The Future of Democracy Newsletter: February 2022

At our February 7 meeting, Curtis Estes presented a summary and discussion of his new book, The Bitter and the Sweet: The Saga of a Black Family in America. 

Curtis is 87 years old and has spent about half his life in the Jim Crow South. His book is a compilation of memoirs and research done over a 20-year period into the history of his family and suppression of Blacks in the US going back before the Civil War.

His great-grandfather came over as a crew member on a slave ship in 1835 and fought under Sam Houston in Texas, after which he was given a land grant. One of his young slaves bore a child who became Curtis’s grandfather. This property remained in the family for many years.

Curtis’s presentation included stories of growing up based on an impressive memory, including some charming anecdotes, such as the time he helped gather wood for the fireplace in his little elementary school and how, when he was 17, he and a friend watched adults going into a jazz club, then scraped together enough to buy suits, and held their breath to see if they would be admitted.

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​Curtis also discussed blatant cases of discrimination he lived through. In his elementary school, which was segregated, the class was given random books cast off from White schools, many with pages torn and covers missing. When working in a hospital as a teenager transporting patients, he had to go back and forth bringing them from the Black section to the White section for surgery. After his army service in the 1950s he was expected to work in the Houston Army recruiting office, but when he walked in, he noticed it was entirely staffed by Whites. Not long afterwards he received his discharge papers in the mail.

He eventually moved to California, where he became a teacher and then a gardener.

One of the more poignant parts of the book describes “The Condition of the Slave Ships.”

​The slave ships were probably the most inhuman form of transportation for human beings to be devised until the Nazi freight lines began rolling toward the concentration camps of Eastern Europe in World War II. The African slaves were wedged below deck, chained to low-lying platforms, stacked in tiers with an individual space allotment that was six-feet long, sixteen inches wide, and perhaps three feet high. They were unable to stand erect or turn over. The slaves were given a twice daily ration of water plus either boiled rice, millet, cornmeal, or stewed yams in small portions, resulting in near starvation and attendant illnesses. Many Africans died or went mad during the long weeks at sea. The loneliness, bewilderment and panic of those who survived the journey must have felt when they reached Boston, Baltimore or Charleston can hardly be imagined. The slaves were sick and exhausted, half naked, surrounded by sights of a strange civilization and the sound of a strange language. They were not allowed to talk to their fellow slaves. New arrivals who spoke the same African dialect were generally separated to keep them from conspiring to revolt.

Despite his considerable experience with discrimination for most of his life, Curtis always seems to focus on the positive. He is determined not to have his negative experience dominate his life. His story provides an example of how we hopefully can learn from our history without allowing ourselves to be consumed by it.

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