Someone You Should Know

We called her GaGa. Maybe it was because she was from Louisiana and it was a Creole idiom for grandmother. Or maybe it was because her oldest granddaughter had a speech impediment early on, and couldn’t say ‘grandmama’. Whatever the case, you might not have known Loretta Davenport Smith, but you knew GaGa.

She came to Chicago in 1920 with her mother Celestine Barber, and at the age of 16 she married Roosevelt Davenport with whom she had three children:  Calvin, Madeline, and Nathaniel. They all lived with Roosevelt’s mother and stepfather Georgia and Earl Jennings, in a kitchenette apartment, at 5526 S. Michigan. 

Times were tough back then because of the Great Depression, and employment wasn’t on an upward swing until America entered World War II in 1941. The Works Progress Administration, formed in 1939, provided hard earned, honest money for Earl and his stepson Roosevelt. GaGa, on the other hand, got involved in what was called  ‘policy’. She wrote numbers for patrons in betting parlors, and delivered numbered slips and money to the policy headquarters located in a basement apartment on 54th and Prairie. Dangerous and illegal, but steady income, this precursor to today’s lottery was one of her earlier means of contributing to the family’s financial well-being.

Now GaGa was very fair-skinned with hazel eyes that turned gray or blue dependent on the color of her attire. Had she so desired, she could have easily passed for white but her refusal to do so caused her to be denied a job at Marshall Fields which her fair complexioned friend accepted without hesitation. GaGa’s favorite phrase, ‘Got to keep on keepin on’ was a never ending stimulus, and she was seldom without employment. She held several ‘legal’ occupations, the most sustainable being a waitress at an army officers’ club. From our conversations, her presence there can ironically be attributed to her being able to pass Hollywood’s ‘brown bag test’.

GaGa’s husband’s unfaithfulness, and her son Calvin’s heroin addiction caused her extreme vexation for several years. After a divorce she met Reon Smith, whom she married, and who was very adamant about moving to California. Wanting to start a new life, and seeing an opportunity to be relieved of her son’s continued harassment for money,  she and her new husband, in their mid fifties, moved to LA. Reon died suddenly a few years later, she remained in LA, but decided, at the age of 70, to return to Chicago.

She moved into a building about 5400 North, in a predominantly white area. At the age of 75 she shared with us that she wanted a companion. When asked why she didn’t pursue one she responded that there were only white men available, and  that she preferred men of the black persuasion. Within a month or so, after being informed that elderly black men frequently gathered at a McDonald’s on 7800 South Cottage Grove, she had moved into a building on 7600 South Maryland, 3 blocks from that particular McDonalds. 

Being the enterprising person she was, Ga Ga had no need to go to 7800 South Cottage Grove. Soon after the move, she came down from her apartment on the sixth floor and noticed an appealing gentleman in the lobby. She leisurely approached him and inquired if he knew how to defrost a freezer. He replied that he did and although the freezer was never defrosted they developed and maintained an intimate relationship for the next 15 years. They totall enjoyed traveling together and alternating their overnight night stays between her sixth, and his fourth floor apartment. According to GaGa , she had never been that happy in her entire life.

Today would have been her 101st birthday. I remember the day before she left this earthly realm, when just before her 91st birthday she announced, “If you want to see GaGa again, you’d better do it today”. I didn’t see her that day but I called that night. “How you doing GaGa?”, I asked. “I’m doing well”, she responded, “Just waiting on my mother”. Evidently her mother came, cause early the next morning, Ga Ga had passed on. 

The GaGa I speak of is my grandmother ya’ll, I love her, I appreciate the legacy she left, and I feel that she’s someone you should know. I ask that you join with me in saying ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY GAGA’, and implore you to at least consider her conviction to ‘keep on keepin on’, despite all odds, cause someday someway it’s gon all work out…in this realm and in the next.

I’ll holla… 


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