Hannah’s Beginning
H annah was born in the city of Newark, NJ in the middle nineteen fifties at Martland Hospital. When Hannah was five her family moved from Broom Street to the Stella Wright projects, where they lived from the time she attended school in first grade until she was in the fifth grade.
When Hannah was around five years of age, she was a victim of incest. She was violated by her second oldest brother, Ray. He used to sneak into her room at night after everybody was in bed asleep. Ray would come in the room and pull the covers off of Hannah, pull down her panties, and lick her vagina. Hannah was so afraid she didn’t know what to do. She was too afraid to tell her mother and father what her brother Ray was doing to her. One night her mother came in the room unexpectedly and caught him sexually violating Hannah. She beat both of them. She did not realize that Hannah was not consenting to what her brother was doing to her. After that beating, Ray never tried to touch Hannah again. But she lived with the fear of him wanting to have sex with her, and also with feelings of shame and embarrassment about what had happened to her. These feelings lasted for years, even after he was killed at the age of twenty-one, when she was sixteen. Hannah was a grown woman in her thirties before she was able to talk about the incest that took place when she was a little girl.
After the Stella Wright projects her family moved to Sherman Avenue. By the time of this move her mother, Tessie Mae, and her father, Royce Senior, had been separated for a year. Royce was an alcoholic, and was mentally and physically abusive to Tessie Mae. He did not provide for his wife or for their twelve children, he abandoned his family the year before they moved out of the projects.
After Royce left, Tessie Mae got involved with a married man and had two daughters by him. This man played a large part in Hannah’s life during her early teens. Tessie Mae had fourteen children altogether, eight boys and six girls. She practically had to take care of and raise the kids by herself, until her mother moved up from down south, from Alabama. Grandma had started living with them just before they moved out of the projects, when Hannah was eleven. Grandma had three children, Tessie Mae and two sons. Her husband had been deceased for some years, and all of her children had grown up and married and moved up north. The sons and their families moved to New York City, and Tessie Mae and her husband and children moved to New Jersey. So Grandma moved up north at the right time, when Tessie Mae needed her most after her husband abandoned her and the children.
Hannah’s grandmother was a cursing and fussing part Indian and part black woman, about five foot five and a hundred and sixty pounds. She had pecan colored skin and white, shoulder length hair. Grandma never went anywhere except for the front porch and to the doctor’s office. She mostly stayed in the house like a piece of furniture; you know how furniture stays in the house except when it’s being moved. Grandma was the one who did most of the cooking, getting the children up in the morning and getting them ready for school, and taking care of them after school. She also did most of the clothes washing. On Pioneer Street they had one of those old-fashioned washing machines, the kind that put clothes through a wringer to squeeze the water out. Grandma would hang the wet clothes on the clothesline to air and sun dry.
The kids would call Grandma when something was wrong in the house, or if they were doing something wrong toward one another. They would holler for their grandma instead of their mother, and Tessie Mae would be right there in the same room as Grandma. But they would still call their grandmother to rescue them. There were many of times that Grandma would get mad and tell them to stop calling her and to call their mother.
Hannah remembered her grandmother being mean, giving her a good beating with a switch for turning on the oven and toasting her a piece of bread because she was hungry. Grandma had no problem using that switch, everyday if necessary. There were many of times Tessie Mae would be fussing and cursing at her children, and Grandma would tell her that she needed to stop sinning by fussing and cursing and go on and beat their butts. Tessie Mae’s mother lived with Tessie Mae and her children until she died in Irvington Hospital. By the time she died, Hannah and the rest of her siblings, except for two brothers who had died young, were grown and had children of their own.
Tessie Mae and her mother and children moved from Sherman Avenue to Pioneer Street; then they moved from one house on Pioneer Street to up the street to another house on the same block. Believe me, every place they lived had its own problems and drama. Hannah’s family was on welfare and received food stamps, and her grandmother received SSI. Tessie Mae paid the rent and the rest of her bills with the welfare check, and her mother gave her some of her SSI money every month to help.
When the family moved up the street on Pioneer Street it was the summer of 1967. During that summer, when Hannah went outside to play or sit in front of the house, her mother did not allow her to go any farther than that block. When she went outside it included taking her baby sister and her niece outside with her. Hannah couldn’t go outside unless she took the babies with her. Hannah was a skinny, light-skinned girl who wore glasses.
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