Dorchester Banner/Paul Clipper
Nona Stanley reads from Barbara Lockhart’s manuscript of Everything I Seen, an oral history taken from the experiences of the late Mary Taylor of East New Market.[/caption] Black History comes alive in DCHS reading CAMBRIDGE — In celebration of Black History Month, the Heritage Museums and Gardens of Dorchester have created programs to encourage the sharing of personal histories from the black perspective, unfiltered or censored. The first offering for the month was an engaging reading of a manuscript compiled by Barbara Lockhart entitled Everything I Seen. Ms. Lockhart had the good fortune to meet Mary Taylor at her home outside of East New Market many years ago. Ms. Taylor grew a garden, and shared all the vegetables she could, and the two ladies exchanged the product of their gardening efforts as well as many conversations. Along the way, Barbara Lockhart, an author by trade, decided to take down Ms. Taylor’s oral history. The manuscript from their talks became a collection Ms. Lockhart named Everything I Seen. Written in an authentic dialect, the story shares Ms. Taylor’s thoughts, experiences and realities as an African-American woman who lived in North Dorchester for decades after coming up from a sharecropper’s existence in the Deep South. Mary’s experiences made their way into sections of Barbara Lockhart’s book Elizabeth’s Field, as the experiences of the character Mattie. For this program, portions of the manuscript were read by Nona Stanley, who also knew Mary Taylor during her life. “Peoples around here don’t know,” read Ms. Stanley. “Don’t want to know. But I know history that isn’t in no book. My grandmother was freed at 14, and when we were freed we could work all day for 50 cent. All day. “My whole life’s been hard. All of it. I always worked hard but never got nothing to show for it. And Lord, everything I seen was bad.” In her story, Mary Taylor tells the history of her life, growing up in the South and moving to Dorchester County. The story she tells is one of want, of doing their best while doing without. “A lot of white peoples had electricity, but we didn’t have none. We used kerosene lamps. We had a fireplace for heat in the winter. We had no insurance, no hospitals. Dentist? Papa pulled our teeth .... “We had an old doctor, Dr. Jack. Dr. Jack cared for colored folks, and he wouldn’t doctor on nobody but the colored. He was white, but he helped the colored. People couldn’t pay him, but they paid him with a ham, or middlings or potatoes or peach preserves. He loved mama’s preserves. He’d take whatever we gave him, and he was happy to get it. He was for the colored. A good man. He come from the North and he did a good thing.” After an altercation with an abusive husband, Mary moved to New York City for a while, and learned about the ways of the north. “We had peoples up north, first and second cousins, so I went there ... When I got to New York I was scared. I worked for Heinz Catsup for a while, worked on the line and watched for bottles that weren’t full. Then I got a job in the Roosevelt Hotel in the kitchen preparing vegetables for the cook. I lived with my people in the city, up there on 59th street. It was a whole lot nicer than in the south. People were a whole lot nicer, and I wasn’t afraid after a while. You could go wherever you wanted and people didn’t mind. It was a good time. We went to the Apollo Theater a lot of times. Big name peoples were there — entertainers, music and dancing. It was the first time I saw colored people doing something besides picking crops.” Mary stayed in New York and worked for the war effort during WWII, and moved back down south to her family when the war ended. She traveled and followed the crops for a while, like many migrant farm workers. She was around 30 years old when she arrived in Dorchester County, here to pick cantaloupes. “When I got here, it was just like the old south. The attitudes were the same. No different. There was only one place they didn’t have slaves — Delaware. If you were a slave and you got there, you were okay. They sent you further on to Philadelphia. But Maryland had slaves, and in a lot of ways, people thought about the colored in the same way they did back in slave times. I often wondered why they brought us here from Africa if they didn’t want us. But I know the answer for that: so the white folks could get their crops for nothing. “It was better here than down south. Picking crops up here we got good money compared to what we got in Georgia. Here you got paid good. These peoples up here, instead of working you all day for 50 cents, they’d give you more. I got 50 cents an hour here, so I stayed.” Ms. Stanley read out loud about Mary Taylor’s exploits for a half hour or more, then a discussion followed. It was a great way to spend a lunch hour, and all the seats were full for the program. You can learn more about Mary Taylor through the Dorchester County Historical Society, which is at 1003 Greenway Drive in Cambridge. Parts of Mary Taylor’s story were adapted for use in Barbara Lockhart’s book Elizabeth’s Field, which is available at bookstores or online at barbaramarielockhart.com.