Texas State Historical Association - My Texas

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Welcome to Brown's Addition

The men began unloading our belongings and moving them into the silvered wooden frame house, our new address. Between our house and a neighbour's stood a forest of newly built wooden outhouses waiting to be taken away. Their number, the colour and texture of new wood, and the banana smell of freshly cut lumber made this scene unforgettable. A rash of noisy, dirty children swarmed in and out of them.

This was my welcome to Brown's Addition, our suburb.

I learned that rain always followed the exquisite earth scent that filled the air when earth and sky met. Some children always rushed into the street, dancing, laughing, and screaming in the downpour. As rain flooded the drainage ditches in front of our houses, boys removed the wooden slats generally used to walk over, so they could "swim" the length of the ditches unobstructed. The forgotten broken bottles and rusted tins lying at the bottom of the ditches slashed through vulnerable flesh.

I was lulled to sleep by frogs calling to each other all night. Crickets joined in, accompanied by the indoor music made by raindrops filling buckets and tin cans, catching the downpour leaking through the roof.

The drainage ditches were soon adorned with foamy tadpole clusters and blue dragonflies suspended in midair like gauze-winged fairies. Tadpoles developed into frogs in stages. We turned them over, marvelling at their insides visible through translucent skin. We were fascinated as tadpoles developed one pair of legs at a time and finally became frogs. When the drainage ditches began to smell, a green scum covering the bottom evaporated into cracked earth among the usual tins and broken bottles.

The increasing temperatures meant we could stay up later. Too hot to sleep, everyone sat on their porch steps. We watched the older boys reenacting parts of the latest Cantinflas or Tin Tan movies. Or playing "Los Valientes," our equivalent to cowboys and Indians. Lela always played a famous Mexican singer. She adorned herself with bits of lace and colourful remnants left over from her sister's dresses.

We caught fireflies and smeared them on ourselves so that bits of glitter caught on our clothes. The following morning only black smears remained. And we caught locusts by following the direction of their singing, and put them under tin cans so that their hopping imitated the sound of popcorn. Ant beds provided hours of entertainment. The red ants met, greeted and identified each other, and carried goods into their nest beneath pebble-covered mounds. In spite of being bitten, we always returned to watch them kill and carry away insects much larger than themselves. When they got bored, the boys, armed with slingshots and an endless supply of small stones or chinaberries, staged wars, or shattered empty liquor and beer bottles.

Mother restricted my contact with the children next door after she saw some of the girls playing "childbirth" and the boys playing a game of death and burial. I was the corpse being carried over the heads of the bigger boys on my way to being buried, because I was one of the smallest children. Lela continued visiting, and sat by the hour on the other side of our screen door, telling me stories. She brought over her hoard of empty perfume bottles, unmatched earrings, and scraps of material, and taught me how to make dolls by rolling over a strip of cloth, folding it over, and after inserting a smaller piece across to serve as arms, tying strips to separate the head and arms from the body. Other strips, folded in half with a hole in the centre, went over the doll's head and tied at the waist, becoming dresses. We made large families, all consisting of babies, girls, and mothers.

I had toy dishes and rubber dolls, but wasn't encouraged to share my toys with the other children. One little girl would have fit Mother's qualifications as an ideal playmate. She lived two doors down, was my age, clean, well-mannered, and we liked each other, but Mother wouldn't allow this friendship because she was black. A couple of black families lived up the street, and other families lived in the street behind ours, but interracial socialization was rare or nonexistent.

Our house may have belonged to a black family, because Ruth, the teenager who collected rents, was Negro. The men worked for the Missouri Pacific railroad alongside blacks and Anglos, but lived in separate worlds. When we children got on a bus we automatically ran to sit in the back, because there was usually more room there, and we could all sit together along the long back row. Mother pointed out that those seats were for black people only, so I never sat there again when I was with her.

Sometimes an old black man, fondly called Papa Brown by all the children, drove his horse and wagon down our street. Children immediately rushed forward, begging him for a ride. He rarely acknowledged them, but daring ones like Gloria held on to the back of the rig, legs pulled up on each side like a frog, and rode to the end of the street until he turned towards his destination.

Occasionally, music coming from the black church induced the more inquisitive children to venture further from home in order to look at the brightly lit church and listen to the singing, from a distance.

Trucks rode up and down our streets, spraying our suburb with DDT, in the heat of summer and dense mosquito infestation. Neighbourhood children immediately rushed out to follow and play in the insecticide fog. Mother closed all doors and windows and kept me safely inside, but some of the mist crept in through wall cracks, in wisps.

Danger never registered. Each novelty held the potential for magic. The best part about our childhood was how easily we dissolved, transformed, and recreated our reality throughout the day, every day.

Alma Iris Ramirez
Adelaide, South Australia
Published: November 14, 2005