u/cagethehornytoad

My dad was born in 1940 and my mom was born in 1954, so I can only estimate that the pictures of my mom were taken around 1958 and 1970 (her senior picture), and my dad’s pictures taken around 1948 and 1957 (legend has it he flubbed his age to enlist before he was 18).

The photo of all three of us (1979) cracks me up, because they look like frazzled, new parents, trying to take a good picture, but really just looking like hostages. I was so hopelessly addicted to my pacifier, that you can tell they had to yank at the very last minute, lest I erupt in a fit. That morning’s grape jelly or whatever is caked around my mouth, and not one of the three of us looks genuinely happy. Gotta love it.😆

Edit: omg y’all!! I just finished episode one of Scandal, and now I see it!!

No, not that I look like Olivia Pope, (we have a similar smile, and that’s about it ) but that this is a good ass show I should’ve been watching all along! I love Reddit!!!!!

This was a strawberry lemonade cake with strawberry coulis and lemon cream cheese frosting. The “Dirty Thirty” is made from cherry chocolate chip blondies, coated with tempered white (I mean, blue) chocolate.

Apologies for no cross section shot, it was for a client, I don’t think they’d appreciate it.

This was a strawberry lemonade cake with strawberry coulis and lemon cream cheese frosting. The “Dirty Thirty” is made from cherry chocolate chip blondies, coated with tempered white (I mean, blue) chocolate.

Apologies for no cross section shot, it was for a client, I don’t think they’d appreciate it.

My family is complicated, and as a result I lost touch with beloved aunt Gloria. When we reconnected, the experience taught me a great lesson in the power of genetics. Here, all those years I thought I had free will, but as seen in the 2nd photo, even our physical mannerisms were creepily similar.

🥂 here’s to the power of family

Edit: This was at the Shakey’s Pizza in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I just searched and it’s no longer open 😭

I have mixed feelings about Jesse Jackson, but around the time this pic was taken with my dad, he was an instrumental figure in the Civil Rights Movement, so I love this photo of him and my dad- who was a fearless and idealistic man who fought hard his whole life to advocate for others and exceed the expectations laid out for him as poor black child born in 1940. He definitely did.

*it used to annoy me that the only copy I have of this photo is copy which was signed for my aunt in 2000 when she met Rev. Jackson at an event, however the more time passes, I like it. The signature is dated 2000, and my dad passed in 1999. When Jesse passed a few months ago, the photo suddenly felt like so much of a time capsule. Given the state of our country currently, this photo lives as a bittersweet relic from a time which was also brutal, yet there existed hope. I miss my dad, but I’m glad he didn’t have to see all of this- given how hard he pushed in the opposite direction.

My dad was the second of six, in the first pic, he’s the little guy in the chair. He was one of the first- if not the first- black students admitted to the university he attended. He was a soldier, a world class chef, and a fearless civil rights activist. Here he’s pictured with Jesse Jackson sometime in the late 60’s. He was always impeccably dressed. His favorite expression was, “when you look good you feel good, and when you feel good you do good”.

Looking good, Pops.

This happy little camper is a 4” chocolate fudge cake, filled and topped with chocolate ganache. This is topped with toasted graham cracker crumble. The logs are made of the same crumble, packed into log shaped fondant molds, frozen, and brushed with bittersweet tempered chocolate. The flames and greenery are cinnamon French buttercream, topped with a skewer of toasted marshmallows.

This is the freeway overpass area of the SMART trail. It’s been up for several days.

Petaluma has a problem. The entire last year that I waited in the Kenilworth Junior High car pickup line, I heard countless children shouting this word, as well as doing N*zi salutes.

Last Christmas, local businessman and former Harlem Globetrotter had his car vandalized with racial slurs:

https://abc7news.com/post/petaluma-police-investigating-former-harlem-globetrotter-william-bullard-says-car-vandalized-racial-slurs/18284464/

This is when I met with the administrators at Kenilworth and asked them to hold an assembly, or implement a program addressing racism, they declined. They said they did one two years ago. I spoke with the district, and spoke at a city council meeting on the matter, to no avail.

Then I did some digging and discovered that Petaluma was a sundown town until 1970, extremely odd for a non-southern town. That sentiment has lingered.

https://petalumahistorian.com/petalumas-days-as-a-sundown-town/

I love this town because it IS so old timey- an accessible respite from city life—but it’s irresponsible to live here and bury our heads in the sand. The black population here is less than 2%, and I don’t wonder why. For inclusive and liberal as this town purports to be, it’s sometimes hard to believe. It tough to feel welcome when this hateful word has been up for several days; on one of the most popular walking trails, in full view of the police and SMART trucks which drive that trail daily. Many people have seen it, yet it remains.

What are we going to do?

EDIT: rode past a couple of hours ago and they painted over the ‘black is beautiful’ with a heart around it, which was up for less than 12 hours. Good to know the city’s priorities are in check when it comes to removing offensive graffiti 😆

My grandmother was born Beulah Joplin in 1918, in Bethel Springs, Tennessee. She was the youngest of 8 and she and her family were ‘gleaners”, which was a rung beneath a sharecropper. They essentially lived on the scraps sharecroppers left behind.

The second photo is her and my grandfather, Joffrey. The group photo is my grandma with all of her brothers and sisters, she’s bottom left. She outlived them all by decades. I can’t imagine.

The baby in her lap is my dad, her second oldest. She had 6 total. Pictures 6 and 7 are her 99th birthday party. She’s opening a portrait of my father I painted for her (he was her favorite and passed away 20 years before her 😢). The pic of her looking at me crazy was followed by, “you painted this?!?!” Haha.

The last photo is of legendary ragtime composer, Scott Joplin, who was grandma’s great, great uncle. Pretty cool.
(This is not a family photo, I found it online)

I regret to say it but I don’t even know his name. I know that hers was Cora. She was born a slave but freed at a young age and supposedly her masters were on the benevolent end of that spectrum because they recognized her brilliance and saw to it that she was well educated.

By the time this picture was taken, she and her husband owned the company or general store in their town- and again, I regret that I don’t know where that was. They were essentially king and queen of their community, and he handled…collections. He was the guy you didn’t want knocking, and I think his portrait reflects that.

It’s bittersweet looking at these, knowing what was to come, but for this period of time I love that my people got to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

I’m unclear on the year any of these were taken. My grandmother was born in 1918, and I had the honor of attending her memorial services in 2018. She was the youngest of 8 and outsurvived them all by decades. I don’t know a ton about my great grandmother, Jeanette, however I do know that her mother, Cora, was born a slave, but was made literate by her masters. After she was freed, she did quite well. At the time this photo was taken, sitting for a portrait was quite expensive and not everybody had one, ESPECIALLY not black folks. I love her silk dress and the look on her face is nothing less than regal.

I’m so fortunate to have any photos of my relatives from this far back. Jim Crow hit my folks hard and by the time my father was born in 1940, my family had next to nothing, however somebody held onto these photos because they meant so much.

**apologies for the quality of the photos, their pictures of pictures**

EDIT: I never expected this post to garner so much attention. I saw that gorgeous colorized photo of a lady from around the same era as my grandma’s colorized photo so I thought I’d share. I wish it’d occurred to me last week for Juneteenth.

It’s been emotional reading these comments. I always knew that it was special for my family to have photos and an idea of our history, but I’m realizing more and more just how rare it really is, especially considering black erasure is still happening as we speak!

I have many more photos and I’ll post them all, with as much information as I have. My family didn’t have much- especially post Jim Crow- but they were gorgeous, elegant, stylish, and humorous folks, and it. Really come through in these pic. These don’t just belong to me, they belong to all of us. Much love

i made this for a friend’s daughter’s 10th birthday.

I started with mid weight (9.5 oz., I believe) black denim and reverse tie dyed with bleach. Once it was washed, dried, and pressed, I laid it flat on a plastic sheet and used Jacquard dyes, diluted- applied with pipettes and sponges, then quickly further diluted with a spray bottle with water. After this was dried, washed and pressed, I cut the pattern (which I freehanded on paper), and assembled. I incorporated 2 layers of heavy duty interfacing to keep the brim rigid and non-droopy. The cord was made of twine that I dyed and twisted, then coated in pearlescent medium. The stars are Posca white acrylic paint marker.

The flip in the brim and the bends in the top of the hat were created by a series of fishing lines hooked and affixed in a number of places and this was the most frustrating and time consuming part of the project—- also not very pretty, so I sewed a circular panel about 4 inches up so nobody had to see it 😎

**apologies for only one photo, I’m trying to get better with progress pics. This one was a time crunch**

I’ve never been a cat person, in fact I’m pretty allergic. This cat ignored me for the better part of a year- living directly across the street- I liked to watch her hunt insects but that was about it.

Then she started hanging out in the front yard, and I discovered she was a bongo cat. One night, her human stayed out for the night, this one jumped through my bedroom window and slept in the crook of my knee and the rest was history: She wants to be with me 24/7. I work from home which doesn’t help.

Her human confronted me and sternly asked me to shoo her away from now on, which I swear I tried, but she’s scratched and bitten me trying to remove her from my house, also she smarter and faster than me. Add to all of this, I’m in love with her and- as I’m seeing is a common thread— she happened to “adopt” me during the roughest year of my life (so far). I’m convinced that cats are angels, even if this angel is going to get me beaten up.

Worth it :)

Blink and you’ll miss ‘em! These were yellow cake with a peach melba mousse filling and vanilla bourbon buttercream.