She figured running away and getting married would do the trick. Three of Evelyn’s siblings died young, and the age gap between Evelyn and her remaining sisters fostered a maternal streak that strengthened as she grew up.īut Evelyn wanted to get away from her parents and from Youngstown. She was the eldest of seven, and bore the brunt of her father’s strict upbringing and more than occasional beatings. N ew York City was supposed to be a fresh start for a woman born 25 years earlier in Youngstown, Ohio, as Evelyn Jane Blanshaw. When one of the nurses, Doris Williams, checked again at just after 8pm, Chaneta was gone. When two nurses checked in on the babies at 7.30 that night, all five babies – Chaneta the only black child – were fast asleep. To be able to live there, Clifford used a significant portion of his GI bill money, which also funded classes he took to get certified as a television repairman.įor this, the Holdens had migrated up from North Carolina, in search of a better life.Īt least Chaneta was safe in Lincoln hospital’s incubator ward, five babies strong, located on the second floor of the building. The kitchen wall was, as one newspaper report described it, “a surrealistic picture of plastic and patchwork”.įor this, Clifford and Anna paid $34 a week to their octogenarian landlord, so notorious for the squalor of his apartments that he’d already had 28 Harlem houses taken away from him by court order. The broken bathroom light fixtures hadn’t been replaced, but the darkness couldn’t hide the paper spread around the toilet bowl to catch droplets leaking from the ceiling. Rat holes plugged with bottles abounded in the kitchen and bedrooms. If she needed to run a bath, she went to a friend’s house. Anna spent her entire pregnancy without hot water in her home.
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