Lessons From Candy Hill

Growing up in the small central Texas town of Bryan in the 1950s and ‘60s, writer Sunny Nash lived in the segregated neighborhood of Candy Hill--a far-from-sweet maze of dusty, unpaved roads, mosquito-infested drainage ditches, three-room “shotgun houses” with outdoor toilets, and corner taverns where the beer flowed day and night.

Nash grew up in a poor neighborhood, but her childhood provided a wealth of memories--memories that remain as vivid as “the dead of dog days” of summer when the “Texas air was too hot and heavy to hold for any length of time in the lungs.”

She remembers the toothless old man who could take no more than 2-inch steps and who would sometimes spend half a day walking two blocks to buy a quart of Grand Prize beer.

She remembers the smell of burning hair from Miss Rosetta’s beauty shop across the street, a place where women “paid Miss Rosetta to anoint their heads with Royal Crown Hair Pomade and fry fresh shiny curls into their hair for church.”

And she remembers her first trip downtown with her mother for lunch and a movie when she was 4 years old--and how, after her mother ordered hamburgers at a lunch counter, they were forced to eat them outside, and how, at the movie theater, they had to bypass the upholstered seats and sit on splintered wooden chairs in the musty, unlit balcony.

But most of all, she remembers Bigmama.

Edna Minor Gibbs, Nash’s maternal grandmother, lived with Nash and her parents. Bigmama, as she was called by her young granddaughter, was the dominant force in Nash’s life throughout her childhood, and she plays a prominent role in Nash’s debut nonfiction book that chronicles her days growing up in Candy Hill.

“Bigmama Didn’t Shop at Woolworth’s” (Texas A & M University Press, 1997) is a collection of true-life stories--64 nostalgic vignettes ranging from two to five pages--that Nash wrote for Black Consciousness, a newspaper syndicate.

“Almost every story in there has something to do with some wisdom or lesson learned from Bigmama,” said Nash, 47, over coffee in Long Beach, where she moved in 1993 from Texas. “When I was picking the stories out for the book, the ones that the publisher liked the best were the ones that had Bigmama in them.”

Bigmama, whose father was Comanche, was born in 1890. She was, Nash said, a strong-willed, fiercely independent woman.

“Bigmama didn’t talk a lot,” Nash recalled. “She was pretty quiet until she felt she had something to contribute. One thing she hated was people whining about what they couldn’t do or couldn’t have. She would really get angry. That’s the point where she would lecture.

“She was the kind of person who, if she didn’t have something or couldn’t afford to buy something, she would figure a way to make it.”

Once, “She made a man’s suit for a relative. She didn’t have a pattern or anything. She sized him up and cut the fabric out, and it was a gorgeous suit.”

In her book, Nash describes Bigmama as someone who hummed hymns “to the rhythm of her knuckles on the rub board” as she washed the family’s clothes in a galvanized washtub. Bigmama owned hundreds of pairs of white gloves and never dreamed of going out in public without wearing a pair. And in 1961, after enduring 71 years of segregation, she defied the “Black Code” and sat under the “White Only” sign while waiting to visit a relative at the hospital.

“She just decided she wanted to see what would happen, and the nurses at the desk had been a little bit rude to her by ignoring her and so she just had enough and so she sat there,” Nash said. “Everybody was very uncomfortable. Especially me. I was terrified. I just knew they were going to call the police on us. But nothing happened.”

*

The reason Bigmama didn’t shop at Woolworth’s was not because it was for whites only.

It wasn’t. But in the 1950s and ‘60s, Nash said, “Woolworth’s was not a real welcome place for African Americans in the South. If you bought something, you could not return it. Or if it was an item of clothing, you couldn’t try it on.”

But there was a second reason Bigmama didn’t shop at Woolworth’s, even though she wasn’t welcome there, Nash said with a grin: “The quality of the merchandise did not suit her very expensive taste.”

Nash said the title of her book reflects “my very fierce pride in my grandmother. I think the book probably deals more with pride than with discrimination. I don’t talk about it much except to describe it as part of the environment.”

At the time, that included Nash and her friends in Candy Hill having to attend segregated schools.

Nash remembers coming home one day after the start of a new school year. She and her classmates had been issued used textbooks, discards from a white school, that were marked up with penciled-in curse words and racial slurs.

“I was complaining and whining, and Bigmama didn’t say a word; she just gave me a pencil with an eraser.”

Nash laughed at the memory.

“I knew there was a whole story behind her giving me that pencil. When she was a girl, she couldn’t go to school; there was no school for her to go to. So for me to complain because a book was marked up, she would not accept that.”

Nash’s book focuses on the ordinary, everyday events of growing up in Candy Hill, so named for the “candy men,” as the crews who cleaned the neighborhood’s outhouses were called.

Her parents, Henry and Littie Nash, still live in the old neighborhood. And in the same corner cottage they moved to in 1958 after leaving their wood-heated rental house nearby.

After graduating from high school in 1967, Nash was hired to sing jingles for a San Antonio recording company. She joined a rock band, sang studio backup for country music singer Mickey Gilley in Houston, met and married a gospel singer-guitar player, had a daughter in 1970 and divorced a year later.

Moving to New York, she became a studio musician for Brunswick Records and sang occasional backup vocals for Jackie Wilson and other singers. She toured the British Isles with singer Johnny Nash, her cousin, on his “I Can See Clearly Now” tour.

She then entered Texas A & M University, where she majored in journalism. For the last 10 years, she has been earning her living as a freelance writer.

She also has taken thousands of photographs of storefront churches from Harlem to Houston to Southern California for a planned book and photo exhibit she calls “Shopping for Hope.”

Bigmama died in 1972 at 82.

Nash was able to return home and see her ailing grandmother before she died. Her grandmother left her some jewelry and three or four of her favorite china cups.

But Nash already possessed Bigmama’s biggest gift: a positive attitude.

“Oh yeah, I absorbed that, I really did,” Nash said. “I still think about little things she’d say to me when I’m feeling despondent about some project I intended to do and didn’t do or an award I was up for and didn’t win. She’d say, ‘There’s one way you can ensure failure. That’s just not to try.’ ”