My Sister was black and Talmon was white during the time
of legal segregation in rural Alabama.
See what this photo
of them reveals.
{Please note at the outset, Authorsdencom is limited in uploading photos). Please visit: facebook.com/uriah.j.fields to see photo.} In late April 2017, I received an email from Karen Henson Robbins which informed me that her father Talmon (See attached photo of Tamon and my sister Janie) who is about the same age as myself told her that he rememebered me and the growing up we played together.
Karen, nearly forty years younger than her father came across my name on the Internet. Talmon is white and my sister Janie is black. My family lived about a mile from Talmon and his parents in Sunflower, Aabama. At the time this photo of Janie and Talmon was taken, Jane was employed by Talmon's parents. For a number of years she lived in the same house as Talmon and his parents.
I would estimate that at the time this photo was taken Janie was in her late twenties and Talmon was not ten years of age. Karen said her father, now retired from his work as a University profesor, has only a handfull of framed pictures in his bedroom and one of them is this photo of Janie and her father. Karen said her father remember playing with me as a boy. I also remember playing with him when we were boys. I often envied seeing him being picked-up by a school bus that stopped in front of his home when, after I left the Fields School that I attended the first eight years of my schooling, a school started by my paternal Gramdfather who was born in slavery and his three sons and named in his honor, that there were times when I had to walk six miles to my high school when I was unable to thumb a ride and be picked up by the driver of a log truck.
During my teenage years I mowed Talmon's parents yard and work in their field for fifty cents a day which meant a lot to me.
Karen said she met Janie only once, when Jaine was married and in her sixties.
Karen has worked for CARE all her professional life Currently she is Director, Resources, Development, Communications. In her last email to me she said she was leaving for a two-week trip to Afghanistan and Myanmar (Burma) to visit schools CARE helped established.
Thank you Karen for the work you do and thank you for sharing with me this photo of my sister Janie and your father Talmon. You and I will always remember that we lived in Sunflower, Alabama. Although, unfortunately at the time when segregation was the law of the land in Alabama your parents and my parents and my Grandfather respected everyone. This is evident in that my sister Janie, for a number of years, lived in the same house as your father. And this photo....
Hopefully, one day you and I will meet face-to-face. I know you will continuie to do good work for others. Like myself, you are from Sunflower.
Old photos can be so revealing. In this case, Talmon's family respected your sister, Janie's, contribution to the family by taking her picture with him. It certainly is a prized heirloom to have that photo even though those times were very unfair. I'm sure that that that that if a white man worked the whole day, he received much more, perhaps three dollars, than you did.
I don't have the photo, but I've seen it in my mother's albums of my father, about four, standing between two taller girls (his two sisters?) with stilts. He was wearing one of those all-in-one shorts with a bib front and a single strap over one shoulder. What was remarkable was his very large blonde Afro! Dad always had black kinky hair that he kept quite short. My cousin wrote that some of our family was black from Massachusetts. I believe that's why his hair was the way it was.
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