The world of patience gromes

Frank and Patience saw women sitting in chairs on front porches. Beside them crocus bags were folded and stacked in piles, and their hands worked quickly, methodically as they threaded drawstrings. They saw corner stores run by Jews from Poland where homemade pies sold for two cents. Grills and bars were scattered among the houses. Crowds of men came home from work wearing rough clothes, talking and laughing, walking on sidewalks and in the streets. Women in aprons stood on front porches waiting. Voices carried gently.

Frank and Patience rented an apartment in a wooden tenement on Denny. Within a week Frank began work as a laborer for the C&O. A year later they paid ten dollars down on a house of their own up on Denny near Charles Sessom’s ice house. Within a year Patience gave birth to their first child.

Frank worked graveyard shift, eleven in the evening until seven in the morning. Patience would have his breakfast ready for him when he came home. After eating, Frank would sit in a rocking chair in the living room drinking his toddy, smoking his pipe. At two-thirty in the afternoon he would go to sleep. At ten in the evening he would rise in time for work. As required by

The World of Patience Gromes: Making and Unmaking a Black Community






"Fulton is a neighborhood on the banks of the James River in Richmond, Virginia. The houses and tenements of Fulton are old and made of wood or brick. The men and women who live here are Black. Patience Gromes is 83 years old, quotes the Bible, and serves fried fish and spiced potatoes on Friday evenings. Her father was an indipendent farmer and businessman in the country during the worst years of segregation. Her grandfather escaped from slavery at age 14. William Francis, or Snort as he is called, is an enormous man with a bad temper. He will knock a person over for no reason and is widely feared. Yet when the gangs from neighboring districts pull a raid, people on the street call for his help. The Rev. Squire Dowd preaches in the afternoons from the pulpit of his front porch. He doesn't hesitate to explain to revelers the nature of their sins. Although normally a gentle person, he keeps a shotgun inside his front door and has been known to fire in self-defense. Patience and her contemporaries are the third generation since slavery. They moved in from the country at the turn of the century and brought wit


Scott C. Davis was born in 1948 in Seattle, graduated from Stanford in 1970, and now lives with his wife, Mary, in Seattle. He serves as the US correspondent for Damascus-based Ad - Domari magazine - the first independent publication in Syria since 1963. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Exquisite Corpse, and other publications. Davis’s first book, The World of Patience Gromes: Making and Unmaking a Black Community, won the Washington State Book Award. His second book, Lost Arrow and Other True Stories, won the KCAC Literary Award. Davis has edited and produced a distinctive collection of essays by 75 new writers. An Ear to the Ground: Presenting Writers from 2 Coasts was endorsed by Horton. He recently received a King County Arts Commission grant for his work-in progress: A cycle of carpentry tales. In 2003 Davis published The Road from Damascus: A Journey Through Syria. This is the first travelogue on Syria by an American in over a century and is based on Davis's travels in Syria since 1987.

For more information, visit www.scottcdavis.com | www.cunepress.net.






وصف الناشر



After the Civil War, Patience Gromes and other African-Americans of her generation left the country and came to the city. They married, took jobs, purchased houses, raised families. They pursued the program of hard work and thrift that their parents and grandparents had perfected in the country after the Civil War. Patience Gromes and her peers brought the project that three generations of African-Americans had been pursuing to a triumpant conclusion in the Civil Rights Movement. Then came a complex new world that rewarded a person's ability to wheel and deal in the city world, a world that rewarded bootleggers and gamblers and those who knew how to maneuver in a realm dominated by whites. Those who merely knew how to work, save, rear their children, build churches, schools, social clubs - those who merely knew how to lead good lives found themselves cut adrift. In this new modern world, Patience Gromes could scarcely survive.




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