Free Certain People by Stephen; Birmingham

former Army base just behind Indian Hill, Cincinnati’s most expensive suburb. The large main house had been at one time a barracks, and was surrounded by extensive gardens. At Camp Denison, life was decorous and mannered. Since Grandmother Hickman was very much a grande dame , other black women in the area came to her for advice on how to do things properly. Her house was meticulously kept, furnished with antiques, many of which Lina Fleming has inherited, and meals were served on the dot, on fine china, a table of gleaming mahogany,with silver napkin rings. Grandmother Hickman was famous for her food, and for her Sunday dinners there were often as many as thirty cars parked in the driveway. “We didn’t eat what colored people ate,” Lina Fleming says. “We ate mushrooms, asparagus, broccoli—I never heard of Soul Food until I went to work for the Welfare Department. Both my mother and my grandmother were recipe cooks. Grandmother Hickman reared us by the book. Our table manners had to be perfect. We had to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’ we had to say good-night to everyone before we went to bed, and to say good morning when we came down for breakfast. We wore prescription shoes. We went to museums, the symphony, to plays. We read from Charles Lamb’s Shakespeare. In those days, Negroes couldn’t go to the Summer Opera, but Grandmother had been to New York, where she had season tickets to the opera, and heard Caruso. So we went to the park on opera nights, and sat outside on benches so we could hear the opera.”
    When Lina Fleming’s father finally managed to join his family in Cincinnati, he was penniless, and had to go to work for a private white family—the Krogers, who own a supermarket chain—as a gardener. This was a terrible blow to Nathan Wright’s pride, and it also pained him to have to live more or less off his wife’s family. He did, however, become executive secretary of the N.A.A.C.P. Still, Lina Fleming says, “Grandmother Hickman always felt that Mother had married beneath her station.”
    Again, it was the women who seemed to carry the family. “All the women on my grandmother’s side were free women,” Lina Fleming says with pride. “None of them ever worked for white people. My grandmother’s sisters were black and tall, with lots of hair, but my grandmother was a light olive color. My cousin Ella is very, very white. She could pass for white if she wanted to. A lot of people pass, of course. They cross over, and are never heard from again. When I was a young girl, seeing all these light-skinned relatives gathering at family dinners, I once said to my grandmother, ‘Didn’t some of those white men get at them?’ She gave me a look I’ll never forget, and said to me, ‘Don’t you ever mention that again!’
    â€œMy grandmother’s friends were an international group. Anybody who was anybody who came through Cincinnati stopped to see her. People came from London, Paris, Rome. Doctor King used to come to Sunday dinner, and used to tease her about all the food she gave away to the poor. At Christmas, we’d go around with baskets of foodfor the poorer families. Marian Anderson was a friend of the family, even though she was in entertainment. After all, she sang opera .” When Lina, her sister and two brothers weren’t being trained, they played, but even their games were educational. “We played math games, and read to each other from Proverbs and Aesop’s Fables.” From the time she was two years old, Lina’s sister Lydia wanted to be a doctor, and would play with her grandfather’s stethoscope. Brother Nathan wanted to be a minister. “Sometimes when Lydia was playing doctor, she would kill off her patients and let Nathan conduct the funeral.” When Lydia, who is now a doctor as well as married to one, was doing her residency in Boston,