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jenniemae & james

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also by Bro oke Newman

The Little Tern

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Jenniemae &James
a memoir in black & white

Brooke Newman

H a r m o n y B o o k s / N e w Yo r k
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Copyright © 2010 by Brooke Newman

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Harmony Books, an imprint of the

Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

Harmony Books is a registered trademark and the Harmony Books colophon is a

trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Newman, Brooke.
Jenniemae & James / Brooke Newman.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Harrington, Jenniemae. 2. Newman, James Roy, 1907-1966. 3. Newman,
Brooke—Family. 4. Washington (D.C.)—Race relations—History—20th
century. 5. Men, White—Washington (D.C.)—Biography. 6. African American
women—Washington (D.C.)—Biography. 7. Mathematicians—Washington
(D.C.)—Biography. 8. Women domestics—Washington (D.C.)—Biography.
9. Friendship—United States—Case studies. 10. United States—Race
relations—Case studies. I. Title. II. Title: Jenniemae and James.

F205.A1N49 2010
975.3'0410922—dc22 2009029721

ISBN 978-0-307-46299-2

Printed in the United States of America

Design by Leonard W. Henderson

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First Edition
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For
Nikos, Samantha, Blue, Joey,
and for Mark
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These numbers gonna sing

These numbers gonna cry
These numbers gonna dance
These numbers tell no lie
— Je n n i e m a e H a r r i n g t o n, s o n g, 1 9 4 8

To count is to talk the language of numbers. To count

to a googol, or to count to ten is part of the same
process; the googol is simply harder to pronounce. The
essential thing to realize is that the googol and ten are
kin, like the giant stars and the electron. Arithmetic—
this counting language—makes the whole world kin,
both in space and in time. Mathematics may well be a
science of austere logical propositions in precise canon-
ical form, but in its countless applications it serves as a
tool and a language, the language of description, of
number and size.
— Ja m e s R . N e w m a n,
Mathematics and the Imagination, 1940;
wherein the term “googol,” aka
“ g o o g l e ” wa s f i r s t d e s c r i b e d
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au t h o r ’ s n o t e

This book is a family memoir; it is a true story based on my best

recollections of the events and times, and the recollections of my
family who shared those events and times with me. In some in-
stances, I rearranged and/or compressed events and time peri-
ods in service of the narrative, and due to the limitations of my
perspective as a child, I was compelled at times to create what I
believed was plausible and likely dialogue to bring the actual
scenes to life and to match the best available recollections of
those events and exchanges.
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c h a p t e r o n e

“Get up with the sun,

get to work by the gun,

go to bed when you’re done.”

Jenniemae Harrington was an underestimated, underappreci-

ated, extremely overweight woman who was very religious, dirt
poor, and illiterate. She was uneducated, self taught, clever, and
quietly cunning. Born on an unknown day of an unknown
month during the harvest season of 1923 on a small sharecrop-
per farm near Hissop, Alabama, Jenniemae picked October 18 as
her birth date because on that date, at the age of four years, she
had for the very first time been permitted to wear flowers in her
hair to church. It was as memorable a day as any, and a very
good day in a long line of difficult days. There were not many
simple pleasures for the Harrington family, but at least on Sun-
days everyone tried hard to greet the Lord’s Day with a smile,
and wearing flowers in one’s hair was a special way to celebrate
church day.
Home was the farm. The farm, like most sharecroppers’
farms, was located on the least arable land in the worst loca-
tion—it was land unlikely to produce more than a barely

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sustainable crop even if all the atmospheric conditions were

perfect. The Harringtons lived in a one-room shanty with
enough holes in the roof to collect rain even if there was only a
thin mist during the night. Jenniemae was born to Molly and
Jefferson Harrington in 1923, one of twelve children. Hissop is a
small town not far from Equality, Alabama, which Jenniemae
said was exactly what the people who lived there meant to call it
when they named it that, because equality down there was a
thing for white folks and not at all meant for black folks. As Jen-
niemae said, “That e-quality ain’t nothin’ more than a white
word, jus’ a word—nothin’ more, nothin’ less, and surely not
meant nor ’tended for a colored man.” And she was right. The
laws there were meant to protect white folk, and all the rest just
came to the table when and how they were told.
Hissop was home because it was where Jenniemae’s family
ended up, not because it was a chosen home site. And Jenniemae
told me that if it hadn’t been for her father’s ill-willed nature,
they never would have left.
“Now, if ’n it hadn’ been for my daddy bein’ to who he was, I
wouldn’ be standin’ here right now and takin’ care of you chil-
dr’n. If we had had us a nice and kind daddy . . . well, then, we
would best be livin’ down there in Hissop still, to this very day.
So what I am sayin’ is that a person can’t always tell when a bad
thing is the cause of a good thing to come, or if a bad thing is
jus’ always goin’ to be a bad thing forever and on.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean that it was all the cause of the evilness inside my
daddy’s veins that his blood turned dark and then the blood

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darkness made him one bad-angry man. Some said his blood
went bad from one too many humiliations, which will do it to a
man. One too many humiliations can turn a good man into an
evil devil. Which is why one night when he was out with his
liquor, my mama packed us up and we ran away.”
Jenniemae’s mother fled their drunk and abusive father and
Hissop, Alabama, when Jenniemae was six years old. Of the
twelve children born to Molly and Jefferson, Jenniemae was the
sixth, which is why the number 6 became her most important,
“standin’ tall and walkin’ out” number. Six played a major role in
Jenniemae’s life and therefore played a role in our family’s lives,
because whatever affected Jenniemae affected us. For instance,
Jenniemae wore six hair pins to tie back her hair in a bun; she
always set rows of six cookies on the cookie plate, rows of six
carrots on the carrot plate, and rows of six celery slices on the
celery plate; she set up six clotheslines outside to dry the
washed wet clothes, and when it was possible, she hung six
pieces of clothing on each line. She sang six verses of each song,
dusted each bookshelf six times, every book spine six times, and
secretly tapped the banister six times as she ascended and
descended the staircase.
When Jenniemae’s mother left Alabama, she headed north
and just kept going. She had nothing more than what she
needed—her children and the clothing each one had on his or
her back. They planned to live with a cousin who had settled in
Washington, D.C. When one of us would ask about those years
in Alabama, Jenniemae had little to say. She would tell bits and
pieces about the long, hard, hot, and humid days she had spent

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in the fields picking from the time she could stand up until the
time they headed north. “Pickin’ cotton, pickin’ berries, pickin’
beets, pickin’ bo-weevils, ants, spiders, chiggers, skeeters, and
any other crawlin’ and itchin’ ugly insect you ever laid your eyes
upon. Nope, nothin’ to talk ’bout in those times. Nothin’ but
bent-over, achin’ backs and hotness.
“We went up north ’cause. Just ’cause. If a person was to go
away to some other place than where they lived, well, then, that
person was goin’ to go north,” she told me. Jenniemae said that
her people went to Washington, D.C., because they figured if the
president lived there, life for a colored person would be better.
In Washington, D.C., they all hoped they could get decent jobs.
“Little did they know,” she said, “and most over, little didn’t they
know.”
Once they got to D.C. by the back of anything that moved—
“Back o’ the train, back o’ the truck, back o’ the back”—the
extended Harrington family lived in a run-down, two-room bad
excuse for a house located in Foggy Bottom, which today is
home to the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, the
State Department, the Department of Interior, and the George
Washington University campus. In those days it was an area
mostly occupied by the working poor. Since 1860 Foggy Bottom
had been a neighborhood where Negroes, as we called African-
Americans back then, settled after they fled from slavery and
where German and Irish immigrants settled upon arriving in
this country. By 1920 the area was the home to the largest
Negro business and residential community in the United States.
It also became known as the home to Negro jazz and blues

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entertainers, and Negro intellectuals and artists. It was where
Jenniemae grew up and spent most of her childhood.
Fancy automobiles driven almost entirely by white men and
women ran along the paved D.C. streets while horse-drawn
buggies, driven almost entirely by Negro men, pulled both
cargo and people through the bumpy, stone-cobbled roads of
Foggy Bottom. When the United States went to war in 1941,
everyday life changed for most white people in the country as a
result of gas rationing, soaring rents, and rising food prices. But
for the black people of Foggy Bottom, life didn’t change much at
all. As Jenniemae said, “Get up with the sun, get to work by the
gun, go to bed when you’re done.”

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