS: That's when I wasn't allowed to go to the school because they couldn't place me.
SPEAKER: Which school?
EVELYN FAIRBANKS: It was a comptometer school. And that's when it became real.
SPEAKER: What happened in that experience? You went in and said, I want to go to this school.
EVELYN FAIRBANKS: And she ended up by saying the short version that she couldn't place me. So there was no point in me going.
SPEAKER: What was that like, your interchange with her?
EVELYN FAIRBANKS: That was terrible. I hadn't learned yet that I should just take the course and then I'll find my own job. I didn't know that then. She said that she couldn't place me, so I thought I couldn't get a job. And I didn't see anyone else with one. When I went to business school as it was, there weren't any jobs waiting for me.
SPEAKER: Can you remember looking at her across the desk and that experience of her telling-- of her saying to you no? Did you feel?
EVELYN FAIRBANKS: I wanted to get out of the room, because her ugliness was unreal. That's what I mean by not knowing what people look like. She was ugly. Probably the ugliest person I probably have ever seen. To me when people are mean, they're ugly. And if they're kind, they're pretty.
SPEAKER: So tell me what happened when you walked out of that scenario.
EVELYN FAIRBANKS: Oh, I was feeling sorry for myself. Absolutely feeling sorry for myself. I cried all the way home. I thought, oh dear. That came as a shock. Even what everyone had said. It had never affected me.
Because by that time, some of my-- I was in high school by then, a senior. So by that time, some of my best girlfriends were white. Yeah, I'd smile as I think of some of them now. And the teachers, the teachers, the teachers were all white. And I didn't really see that.
I didn't think there was any problem. I had never done anything in my life or not been able to do anything in my life because of color before. Never. It had not come up in day to day living. It had only come up in stories told about what happened. So I was just shocked. And then the realization that I was, in fact, that I was a part of that group that people didn't like. That they weren't going to give me an opportunity. That something was wrong with me, if you will. Well, you get over that.
SPEAKER: How'd you get over that?
EVELYN FAIRBANKS: I don't know how you do. In the first place, you don't really like people telling you what you can do and what you can't do.
SPEAKER: But you walk home from this experience with the comptometer lady and you walk into the house and you're feeling terrible. And what happens?
EVELYN FAIRBANKS: Well, [? Maurice ?] talked to me.
SPEAKER: What did he tell you?
EVELYN FAIRBANKS: He told me that there was nothing wrong with me, because I said something was wrong with me. Says, we went-- There is nothing wrong with you. It's something's wrong with the world and we have to deal with that. And then he told me how to do it. You just be better than anybody else.
SPEAKER: That makes sense to you?
EVELYN FAIRBANKS: No, it meant that something was wrong with me. But if those were the rules of the game, that's the way you did it, then that's the way you did it.
SPEAKER: So what'd you do?
EVELYN FAIRBANKS: Then I went to another school to accounting and I got better than-- way over qualified for any job I applied for.
SPEAKER: And got a job.
EVELYN FAIRBANKS: Almost every job I've had, and I've had a lot of them, I was the first Black on it. Most people my age that lived in Minnesota are. It isn't just me. So we all opened up all these doors. I remember when working in a sewing factory was a big deal for a Black. I was the elevator operator at Bannan's Department Store. That was a big deal for a Black. Of course, all office jobs.
So you just prepared yourself, over prepared yourself. And then the strange thing happens about always over preparing yourself. You get real good at what you do. [LAUGHS] I mean, and that brings some-- and women have had the same experience. Women have had the same experience.
SPEAKER: You about it in a relatively light vein. I mean, that's a lot of pressure being the first Black person everywhere you go.
EVELYN FAIRBANKS: Yeah, it is. That's why we die so young.
SPEAKER: Let's talk a little bit about high school and sort of as you come into young adulthood, because you talk about in Days of Rondo some limitations that start to happen socially for you as a Black woman in high school that made things a little bit tougher and that sort of changed the social scope for you, where you went to dances and who you could dance with.
EVELYN FAIRBANKS: In high school, right, but that's happening right now today is I go to schools and talk to them. When puberty hits, segregation starts. And all the teachers I've talked to have said the same thing. Yeah, they noticed that junior high school age, that's when it starts. So that situation is still true today. It's so difficult. I wrote a poem about it.
SPEAKER: About what?
EVELYN FAIRBANKS: Being Black. Because so many people would ask me and I got sick of talking about it. And every time I ask the question-- every time I'm asked the question, I realize that the person is sincere and wants an answer, wants some understanding that maybe I can give them that they don't have.
You ask what's it's like to be Black? And I answer there are days I am totally Black. I mean, each layer of my skin Black. Man, I'm talking each and every layer and my muscle tissue and my sweat glands and my nerve endings and my fat globules and my bones and the marrow in my bones. All is saturated with my Blackness.
Days when I think of Joe Louis winning the World Boxing Championship in the third round from Jim Braddock in 1937. Jesse Owens earning four gold medals in 1936 Olympics in Berlin, which Adolf Hitler refused to present. Marian Anderson singing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939. The bombing of a church in Birmingham.
The bombing of a church in Birmingham one Sunday morning in 1963, which killed three little Black babies. The Challenger blowing up our Black astronaut and all you could hear about was the white teacher. The silencing of Dr. King, the Kennedy brothers, Mr. Malcolm X, and the white women who went South to help. Charley Pride singing good old country western songs.
A famous Black person does something cowardly or unkind or ugly. Thurgood Marshall's appointment to the United States Supreme Court. Did you hear me? I said the Supreme Court, the highest court in the land. We were sitting on the Supreme Court, that same court that denied Dred Scott his freedom after he had tasted it.
Yet at the beginning of each day, I wake up and I review with closed eyes the possibilities of this day and then choose one, maybe two things to pick away at. Then I get up to let the dogs out and start a fire and fill the kettle and go to the bathroom where I sit and do more daydreaming. Then I brush my teeth and wash my face and hands and weigh myself. Funny how nobody ever asked me what it feels like to be skinny.
The day continues and I get my chosen task done or at least looked at, and I play with books, picture books not reading the captions unless I feel like it. With fabric, looking at it, planning with it, feeling it, but not using it up. With jewelry, boxes of old jewelry, pairs separated, stones missing, fasteners broken, beautiful. With old postage stamps, rocks, yarn, fancy flower scented soap, old records, and handcrafted paper.
Sometimes I study or write or read. Sometimes I have the fellowship of family and friends. Sometimes I enjoy the blessings brought by solitude or share a joke with the dogs. Sometimes I go fishing at a spot on a small bridge where only one person fishes at a time.
I stand there watching the infant river oozing from its wound, the lake. I think about sitting in half a peanut shell floating down the river, exploring the riverbanks. That's usually the time you pick to ask what's it's like to be Black. And I look toward the sound of your voice and say, say what?
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