Chronicles of Faith: The Autobiography of Frederick D. Patterson

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Chronicles of Faith

The Autobiography of Frederick D. Patterson

The University of Alabama Press

Early Years

I remember chiefly what my sisters and brothers told me. Apart from one brief instant when I remember seeing my father, I knew neither of my parents. I have no memory of having seen my mother at all. My father was William Ross Patterson, and my mother was Mamie Brooks Patterson. They both died of tuberculosis, my mother when I was eleven months old and my father when I was a year and eleven months old.

I recall my father from a visit with him when he was ill at Freedmen's Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he died. I had brought him some candy, and instead of eating it, he fed it to me. I have never forgotten being fed candy by my father. In my mind, it explains the sweet tooth that I've had all my life.

My mother and my father both graduated from Prairie View State Normal and Industrial Institute, a state school in Prairie View, Texas. Father had been principal of a high school in Calvert, Texas, and actively identified with the Republican party there before moving to Washington. He did not fare well in Calvert because of race relations. For a person of his ability and ambition, the political climate was too restrictive. In search of a better environment both for himself and my mother and for their five children, all born in Calvert, my parents moved to Washington in 1898 or 1899. My sister Bessie was the oldest child. Then followed James and John and next my sister Lucille. After her came Lorenzo, who was five or six years old when I was born.

My father had formed the impression—probably through his political connections—that, if he went to Washington, he could get a job of some substance with the U.S. government. When he arrived, I am told he found that he could work only as a messenger. He was not satisfied with that job. Perhaps he could have worked for the post office if he had wanted to, but he must have felt that he could and should do better. At any rate, he decided to go to law school at Howard University, even though he had a wife and five children to support.

By the time he finished his law courses at Howard, I had been born, on October 10, 1901, in an area known as the Buena Vista Heights section of Anacostia. My father named me for Frederick Douglass, near whose home we lived. At about this time my mother died. Father passed the exam for the bar, but he, too, died before he was able to practice.

He had, however, drawn up a will:

Know all person to whom these lines may come greeting that this is the last will and testament of Wm R. Patterson written [in] his own hand. On the demise of the said Wm R. Patterson, it is his wish that Mr. Solomon G. Brown of Ellvi[r?] Avenue shall take my daughter Willie May (Bessie) and her piano as his own child and his own instrument to use in his own way till she arrives at majority.

Second it is my desire that Dr. and Mrs. Hunter should take Lucille and her violin and the family library to have as their own child and their own instrument and library till Lucille shall become of age then the instrument and library shall become Lucille's property.

Third it is my request that Mrs. Webster of Staton Avenue should take James Gillespie and with [him] one of the bedroom suits in the house. I desire Mr. Charles H. Armstrong and wife shall take John Ross and with him the sideboard, glassware, silver or whatever in the way of dishes there may be in the house. I wish that Mr. [&] Mrs. Ivy Brown shall with the understanding of my executor use every possible mean[s] to secure government [assistance] in maintaining him. It is my desire that Aunt Julia Dorsey shall keep Frederick Dougglass [sic] and shall have one of the bedroom suits in the house and all the chairs and other articles of furniture. I desire that James shall have his mother's picture, and prefer that Bessie should take mine. I desire Lucille shall have her mother's watch and I desire that John shall have his mother's wedding ring. I desire that Lorenzo shall have my plain gold ring but that Bessie shall hold it in trust for him till he is old enough to use it. James may have my silver watch.

Undertaker W. E. Mason of Nichol[?]s Ave. is requested to prepare my body for burial on my demise at a cost not to exceed sixty dollars. Said sixty dollars to be paid by any executor from the Equitable Insurance Fund of $98. From the balance of said Equitable Insurance of $98, my executor is required to [pay] said W. E. Mason $31 balance due of funeral expenses of my wife.

Of the $250 I set apart fifty dollars to reimburse my executor for any outlay he may have been compelled to make. I want Bessie and Lucille, James, John, and Lorenzo each to be given $10. I want Frederick Dougglass to have fifty dollars. I wish that the remaining $100 shall be given to Miss Harriet A. Gibbs of 14 N St. N.W. to be used by her in furthering the interest of Bessie's and Lucille's musical training.

Several individual families had apparently made the trek to Washington with my father at the turn of the century. Some were related to us, and some were just close friends. "Aunt" Julia Dorsey was a friend. As very often happened with black families, "Aunt" didn't necessarily mean the sister of one's mother or father. So I really cannot say how she got to be my aunt, but after my parents had died, I remember, I lived with her in the house where I had been born. I called Aunt Julia my "Civil War" aunt because she was born during slavery, though she was about eleven years old when the Civil War ended. I was a toddler living with Aunt Julia, learning to venture out, going down with my playmates to what we called The Caves, which were the remains of the fort near the family home. At other times, we fashioned trains out of sardine cans and made other toys that helped us pass the hours before we were old enough for school. Later, Aunt Julia and I moved to a fairly large house off Morris Road. We lived in this house when my school days began.

After our parents died, their children couldn't stay together. My sister, Bessie, who became my guardian after a few years, was living in the city of Washington itself and had to work to support herself while she went to school. She lived with a fairly prominent family, the Ivy Browns. After graduating from high school, Bessie was able to attend the Washington Conservatory of Music, where she studied under Mrs. Marshall and received a diploma. When she finished school, she wanted to work as a music teacher and earn money by giving concerts.

My brother John was placed with the Armstrongs, who lived in Buena Vista Heights, a few doors away from where I was born. James was with Mrs. Webster. It's not clear to me who was to care for Lorenzo. In time all three of my brothers were sent to St. Paul's, a vocational school, in Lawrenceville, Virginia, where they were registered in the mechanical department. Little money was available, but even St. Paul's had some sort of student work program, and they each had jobs of some type. The oldest of the boys, James, became proficient in carpentry and construction and followed this trade throughout his life. The next brother, John, lived with different families at different times and was noted for running away from home. Somebody always found him and brought him back. He stayed for a while, and then he would be gone again. He was a rambling sort of child who, having no parents, adjusted to life using whatever resources he felt he had. Lorenzo, the sickly one, returned to Washington and worked for James in the construction business.

Lucille Emma Patterson, my second sister, married at an early age. She was only nineteen when she married Henry Dale, of the John Henry Dale family. The Dales were also a large family. They had migrated to Washington from Mississippi. All of the Dale brothers went into the U.S. Postal Service, which offered just about the only decent job that literate blacks could have in Washington at that time.

During the time I lived with Aunt Julia, I started attending the Birney Elementary School. I went for one or two years. It was several blocks from my house. Each day, someone would take me—in my long plaits and the little sailor dress that I hated—to school.

In due course Bessie finished at the Conservatory and contemplated her next move. Being the oldest of the children, she was aware that my parents had relatives in Texas: Uncle Walter and Aunt Josephine, also Aunt Sara Woods and Aunt Emma Bailey. Bessie thought the best place to get a job was where she knew people who would help her. Since most of her contacts were in Texas, she decided to return there, and she took me with her. Bessie had always visited me, so it seemed natural to begin living with her and to move to Texas. It meant saying goodbye to Aunt Julia, but I never forgot her and remained grateful for her love and care during the years when I needed it most. Now I was off on a new adventure with Bessie, whom I dearly loved.

For the trip, my braids were cut, short pants replaced my dresses, and I became a boy. I was about seven years old and Bess was nineteen or twenty when we boarded the train for the trip from Washington to Gainesville, Texas, traveling through the Colorado canyon and the Rocky Mountains and scenic areas further west. These sites were breathtaking to me as we traveled to the state our parents had left just ten years earlier.

After several days of traveling we arrived in Gainesville, where we stayed a year or less. I was in the third grade, and Bessie taught. Then she and I were separated while Bessie worked at teaching jobs where I couldn't be with her. So for the next few years I lived with several families who kept me.

First, I lived in San Antonio while Bessie got a job in Oklahoma. She left me with Uncle Walter Patterson, my mother's half brother, who was also named Patterson. He was a retired barber, an older man in his fifties, living, as a I recall, in a modest house with porches around it. He had two grown sons, Eddie and Cephus. Cephus was like my brother John; he loved to roam around. I don't know how he died, but I'm inclined to think that his death was probably a violent one. Eddie became a police officer and remained on the police force for many years. He had a family, but he was not married. His common-law wife wanted marriage, but apparently he kept putting it off, even though he raised two daughters, Josephine and Mary.

Uncle Walter and his wife were separated during the year or two that I stayed with him. Bessie and I knew his wife, Aunt Josephine, and spent some time with her too. She was not a blood relative, but she felt close to both Bessie and me and later on even willed us some property in Victoria, Texas.

I was not in direct contact with my brothers and Lucille during this time. I knew more or less where they were and what they were doing, but I did not see them until I made a summer trip back to Washington to visit the family. I spent some time with Lucille and Lorenzo. The oldest boy, James, was a contractor and had given jobs to both the other brothers.

When I returned to Texas from this visit back East, I found that Bessie was working in Austin. She brought me to live with her again at the home of our aunt, my father's half sister Sarah Woods, who was about Uncle Walter's age. Aunt Sarah was married to a carpenter. They had no other children living with them. Bessie taught, and I was enrolled in the elementary school of Sam Houston College.

I began studying at the fourth or fifth grade level at Sam Houston. I finished the eighth grade many whippings later. My sister had overall say-so about what was going to happen to me. When she put me in school at Sam Houston, she paid the tuition, about eight dollars a month. I don't imagine she made over twenty or twenty-five dollars a month.

While I was living with the Woods family, I worried my sister until she bought me a bicycle. I got quite good at riding until I ran into something that got in my way. I broke my leg. I didn't go to the hospital but was treated instead at home. My leg was splintered and I stayed out of school for six weeks. During my spare time during those years, I enjoyed spending hours under the house playing with my favorite pet, an old black cat.

At one point, Bessie left me in Austin in order to take another job in Oklahoma, and she put me in the school's dormitory. Without her there, she thought, I needed supervision, and the Woods were too elderly to keep up with me. At about this time my brother John joined me in Austin. He had been working for James but became restless and decided to return to Texas and work. I was with him when we learned that Lorenzo had died in Washington at the age of twenty-one. Lorenzo was really the sibling that I liked most, I guess because he didn't seem to be very strong. He died from tuberculosis, the same illness that had claimed my mother and father.

Sam Houston was a boarding school. Although it was called a college, it had primary and high school departments. I was in the primary department and wore short pants. James Brawley, who later became president of Clark College in Atlanta, was an upper-class schoolmate of mine in the college department at Sam Houston, where I attended the seventh and eighth grades.

My dormitory housed two or three students to a room. A string of showers and toilets adjoined our rooms. We assembled for meals in the dining room in a separate building. Mr. Brown supervised our dormitory, and Mr. Marshall, the dean of men, had charge of all the students in the school.

I didn't object to school, but I didn't do much with it. At the time I didn't take my studies seriously. I played tennis a lot and loved baseball. Some subjects I handled fairly well, but mathematics and scientific subjects did not interest me. I was the typical boy, and without parents to encourage me, I was certainly not diligent. I took life as I found it. I was frequently in trouble. Bad language and absence from class were infractions at our school. I got whipped by most of the school administrators. Dean Marshall once whipped me in front of my girlfriend, Stella Brewer. (She didn't know she was my girlfriend, but I was her secret admirer.) Stella later had a great career as a teacher at Clark after Brawley became head of the college.

Sam Houston was a church-supported school, and the budget was quite tight. As a result, the meals were not good. There was lots of grits and gravy and cornbread. You got hamburgers or frankfurters once a week. That was about all. The only time a really good meal came along was at Thanksgiving. Then they gave you all you could eat. But grits and gravy were standard fare.

Sam Houston was located in the countryside where I had once played hookey and had gone hunting with a couple of white boys. On that occasion I had one of my most memorable adventures. The white boys were hunting rabbits and squirrels, but they wound up threatening to shoot me. I think that we had lost some of the game they had killed, and we had to go back and find it. They said that if they didn't find it, they were going to shoot me. Although they probably didn't mean it, they might have meant it. I managed to get back to school and was determined never to repeat that experience. Despite my regular attendance from that point on, however, my eighth grade classmates voted me least likely to succeed.

Bessie, on the other hand, had a tremendous amount of drive, not only for herself, but also for me. Although I didn't take my studies as seriously as I should have, she gave me the impression that she expected me to stay in school and graduate from college. She thought I should go to law school and study international law. Frankly, I didn't know anything about national law, to say nothing of international law. In fact, the legal profession did not appeal to me.

During summer vacations, I went to stay with relatives, like Aunt Josephine in Victoria or Aunt Emma in Davilla. Aunt Emma was my father's full sister, the mother of twelve, some of whom were grown by the time I began visiting. I used to spend the summer with them, picking cotton and living in the primitive, country way, using kerosene lamps and lanterns. We'd have to go twelve miles to church in a wagon, sitting in a chair or something similar, pulled by a team.

I was always around a lot of children during the years when I was growing up. Aunt Emma's children took care of me, and I tagged along with them when they went into the town of Davilla. During the summers there I made enough money picking cotton to buy my clothes for the next school year. I enjoyed going into town with the ten or twelve dollars I'd earned to get some clothes. I think I bought clothes before my aunt and her family wanted me to buy them, but I had already spent the money. I got some suits and other things. I've always been independent. Whatever I had I controlled whenever I could. I remember, though, one time when I was with some of the older of Aunt Emma's sons. We were in the little town of Davilla. We passed a little white boy who was selling soda water, and he offered to sell me some. I don't know whether I didn't have the money to buy it or didn't want to. At any rate, when I didn't buy it, he spat in my face. I was going to go after him, but my relatives held me back. They said, "Don't do that, that's dangerous." Fighting back was dangerous. "If you start fighting with him, somebody might kill you." They didn't say the words, but they let me know that I wasn't free to fight as I wanted to because the boy was white and I was black. My fighting, they had me understand, could have jeopardized not only my safety but that of my cousins, Aunt Emma herself, and her children who were not living at home.

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Excerpted from Chronicles of Faith by Frederick D. Patterson, Martia Graham Goodson. Copyright © 1991 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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