This anniversary week, I need to reflect on my g’mother and not be so distracted. Jessie Bryce was very intelligent and worldly for one who was raised on a small island in the Caribbean. She came to the US with just $32 and ultimately owned two houses … they weren’t great houses but they were her houses. As you can see by the photo, life in the US was a challenge. She did everything she needed to do to raise her son (his father was booted early on … he said he didn’t need to work because Jess would … he was also taken with his brother’s wife …) She lost most of her eyesight in a silk mill doing fine work and survived by working in people’s houses. In fact, she had to put my dad in a boarding school in Montreal for a couple of years so she could work in a house. The school was Mt. St. Louis and run by the Christian Brothers. Virtually all the students there were foreign. He came out of there believing that he would become a priest. My mother believed that she would grow up and become a nun. Whew! Kath almost missed the ride into this world. See what you would have missed!
For whatever reason, she moved around … I imagine going where jobs were. They lived in Los Angeles and Detroit … she had a half-brother, Dr. Roderick Adolphus Bryce, who was a medical doctor there … by that time, my father was able to sell the Detroit Free Press on the street to support them … When they returned to Syracuse, she worked in the rectory at Most Holy Rosary Church. When the stove blew up in her face, they merely bandaged her and put her to bed for a couple of days. Perhaps they didn’t think a Black face would be harmed by fire. (To this day, 65 yrs. later, I cannot light a fire.) During the war, she and my mother put a roof on the garage. She taught Mom how to cook West Indian and we enjoyed that for my mother’s life as well as hers. When the 1940 Census was recently released, I was half surprised that it stated she was from Spain rather than Port of Spain, Trinidad. She knew how to survive as did my dad. She read tea leaves for the neighbours and served as their “lawyer” filling out papers and assisting with those things that plague the foreign born. The Italian and Polish people that filled the neighborhood loved Miss Jessie and relied on her judgment and skills. I have her hands. I see her every time I look at them. She was my life for eleven years. She is my foundation today.