Saturdays with Seniors: Celebrating Wanda’s 99th Birthday

1921 was a very good year: Wanda Geneva Johnson was born that year! If you’ve followed our blog for a while, you know Wanda Johnson by her married name, Wanda Bridgeforth. Witty and talented, Wanda had been attending the memoir writing class I led in downtown Chicago for nearly two decades before coronavirus hit.

What you might not know about Wanda is that she is an immigrant: she was born in Canada. Hamilton, Ontario to be exact. The woman Wanda has always affectionately called Mama is the woman who adopted Wanda as an infant and loved and raised her on Chicago’s South Side. To celebrate her 99th year, we’re publishing an essay featured in my book Writing Out Loud. Wanda wrote this piece to describe the resilience and determination that guided her family through the Great Depression — and has influenced Wanda’s own life ever since. Sheltering-in-place in her apartment now, Wanda fills her days with episodes of Jeopardy!, naps, meals, and visits from Wanda Jr. The rest of the time you’ll find her looking out the window, amazed at the beauty of Lake Michigan and the sky above. “And sometimes I just close my eyes and reminisce,” she says. “It makes me happy.”

Memories of the Great Depression

By Wanda Bridgeforth

Chicago was especially hard-hit by the Great Depression. Men couldn’t find jobs, especially Black men. Here was my father, with a degree in chemistry, and he could not get a job. He was humiliated. And really, that’s when he started to fall apart, and that’s when Mama started working “in family.” She told me that this was the way it had to be. We either survive doing it this way, or we don’t do it and we don’t survive. So I went to live at Uncle Larry and Aunt Gert’s house.

My neighborhood was known as the Black Metropolis. Louis Armstrong had lived there, and Ida B. Wells. Uncle Larry was actually a cousin, but we called him uncle as a term of respect because he was the head of the household.

Uncle Larry was a big Black man that had been injured in WWI, where he fell in love with a White German woman named Gert. He married her and brought her home to the Black Metropolis.

Aunt Gert was a very heavy woman but had very small feet, I think she wore a size three-and-a-half shoe. All her shoes were too big on her, so we could always hear her clomping down the hall.

I had to learn to share. Nineteen of us lived in Uncle Larry’s six-room apartment. The grownups had the bedrooms. Where we slept, in the daytime it was a dining room. We each had a roll-away bed, really a cot on rollers with a cover. At night we took the leaves out of the dining room table and took down our roll-away beds. That was our all-purpose room. We ate in that room, did homework at the table, played cards there and slept there.

Some of the people in the apartment were on relief. Everybody but Aunt Gert would go out every day to try and find work somewhere. Aunt Gert ruled the household. She did the cooking and sent us out.

Every Saturday, some people living there would get ration cards. We would take baby buggies to a warehouse and use the ration cards to get our vegetables, fruits, and dairy goods. Auntie Gert baked a pound cake every Saturday and whipped the batter with her hands. We just loved it when we heard her slapping that bowl. We knew we were in for a treat.

She formed committees, and I was on the committee to churn the ice cream. We would always fight over who would get the dasher. Aunt Gert would bake the cake, but we didn’t get it right after dinner. After dinner the boys were sent to the kitchen to clean the linoleum floor.

Once they were done cleaning the floor, she would sit in the corner and play the guitar. That’s when the rest of us would know to take our shoes off and come in our stocking feet to spread the wax and wax the floor. She’d say “Clarence, get over to that corner, it needs more wax!” We would make so much noise that others in the building knew it was time to join us. Nobody reported us for being too noisy because they were all involved. In the summertime Aunt Gert would play her guitar on the porch and we’d dance in the yard.

We were kids, and we didn’t know we were poor. And actually, we weren’t poor, we were po’.

And today, thanks to Wanda’s fabulous memory and tremendous writing, we are all richer for knowing her. Happy birthday, dear Wanda.