The hiSTORY of Barbara Pete...

Growing up was so wonderful. I grew up the oldest of ten siblings and something was always going on. We had cousins who came over often and life was really great. Sure we got whippings but not me because they hurt.  Back then everybody got whippings so it was no big thing and you wouldn’t go to jail for whipping your kids. Besides we didn’t think our parents didn’t love us because they didn’t beat us. Growing up we didn’t have much to watch on TV. It was a lot of cartoons and cowboy movies which I still like today. Also, what we did was we played outside all the time. We played baseball and skating, but I had to watch myself cause mama didn’t want me to break my legs. We also played pop the whip. My parents bought me white dolls that we played with but most of us put those up. We had something called twine and we would play hair and do designs on it. We had several of those. This may be off topic but my favorite food growing up was okra and rice, mustard greens with fried chicken.

Something that I was told growing up that makes me proud of where I come from is that my maternal grandfather was a plantation owner’s son. All of his brothers and his sisters were the plantation owner’s kids. So my grandpa had red kinky hair and blue eyes. And I was told that my grandma was Blackfoot Indian but we never had the proof that we were Indian decent accept for the high cheek bones and stuff like that.

My dad was in WW2. I wasn’t born until 1947, but Vietnam was a really hard thing because that was right in my era of growing up. A lot of black guys were killed from my hometown. Then Kennedy died and that hurt us all a lot. Then my mom passed in 1968 and then Martin Luther King died. The sixties were kind of rough times.

As a young adult I was already married and raising children. My mom died and I had to take on the responsibility of raising all of my brothers and sisters as well as my kids. My mother left a 6month old baby behind. I had to learn how to cook because my family only consisted of me, my husband, and our two kids. I knew how to cook for them but to cook for all of my brothers and sisters was hard. I was only 20 when my mother died and she was 43. She only let me do certain things in the kitchen so I didn’t know a lot of things about cooking. That was a hard period in my life. And learning how to deal with teenagers and preteens was hard. I had some that were my kid’s ages but I had to learn how to deal with pre-teens and teenagers. My mother influenced me by the way she raised kids and the way she cooked so I strived to be a very good mother and a good cook. I learned from this experience that you just have to be a strong person and don’t give in because when my mother died I was just getting to know her as a person and friend so her death was very saddening. I cried every year for so many years on mother’s day and stuff. And it hurt. After I started getting grandkids I noticed it wasn’t so bad. It was then that I stopped crying. Having kids and grandkids are my greatest joy!

Barbara Pete with her new Great-granddaughter Loriyah!!

Something that I remember about growing up in my generation were the home remedies that they used on us. We didn’t just run to the hospital for everything. I remember they would fry the fat off a hog and then you put turpentine in it and then you rub it on your chest and back if someone had a cold and stuff. Then we had mamoo tea which is French named, but it was the bark of a certain tree that you had to go out into the woods and cut. Then they would put a little whisky, lemon, and honey that they used to make the tea. If you were sick with pneumonia or a really bad cold they gave it to them to drink and it breaks the fever. My mom gave it to me and it broke my fever and I was sweating and sweating. Oh and there was another thing if you got cut they would get the spider web from off the porches which is why they didn’t sweep them down. If you were bleeding they would get the spider web and put it on there and it would stop the bleeding.

I have a lot of drugs down in my family. I have two brothers who died from AIDS from needle use. And there’s still crack use in my family to this day that hurts me so bad. And mental health issues like depression and schizophrenia, as well as bipolar disorder runs in my family and it hurts me. I get depressed too but I take medication. And I have rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, and blood pressure, but the worst is when my body hurts me all the time from the arthritis although I am in partial remission but not nearly as bad when I’m not in remission.

I’ve had some life experiences that I never imagine would be a part of my history. I had to ride on the back of the bus for white folk to have the front of the bus. I had to go to the back of the restaurant to order food. And there was a Kress downtown where they had a lunch counter with 5 seats at the back where blacks could sit. The white waitresses didn’t wait on us the black ones did and they may have only had one. I’ve also traveled to some very beautiful places. I traveled for fun. I traveled to Canada, Detroit Michigan, Mexico, San Antonio, and a boat cruise around the different Mexican stops. On the cruise each night they would have a formal night for people would have dinner and you have to dress up. It had so much stuff you could do on the cruise. Going to Mexico was just a whole new scenery for me. Canada, just to go into another little country and see that its really no different from home was interesting for me. I’ve been to New York and I saw the Niagara Falls which was beautiful. I rode in the Over sky rails in Detroit that was different. Scary but different.

My faith is non denomination. My parents were Catholic and I was catholic for 50 years of my life. I’m more involved with my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ now and that keeps me going. My beliefs are really important to me because I want to please God. If I didn’t truly love the Lord and want to go to heaven I guess I would be all out there when I was younger. But I wasn’t in the streets or nothing like that.

If I could tell the younger generation anything it would be to be true to yourself and God because if you can’t be that then you don’t have nothing. As to my children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren I want them to remember me as a good person. As a God-fearing woman. I’m a reader and they don’t like to read so I don’t have any heirlooms to pass down. I just hope that they would all love one another because I know I’m getting older and I’m not promised here forever. I just hope sometimes that they are closer because I have this feeling in me that everyone is just going to forget one another once I’m gone. And I wish I could’ve went to college but I couldn’t so I would love to see my grandkids accomplish college degrees.

I’m so proud of my faith and my struggles which just made me a better person in life. Like everyone I’ve had my share of struggles but I thank God for my struggles and bringing me out.

Barbara Pete

          ….A beautiful hiSTORY told!