Betty Reid Soskin | Interview 1 | October 30, 2002

WILMOT: Good morning. It's October 30th and I'm here with Betty Reid Soskin. Just to begin can you tell me when you were born?

SOSKIN: Yeah. I was born on September 22, 1921 in Detroit, Michigan.

WILMOT: In Detroit, Michigan?

SOSKIN: Yeah, my father was working there and it was just before they returned to Louisiana, which was the family home. So I've never really known anything about Michigan.

WILMOT: Hmm. What kind of work did your father do?

SOSKIN: My father, at that time was working in the automobile plant, I think at the Ford Plant. He was a millwright. He was an architect by training. Not so much by education, just by training through his father.

WILMOT: And what did your mom do at that time?

SOSKIN: I haven't a clue, but I think my mother did little. I know very little 00:01:00about my mother's educational background, if there was any at all. I'm not sure she went to school. Her education may have been purely by older members of the family. She had an aunt who lived in the same home she was raised in, who created the first school for black children in St. James Parish, Louisiana. So I think my mother's education was pretty much informal. To the extent that she did work, she was a service worker.

WILMOT: [pause] I was just taking notes. Can you tell me your parents' names?

SOSKIN: My father was Dorson, D-O-R-S-O-N, Louis, L-O-U-I-S, Charbonnet, C-H-A-R-B-O-N-N-E-T. My mother was Lottie Allen, Lottie Estelle Allen I believe. 00:02:00She was from the Breaux family.

WILMOT: Were they both from New Orleans?

SOSKIN: My mother was from a Cajun line of people in Saint James Parish, Louisiana. My father was from New Orleans.

WILMOT: Now for me, I get confused between all the terms, Cajun, Creole. I'm wondering if you could tell me what would that mean to be from the Cajun line of people?

SOSKIN: The Cajun line of people are the people who arrived--at least my part of the family history I've done--arrived from Loudon, France. That's L-O-U-D-O-N. Back in 1631, the first of the Breaux family. That coincides with the witch burning period, so I don't know how those things connect. They left France; they 00:03:00arrived in Nova Scotia where they were for a number of years, generations. They went from Nova Scotia into Maryland, and from Maryland they received a land grant from the Spanish who had then settled in Louisiana Territory and wound up in Saint James Parish, Louisiana, which became the--they were the Acadians, which were the French who became the Cajuns. My mother, I can only go back to her grandmother because the slave curtain drops and you can't get anywhere before from about 1830. But that is her side of the family.

WILMOT: And you said your father was an architect and a millwright? What was his education like as far as you know?

SOSKIN: I'm just learning now about my dad's background. According to a correspondent that I'm working with, a researcher at Louisiana State University now--we happen to share the same family name, de Charbonnet and he's researching for his children--what he's discovered in his family history is that in our line there was an arranged marriage back in the early 1800s, in which there was apparently unhappiness and the male Charbonnet in the family took on a mulatto woman as his consort, or whatever, paramour, I guess it would be in French, with 00:05:00whom he fathered eleven children. And that was my grandfather's background. Those eleven children he educated very well. My grandfather, apparently, became an engineer through correspondence courses at Tuskegee early on, and that was passed on to his children. So, to the extent that there was formal education, that was pretty high education in those days. I still have those books here that taught my grandfather.

WILMOT: I saw them upstairs. They're marvelous. How long did your family live in Louisiana before your family moved as a child?

SOSKIN: I was only four when we arrived in California, so all of my education from kindergarten up was here.

WILMOT: Do you have any memories of New Orleans?

SOSKIN: Oh sure! I can remember when I was three and four years old, and that 00:06:00was before I even began to consciously seek out history. I have images in my head of the first time I was allowed to walk to the store alone. I have images in my head of standing on top of a huge wooden chest outside of the grocery store in which ice and oysters were kept. And the men in the community would be out cracking oysters and drinking beer, and my dad standing me up on top this wood chest and my singing, "In a little Spanish town." [chuckles] I must have been three, because I was four when I came to California. But I have images of the time being separated out and sitting on the front lawn when my baby sister was born. I remember the house, I remember falling and bumping my head sitting 00:07:00on some sort of coil the hose was kept in. I have memories of a huge hurricane that hit and sleeping on mattresses atop boxes to be above the water that was in the house. I remember a lot of things about being a small child in Louisiana.

WILMOT: So you remember where that house was?

SOSKIN: Yeah, it was on Touro Street. When my sister first was born on Frenchman Street, I remember that house, too.

WILMOT: You lived in two different places. What part of New Orleans was that?

SOSKIN: It was called Downtown, which was the Creole section.

WILMOT: My familiarity with New Orleans is very limited. I know a little bit of the French Quarter, a little bit of Esplanade Avenue, a little bit of uptown by the university--

SOSKIN: Right, right.

WILMOT: --by Tulane University. So what was downtown?

SOSKIN: Well, downtown for me was Corpus Christi Church which my grandfather had 00:08:00built. I was sitting on the front porch on Baton Rouge Street in a duplex that my grandmother lived in. I remember sitting in her lap, and you know how women have this fleshy part of their arms between the elbow and the shoulder? I remember cuddling that, holding it. And now I know that because she was blind from diabetes that my mother must have run that household, because they lived with my grandparents and she must have taken care of the little girl because my mother was taking care of the little baby, who was my younger sister. Maybe it was even before that. But I can remember brushing her hair, for long, long periods, her waist length hair. And I guess the way a blind person takes care of a child is they keep them close, they hold them as much as possible. I can almost smell my grandmother, I can have a deep sense of her though I can't 00:09:00visualize her, I don't know what she looked like. But I remember holding on to her lower arm, or her upper arm underneath, and brushing her hair. I learned how to braid on my grandmother's hair, and I must have been four.

Those are big memories for me. They are more important now and they're freshening up because I've been consciously searching out memories.

WILMOT: Does she have hair like you?

SOSKIN: No, her hair was heavy, very dark, much coarser, straighter. Her parents were [islenos?] from the Canary Islands, heavily Spanish, named Morales. What I remember of her is that kind of image. My cousin Doris who looked like that, one 00:10:00of the most beautiful women I think that I have ever seen. She died when she was quite young. I thought of my grandmother when I saw Doris.

WILMOT: Will you tell me your grandmother's name?

SOSKIN: Victoria Morales Charbonnet.

WILMOT: So she married in to the Charbonnet family?

SOSKIN: She married into the Charbonnets.

WILMOT: Wow, do you know the story of how she came to New Orleans?

SOSKIN: Well, according to recent research, her parents came from St. Bernard Parish, which was the place where most of these islenos lived. They were brought in to settle when the Spanish were dominating New Orleans. You have to remember that was a territory long before this was a country. And my family, my father's family, arrived here, those two brothers before the Louisiana Purchase. Into 00:11:00Natchitoches. Natchitoches! One of them went to Haiti, he died in Haiti. But his family made it back to the country at the end of the war in 1812. We were on the wrong side of the Haitian Revolution, apparently. [laughs] Toussaint L'Overture was among the--. But that's when, I think that was before the family crossed over and had become--no, that would not--. I'm not clear when the African-American branch came into it. I know that this was a woman who was a mulatto who was married into the family, who also lived to be 101.

WILMOT: As your mother did.

SOSKIN: My mother did, and her grandmother lived to be a 102.

WILMOT: Wow. I'm holding off on going into your whole family history because I 00:12:00think that's a whole session in and of itself, but--I think we might actually get there today. You mentioned your sister being born. Can you tell me about your siblings? Were there more than the two of you?

SOSKIN: There were three girls. Yeah, Margie was the oldest.

WILMOT: Marjorie, yeah.

SOSKIN: And we were each spaced out so that we were four years apart. I don't remember sharing much life with them, because we were never in the same schools at the same time. We were never in the same social groups at the same time. We didn't really share much life until we got to be adults. By that time I think it was too late, because we didn't forge close relationships because my eldest sister married when I was, what, she was nineteen which means that I was fifteen.

WILMOT: That was Marjorie?

SOSKIN: Marjorie. So that she went out of my life and into her own and I became 00:13:00the oldest. And then when I was married at nineteen, my youngest sister was only fifteen.

WILMOT: And her name?

SOSKIN: Lottie.

WILMOT: Lottie.

SOSKIN: So that I moved out into my own life. And as we became nuclear families of our own, we didn't reconnect. I don't ever think we really got there. My sense of us as adults is that we're all pretty much strangers. Marjorie moved to Southern California, or at least to Kansas for a long time, because her husband was with one of the black insurance companies. Then they moved to Southern California, which is where they raised their children. My younger sister also moved around a good deal more than I did. And I moved out into the suburbs. So that we disconnected early. I wished that we had more--my own kids were spaced 00:14:00closer, and I think that was consciously why.

WILMOT: So you had this interesting way of--you described your mother as--actually I described her as beautiful and you said that was her job. I wanted to ask you what kind of person was your mother, what was she like?

SOSKIN: In one of those binders is the obituary I wrote for my mother that describes who she was for me better than I can--

WILMOT: Should we get it? Will that be okay?

SOSKIN: Yeah, I'll go get it for you. [flipping through pages] This was her 00:15:00obituary; here's the part. [reads] "You'll be remembered as a single bright feather on a pink silk hat aimed heavenward. Three inch heels on {Noire?} sandals with small red rose on toes. As a single, fragile butterfly in a windswept world of those too caught up to know your needs for touching and loving and caring, and most of all, for seeing your beauty. Bereft of worldviews, books unread, causes unserved, your time on earth was spent in 00:16:00simple ways, ways suited to a temperament shaped by your motherless beginnings that brought no models for your own mothering but instilled a deep appreciation for family in its broadest sense, the legacy of that love-filled cabin in Saint James, and your dear Maman who nurtured her brood with such warmth. It's that larger family that will miss your presence on this earth, family and friends of all ages, many of whom stayed with you through a long, long life as a replacement parent for those lost until the end game. I will miss you deeply, as we came full circle during your long lifetime, reversing roles, until near the end, you quite seriously introduced me to others as "Mother." Perhaps I became that in return at some point. You invariably made the correction, but I knew that no error had been made. We honor you in death as we loved you in life. 00:17:00Betty." Her mother died when she was only seven months old.

WILMOT: [pause] I'm smiling because I'm reading the part where it says; "She was active in St. Bernard and St. Benedict Catholic Churches in East Oakland where she and her husband rededicated their marriage after fifty years together."

SOSKIN: Um-hmm.

WILMOT: And your father?

SOSKIN: Tall, handsome, seemingly remote but soft and loving, formal. My dad 00:18:00wore a necktie to garden. He was an aristocrat. And now I know why in checking out the research of what went into that Charbonnet name for him. And I understand him better now than I did even then. I never saw him unless he was fully dressed. I don't think I ran into my dad in his pajamas until his last ten years of life when he was bedridden a good deal of the time. My dad, I remember as the man who counted the church collection as the head of the St. Vincent de 00:19:00Paul Society for his church. But that's only one side of it. The other side of it is that this very handsome, blue-eyed man, proud, arrived in California just before the Depression hit with nothing, having lost everything in the hurricane--home, business. He owned a rice mill that was rusted out when the water went down. We arrived in California, and my dad in the Depression could not get a job because he wasn't black enough for the railroads and he wasn't white enough to be white. He wound up being a--actually he got a job with the Ford Plant, but somebody reported to them that he was not white, that he was a 00:20:00black man passing, and he was fired. Then he got a job on the railroad wearing a white apron and for years was a lunch car man.

WILMOT: How would they find that out?

SOSKIN: You know, someone who was African American apparently--you know this was dog eat dog days, in the Depression, there where just no jobs. The same thing happened to me eventually, so that this was real. Before he ended his work life, however, the Albers Mill burned down in San Francisco; there was a huge fire. They couldn't get anyone to rebuild that place. A millwright, I guess you know, takes a function and creates machinery to perform that function. My dad put 00:21:00together the design that put together the equipment that coated the rice with vitamin B, that whole process, and reestablished the belts; the conveyor belts that put together Albers rebuilt. By that time it was called Grosjean's Mill on the San Francisco Bay and that was my Dad's work.

Wilmot:

Grosjean, that sounds like a Louisiana name, too.

SOSKIN: He finally came back into his own, and one of the things that I was able to hand to my son David was Dad's union card, David who eventually became a carpenter too. But Dad never rose above again the classification of carpenter, even though he was doing the work of a millwright, because of racism. But I 00:22:00think he never forgave anyone--and to this day, I think if he'd lived--that had he not left me New Orleans he would have had, as his father did, a special status as a Creole. And come to California where none of that counted. My dad described racially people other than Creoles as white, Creoles, or American. I didn't understand that until I began to read the research that's been coming into me from Ken Jenkins in Louisiana. That really was true; it wasn't just my father. I used to kind of laugh at that. There were white people, there were Creole people, and there were Americans.

WILMOT: What did that mean?

SOSKIN: I didn't know what it meant. I know now.

WILMOT: What does it mean?

SOSKIN: It means that the people downtown--I think to describe it most clearly, my sense of it is that the Creoles were the people who related to both sides. 00:23:00They were educated; they were treated differently. My father used to tell me that if any of his seven brothers got into trouble and were taken downtown to the courthouse, that Judge Charbonnet, who was white, wuld take him into the back room, talk to them, pat them on the fanny, and send them back home. That they were a special class of people. They were not treated in the same way.

WILMOT: As?

SOSKIN: As ordinary African Americans. It was a different class of people. I didn't know that, and I rebelled against it when I was growing up, because it seemed like another form of racism to me. I'm only beginning to get a full picture of what that culture was like now that I'm looking back on it as a researcher.

WILMOT: If I understand you, then his universe looks like white, Creole, and then is it American or African American?

SOSKIN: No, no. he called them Americans. Anybody that wasn't either Creole--for 00:24:00me, I didn't know there was anything such as a white Creole. Creoles were always people who were mixed. They were French, Spanish and African. But they were a class of people who were simply separated out. They had their own culture. My parents were bilingual! They spoke a patois of French. But that didn't matter in California, nor did they teach it to their children. But there was this language. I mean, they were a separate people. I regret now that they didn't pay more attention, because I think there was more to be salvaged there then even I was aware of. I turned my back on all that in the fifties and sixties when I began to be confronted by racism by myself. At that point I had to choose sides and I chose to work with the Panthers; I chose to prove my blackness; I chose to turn my back on all that. And now that I'm in my early eighties, and looking 00:25:00back on a culture that's disappearing, I regret it, I wish I had listened harder to the stories. I wished I paid more attention. I'm getting it though. I'm getting it now second hand through research from people who still remember.

WILMOT: You know you mentioned your father's mill was rusted out by the hurricane, but what brought him to California, what was it about Oakland--?

SOSKIN: My mother's father was already here.

WILMOT: Okay.

SOSKIN: So the family already began to gather here. But this is my mother's family. There were already a number of Creoles who had arrived during the teens, in the First World War and just after had begun to arrive here, so that my grandfather was one of these people. He was a waiter at the Oakland Athletic 00:26:00Club, and my mother, this was the place my mother could come to because her father was here. And then her sister Vivian, whose picture you saw there, she had graduated from Xavier Prep in New Orleans and then came out here and did three years at Cal.

WILMOT: That was her high school, Xavier Prep, so then she went to Cal.

SOSKIN: Yeah.

WILMOT: It's interesting to me when you talk about her education and we compare it to what you know of your mother's education.

SOSKIN: It's not hard to understand that my mother's father was the eldest in a family of fourteen, fifteen children. His mother was widowed; her husband who had served in the Civil War was a veteran and died, leaving her with these children. Her eldest son George married my mother's mother who was fourteen. 00:27:00They had one child who was my mother and when my mother was seven months old, she died. That was Julia, known as Minette.

WILMOT: Which means?

SOSKIN: I don't know.

WILMOT: I think it means, well it's close to "cute."

SOSKIN: Yeah, yeah.

WILMOT: Mignon is cute, different.

SOSKIN: Yeah, but he brought her back to Maman's house. This was a little house on the Mississippi that Maman owned that was on a strip from the river back. I have pictures of that land now; somebody in the family went down and took pictures. The house is no longer there. My mother grew up there then her father George went out and remarried Vivian's mother. They had five children and then that wife died. This was Desiree Fernandez, also Spanish again. He brought those children back, they grew up in Maman's household, so that my mother was the 00:28:00eldest of the grandchildren and then her five--or four brothers and sisters, because one of those children died very young--but those children were brought back to the household.

So my mother grew up in this household of fifteen to twenty people, all children. They worked the farm, they took care of things, they took care of each other, they educated each other. And then as the older members began to leave Saint James and move into town, which was New Orleans, Vivian went in to live with my Aunt Emily, with my father's next oldest daughter, who married a doctor. She lived there while she went to Xavier Prep, so that the older members of that family began to take on the younger members. But my mother, being the first, didn't get in on that, so she never left the country until she married my father when they were both nineteen. So when I get it all in perspective on a timeline, 00:29:00I can understand it and it makes sense to me. But it means my mother's hunger to be seen, my mother's need which is the sort of thing that sort of characterized her, her returning easily to being a dependent for me after my father died, because my father had been the caretaker for her for all the years. Her never leaving the child in her, it was always up front. But I understand that, because she never lived that out. She was invisible in a household of many, many children. I'm grateful that I began to get that sense of her before she died, which is why I wrote what I did. That it was okay to let her be who she was. And 00:30:00I really do remember her in that way with the feather, and that's okay, that was her role.

Is it okay?

WILMOT: Yeah. When you family came to Oakland, the primary pull factor was that your mother's father was already there.

SOSKIN: It was a place to go.

WILMOT: Was there anything else about the Bay Area that brought--?

SOSKIN: No.

WILMOT: It was just--

SOSKIN: Because I was so young and we all lived in my grandfather's house. So he was replicating what his mother did. My uncle Lloyd, who was his eldest son, Aunt Vivian, my mother and dad, and their three children all lived in a little two-bedroom house out on 76th Avenue, a house that's no longer there. It's a 00:31:00foundry that sits on the land now. But the extended family was their way of life. So until my parents were in a position to buy a little piece of house, which they did, out in East Oakland in an area that was largely Portuguese, actually. In East Oakland, and that was where I grew up, in East Oakland. They all fanned out from my grandfather, having formed a base, as immigrant families do. This is what we were.

WILMOT: Yeah, it's interesting thinking about it.

SOSKIN: Yeah, I think that's the way life goes. I'm not sure it's still that way. Maybe it is, maybe it is.

WILMOT: You mentioned that your father passed to the extent that he was able to get a job at the Ford automobile factory, and you talked a lot about the way 00:32:00that colorism and racism played itself out in his life or you talked some about it. I'm wondering, in your family, how was passing regarded? How did you parents look upon passing?

SOSKIN: I think that would best be described when I went to my mother when I was about in seventh grade, was about to--or was it eighth or ninth--when one decides on a foreign language. That my mother's comment was, when I said I wanted to take French because, of course, they spoke French, because of course they spoke French and as a kid this would let me into the club, you know. I'd never been able to really know what the family gossip was because the older members would drop into French or Creole as soon as they didn't want us kids to hear. And for me it was learning French, and my mother said, "No, you look more Spanish, you need to take Spanish," because I was darker than my two sisters. 00:33:00And I took Spanish. So that I think that passing as a way of getting into the mainstream was accepted for them. And there was a certain amount of shame, I think, connected with dark skins because my parents certainly expressed more racism than I saw outside.

WILMOT: They expressed more?

SOSKIN: Yeah, and I don't know because it was partially pride in what they were and I don't think we can underestimate that. Some of it was Creole pride just in being Creole, and I'm appreciating that more now. Part of it was just the same kind of racism that I saw outside. It took me a long time to forgive them for that, because I came from a generation where--you have to understand that in the 00:34:00forties suddenly I was in a black world where I had been in a world where it was pre-segregation. It was not that there was no segregation. It was simply before there were rules made against it. There weren't enough of us for anyone to make any rules about. To some extent we were together by choice, not because we were separated out. Our social life was protected by our families, and we were pulled together as an enclave of young people.

But I remember my mother saying unforgivable things like, she looked at one now well known accomplished woman in my age group and saying, "Those parents sure better educate that girl because she'll never get a husband." Education was second to physical attractiveness, always. There was no thought of my going to 00:35:00college for instance, none. That was definitely not--it was never even thought about. Never even talked about, nor my sisters. Everything was towards moving us to marry someone as soon as we could. And we did. My younger sister was seventeen, and Marge and I were both nineteen. It was the only way to leave home.

WILMOT: You've described a little bit about the community you lived in, what was that? I know that East Oakland now, I know that East Oakland has the--I grew up in East Oakland, so I know what East Oakland is now--it's transforming right now actually, at this moment, it's changing again.

SOSKIN: It's becoming, yeah, more and more Latin.

WILMOT: It's becoming more Latin and also there's a lot more white people 00:36:00becoming more excited about East Oakland. But what was East Oakland like then, what was your community then?

SOSKIN: I knew almost intimately every single African American family in East Oakland. There was the Watkins on 91st and the {Swannigans?} on 21st and the {Warleys?} on 27th and the Charbonnets on 83rd and the {Goosebys} on 27th--everybody, we were all there was. The {DeBiques} on East 17th. We all were one. A big band would come to town to Sweets Ballroom and they would hold what was called danzons which were afternoon parties and we would all go for Duke Ellington and Jimmy Dorsey and whoever it was, and everybody in the East Bay would be there. And the Ribs down from San Jose, they were the black family from 00:37:00San Jose--and there were a couple of families like the Williams who lived in San Mateo. All of us would be in one place together. You drop a roof over it and you'd have every--but this population must have not been more than ten or fifteen thousand people. In the entire Bay Area, that was it! Of those there were the enclaves of the Creoles who sort of hung in there together. I have pictures of my mother and her bridge clubs that were all women who looked alike, all out of New Orleans, who would during the Depression get onto a bus with card tables and go to each other's houses to play cards with folding chairs. I remember going to parties with my parents because there were no such things as babysitters, and the kids would be thrown on a bed to sleep among the coats while the grownups partied in the next room.

It was very, very--there were no strangers in the Bay Area. There were no strangers. It wasn't until just before the Second World War, well in the late--no, it was just before the Second World War that it exploded and I found myself in a world where I had to make choices. Being black--there were exclusive tennis clubs, for instance, that Tom Berkeley and Lionel Wilson who's a former mayor and a publisher of the Post, these people were students of the University of California, and there were tennis clubs that came up from Southern California from L.A., to play the tennis clubs up here. Very exclusive, with parties afterwards and before. Black people were together because they wanted to be. We were not separated out. We didn't have the sense of being separated out. When the black baseball teams, the black leagues came to town, we were all in the 00:39:00stands because we wanted to be, because black baseball was great! I dated Jackie Robinson and Kenny Washington, people who would be in town for these games!

WILMOT: Wow.

SOSKIN: Yeah! That's a different kind of black pride. Black pride, then, was sort of untainted and innocent. The black pride that I moved into in the sixties, as a member of the National Black Caucus was a different black pride. It was a labored, hard, black pride. But it was not unfamiliar to me because I didn't have to not be proud of being who I was. It was tainted by being Creole and being light-skinned--I'm sure that's something you have to deal with--but I 00:40:00didn't have the same kind of hollow pride that my parents had. But now I understand the ethnicity stuff that they were involved in which was a different kind of pride that they had. And I still have it. Someone once said to me that it was very hard to feel superior to somebody who refused to be inferior. [laughs] That's been me all my life. I've never had a period when I didn't feel equal. It moved around. But I still don't feel unequal. I feel whole. And all of that stuff went into it, all that stuff went into it.

WILMOT: I'm very interested in the ways that you compare the different ways of 00:41:00experiencing black pride and just how that consciousness was different between your early upbringing and during the time of the 1960s. Sounds almost like it came from different kinds of origins.

SOSKIN: Oh, I'm sure and I'm only beginning to understand that now that I have a life span to measure all of that against. That's one of the luxuries of being older. Really it's incredible because you get to look back. It's like you get to live your life in blocks of time and then change comes. It's like reincarnation without ever leaving. So I get so now I almost recognize the cycles changing, 00:42:00and I begin to feel the restlessness and begin to wonder what comes next. And it seems to come in ten to twelve year cycles. And now I look back at those cycles and wonder how they were lived. I think I told you one day I had this sense of being all the women than I ever was. And they all come out at different times depending on what's going on. But I'm aware of that now. I don't think it's something that I could have been aware of until I'd reached this age.

You only know it in retrospect, you don't see it coming up. But, now, it's the excitement of being an octogenarian. Because I have the luxury of coming from strong genes that go on for long periods, I have a sense of really having eight more years of sentient living, and maybe I won't, but that's not the way my life 00:43:00is colored. I look at this next ten years and wonder what am I moving into now. It keeps me propelling forward. Without being able to look at those long lives, on both sides, it's the slave women who had it. My father's great grandmother who was a mulatto and a slave, 101, and my mother's grandmother, 102; one of her daughters went to 107, my mother, 101. I don't have a sense, barring accidents; I don't have any sense that this isn't also another one of these periods. It's 00:44:00incredible! [laughing] Are we done?

WILMOT: Do you need to be done today?

SOSKIN: I need to be at work. What time is it?

WILMOT: Well, it's been about forty-five minutes. I wasn't quite ready to be done, but if you need to be--

SOSKIN: No, no, no! I need to leave here in time to get to a 12:30--

WILMOT: We just need to have a clock with us at all times.

SOSKIN: Let me get a clock. [searches for clock]

WILMOT: And then we can be able to do this. I should have brought my watch. Do you want to end for the day?

SOSKIN: [shouts from another part of the house] we've about a half hour.

WILMOT: Okay, thirty more minutes, I think that's great. Well, I have a question 00:45:00for you which is we talked and you've really given me this amazing description of what the African American community was like pre-1940s, before World War II, and I'm wanting now to bring your memory to the physical, what was your home like, your immediate neighborhood, where you lived? What was that like?

SOSKIN: It was mixed racially. There was Ma Jones who lived a block away, a huge woman, who used to sit in her window. She must have weighed three hundred pounds and everyone talked about Ma sitting in the window with her telephone she was the neighborhood gossip. It's funny, she hadn't come to me until now. But she had several children, I don't know where they were from. She never left her 00:46:00house and she was one of the main characters. And there was my family, the people who lived next door who were also African American, and my mother's cousin who lived next door to her on our left. She had three sons and she and her husband would have come to the house next door. Mrs. Lewis who lived next to her. These were the black families. Oh, and across the street there was a family that was also mulatto--like my family but not Creole. My father would say they were "Americans." [laughs] Then there were the Portuguese families and a few Irish families that lived around the area.

There was a life that was shared among the black families. Not a social life--this is interesting to me when I look back--because that social life, my 00:47:00mother's social life, was Creole and they came from throughout the Bay Area. As I told you, they got together and they got their card tables and folding chairs and went to each other houses. They planned lemonade parties for the children and kept us all together in a little group, so my social life was managed very much by my parents. We'd have skating parties where we would start at 90th Avenue at the Watkins' home and we would skate downtown to Lake Merritt, actually on skates.

WILMOT: Roller skates.

SOSKIN: Roller skates. Our families planned all these activities to keep these children together. There was a lot of that going on. I remember another thing that was a phenomenon that you don't see anymore, and maybe it's because cars were not that--everybody didn't own two cars. But, we would do what was called going for a ride: We'd get in the car and drive off to Miles Canyon and we would 00:48:00have a picnic lunch. My father would just take us sightseeing and we would pile into the car on Sundays. We'd go to church; we belonged to St. Benedicts Catholic Church, which I gave up very early on. My mother rarely went because she practiced birth control. My father was active because he didn't have to bear that sin.

WILMOT: Whoa.

SOSKIN: Yeah! Isn't that interesting?

WILMOT: Yeah it is.

SOSKIN: It was the woman's problem.

WILMOT: Yeah.

SOSKIN: My father, you know, he belonged to the St. Vincent DePaul Society, and the men's things and all the stuff but my mother hardly went to church. When I asked my mother one day, because we couldn't go out, unless we went to church on Sunday morning, we had to stay home. When I asked my mother, when I got to be a 00:49:00teenager, how come she stayed in bed and we had to go to church? She'd say to me, when I got old enough, "I can't do this, because I believe in birth control," and my mother would say, "But some things are none of the priest's business."[laughing] "You don't have to confess that because some things--." That was always a problem for her I think. I remember music, lots and lots of music. My dad and Mr. {Dewson?} across the street, the American non-Creole, he played drums and Dad played piano, ragtime, and an old trumpet that he painted baby blue to plug up all the links. And he played bass on the door. He would wet his fingers and than he'd bump his hands against the kitchen door in the rhythm 00:50:00of the music. There was one other instrument. There were three of them--they called themselves the Three Blind Mice and those three men would get together on weekends and play. Any of us who wanted to could be in the band but--you use comb and tissue paper or the pots and pans in the kitchen. Anything, anybody can be in this.

I don't remember ever learning music or learning to dance. Those were things people were born with. Everybody around me made music, but there was nothing about learning anything. I don't know if that makes any sense. It came out of some place in you and it was expected of you. And so, I began to write music when I was--I have a developmentally disabled daughter--and when she was young, I went through a mental breakdown because I had three little boys, a very busy 00:51:00husband, and a handicapped child. And I had to have ways to travel while she could hold on to my skirts. And I began to write music out of this, and I was writing things that I couldn't reproduce. I was writing them in my head. I began to play a guitar by ear. Now, I know that was part of the same phenomenon, that it's something that you assume that that everybody does. I didn't know I couldn't do that so I did that.

I've written lots of music. It's also interesting that I stopped writing music after I married the second time. I married a professor at the university. I began--I wrote a couple of things and I remember one night, we were living in 00:52:00this lovely house up on Grizzly Peak, and I ran downstairs into the library where he was working on a grant proposal. I said, "You've got to put this down," I had my guitar, "Listen to this!" And every one I wrote was the most beautiful song in the world. This is it! I sat down and started singing and I sang this song and he listened, he really did listen. And I got all through, he said, "You know, you are so good Betty, I think that I can get you into the Music Department as a special student at Cal, and you can learn how the real composers do it." And he said "The joy you're going to have when you get all this really polished." And I said, "No! It's all done." And he said, "Oh no, the joy is in the editing and rewriting." And I said, "No. If I try and do that, it's going to turn into something else, because twenty minutes from now I'm going to feel differently. This is what I felt five minutes ago upstairs. This can't be 00:53:00changed." He knocked my confidence and I went back downstairs and said, "This is how real composers do it." And for the first time I thought, 'I'm not composing, I'm making up songs like I did when I was six. This is not real.' And I stopped and never wrote another piece.

But I think the importance in that is that I think that's how --it isn't that we just turn off children, that's how we turn off people. That's how we turn off people. I feel teary even thinking about it now, because it's shut down the poet in me. It squeezed out in other ways--and you can tell by writing, that it had 00:54:00some place to go, and it's gone there. And so it's found its way into my computer, into the Internet, into strangers across the world. It's found a way to bleed into life.

WILMOT: Into the way that you communicate everyday with everybody.

SOSKIN: Oh I don't know, but it's still there. It's reshaped itself like the rest of my life reshapes itself. But it was a rich period, and I'm going to show you some of that stuff before we're finished. Because some of it is--in fact, there's a tape somewhere, an audio tape. Some [inaudible] that's really quite lovely. Makes me feel like somebody else. Now if I listen to it, it feels like somebody I once knew. There's no ego involved in it at all. I listen to it and I 00:55:00think, "That's wonderful," but without having any sense of created it. Somebody I once knew.

WILMOT: Maybe it's like you said it's one of the all of the people that you are.

SOSKIN: That's where some of that comes from. This one that I wrote, that I sent to my grandson in this first packet of family history that's called "To Each of Me." It was about the period when I struggled my way out of strong blackness and a sense that for a period of time I had gone through feeling like I was nobody because I couldn't pin myself to black, I couldn't pin myself to black. And then 00:56:00suddenly, a flash of insight, realizing that I wasn't nobody, I was everybody. I wrote this song about to each of me.

"To each of me, to love within the reach of me,

and if this love could teach to me why each of me in turn

must torture so the soul of me and tear apart the whole of me.

Within life's play, each role of me must speak to me,

must learn that blackness and the white of me

are just the day and night of me.

I'm not the wrong or right of me.

Can't you see there's got to be some answer to this planet's pain,

my microcosmic world insane.

If only I could make you see,

It's here to see, just look at me.

There is within me all of you,

from distant lands to whole of you.

The dreams, the heart, the cell of you.

If only you would see that black and white are part of it,

my brown gets to the heart of it.

And blending is the start of it.

And someday it shall be that blackness and the white of us

are just the day and night of us,

are not the wrong or the right of us.

the weak or might of us, then we'll be free.

WILMOT: Okay.

SOSKIN: Isn't that amazing?

WILMOT: That's amazing.

SOSKIN: Isn't that amazing?

WILMOT: Yeah, you're a songwriter. That's a beautiful song.

SOSKIN: Isn't it? That's what I sent to my grandson, because I kept thinking that some day, you know, the torturing through all this stuff is going to be a 00:58:00value to somebody. Isn't that an amazing piece of work?

WILMOT: Yes, it is. I hope you'll show me the picture of this grandson who you sent. I think you showed me when he was sixteen.

SOSKIN: Yeah, the one who was sitting down with a guitar with my mother. I'm hoping that by giving him some sense of the genetic line he sits on top of, that he'll find his place, because teen years are so hard on a kid who is as mixed as he. Because I know that he's going through this at a younger age than I went through it. I went through it later, much later.

WILMOT: What do you think is different now that you went through it later and 00:59:00he--? Were you more protected or--?

SOSKIN: He's even more shattered, I think, racially. Because added to the racial mix that we already are, which is Spanish, French, and African and all the rest of it, added to that, his mother is Filipino, his best friends are Mexican. He's in space without a sense of an anchor at all. The world I grew up in wasn't politicized around race.

There were things--when I went to high school at Castlemont, for instance, there were only, I think, three or four black kids in the entire school. In my graduation class there were only two, and my sister was one of the first black kids to attend Castlemont, if you can believe that! When I went there, I 01:00:00remember being in the drama class and I must have been about a sophomore, a junior maybe, and we were reading Maxwell Anderson's Winterset. I was reading for the part of Maria and I knew I had done well. I knew I had done it well. When I was reading, the kids were all quiet and the teacher was intently watching. When it finished, she held me after class and she said to me, "You did a very good job in that role but you know I can't give it to you because the parents would never allow for that." And for the first time I understood that but for the fact that I wasn't white--and she told me. She said, "Eddie is--you 01:01:00can't play that against--Eddie's white." Eddie Castro was one of the Portuguese kids. But they couldn't put me in that role.

So that, that kind of thing popped up just enough so that I had a sense of being guilty for bringing this to her. Because I wanted her approval; I wanted the part. But there was no constituency. There was no group; there was nothing to feel except that I was inconveniencing everybody. I don't know if that makes any sense. But there was a certain amount of shame mixed in with the hurt of rejection that's very different than what kids have to deal with now. Now there are political positions; now there are kids with ethnic studies. Now there are formalized differences that didn't exist then, they simply didn't exist.

But I also had a retreat into my own social group. The kids that I was going to parties with on weekends, our boyfriends were at San Jose State, they were at Cal. As I told you I was dating men like Kenny Washington from UCLA who was their big quarterback, Jackie Robinson, all these people. There are pictures upstairs and I should show you. My niece, even her generation, my sister's daughter with Bill Cosby and all these people, Muhammad Ali. We were among the celebrity group as long as we were black, so that we were black by choice. We were going to the International House to parties and formal dances and my contemporaries at school were going with the guy who worked at the gas station around the corner. The white kids were lower class white kids, while the black 01:03:00kids were part of an elite group. So that played against that, I didn't go to my senior ball, there have been nothing there for me. I was going with the kids at sororities and the fraternity's kids at Cal. I wasn't even relating to children at my high school. I've never even been back to a reunion.

WILMOT: What about the Portuguese children in your neighborhood that you grew up with?

SOSKIN: They weren't the kids that I grew up, but they were not--my parents, by that time, had built us into this elite group of people, which I'm sure they were in New Orleans.

WILMOT: In your neighborhood, and I do this thing, trying to situate you. I understood you grew up on 76th Avenue--

SOSKIN: No.

WILMOT: And also 83rd Avenue.

SOSKIN: I grew up, when I was very young, I lived on 76th in my grandfather's 01:04:00house and then we moved to a little house that was behind my grandfather's house. And that all became industrialized, which is not far from San Leandro Boulevard down in where there are iron foundries and things. There were meadows with cows and things.

WILMOT: Is this by East 14th?

SOSKIN: No, no, no, down near San Leandro Boulevard is--

WILMOT: Oh, right where the BART train is now.

SOSKIN: Yeah, yeah, way down there. Very, very close to there.

WILMOT: And--

SOSKIN: Now there's a huge foundry there.

WILMOT: I know, yeah.

SOSKIN: Okay, there were two houses and my grandfather had his truck garden, grew all his vegetables and there was a dairy and the cows were all on it. It was--you can't imagine. It was all swamps between--there were two railroad tracks, the Southern Pacific and the Western Pacific, and everything else was swamp land, all wetlands. And we watched the Oakland Airport be built from one 01:05:00hangar to what it is today. That's how far back my life goes there. So I went to Lockwood School, which is I don't know what there is now, is it still Lockwood?

WILMOT: Lockwood, yeah, it's right there--

SOSKIN: I went there for my first, second, and third grades.

WILMOT: It's on Sixty-Eighth Avenue.

SOSKIN: And then when I was about the third grade, my parents bought a house over on 83rd Avenue, just about a half a block below East 14th Street and I went to Highland, and then I went to Elmhurst Junior High on 98th, and then to Castlemont. I went to Lockwood Junior High for a short period when I first got back. I don't know what I was doing there, but I think I went to seventh grade.

WILMOT: First got back?

SOSKIN: Yeah, I was away for a year in--what was it called? Livermore. There was 01:06:00a place for children who may have a tendency for tuberculosis. My father had tuberculosis at one point, so I spent a year in [Dell Valley?] which was a--and this was another place where I got disconnected from family and was just absolutely, just totally isolated. Because my mother couldn't get out to see me because I was out there for a year. And that was when I was twelve or thirteen. And then I came back and went to Highland for a year. Not Highland--Lockwood and then went to Elmhurst.

WILMOT: Do you remember what that time that place? I guess there's an old name for it, they used to call it a sanatorium, a place where you could--

SOSKIN: No, there was actually a sanatorium, which my father spent some time in because he actually did tuberculosis. But it was a few miles away, farther up 01:07:00the road from where we were. That was a sanitarium, that was Livermore Sanitarium and people there actually had tuberculosis. Where I was it was called a [preventorium?], and it was [Dell Valley?] and it was just for children.

WILMOT: And so there were a lot of children there?

SOSKIN: Yeah, it was dormitory. I don't remember any other black kids there.

WILMOT: So you were there?

SOSKIN: I was there for about a year.

WILMOT: Yeah.

SOSKIN: I can close my eyes and remember it. I can remember being on some sort of deck and wearing loincloths and laying in the sun, because every day we had to toast our selves on one side and then the other. I remember caroling, I remember singing at the--being taken to sing for the patients at the sanatorium, which is why I recognize that so well. Because we went there and did Christmas caroling.

WILMOT: What were the other children like? Remember them?

SOSKIN: I can't even remember them except that I was at the upper end. Most of 01:08:00them were, I think, younger children. I remember that we were in huge, we were in dormitories. It must have been twenty beds to a ward. It's funny, I hadn't even really remembered that until now.

WILMOT: What authority would locate, would choose out a little girl and say she was a potential TB--

SOSKIN: The County. Because I was what was known as a delicate child, always underweight, very small. I think that's why, from a very early age, from a very early age I must have been very confusing to my mother because I was obviously very bright. I think I thought myself around her, past her, when I was six. But I also was a reader; so I was alone a lot and liked being alone. I remember 01:09:00discovering Renaissance. I must have been, before I went to [Dell Valley?] I loved--

WILMOT: Discovering--?

SOSKIN: Renaissance. I must have been withdrawn as a little kid. And I remember being very, very thin. I didn't weigh a hundred pounds until I was fifty. So where now I look slim to people, I'm big for me, I'm huge, [laughs] but I was always small and my parents were very small-boned, little people. Dad was tall at six feet, but he was slender always. So it was genetic. But I remember spending a lot of time in county clinics. So I don't know all that was about, I 01:10:00didn't have any recollection of what that was.

WILMOT: Was that a common thing you do you think, just to choose children up and say, "Go away from your family for year and live in--?"

SOSKIN: No, I had no idea what went into that.

WILMOT: That's very interesting to me.

SOSKIN: Those decisions were probably made, probably made in French. [laughs] Seriously, I really think those conversations were confidential. I simply never experienced-- I simply was gathered up and taken there for my own good. I remember being just terribly disturbed by it for a while. I came back into a nest of strangers; it took me a long time to get back into the fold. In some respects, I never did.

WILMOT: Hmm. I want to ask one last question for today, because I know we're running out of time due to your constraints, not mine. This is the same question 01:11:00I asked you before we started recording: What did being a Charbonnet mean to your family? The way I would ask this a little differently, the second way I would ask it, is what stories did your family tell about being Charbonnets? Almost like mythologies that people have about themselves as a family.

SOSKIN: That's not easy to answer because the standards by which people judged--I don't remember having any connection to money, for instance, because during those years my parents' social life--they were together around being Creole. And names meant a lot to Creoles: the {Bejois?}, and the Charbonnets, 01:12:00and the {Le Boeufs?}. All these people were all here and they were Creole, and that was status. Those Creoles were also barbers; they were dentists; they were redcaps; they were postal workers; they were rarely teachers--I think the first teacher was when I was an adult, the first black teacher in the state of California. So that women didn't have the status of men, but it wasn't based upon money, it was based upon names. And the Charbonnets apparently in New Orleans--and I'm learning now--were very, very old families. I told you, they came here before this was even a nation, before the territory, before 1805, 01:13:00that's when the Louisiana Purchase was made, and they were already here. So that even the Creole Charbonnets carried that same special-ness about them. So that, I remember my father telling me that when my granddad died, because he was such a great man in the French part downtown--"Creoles lived downtown, Americans lived uptown, and Canal Street divided them," you know--because he was such a special man, his body was laying in state on the altar for three days so that the community could pay homage. This was the man whose picture is up there that you see. So he was a big man and I knew that. My dad's pride in his father was unbounded. I remember my dad even as a blind man, after he had lost his sight, 01:14:00because he was blind for ten years before he died. My dad knew that the length of his thumb, I guess from here to the end, was exactly one inch. He would make home repairs and set things by using his finger. This kind of precise thing about him. He would tell me, "You never go back and measure any thing twice," because my father always told me, that if you have to do that, you weren't careful in the first place. So my dad never retraced his steps. And I find that in myself, I never drive by the places I once lived in. I never drive by. In Walnut Creek, in Berkeley, I never retrace my steps. So I can see in myself the 01:15:00remnants of those stories from my father and my grandfather and I know what that's like.

There were wonderful stories that my dad used to tell me about New Orleans, but they were always family stories. His brothers--always crazy stories about them, and many of them I thought were lies. My mother would be standing behind him and laughing, "Don't you listen to him!" And he would tell these wild stories about his brothers. There were seven boys and four girls. He would tell these wild stories about these brothers that were just wonderfully crazy, and I wish I could remember them now because I remember just sitting spellbound.

My mother's side of the family also had stories about being Creole. There was a cousin Olga who was my mother's first cousin, Aunt Louise's daughter, who ran 01:16:00what I now know must have been a whorehouse. I mean I know that's what it was. No one ever explained but Olga was a character and she had this house. I remember the first time I met her, I was fourteen. I had gone down there on a trip, my parents sent me down. We were approaching this woman, this huge woman, who was scrubbing her front steps. You know these New Orleans houses, if you've been there, they're right on the street with steps and you go into a courtyard, and this was the way her house was. We called them patios, but they were courtyards for them, but the door was on the street. She was cleaning her front steps with pounded red brick: I'd never seen that before; water, red brick, and a brush. Here was this huge woman doing this. You'd go into her house, through this courtyard, and inside there was a jukebox in the living room. I should've 01:17:00known! [laughs] I mean, at fifteen, what do you know? Then I learned later that this was the place in New Orleans where all the bands who came through that couldn't stay at hotels because blacks couldn't, stayed at Big Olga's. She was the place where everybody went. So if you wanted to see any of the sidemen, Ellington, and all these people, and Jimmy Lunsford, they all stayed at Big Olga's. Well Big Olga eventually--Mother used to tell this story and just laugh--had opened a bar. And of course in New Orleans at that time, I don't know if it's still true, there are no minor laws, anybody who could stand at a bar could drink. Anybody.

WILMOT: Did you say Mother Theresa?

SOSKIN: No. Mother--I don't know what I said that sounded like that. But anyway she opened this bar, but the thing that was wonderful was that she had named it the "Holy Bar." And the reason was is that the priest in the parish had given 01:18:00her some of the old altar cloths that could no longer be mended, and she opened a bar and put them on--and here in her Holy Bar, she had these altar cloths from Corpus Christi Church on the bar. I mean, Olga was as sacrilegious as anybody could be. [laughing] But she was also--the stories about Olga were--one of mother's stories--no, this was when I was down there. Olga had been taken to jail on the streetcar. She'd got on the streetcar and she--at that time, you had to sit in the back and there was this thing, what they called the "bar" that you could slip into the slots at the back of the seats. White people could move it back, but black people couldn't move it up. But Olga got on, there were no seats in the back, and she picked it up and she moved it. And the conductor came back, 01:19:00knowing her because that was her line, and told her she couldn't do that. And she said, Yes, she would and he wasn't going to stop. They took her downtown, the streetcar, past the jail, and took her to off to jail off the streetcar. [laughs] Because she simply, she was going to beat them all up with the bar. [laughs]

Mother had some really wild, crazy Creole characters in her family. My dad used to be embarrassed by this, the Charbonnets. My mother was the Cajun black, my father was the Creole black. And both--my father came from what he saw as aristocracy and my mother he married from the country, St. James. So that, that's early on where I got the sense of the difference. My father and grandfather built the first convent for black nuns, which is the first black order in this country, for the Holy Family Sisters out on Gentilly. My husband, 01:20:00my second husband and I, I guess in 1986, went back to New Orleans and visited and looked at the cornerstone and knocked on the door and went inside. That was when I first began to get really interested in family history.

But my dad's younger brother, Louis, was a contractor. He also was a builder. Most of the seven boys were builders of one kind or another. My father was the closest to my grandfather. But Louis and another contractor who was a white Charbonnet across town used Canal Street so all the jobs that came up on one side would go to Paul Charbonnet who was white, and all the jobs that would come up on the other side would go to my Uncle Louis because he was the Creole 01:21:00brother. There was this understanding between the families and these two contractors worked with that.

My dad--God, I wish I could have a conversation with him at this stage of my life. There's so much I want to know that I'll never know now. I understand so much better his quiet times, his withdrawal, his formality, his huge pride. I understand it now. At the time, as a teenager--

WILMOT: Listening to the stories you're telling in response to my question, and I'm hearing some different things, but they're very, very interesting. I'm 01:22:00hearing that part of your family story is, "we were wild," and part of the story is, "we were aristocrats." And part of the story is this; "we were a special people." "We were wily." It's very funny.

SOSKIN: But it's true, we are that complex. That's what's so interesting to me, that one of the things that comes with getting older is losing the need to be that concrete, that you learn to live comfortably with conflicting truths, that when I was younger, something had to be this way or that way and now they can be both.

WILMOT: Yeah.

SOSKIN: Because it is that complex. My father's younger sister was as wild as my 01:23:00father was staid and aristocratic.

WILMOT: And what was her name?

SOSKIN: Dorothy. Doritha is what they called her: D-O-R-I-T-H-A. I know now she must have been nuts, I'm sure that she was really crazy. And she died, with what I'm sure must have been Alzheimer's. It must have been early set in thing for her because I remember she used to beat her husbands. She was married twice and she was just crazy, I mean, absolutely crazy. She had one child, I haven't see him in years and years and years, he's a musician too, and he lives in Santa Cruz. I haven't seen him since he was a child.

WILMOT: How'd you hear that?

SOSKIN: How did I hear that? She lived with my father and mother for while when she first came to California. My father finally had to ask her leave. She used 01:24:00to keep our house in chaos. And after she was gone, she would come sailing back, and my father and her husband behind her and their would be all this stuff and my father would call the police. And, you know, she was absolutely crazy. She was so embarrassing to him. I mean, she was so embarrassing to him.

WILMOT: But that was his sister.

SOSKIN: Oh, yeah! That was his younger sister. So, all these pieces are there. I don't anybody else in the family except maybe my dad's youngest brother, Louis, who shared that regal kind of stuff. The rest of them were all pretty straight ahead guys. I don't know what my dad was holding up. He revered his father, God, he revered his father. I'm sure that was the gift from his father. Oh yeah, you 01:25:00can see in these pictures. I can see it now. I didn't even know him. I was four when he died.

WILMOT: Well I think for today we should close.

SOSKIN: Okay, all right.

WILMOT: Because you have run.