Learning from my ancestors
Earlier this week, my family and I said goodbye to my great aunt, Rose J. Jones. She died in her Hamden home on Friday, April 23. She was 82.
I will miss Aunt Rose’s voice, the sound of her laugh, her smile and her insight. I never imagined this world without her, but it is indeed better because she was here. During her life, she prioritized her faith in God, showing empathy towards others, her family, education, upward mobility, community service and fashion.
“Never date a man who doesn’t own a suit,” was one of the most memorable pieces of advice Aunt Rose shared with me.
Aunt Rose was my dad’s aunt; my grandmother’s sister. Just two weeks before she died, I talked about my grandmother, Evelyn, for Storytellers New Haven,where people who live and work in greater New Haven get together once a month, in person and now virtually, to share and listen to stories about their lives. Evelyn died in 1996, when I was 14 years old. She was 60.
Aunt Rose and Evelyn carried themselves similarly. They were proud and stylish brown skin women, born in Arkansas. They moved from the South to New Haven in 1942. Many Black families moved from the Southern states to the north during the Great Migration. My greatgrandparents purchased a multifamily house at the intersection Dixwell Avenue and Argyle Street. They also helped start a church, Christian Tabernacle Baptist Church. They were one of two families to put their house up for collateral to secure a mortgage.
Aunt Rose and Evelyn, along with their parents and siblings, became founding members and volunteers of the church, which had its first service in 1962.
They were both graduates of Hillhouse High School in New Haven, and went there when the school was predominately white in the 1950s.
Aunt Rose and Evelyn both got married and had children. They each had two children — first girls and then boys. Evelyn continued to live on Dixwell Avenue; Rose moved to Hamden, the suburbs.
While raising two children, Aunt Rose graduated from Albertus Magnus College with a degree in accounting and later became an accounting manager at the Regional Water Authority; Evelyn worked at Yale New Haven Hospital for decades.
When I think of my Aunt Rose and Evelyn, I think about how their choices, and my great-grandparents’ choices, impacted my family tree. If my great-grandparents chose to stay in Arkansas, Evelyn may have never met my grandfather, and my dad wouldn’t exist, and then I wouldn’t, either.
I imagine all of the racism that they encountered in Arkansas and in Connecticut during the Jim Crow Era, as brown-skinned, Black women, when “Coloreds” could only sit in the back of buses and movie theaters and had to drink at separate water fountains because it was the law.
I imagine the strength and patience my great-grandparents must have had to raise eight proud children, including Aunt Rose and Evelyn, and to move and settle in a much different part of the country, make it home and establish community for themselves and other Black people in Greater New Haven.
Aunt Rose and Evelyn had full lives. They dated, they had marriages and their circles of friends, they had their biological families and their church family. They worked, they vacationed domestically and internationally, all while fabulously dressed and groomed.
I will honor the lives of my aunt, grandmother, their siblings and my great-grandparents by remembering the lessons they showed me: serving and teaching younger generations what I know, honoring commitments that I make to others, taking care of myself, keeping track of how I spend my money and using it wisely, and by sharing my gifts with the people around me.
Stacy Graham-Hunt is a national-award winning columnist and author, who writes about race and identity. She is passionate about Black people telling their own stories. Email her at stacygrahamhunt@gmail.com or follow her on social media @stacyreports.