New book describes growing up black in Curtis Park

Special to the Viewpoint
By Eva Fields

Over breakfast one day grandma said to me, "I want to inspire people and I want to make them feel good," and all of her books do that. My grandmother, Eva Rutland, for whom I am named, has written over 20 books, mostly romances.

But her first book, a recently republished memoir "When We Were Colored, A Mother's Story," tells of raising her black children right here in Curtis Park. And while my grandma's experiences were mostly positive, it wasn't always easy being black among a neighborhood of whites.

My college friends are often surprised when I tell them that my grandma wrote a happy book about being a black mother in America during the 1950s and 1960s. "You mean she doesn't focus on how horrible life was?" they always ask incredulously.

"No, I reply," my grandma had a mostly happy life. "When We Were Colored," first published in 1964, tells the story of her family from her childhood in Atlanta, Georgia, to her adulthood in Sacramento, California. Grandma was a middle-class black woman, the beloved only daughter of a school teacher and a pharmacist and sheltered from many of the harsh racial realities of life in the South.

Her memoir does not focus on lynchings or sit-ins. She writes about being a mother protecting her children in a newly integrated world that was not always kind to black children. She talks about being the first black woman in the PTA, of being the first black family in a previously all-white neighborhood, of having the only black child in the class or the first black girl in the Girl Scout troop. It is not the whole black experience. It's the story of middle class blacks that you don't often read about.

Grandma writes about Elsie, her oldest child and the only black student in her class at Sierra School in the early 1950s. Elsie makes friends with a white girl, Janey, whose mother is prejudiced and doesn't want her to play with Negroes.

One day Janey promises to come over and play but she doesn't come. My grandma describes a distraught Elsie crying to her mother saying, "Janey says Negroes shouldn't be in this neighborhood. Her mother is very careful about her. She can't play with Chinese or Negroes or… Oh, I wish I wasn't colored!"

Almost 50 years later, I'm surprised by how much the world and, especially the neighborhood, have changed. Grandma raised her children in Curtis Park. Her kids went to Sierra Elementary, Cal Middle, and McClatchy High. Except for the Sierra School (I attended Bret Harte) I went to the same schools as grandma's children.

But the world my grandma describes is not same the world that I grew up in. I don't pretend that racism doesn't exist, but I never had to deal with the overt racism that my family had to endure. I have friends who are white, black, Asian, Latino and every other race you can think of, but there were no "Janeys" in my childhood. Curtis Park isn't perfect, but it's a lot better and it's a neighborhood that I love.

You can read more about my grandmother and her books at www.evarutland.com or meet her while she signs books at 2 p.m. on July 14 at Underground Books, 2814 35th Street.

Editor's Note: Eva Fields has grown up in Curtis Park. Her grandmother, Eva Rutland, shares her time between Curtis Park and Land Park.

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