Our Time PressThe Local Paper with the Global View

-Bernice Elizabeth Green

In late winter 1998, artist-photographer Barry L. Mason, his daughter, Da’Nelle Mason and I attended an Underground Railroad tour event hosted by LaFern Joseph in Peekskill, NY. Joseph, proprietor of The Fern Tree gift shop in the city introduced us to historian-writer Ethel Lipscomb Jackson. After the tour, we visited Ms. Jackson at her apartment in her home city and quickly learned the reason Joseph insisted we meet the elder who personified the message of the Million Woman March, held the previous October. In the photos, Elder Jackson is seen, as a toddler; as the only African American in her graduating class at the city’s Oakside H. S., and, in Barry’s photo, working at her faithful electric typewriter on a book about her travels. The article emphasized how Elder Jackson. A nonagenarian, at the time, was “making her mark and embracing the future.”

The spirit of Harriet Tubman is vibrant and strong in Peekskill, N.Y., more than a century after she led runaway slaves to the shelter of the AME Zion Church on Park Street. The small building, a study in resiliency of formerly enslaved Africans, abides in the sentiments and actions of Ethel Lipscomb Jackson, 94 (1998), author of “My Memories of 100 African American Peekskill Families,” and in the convictions of LaFern Joseph, owner of The Fern Tree, an African Gift Shop on South Division Street.

Like their activist ancestor, both Ms. Jackson and Sister Joseph are committed to providing resources for African American families to keep them strong and proud; Elder Jackson, through her book and the stories she shares so generously; Sister Fern, through her work with Sisters in Support, a health, education, and employment referral service for women of African descent and their families living in northwestern Westchester County, 35 miles north of New York City.

Peekskill was established as a town around the time of Harriet Tubman’s birth in Maryland. Ms. Jackson, the daughter of Joseph Lipscomb and Hattie Scott, was born in 1904, in Peekskill, nine years before Tubman’s death in Auburn, N.Y. In her book, “Memories …”, she describes African American families that she had known during her lifetime: The Amorys, Hicks, Hortons, Moshiers, Petersons and others.

In fact, Ms. Jackson has known most of the black families who ever lived in that city. She can recall the names of men and women who made their living as domestics, coachmen, boarding room owners, butchers, music teachers, taxi owners, wrecking car owners, beauty and barber shop owners, and more. She knew people who worked Peekskill’s foundries forging iron into stoves for homes across the nation; she knew seed and grain dealers, like her father.

She knew the relatives of Lydia Hicks Hutchinson, who was at the Peekskill Railroad Station when President Lincoln spoke from the platform off the rear of the train in 1861. She knew the families whose cars were stoned by whites standing on either side of the road 88 years later, in 1949, as they drove up the hill from the famous Paul Robeson concert. She knew the struggling Hallenbecks, who arrived in Peekskill in an old houseboat, and lived on it until it started falling apart, then moved to an outbuilding at Annsville Creek. “They taught three generations of boys how to swim,” she recalls.

At the annual Lincoln Banquets in the 1920s, held at church on Black History Day (then Lincoln’s birthday), she learned about the struggles and contributions of her people. She recalls how “Colonel” William Singleton, born in Newborn, N.C., “the son of the slave owner’s brother and a slave woman,” often spoke of being sold a number of times. “He could not read nor write until he was 38 years old. And when he spoke of slavery, he shed tears. He was a tall, big man.” His life story, she says, is recalled in an autobiography published in Peekskill in 1922 entitled “My Recollections of Slavery.”

Mrs. Jackson, whose parents, Hattie Scott Lipscomb and Joseph Lipscomb, moved to the area in the 1890s, once lived with her husband, William, at 668 Harrison (a house they planned, built, and later sold to the black Mt. Lebanon Baptist Church, next door).

The couple meticulously manicured the front lawn, creating a backyard-Eden which yielded zinnias, peonies, dahlias, lilacs, cannas, hollyhocks, apples, peaches, plums, oaks, a red maple, and vines of plump, sweet grapes, which they canned as jelly. It’s no wonder Mrs. Jackson with her cat, Gray Cloud, appeared in the home section of The New York Amsterdam News. (November 22, 1952)

In another life, she might have been a travel writer or a columnist, but Ethel L. Jackson — a constant letter-writer — chose the health field. She was a licensed practical nurse for 40 years and volunteered at the Peekskill Hospital for 22 years. Despite the condition of her health (her fingers are challenged by arthritis), she crochets (Afghans) and is writing a book about a 35-day cross-country trip in 1969.

As she did for “Memories…,” Elder Jackson is typing her manuscript on an old electric Smith-Corona. (She gave up bowling at age 90 and driving a car “when it became too difficult to downshift” at about the same time).

She loves Peekskill’s “rocks and rills” she wrote in her book. She also pined, “Each time a tree is cut down, I feel the saw within me. I age as buildings are renovated or torn down. If I could plan a city, I would leave some old, some new so that them memories would not all fly away to a tiny city within my mind.”

Jackson says she compiled the information for “Memories …” because “there are so many new people coming to Peekskill who didn’t know about the old ones.”

La Fern Joseph shares similar concerns for different reasons. So many young people, Joseph told us, were drifting through life and needed mentoring. Many families need support systems, she told us. And that too was rallying cry of the Million Woman March in Philadelphia, for which Joseph and her friends were New York State coordinators.

When Joseph sought an answer to the “Now-that-the-Million-Woman-March- has-happened, now-what?”-queries directed at her and others, she realized there was work to be done right where she lives: from referral networks for the embattled to the process of seeking approvals and placing plaques indicating landmarks in the history of Africans in the area where she lived. Joseph looked around and saw there were no markers where Harriet Tubman once walked, no testaments to the legacy of those families she freed, no reminders of the courage of Paul Robeson.

As part of a sister-support network, she saw a need: finding a way to connect with young people who knew much about Little Kim, and not enough about Kemet: “no knowledge of the roads traveled by their historical ancestors like Tubman or Robeson.” Or even Ethel Lipscomb Jackson who will be honored February 28 by LaFern and her sister New York State Million Woman March coordinators, among them Dr. Vickie Gholson of New York City, Janice Williams of Queens, and Elizabeth Fulcher of Brooklyn.

The all-day event will benefit the work of a mentoring and referral service for women of African descent and their families. The day’s highlights she informed us will include a gala performance by Gloria Lynne, a tour of Historical Peekskill Underground Railroad sites, and workshops — one directed by Regent Adelaide Sanford.

There also will be a special award given to Ethel Lipscomb Jackson
In a recent meeting with La Fern and Dr. Gholson, Mrs. Jackson revealed she will wear “an African gown made in Senegal” for the gala tribute, and that of all the numerous honors she has received over the years, the one she receives on February 28 with generations of family members present, is the highlight of her life. “It is because the award is being given to me by African American women,” the elder activist told us.

Commented Dr. Vickie Gholson, who accompanied Sister Fern on our visit to Elder Jackson’s apartment, “This is what it is all about. This is what we are trying to teach young people: that in growing old gracefully — to get old — is to win.”