Text
10
Mabel
take
Page
Han1pton
you
horn~ until
it's
tl-ian
me.
this
And
sl1e
"Wl1at.' s youi'T name?"
do yoi,1 know
I says,
11
1\Jo.
Sl1e says,
tlnti
Yo1.1're
in
you're
was
taller
at?"
City
Jersey
know
"f-Iow did
I -.iust
taller--she
11
corr1e here?"
.Jome on,
my
She
told
because
it's
me to
sit
"
I I r◄
left
.. "
City.·•
Jersey
}tOL"l
1 s11.e ca1ne baclr.
and
bit
wl1ere
"Al r i gl1.t, '' sl1e
late,
will
''
1 don't
Sl1e said,
here
says,
"mabel,
11
And they
aunt.
a little
"Mabel.
11
your
woman was
I says,
I says,
for
r i gl1 t . "
" A 11
So,
time
f6
·boyfriend
in
the
bar.
getting
Sr1e di'?anked
·•
a lot.
was
\.T:
Was
M:
Black.
So,
she
So,
they
7th
or
wl1i te
she
says,
"(:ome
lived--now,
8th
and
or
black'?
I ' 11 ta.ke
or1 ..
she
somewhere
live
goin'
b.er
on Fifth
into
l1ome to
mo tl1er.
Street.
Grove
"
That
Street-•
somewhere
She
around
says,
in
11
I didn't
there.
Con1e or1,
now.
find
those
things.
11
6
l
----------------------
Page
J.via
be 1 Hampton
I'
that
111
boy
..
and
cop--!
the
I krow
she
So
took
I thanked
"I'll
says,
tell
She
says,
the
cop,
I
shut
to
kj_sst_,d
II
All
II
n.
"Come
n1e "goodbye.
got
lady's
ays
up
Sl1e says,
hand.
T}~e girl
girl.
the
11
T'he cop' 11 tl1ir1k
know wl1at
to
tell
"
She
you."
through
that
lady's
aunt,
yol1r
and
l1im. "
yo1.1 tell
"Alright,
this
So I go on with
cut
and whe
the
So
them.
of
"Al'
_ rig~ lt" .
ys
I says,
Sle
d see
total
me by
the
Is
I dor1 t
cou
when
I' 1n tl1inking
and lcoked.
I turned
tl1i11.king
£7
11im."
We wall-{ed ..
woman.
like
streets
we were
doing
in
We walked
..
The
this
Park
She was a trifle
•
1nc)rn1ng
.
bit
•
taller
or
tl1an
something
Okay>
walked
and
and
walked
and
all
says,
was
She
me.
like
so
she
walked
some
n1y
have
that
'cause
took
me,
and
walked,
been
a woman
I haven't
and
we walked
then
around
grown
and
we walked,
five
see.
walked
and
and
walked,
more.
private
"I-fe.1..e' s
must
• i,::> C:
houses.
motl-ier,
" and
Nice1
private
s11.e ope11ed
7
houses.
a ,gat.e,
and
live
went
Mabel
Hampton
J:
Page
We have
(Tape
is
to
was
We went
a gate.
And she
on a porch.
I says,
a second.
paused).
Opened
and
stop
£8
'' 1iss
says,
up
a flight
"My name
is
3tairs
of
Bessie."
Bessie?"
•
Sl1e says,
"Yes.
taller
than
a little
So,
good
I looked
lookin'
C
._)o
You have
going
Sl1e looked
at
not
too
me,
at
but
I says
her.
me and
She was
smi 1 ed ..
much.
to
11
1nyself,
Gee,
she
s
."
she
,
"
to
back
,.Mamma, I brought
.sa y s ,
take
to
of
ca1"9e
visit
her
l1er
boyfriend
''That'
or
stay
some
lost
back-
- ''
girl
..
S11.e was
bing.
l1ome r10 tin1e.
I'll
s okay.
a little
I goin
'cause
Mamma sa 'trs
., ' '' You d(Jn' t
Sl1e says,
you
"
be back."
•
So,
by
the
she
hand
I says,
In
lighter
says,
the
than
went
and led
''Y es,
room
all
,...h
,:> e s ai . d ,
I said,
So,
n1a , am .
•
of
"Miss
sl1.e said,
She
us.
stairs,
says,
and Mamma took
a bj_g
"Yot.1're
Sr),
man and
Mother
El le~r1 Wl1i te.
girl."
another
11
says,
Miss
girl
\'Thi te.
''
White."
a11nt.
"That's
me
IC
a grey-haj_red
"Who learr1t
"My
down the
me in.
sat
"My nan1e is
I said,
on back
you
how i..,o tallt'i'
I go t.o scl-1001.
verj?
nice.
8
11
··
"
She
saic_i,
''You
11
Sl1e
Mabel
I sai, . d
gave
Page
Han1pton
II
y es,
ma ' am.
I'd
II
ate
t]1e
f9
the
sandw:i.cl1
girl
rr1e.
d
So,
she
I tl1inl{
at
•
she
the
you
grace
.
what
she
,....., ()
C
didn't
'
"
he
eay·c.
►J
• ~
look
gonna
tl1e
be
'
him,
I
my head
Ellen
I sai,:l
said,
to
man,
said
and
She
told
me to
and
she
my head
says,
this
sit
sat
to
.girl
at
dawn
just
say
my
" -t,ha·t.' s
"Pappa,
him
and
l1as
l1ad
all.
I
si ttin,
girl
light
here's
I can
l.111til
a girl
fir1d
''Yo,1' 11 nevei.,.
a1:. tr1e
that's
he1."' people
tl1em. ''
find
my eggs.
sl1e
"T'hat'
son1e
nothin'.
"Ellen,
myself,
ate
biscuits,
like
girl--the
"Mamma,
1ny ~elf,
.. P.3.ppa,
said
awhile
to
some
sl1e
I didn't
II
says,
for
1.1s
..
I just
table:..-she
wit11.
To me,
dropped
"Y ea l1
had
I bowed
tc.1 the
t.urr:1.ed t.o tl1e
She
of
at
and
Sl1e s.3.ys,
him.
and
t]1e table,
at
me,
sl'1e turned
1.1p.
eggs
some·t.hing.
down
watching
call
bringing
end
I sat
sit,
S,o,
or
11.3.d bc1con
table.
like
some
scrambled
can
sleep
s good.
9
with
I like
me.
I I
her.
Good
.. ''
I
t1abel
looking·,
-
balls
great
Light
tall.
because
Her
skin.
it
had
I have
c1f fire."
brown
she
f 1()
Page
Han1pton
-
all
hair
wrapped
her
was
longer
than
tu.rned
up and
was
picture.
mine
around
like
that.
she
got
I'll
eating,
me to
take
you
she
to
"'vi7hen you
says,
the
bathroom
and
tl1rough
get
you
can
she
says,
with
come
bec1 . "
my
''Y es,
I say,
~o--she's
I'm
and
up
na.med
in
goir1g
ma , am.
situation
just
like
an ordinary
and
rooms
downstairs.
There
ki tcl1en.
her
after
1nother--so
"Mom1ny,
1...oon1."
the
Now? the
II
at
their
house
co1ne
was
different.
'fhere
today.
r ot1
was
house
01.1·t.
011
was
the
rooms
upstairs
f ro1n the
porch
a stove--everything--table,
diningroom,
everyt.l1ing.
after
So,
l
I got
bathroom--gave
me a towel
See;
didn't
cry.
washed
my face
in
there
out,
and
put
it
clothes
to
couldn't
-
got
--
__ ____
-......,
eating,
and
I was
one
she
washed
and
a little
Miss
things
very
and
on,
I know
find
out
who I was--where
'cause
I'd
10
she
Ellen,
she
I come
left
So,
woman.
from
and
me to
the
I still
wash.
nightie
shoes
see,
to
my hands
put
took
White
stubborn
on,
do that
-
done
gave
me--went
brought
it
searched
from.
everything
she
my
She
behind
me.
Mabel
I didn't
leave
papers
So,
But
and
she
I knew
r1ever
it
in
things
and
says,
he
the
was
told
i--ernembe1~ tl1at
011, she
M:
Yes.
next
we goi~ to
h er.
start
sit
train--the
they
much
about
older
Much older
'ti).
me tight--oh,
my uncle,
here
and
come
t]1ey
nineteen
than
than
would
How old
J:
beca
with
came
park
was
or
I was
went
back.
she?
twenty.
you.
And when
me.
11
to1norrowc
they
I lived
the
been
people
given,
that
in
have
was
arms--held
So,
that
story
must
J:
I slept
on the
yotir
I had
and
me to
M:
for
them
a minister,
I l1ad to
girl,
lool{
I told
and
her
it
I left
description
shoppj_ng
me in
park,
"We'll
tl·1en1.
that
the
I had.
with
find
fll
Page
Han1pto11
so
she
held
comfortable,
up a breeze.
morning
we got
1.1p,
abot:t.t
ir1qui1~j_n'
mothei .. told
and
tl1.is
11er,
"Now,
We ca11' t. keep
b:id.
fl
(Suddenly,
\
l·1ave to
much
louder).
M:
She
must
J:
Oh,
she
11:
Yes.
her
arms--held
girl,
I slept
have
was
'
was she?
How old
send
me in
~a1· d
I)ad . ~
been
much
Mucl1 older
nineteen
th·n
tl1ar1 me.
me tight--oh,
I was
up a breeze.
11
'
'ca
1
-
·1sA
\..,
we'd
Ellen?
about
older
"No
or
twenty.
you.
And wl1en
so
sl1.e l1eld
comfortable,
Ellen?
I
Mabel
Page
Hampt,on
So)
we got
nex·t
to
rno1:ning
start
we got
inquirin'
mother
and
l'.lp,
about
this
told
f12
l-ier,
We can't
kid.
11
N·ow,
keep
II
h er.
(Suddenly,
hav·e
to
his
1n1-1cl1
her
send
hand
to
Dad
lotlder).
scl1ool.
up my dress,
I-!e was
11
feelin'
J:
When did
t1:
That
said,
the
my pussy,
that
"No,
'cause
first
one
and
I told
we'd
eve1 .. 1.~an
Ellen.
happen?
abot1.t
l1appened
sj_x montl1s
seven
01~
1nonths
later.
Okay,
bring
you
to
up
1'1:
next
door
to
around
there
in
Italian
out
the
Second
house
most
was white
people
So
she
says
e ery
par
e.r
H
I
0.
told
I didn't
But
II
H
I kne
ause
e.
d th~m
d l i 11 l1e1:
day.
next
door
that
as
so,
and
"You don't
t
a
second
Italian
lookin'
'cause
says,
was
and
party
woman
the
Okay~
day.
this
the
to
Tl1en we' 11
date.
a searching
find
go back
Italians,
for
and
they
this
give
woman.
remember
where
were
them
the
hews
tryin'
nas
1
Mamrna called
going
send
They couldn't
dRscription
I come from.
.ncle
t
to
of
place?"
the
I knew my
us was--
Everytl1ing
people.
them
to
,ruld
m~s~ \ith
I
.Knew
kill
m-.
Mabel
you
Hampton
know he'd
her.
the
kill
Whenever
So,
They ain't
nothin'
So,
I just
nobody
by
tl1e
me up
in
school.
donJt
know,
Monmouth
t}1e
of
l{ids
---------
went
tc•
a girl.
ain't
I come
we'll
put
figured
fron1
was
they
her
11--"
told
the
[Kolb]--Monmouth
in
So,
Jersey.
teacher
and
Tl1i.r·ty-Two.
I didn't
school.
sigr1ed
tl1ey
there,
I
[Kolb]--
I think
Street--Thirty-Two.
everybody.
And
I got
try
to
along
beat
tl1.e
wi tl1.
up nobody
scared.
M:
Yes,
l
what
[Kolb]
Was it
I playAd
Ma1111na,
yeai ... somebody
and
J:
we all
They
missin'
T1'1ey figure
lt
was
have
them_
for
They
now.
tell
that.
that
and
about
New York
tl1e
t1~1e scl1ool
didn't
,cause
and
Street
a word
days--nothin'.
s21id,
And,
why I wouldn't
I had
anything
think
of
I was too
'cause
They
end
but
me,
New York.
Eller1
~1aybe
all
said
them
tl1en
to
about
about
let
So that's
passed--three
thought
ot1t
11llmber
spoke
days
churches;
*
another.~
they
two
f13
Page
black
in
to
Jersey
worry
was
the
same.
ith
the
kids,
and
whit
City
students
was black
it
anything
about
I mean,
and
the
------------------
too?
me hittin'
I went
Italian
---
and white.
---
to
somebody
Sunday
boys
-----
and
school
girl
-------
This murder
hasn't
been mentioned
in any transcr·
ts
up to now, but the videotaped
interview
ith
Mabel indicate~
that
her aunt wanted
money from her grandmother
to get this
man ut of some sort
of scrape.
If theres
further
13
Mabel
Hampton
reference
were
wanted
to
very
nice.
get
a little
ragged--the
of
"new
I'll
this
cross-reference
Naturally,
bit,
girl
"--I
the
Italian
know.
you
d fj ght
boys,
They
the1n
and
they
would
that
run
me
was
the
cry
or
er1d
that.
So,
•
tianscript
another
fl4
(SA)
pag'e.
they
in
Page
sorry
that
all
went
J:
Did
you
for
I was
didn't
even
tell
kissed
me.
I didn't
wanted
After
to
discovered
nothing.
Ellen
tell
where
M:
\vhere
I'd
year.
lonely,
Mabel,
or
to
do anythingw
feel
but
lived
you
like
M:
Miss
White
get
rid
about
that
See,
all
from
or
feel--·like
mother
woma1 that
from?
Nobody
notl·1i.ng.
kn.ew
otl1e1" kids
the
and
had
How did
fatl1er.
you
an orphan?
said
me and
that
that
And they
no missin'
he
first
I
Mabel.
feel
see.
the
come
you'd
come
with
of
was
See,
her.
How dj_d. you
a year,
nothin'
get
stubborn
About
they
Did
too
J:
J:
feel?
ever
Ellen.
I come from
family,
a whole
your--
M:
where
for
maybe
was
read
he'd
they
wanted
a good
the
looked
was
14
for
the
me.
mc,ney
and
way to
papers--it
Many years
person.
said
my aunt
do it.
didn't
later
say
I
He didn't
and
uncle
what
look
was
Mabel
brought
to
story
f15
that
comes
in
part
of
the
showed me how to
do
on another
altogether.
work
and
that,
M:
Housework.
Showed
son
a light
parks
·1
t1ere
was
night
I slept
So,
she
I would
tell
ber.
she
a girlfriend
had
loved
This
were
they
in
me.
him sat
up to
her
down to
other
out
talkin'
talk
girlfriend's
to
wanted
was.
So,
tl1e
every
during
end
later--she
one
Ellen
of
told
s rnotl1er.
house,
thjs
her.
night,
1
the
was
Everything
to
her
girl.
happened
I belon~ed-
take
wante d to
a good
at
and
that.
was
lived
was
would
mother
house.
found
was
His
anything
a private
like
Benny,
like
B enny
She
that
She wished
man told·--they
and
And,
And she--I
things
saw Ellen
it.
named
And he
l
w~er_
him.
I know
arms.
ho11ses.
was out
that
h ere
want
her
private
mother
and
in
and
she
playgrounds
and
And Ellen
fellow
looking.
'cause
gay--now
another
int
cook
things.
good
didn't
Ellen
street,
girl
and
Ellen
Ellen
with
' s a pause
marry
day,
goin'
me how to
me those
felJ.ow--was
Ellen.
to
showed
was
little
marry
know.
of work?
Nobody
c~o,
you
What kind
EJ.len
me to
things,
J:
see.
was
he started--they
Pappa,
different
there.
the
So,
them.
So, then
he
Page
Hampton
and
and
his
Ellen
I wasn't
,
Mabel
Hampton
And,
the
Ellen,
nobody
friends
goi11
"I' 11 see
to
"W}1y
Sl1e said,
"Because
there
this
man,
and
she
says,
don, t malte
Bl1t Ellen
that
d beer1
sl1
me and
in
J
~ays,
my family?"
She's
my fa1nily.
on,
been
she
at
the
wanted
him
That's
the
C'h
•., e won't
live
man,
to
See,
and
marry
way
to
she
I think
it
her
I figured
marry
wl1en
Now,
time.
them.
another
by
together--them
gay
I understand
Benny
II
her.
have
out.
it
anyone
if
else
"
didn't
love
the
man!
Sl1e did11't
care
nothing
damn guy.
So,
anyhow,
every
eat
Ellen
understand
daughter.
So,
and
going
had
girlfriend's
come
I didn't
things
a white
must
they
See,
are
about
I ,vant
They
11
else.
to
1na1...ry
So
s.
motheI
do that
you
11
tl1at.
mar ~y nobody
would
means
accidentally
you
to
t]1e
can't
enny
I
f16
c11ild."
women.
was
scl1ool--see,
Sl1e said,
"If
hel:'
I' 11 see
will.
sl1e don't
So that
two
told
mother
else
that
first
yot1r
Page
and
motl·1e.1.. and
day
figured
it
or
so,
So,
talk.
sl1e
don't
know what
wound
up marrying
and
says,
the
out
and carried
they
would
I ··told
EJ. len.
"Wl-iy do
answer
I have
was
her
Benny.
16
and
eat
So,
to
talk
Ellen
marry
mother
She
on.
would
and
goes
cry
to
I
E,enny?"
gave
her,
her
but
she
t
, ~
ll>I
Mabel
Ha111pton
J:
said
Pa.ge
she
been
was
about
funny
Talk
the
first
the
She
J:
And you
were
M:
I can't
exactly
J:
Twelve
M:
No,
kissed
three
years
remember
•
.
older
fourteen
than
years
I mt1st
that.
old
because
have
I felt
M:
Oh,
J:
Good
M:
I don't
I didn't
I felt
know.
funny
or
bad
know
bad
believe
funny?
or
onto
And I held
funny.
I know
good.
her
was
a
so tight.
older
you' re
it
than
yot.1
you
say
"
are.
,~e were
tell
nevei--
co,
in
me,.,
from
bed,
the
s11.e
there
so
says,
on,
I' 11 find
"Bt1.t
she
S11.e says,
I laug1'1ed..
took
me under
her
I went--she
had
to
know where
I
asked
her
was
so
interested
in me.
just
ijhy
don't
she
N"ant hei-- to
get
in
ti--ouble
out.
it
\here
"I
later.
me.
Wh.y?
"I
You
how old?
I was
or
J:
Sl1e says,
you.
kissed
you.
kissed
me about
no ..
kissed
feeling.
she
or thirteen?
thirteen
she
ti1ne
first
woman that
M:
when
funny
about
f 17
~ent.
with
"You' 11
11
wirgs.
Okay
The mo her
And,
any
he said
of
t e
1'1abel
Page
Hampton
Granma
sa
s
I called
'' Sh
her
Granrna,
house
and
hand
M:
I stayed
wit}
J:
W re
going
M:
I was
J:
And,
M:
No, I didn't
yo1
going
djd
like
I'd
she
would
I told
her,
and
she
to
f at11e1 ..--and
much
would
comir1'
blame--it
don't
was--if
they'd
the
put
get
of
take
days
turned
child
it
on
time?
their
house.
for
them
I ' d _;ome h m ~
helped
told
them
tell
the
hjm
Ellen
with
the
and
next
how
cooled
sl1e
knew that
wouldn't
Pappa
gii~lf
speak
1.~iend' s
down.
s wl1.y I don't
11
a].ways--in
Tl1ese
old.
tl1ose
care
fresh
t11.e
days,
was or how old
man was doin'
18
his
the
he
l1er
a child
put
That's
me up to
says,
t,l1e chiJ.d.
to
day--'cause
ai ...ound--that'
how young
trying
arms.
'til
They
around--"
care
her
mad at
so1ne people--Mamrna.
children
from
was
and
it
me next
sl1e wo·uld
a couple
for
whole
nobody.
Pappa
me in
take
And Mamma--Mamma
too
years.
I mean--and
beat
was holdin'
stay
Whit~.
Did you wcrk
too?
"
m
the
right
work with
I looked,
Then
to
school
t
rouble.
that.
knew.
house
no
r fiv
tr
school
to
in to
will
f
know what
my dress.
she
get
namA was Ellen
them
to
to
live
you
you work
you
everytime
when
rier
her
did
under
night
but
How long
all
And,
going
J:
do my chores-
and
t
ain
f18
somethin',
it
I
can
do
Thy
M:
I gu ss
J:
Why do you
1:
Well,
J:
I think
to
M:
Protect
what.
J:
Protect
the
family
M:
Protect
the
family?
J:
Right,
M:
And Pappa,
right.
you'rP
Why is
th
hell
they
t?
hink?
I don't
know.
protect
they
What
he
--
becaus
don't
want
g nna--
to
beljeve
that
someone
do that.
run,
and
sill
J:
run,
stay
run,
run
there
'til
went
Ellen
you
Did
M:
I loved
because
on for
Well,
quite
are
yo1.1 s1..1re VIThat
ma , an1.
o:r· your
street
come
Mrs.
them
all.
to
from
the
at
hit
other
me,
and
girl's
I'd
house
work.
White?
I didn't
Ellen
to
school,
can' ·t understand
say,
"Y es,
mad and
to
nrotect
him
pay
me,
any
see,
and
she
look
that
awhile.
I went
"I
get
love
I had
and
Salem,
down the
J:
attention
he'd
yo1-1 t,old
and
Mrs.
110w yol1.r
1ne was
White,
aunt
left,
you.
at
No~"1,
so?"
II
,gra.ndn1ot11er,
•
or
·t]1e
l1ouse
wi tl1
j~ lowe1~s-
me
-
Mabel
Hampt
M·
ye rs
later
Nothing,
that
I told
found
they
then,
'I
I'll
giv
couldn't
have
I'd
happened.
they
1
the
do something
days,
out
the
that
like
t
to
go to
is
she
said,
So,
I stayed
r it
like
out
it
cop.
th
c p because
the
It
see.
That's
and
people
happened
what's
IJay~,
ha
"
the
first
thing
ran
away
r
that
had
like
wrong
with
a man
ould
In those
understand.
grownup
happen.
She
s
kn win'
believe
you
child,
h
11
tha
the
They wouldn't
and
didn't
find
wr n
wa.
I was fresh
that
a young
parents
it
up und
that.
to
y didn't
ou 1e a go d girl.
we11t
cop
like
T
l{new s metl ing
you.
stood
want
d tell
something
"I
l1a
I didn't
ut.
it
n
s
to
it
It wa
n thing
And Ha1nma says,
"But
f2
g
n
it
all
he
said,
the
plann
not
world
today.
how old
'cause
with
them
I was quite
I was.
five
for
an old
I clon' t
years.
child
when I left
kr1ow
them
I--J:
Seventeen,
M:
Eighteen
( 1 ape
1
c11ts
ejghteen?
years
off
at
old.
I went
pc int,..
tl1is
20
to--
End
Sj de
1) ..
d
Mabel
Page
Han1pton
f21
•
You got
J:
I got
the
a job.
You graduated
M:
Eight
they
B,
kind
after
That's
a job.
J:
11.ighest
What
from
that's
of
I graduated
from
8B.
Eighth--
all,
see,
because
A11d I finished
went.
job?
tl1e
eight-B
Eight-B,
was
and
then
I left.
•
J:
Do you
M:
No,
J:
Okay,
11:
I can't
know
what
year?
Do you
have
any
idea--
?
'
years
or
t
1 il{e
night
tl1.ey
and
Mabel
if
woman done
wasn't
sleep
you'd
to
She
anything
sick
and
be
or
a baby
so
wake
J:
How did
M:
Oh,
girl,
she
she
to
me.
she
She
could
wasn't
after
take
five
I left
married,
11
them.
I
and
the
told
says,
mysteriol1sly.
nothin'.
didn't
got
and
--a11d
was
school>
Ellen
happens
clied
something
It
I left
them:
]1ad
out.
out.
when
ta.lkir1'
were
it
that
figure
leave
Nov-1, she
l1abel .. "
figure
'cause,
him.
one
figure--
we'll
something
How I come
didn,
I can't
husband-my baby
You take
You take
my baby
and
I always
believe
that
the
sicl~.
She
Ellen
C
.:Jee,
baby.
just
went
up anymore.
you
feel?
I seer1
so
surprised.
21
much
dor1e
to
people
tr1at
~to
iO'r
Ma·bel
the
beginning,
n1ontl1s
the
Page
Hampt.,on
and
won't
be he1"'e with
When. Benny
1
'I've
I'm
seen
six
one
was
abc)ut
and
colored.
or
So,
and
to,
won't
baby
bu1 ...1."?y ·the
went
to
under
take
how
sleep
a couple
sl1e told
hin1.
She
The
City
she
sc:tys,
So,
..
put
and
of
all
woke
in
Jived
All
M=
When I think
to
next
to
for
11
take
care
J.c)ng as
as
She
prepare
nigl1t.
You know,
she
''But
says,
as well
so many
under
how treacherous
go around
her
tomorrow
that
to
baby
up.
come
Who?
s
might
boy--white
a white
family.
my
T11e oldest
gi.rls.
for
So,
it.
believe
stay
can
of
up
I've
are
there
them
you
J:
sa
says,
moJ~ning."
'til
live
He was
old.
one
never
and
and
"Mabel
We sat
11
I see
sl1
not.
I cculdn't
it.
years
s11.e, 11 be
they
will
children--boys
fo11rteen
a shotgun
o
..
know how I've
tl1ern.
baby
The
1
believe
s rigl1t.
don't
ruel
about
us. "
r1ig:l1t,,
t}1at
seven
baby.
Tl1at
you
'round
there.
I couldn't
had
the
wife
right
she
wants
came
yot1r
sittin'
So,
only
baby's
said,
old.''
bal)y
the
f23
different
but
the1n,
people
shootin'
I've
lived
I should
are.
all
things,
the
women
and
men.
the--
each
about
how peopl
do each
th
r--
other.
morning
"Benny
st
y
d
1
n
t.
/0
'
__
11111111111
.....
Mabel
I liked
The
Page
Han1pton
because
other
children
So,
the
was
a brunette.
J:
Okay,
,~hite.
M:
Yeah,
they
J:
So,
M:
Cleaning
and
like
no,
before
I doin'?
see.
and
doing
for
them
woman with
she
a mother.
cleaning
and
J:
You were
M:
Uhugh.
like
me very
was
quite
as
na1nes
were.
taught
of
the
well.
I at
She
hair.
their
them?
care
something,
grey
And she
taking
where
ad or
for
liked
that,
wasn't
I tl1inl{
blonde.
was white--
And she
an
A little
•
white.
you
I did
Or maybe
Ellen.
This
that.
[Bamberger]
son
named
were
were
I answered
a middle-aged
now,
child's
f25
and
what
was
and
this
woman was
was
old
like
I was
cook
real
good.
old.
me how to
eighteen,
nineteen
So many things
happened
years
old
at
tl1e time'?
me in
one
These
are
two years--
year--or
J:
in
to
the
This
of the
beginning
M:
So,
on this
It. had
I stayed
other
was
with
jot--the
to
nineteen
around
nineteen
be.
It
them
about
other
job
twenty.
twenties.
had
to
two
with
be.
years,
the
then
two
I come
children.
•
in
t lo
Mabel
Pa,ge f 26
Harnpto11
[Bamberger]
In
and
the
them--he
meantime,
down below
She's
a tall,
mixed
grey
Sl1e would
I falls
these
with
and
she
was
to
and
she
a colored
Her
black
tl1ing·s
brin.g
for
chj_ldren.
good-lookin'
hair,
a lawyer,
was
woman
name
was
woman with
so
nice.
n1e an.d
who worked
[Drummond].
beautiful,
Oh,
take
never--
she
was
n1e places
so
and
nice.
lil~e
that.
But,
maybe
like
the
in
M:
I don't
know.
in
the
How did
M:
Oh,
street
men,
and
porch
and
talk
about
their
talk
in
were
gay.
Now,
were
queer
'cause
an offhand
moved
to
know,
way to
keep
I know they're
I'd
had
the
They
see_
gay
men.
just--somebody--
with
with
up
me,
fun
part.
would
but
switch
I got
more
it
was
out.
they
They
And
on
set
wouldn't
around
and
knowin
that
they
then
I knew
they
so many girlfriends
26
and
and
I got
think
thing
see
me from
gay,
women,
that
l1ello"
them,
into--I
think
come up and
you
life,
some
he].lo,
mixed
mixed
have
tal~,
with
always
how you
had
Street--I'll
to
out.
sometl1ing--"Hello,
White
usAd
find
them?
By getting
Miss
fellows
meet
would
patched
by getting
And,
women.
too?
Never
know
or
life
I got
you
you
see.
with
the
meantime,
J:
that,
[Siegler]
these
Was she
on the
mixed
gay
J:
that
were
Mabel
Page
Hampton
f27
queer.
many
girlfriends--when
that
were
Well>
I think
church.
met--there
we would
all
I need.
days
laugh
So then,
what's
her
dear's
name!
there
got
you
say
had
was--wait
I went
was
and
was
you
you've
to
fill
in.
lots
of
How
girlfriends
aueer-::1.
M:
•
See,
Already!
J:
off
church
and
and
at
name
to
a minute
a couple
I would
talk,
meet
you
know .
goin'
that
time,
I was
now?
Don't
tell
I went
now.
of
times
girls
in
just
a girl
me I forgot
about
named--
my little
Her name was Viola--Viola·[Bellfield].
a staunch--oh,
we used
boy,
to
go to
I
church,
They were
with
and
to
She
bed
and
have
a
same
age,
see.
ball.
But
they
J:
Was she
older
than
M:
We both
were
'round
was
all
New York
you?
about
people--not
the
Jersey
people,
see .
.
I'm
then
that
quite
out
of
Jersey.
I began
to
These
go to
J:
What
M:
She
gave--[Sisuva]?
as tall.
was
all
New York
womens,
see.
theater~
did
she
reminds
look
me something
What s that
1
[Laquita].
like,
girl's
honey?
of--what
name?
that
girl
She wasn't
And
Pa
1 H mp o
e f ....
..
•
brina.
11,
n
11.
but
I u
h
t
wn't
qu·t
as
r
g
m.
s methi11g
Shew
}1 l
, I
And
ld
t·ll
as
h
a 1 niglt
H r
1
h r
h
n
d
•
.f
r
J
•
A
•
r
n
sh
nd ~tay
ut
1
of hr
•
Mabel
Page
Han1pton
'cause,
when
different
they
way,
say
wouldn't
get
ready
thinkin'
to
an.ything
know who I was.
And,
dinner;
their
for
and--what's
me,
J:
Piggy.
M:
Piggy
on the
talk
in
language
no language
So,
liv
they
M:
Catch
onto
Miss
White
liked
[Siegler]
k
track,
make
and
want
their
house
biscuits
a
I
them
to
and
have
and
things
name?
friend--they
and
get
of
ready
I wouldn't
were
were
a couple
would
just
more
talk.
know what
they
saying.
like
would
to
sit
were
And I wouldn't
I didn't
want
talk
them
to
know--
see
her.
She
business.
my business.
I went
them.
I went
Street.
Then
they
talk
take
n rally
1
the
in
to
to
see
her.
And I just
and-J:
would
go to
talk
would
I didn't
always
'cause
all
Know your
lorkin',
~here
so
J:
din
kept
at
to
his
they
I knew what
saying.
'cause
to
friend
and
they
me off
fella's
and
his
porch
Pig
t
in
and
all
used
that
talk,
throw
I used
mother
that--Piggy
out
at
to
f29
s
about
you--yotr
they
~hat
you
did
in
New Y rk
girlfriends--wh-n
~ou
d
J
ak
0
th-y
om
m --Pi
S
see
d
'
Mabel
know
I'm
found
it
to
Page
Han1pton
So,
queer.
out.
I can't
I was
gain'
me a birthday
give
that
Piggy
gay
men--and
formed
and
of
them
it
was
gay.
in,
see
was
bring
me in.
there.
the
now,
'cause
in
M:
No
was in
J:
Where?
M:
Now,
this
let's
lived--
see.
a few
So,
of
these
girls
they
one
tell
em
That's
the
in
when
and
l1ad drinks
so
those
And every
it.
I walked
tl1ey
me in
point
they
and
I think--
Was this
in Jersey,
quite
party?
that
wanted
bring
think--did
when
J:
Piggy--Piggy
to
how they
they
and
men in
them--I
a party
know
girls
some
there
form
them
was
i.t
everything
they
did
I can
walked
to
And told
how--1
They wanted
and included
for--how
because,
party.
wanted
party
was
with
thern--'cause
they
the
figure
f30
New Jersey
see,
Young girl.
in
New York?
New York.
that
I had
See,
or
was
met
His
Piggy's
at
Piggy
mother
house-
long
time
was very
before
nice
and
\
all
like
around
that.
them
And I know t]1ey
just
to
hear
likt~
they
that
it. was
a gi ving-ot1t
They
didn't
tell
do11't
J:
know
the
Dj_d you
it's
name
what
were
would
they
me> arid
tl1.ese
party
for
or
anything.
already
see
30
queer,
so I would
say.
gi1"'ls
a 'butcl1--and
yourself
as
So it
l~ave
that
butch?
hang
seems
told
was
tl1em
1ne ~
Page
Han1pton
Mabel
M:
think
about
because
any
them.
See,
so nice
that
from
everything
up with
one
married
just
Ellen
that
why I didn't
bother
people.
he
told
Back
And,
catch
to
caught
So,
party.
this
know
me,
God
he'd
cut
my
they
re
going
to
have
butch--
how many
,t,.
[Benny]
and
butches.
them
Quite
walked
sl1e * says
And
open.
he
woman--great
me.
this
for
when
fell
if
her,
didn't
I don't
She
and
so that's
M:
can't
me,
me,
party
mouths
to
I didn't
period.
I got
to
coming-out
them.
"It
I liked
husband
But
their
women,
hooked
J:
of
liked
was nice
married
above--her
this
just
was
her
I got
throat.
I
'em,
Ellen
connected
with
No,
f31
to
in
a few
the
room,
othei .. gi1~ 1,
t]1e
be."
·· Tl1at'
says,
s her."
Sc) they
had
been
talkin'
all
along.
And them
faggots
boys,
then--they
did
you
and
I couldn't
keep
I said,
come
us
11
they
in
the
talk
to
I clidn'
come
up and
dark?
t
my
possi'ble
II
want
-----------------------It's
up there--we
tl1.ey
...
to.
hu,g and
And I'm
Sv-1eetie"
called
.. --as
tb.ey
"Wl1y
kiss,
on my porch
sittin'
tl1ey
them
called
tl1.eir
··
------·--··------------------Mabel
n1ay
ha,,e
31
said
11
Pen.ny"
instead
of
L
I/ 6
Mabel
B nny.
really
Page
Han1pton
Was Benny,
Ell n's husband,
gay?
Did he and Mabel
stay
in touch
after
Ellen
died'
For how long?
it was some partyall
night
long.
Well,
'cause
J:
Was it
M:
There
mostly
few white,
all
and
girlfriend
at
work
And,
out
white
them
and
J:
Do you
M:
Well,
that.
jacket
and
But
I never
like
th,3.t.
(stammering,
the
night
was
arty?
white
women
I knew
colored.
you
I was
For
Did
there?
have
a
yourself?
by
I always
alone.
what
you
reason,
managed
I don't
lncw
remember
I tell
what
you,
and
Or else
I had
blouse
blouse.
got
in
z·ight
with
know,
wore
to
jacket.
with
wear,
but
I alway.:>
white--white
women--going
I just
party?
the
to
nothing
and
I dress
a co]ored
I don't
you
to
skirt,
bed
with
simply
inaudible).
J:
What, do you
1nean,
tl1at
M:
I never
right
in--for
with
a
me--
suit--skirt
like
not
the
few.
Or were
alone.
liked
then
girlfriend
alone.
at
people
men there,
very
party?
be
white
my friends
were
I was
a grey
dressed
of
the
everybody
wore
and
was white
there
M:
to
black
Who was your
J:
•
f32
a person
got
and
you
tl1en
r, .-,
yo11
neve1,.
"got
instance,
go to
bed
into
you
with
spend
them,
I
It?
•
Page
f :33
get
away
Everybody
I knew
had
right
me to
Mabel Hampton
you
knoww
it.
But
But why did--
M:
In
I wanted
and
take
what
wot1.ldn't
way,
of
I didn't
feel
from
on a hundred
basement--it
had
was
it
for
if
Even
me--they
from
come
in
it,
I
I wanted
·three
the
rooms--I
you
M:
Not
often.
it
because
t]1ey
would11't
J:
to
just
known
so
an apa1:-tment
Street
in
a lovely
And,
the
My
time.
next
long--lived
I don't
in
door
know,
·to
I was
by
·time.
But
from
had
apartment.
J:
away
love
me the
When I got
twenty-second
I'd
got
all
f rier1d.s..
and
friends--girls--that
Or you
my own.
to
do it.
New York
made
managed
somebody.
And I r1ad so 1nany
myself
I always
somebody
something
it.
done
J:
somebody,
and
I never
be
So,
had
sex?
I never
I was
good
women,
didn't
people
afraid
me like
to
.YOU
didn't
Ellen
you
didn't
make
love
at
M:
Yeah,
yeah,
that's
J:
Which
one,
honey?
M:
All
them
into
with
would
let
all?
right.
one.
I ran
it.
do me bad
or
was.
lov-re t.o women?
malte
and
of
bothered
them
make
Or you
love
to
you?
.J ,J
Mabel
Hampton
husband
Page
J:
So,
M:
Yes,
want
to
you
did
have
I had
some
your
throat
I was
with
slit
sex.
'cause,
some.
f34
why would
that
if--remember?--you
told
rn.e--
M:
don't
Well,
know how he
her,
J:
But
M:
That
blamed
they
dragged
me into
I never
wanted
knew
was
it
Now,
the
in
then
bed
the
her
with
you
me.
her
to
the
make
He found
love
to
be
out.
I
her?
he.
And the
And she was after
home.
And with
caught
in
some
heard
tl1roat.
wife.
out--
I was after
danger,
me!
that,
with
a married
way,
if
him
the
blame
That's
how she
I called
it
woman
'cause
bed.
outs.
catch
"I' 11 catcl1
tl~e
under
wouldn't
husband
that--
say
I was
"
I
you.
her,
I 11.ad been
in
woman.
"-T:
Makin.g
M:
Uhmhum.
bed?
I'd
did
I hadn't
if
I' 11 cut
found
his
Sittin'
J:
But
you
M:
Not
to
draw
the
line
J:
How old
M:
011,
love?
else
do you
down playin'
cards?
What
just
said
to
everybody.
from
were
I was
you
goin'
me you
Just
then
think
we were
doing
make
love?
didn't
some
people,
see,
and
on.
at
in
that
my
time?
twe11·ties--abol1t
twenty-
Mabel
Page
I-Ian1pton
£35
five.
J:
Can you--
M:
No,
it
was
before
twenty-three--twenty-three,
I was
I was
J:
Now,
M:
Now that's
J':
Sl1.ould
we've
to
got
where
in
twenty-five
Bedford.
tell
that
all
because
the
story,
rest
honey.
of
the
things
•
1.n.
con1e
getting
we ].eave
t.}1,at, for
day?
another
·yot1
tired?
(Tape
J:
clicks
Tell
and
off
the
on again
Bedford
I was
immediately).
story.
workin'
woman had
for--this
three
boys.
now,
tell
and
di
her
orce
otl1er
J:
Don't
M:
This
you
their
J:
Thats
alright.
M:
It
one,
was
•
M:
three
I can't,
boys.
Let's
but
went
this
talk
it's
She went
a divorce--or
And she
w
three.
two,
gettin>
he was--n
•
mouth.
right
names.
him.
from
your
woman had
was
husband
man
cover
·s
about
all
with
she
this
a story
all
in
Don t woiry
you.
•
in
was
otler
one.
I worke
She
away.
gettin'
an.
a
Thi
ne.
b
t
m.
..
Mabel
Hampton
an.d
woma11,
divorce
she
from
l'lad
her
tl1ree
tl'le
is
boys,
She
husband.
Where
straigl1t.
Japan
man,
was
•
•
M:
he
There
is
a Japan
controlled--he
J:
That's
M:
In
order
J:
But
it's
M:
I have
sl1e was
and
to
gett,j.n'
can't
marry--I
a
it
get
Point?
J:
this
f36
Page
I don't
•
alright,
honey.
to
be because
Has
Point.
had--it
know,
was
a great
amount
doesn't
make
a
got
to
It
honey.
of
difference.
bring
him
to
bring
things
back,
I've
in.
if
alright
you
can't
remember
exactly.
And she,
left
me--the
Now,
this
to
she
went
away--It
boys
went
away--she
man--oh,
Lord,
something,
it
white
And he--stop
man.
1narried
her ..
wealthy
woman,
up all
the
no business.
remember
She
money
it
divorced
and
or
Th.at's
her
was
what
me of
reminds
.
to
make
a summer
left
is
his
his
name .
th.ere---l"te
her
the
husband.
me with
name?
did
how she
he
do?
come
to
come
fle's
rnai--ried
She
to
He did
divorce
in.
month.--and
the
house.
Everytime
husband--something
what
story
I see
a very
fine
l1e1~.
I-le
·had been
do--did
he use
something
him,
a
and
he had
she
,0
( 2-{
Mabel
was
Page
Hampton
goin'
comes
with
here
very
But
where
she
this
happened.
lived
Viola--[Bellfield],
girl--she
girls
are,
I went
they
soda
a11d stuff.
you,
there's
he
So,
stay
at .
So,
he
with
me.
Jersey
in
So,
used
to
the
to
pick
that
next
in
"Oh,
him
out
the
Viola,
would
up
City
We'll
his
a
mind
family--
"Yes.
"
at?"
and
be
gettin'
them
she--now,
about
you
how these
buy
I said,
yeah.
of
know
they
too
Jersey
there,
couple
you
her
I pick
from
Viola,
name--colored
a man so's
to
Wl1ere will
him
her
a cabaret.
stayin'
his
up
That's
Avenue.
And,
man asked
I said,
I wrote
bring
a cabaret.
come
I was
See,
somebody
Viola,
was
to
attached
11
had
Morningside
that
we go to
says,
she
me of
Viola--Viola,
this
a story
Now,
II
like
us would
asked
in
I think
and
reminds
much.
anyhow
all
She
man4
this
f37
at
ready
was
going
where
to
I work
to
go back
everything.
He
to
days.
address
and
boyfriend.
\
\.T:
Was . he
M:
No!
Wait'll
I tell
thought
about
knew
he
He was
you.
no gay
Wasn't
it
at
in
love
with
he would
take
us
I wasn't
said
gay?
the
man.
gay
nothin'
It
time.
him,
to
the
He was
didn't
and
she
cabaret.
about
worry
wasn't
no gay
him.
man.
I neve1."
me 'cause
in
love,
I
and
,J (
Mabel
Pa,ge
Han1pton
At the
cabaret
[Henderson]
or
the
What's
Ethel
girl's
J:
Billie
M:
No,
So,
waited
did.
she
for
in--him
and
jackets
or
there
of
Wasn't
walked
in--great
I says,
I says,
you
the
was
door;
sit
at
nobody
"What
same
age.
one,
out
do jtou
We dressed
the
door
waiting
'till
let
him
we get
we're
I had
And two
and
man
and
While
I know
there.
I
11
o'clock--this
nine
Now,
and
boyfrier1d
my
tl1ere.
I opens
opens.
white
"We' re
the
we go on out.
else
big
other
my house.
he's
and
door
that
·tl1.e.1~e, and
we' 11
friend--now,
the
He says,
around
was
II
and
something
door.
now?
name
about?
it
They came about
at
talkin',
were
at--Viola
them.
his
them
take
was
child's
so much
Billie,
" 011,.. yes.
a soda,
He knocks
we read
wasn't
it
"I'll
you
give
the
Fletcher
Holiday?
All
He says,
I think,
of--what's
name
I sai . d ,
S o,
playin',
a couple
Waters.
will
was
f 38
white
our
standin'
shut
the
men
men.
want'?
1:·aidin'
11
tl1e
11.ouse.
It
''Fo1. .. what?''
He says,
"Presti
I hadn't
been
with
he
says.
"Come on,"
ttl.tion.
"
a man no time.
'' come
on.
Get
I couldn't
you1"
coat.
figure.
Get
you1"
c a
they
and
l1at.
Thy
t
fing
rprinte
peculiar
An
one
of
They
set
M:
Sure
it
After
about
So,
takin'
time
M:
Yes,
that
to
11
and
front
today
on the
his
Just
us tw1 girls.
d set
his
I could
own wife
wn moth
pick
her!
Hair,
corner.
there's
r
find
up.
lesbians.
They don't
I guess
they'd
know nothing
have
tellin'
go around
thiowed
people
key
the
that
you're
No.
And,
a judge.
woman.
of
h w up.
or
Next
next
mornin',
mornin',
nothin'.
So,
now.
I tried
we was
had
Ain't
to-
·I says,
(inaudible)."
you
.image
didn't
Bedford,
overnight.
of
H
H
les--
know
Why'd
up.
were
other.
no clothes
A little
[Norris],
set
we were
the
a
up.
in
lesbians.
g,
fellows.
HA set
You don't
get
'' I didn't
was
I got
we stayed
in
you
you two
But
See.
us.
two
I
him.
J:
we were
this,
th
th
fellow.
h y gt
n
w1
v i"'ythi
this
J:
everything
at
abut
He st--
about
d
thing
Neither
up.
·
'e111 up for?"
Just
eyes,
I said,
nobody--she
like
little
Judgie.
I looked
everything!
if
that
must
don't
be her
look
mother.
The
spit
at
he:t
like
Jean
Mabel
She
say
is
and
nothin'.
from
other
kid
this
could
to
spend
that
girl
Okay,
f i.1~st
She
railroaded
only
tl1 ing
I can
the
she
was
night.
from
That
for
now,
next
thing,
up to
so that
when
I hit
develops
Mabel's
City
make
came
he
is
she'd
think
that
I
man--and
this
for.
I was
Bedford
The
and
it
Bedford
was
a strange
voice
me.
And the
what
tape
Jersey
prostitution.
that's
(The
railroaded
would
cops
l1appened
I was the
me.
So they
the
t]1ing
point
say,
kid.
prove
there
told
fellow
"Wel]
sl1e
f40
. ··
No lawyer,
other
had
tip there
sat
'Bedford
oldest
come
Page
Hampton
sent.
this
echoing
reverberating
The
[ I1 ...isl1.rr1an].
sound
back
at
this
and
forth).
t.all,
Big,
tell
me your
anyt.hing;
mc,ntl1,
storyJ
3ent
and
11
that.
lil{e
He sat
judge
haridsome
she
(Tape
get
ends
said,
He said,
"Because
And I' 11 tell
down-·-11im
me here.
he
[Irishman].
and
his
She had
payed
for
at
thj.s
0
you
wife--an.d
you
don't
one.
"
told
Now,
look
like
·n1e wl1.y this
to
send
up so man.y people
so
many
peopJ~e.
point).
you
··
a
'
)
I
.
'--J
.T)
N
.del
n
ly,
1.
Thi
M:
Yes.
i.
l )
T p
N
,
•
"'
198~
Y,
d :>f y , r
-T·.
th
ta
I
J.
t
ill
l
r.
w
..•
f
I
l
.11
1 ' 5
~t.
t
d b t
thP
Mi
•
• ITI
.r
--- -
'r .
•
l
.J
t
l
-r .
1
•
•
-
•
•
•
•
l
•
•
•
•
•
I
1
l.
•
,
w
•
B j
r .,
,
f
a
c. l
l
h
I '
J
y
l
I
n
?
?
•
1
t I
1
1 Il w th
l"
2
...
I
I
t r
•
,
•
•
•
•
'
•
f
I
•
•
•
'
•
I '
T
h,
l .
C
I'
'
t
•
•
J (1
•
..
I
•
1
t
•
-
,
I
l
•
•
•
I
.
r '
11
Kn w I
i:,
\
nev
y
sl1
a <J
d
c
) <-
1--
:1
1
I..
body.
1
Hew do ycu
J:
~
f~~l
tit
l
nJw?
Tl1e sa
abo
v1~ll
1 -
I dor 't
ar_,
1
p
1
pl ~nty
J:
al<
i
~
•
tpl~
l
tl in1
1
of
f th
t<_r
:;r-cat
-e
-use
lot
c)f
p
ve
1)....
e~
c ..
f!i
111ly Bedford
1::.-· tl1ey
a:i
er le
1...111..,d
l1as
al
cv._r
Ar1d th,.;1,., 'r
lot
~1
w ,11en~ goo:l.
of
won
- wl :>
j aj 1
1
f tlem,
z
rn t
T
9nd th,y
wasn't
lesbi
n~-
wa~n'
ley
gay
•
•
J:
l i
f
,1
1:
l
l:
Y.
t
•
t
I
'
T
•
•
♦
i .
•
,.:,
-
-
..,.
1
•
'
y
l
•
th_
l
. dn ' t
l
y
\.
l
-
ti1ne:-.
'rhe1e'
a
t
1:lo sn'
they
w]1at
<>r--not
s ~r,
· are
it
ow
I
l
•
fo
5
g '
;
1
11
t
1I
... 11 .
k y
l' :
M:
'
he r.1 y
•
·r110
...,d . n
,... 1e
t
get
)
•
ll
T:
11n lmI
..
Al
11, ., s l
I
ays
t
11
I ' J 1 l 1a~,
said
l
L
L l
1 il~e
f 11
t
I
1
.._ .
11
....
7
..1.
.r ..... .:.
•
•
(
I
-
W1
♦
1
'1
M nhattar
lJ
•
•
1 'V
M
•
!
--
J
...,
}c
}
•
1
•
J_
l
\.I
J.
(.
.
B .. t t · .f?u
r.,;i
?
1n;: 1 ,
3
a
1
'
l
~ L11 .
0
1. '
.,..
.,
.1
rJ - l,
(30
•
,
•
I
I
•
•
,
l
l
•
l
r
W
l
•
'
11
•
,
•
•
•
•
•
'
y
•
l
1
'
l
1
l
l
1
l
I ...
t
•
•
•
•
•
1
•
•
l
..
•
t
\
•
•
· 11
r
l
l
I
•
t
•
P..nd
l:
•
•
J:
M:
m_r.
t,
11 1
1
• 1
A11d
vi7t
t
I
1
l
•
j j
,
l y
{ 1..... .
11 _.
• I
0
I
l l
1 .
11 y
I
•
I
I
- 1
•
•
•
I
•
J.
•
•
'
•
I
•
l
'
•
f
. in
-
I
I
, I
f
C
•
•
tl1
'
:1
g . .r 1
r · Pd 1n
y r
ll.
+
....
l
f
•
I
•
1i
•
t
•
l .
n
•
•
•
'
Laf
T
P
tt
.
Tl
' . 1: ....
. I
•
l
-
*
C
w 1-)
d,
w ...
. k?
-
r
r
r
t
•
f F
d g~
lit·
'k
l
n ... ., l 1s,
:! 1 · r1t. · -Coin
l'
.l
!
ly
l)
--
-
-
--
p
'
•
,_
rt.
C
11is1
-
•
0
l
V
~y
ti
11
lu
l)
i
,11
1 on1 •
f E m
]
ge :ll
w
(
I
M
•
-
..Lllg
.'
\
t
t
1
i
I
y
1 l
I
•
•
J
'.1
t-
....J
•
•
,.J
a
•
'T
N
•
,
w
W1
s
f ct
•
J..n,
n a m cl in -
ar. :l
fl .. t '.._ t
r.; ,
1 •
l
ed 1n
c-·
-
-·- ---
-
-
I
t t
•
t;
s
-
.
. · ik .-
I
•
•
l
Tl R
T
(.lUt.
~
1
l
l
y r arr·
I
•
'
1 i l\._ t
I di dn ' t
I
...
.
l
.-
-
•
_,
n1
n t, l i
't
.1.nA
d rl t J_
r •
( f E m
t
id --, C A
t ti fl
t - \/y 1"" r r- )f f
m "'
.
. _,
)
5 M
1
t l)j 'klu
J
rd g A
1 n t l - r.o n 1 1111 i ._.,
•
•
{j_
)
)
•
j_
[ g
gedly
5~
1 0
· 3d, p lit·
'
'
9
•
•
v_ ~y ·el
(
8
'
'
1
l
en..,
th
-
•
1
l
l i
--
ma
ry
w s
in
0
•
l
n.
J
1:
*
]
r
I .
•
~·------
-
t.} .
t
r
s
,
T
.. u
tl
•
II
tl
•
-
l .
II
-
•
•
•
'
'
r
•
,
•
l
'
f
•
r
t
,
r
•
•
1
•
l
l
p
b
t
d'd
1
lll
l bl
it h
1
•
I
•
B, · n'
V
, r
•
l
I
?
,
t_ ,,
Cl
•
'
'
'
.r
r
L ,
. Il
-
'
•
l
,;J
w
l
•
t
t
l
•
•
Wl
h
•
1
,
•
•
w·
l
l
(
-
_ 1 t,_l
1
V
•
•
'?
•
1
d
w
~
C
l
{
•
ll
:l .
r
I
•
1
-
11
n~Fi
) I
Ial
y'd
r OU l 1 ~ w. tl
•
pl
n 1
,
tl
w, 1J :.in t
-
..l.
t
t d--t1
0
.r
.l •
1
it
I
t
.. w
.]
~b
•
11
1
b
1
l
· ar _ the re
:-,1ta
1
wit
1
,
1
, , 1,
y
•
l'1
OrJ.,
.n
t evt..:rybJdy.
All
of
..
1
t
w
WJn1e1
tjffi
gay_
w r
J.
t}1
y
11e1\.
i g
~i h
h
' s
g
y'
I d'dn'
t
t
•
no
[ li
b
,
1 ( t 1e 1.. d .
trl
J
•
1
t
W
t
wa
.1
aL
i
g
JI
..-:J -
1n
]
~
l
1lg
U
l
l
t
.l 1
•
1
1
l .
--1
t ~}
•
n
ir
.
I
e~
•
tl
'
11 y u i
t
,
•
•
•
y
f
w
M-
Th
in
I
•
in
-
L
red
F
l'.l
Y U
111
F
It
•
•
l.
.::i
..
. 1
l
,
U '"'
F rt i
J_
' t
A
a
..
I
M.
•
T
ti
d F r
J:
t
1i 1 .
0
y
•
- I
1
A d
,. w
l
T
y
..
1
ki
T·
u
•
♦
1
•
l
•
•
t
a
'
•
r1.
n .
t
d
h
r
I
•
•
l
. l
•
•
l
r
•
T
1·
•
•
]
+
1
1
tl
•
r
.J..
t.
1~
T
1
tl , r
.
}
h
n
r
f
tap.
l 1
1 .l
l
wi
t
l
I
•
•
h
'
ame b ~1 from
11
t
1
Bed·
rd
ln
1
b
w
Hill~?
b3
J:
In betvieen
'
k fr
_"lat1 se
Bedfo
d.
Wt;re
ba
yo
A 1th
t
l'l w J r - _,y
l. ir
Ri g l t .
M:
Yeah.
J:
Lt'~
Wh t
yot1
M-
That
.
-
When I cam
u •
•
h
M:
h :,r1 f _1~ t l a
Bently
'
et
T•
•
W 1]
g - Could
I
'
ylu
r1embe.r '?
I
·
,J
1
A.:;_,
r · n1 m 1e
t
12
tal~
3 li
tl
a
tt
GJ~Jy
g
t
H
- n
"
11 t .
1
•
)
r
d
•
•
1 s
•
•
,-
t.
wa,
'
•
•
•
1
l iI
d,
y
lI
f t
t
l
..l
g
-
'
...
d
7 11
h
•
1:r
0 ,
\ '""me1..
i
...
•
.
. d them.ft
-Y
•
dy
1
...t
A
1
m
I
t"
C
1
f
}
Il
•
1.
r
h
•
w
•
I
t
•
1
•
•
T
•
s
l
'
'
'
•
•
•
INTERVIEWWITH MABELHAMPTON
(M)
Interviewer:
Joan
Nestle
J:
This
is
M:
Today
J:
Seventh
this
is
tape
about
Mabel's
Mabel
the
to
Joan
Nestle
New York
to
New York
is
the
or
and
first
Twenty-eighth--
twenty-eight,
Mabel
life
Well,
City
J:
New York
December
in
I don't
Hampton,
New York
question
know.
is,
and
City
in
we're
as
what
But
anyway,
doing
a
a lesbian.
year
did
you
come
City?
M:
•
(J)
or
I'll
turn
Jersey
away
from
that.
That
We' re
just
interes·ted
I come
City?
No, New York City.
City.
M:
in
'
New York
City.
Okay.
1
Let's
see,
nineteen--
I
l'iabel
when
and
Pag
Hamp on
I came
to
York
e
City--you
see,
I
as
c2
goi
g
hen
you
ack
s
ar
forvards.
J:
that's
Okay,
J:
lell,
I'll
hen
you
alright,
say,
first
don
t--
nineteen--
hit
the
ci
y.
irst
city.
it
M:
the
it
ha
city.
J:
A ound
11:
Y al
~
J:
But
you
M:
Y ah
was
tla
.
nineteen--now
•
for
irl.
a li
o J fts y Ci
day~
i i g
r
•
1
0
'
•
T
ld
at.
h
m
•
y
I
y
•
•
l
ou
l .
•
•
as
a few
you
•
•
•
er
I came
m
•
0
bu
ut
y
J:
came
•
yo
U C
Mabel
Page
Hampton
M:
aunt
brought
I came
that
happened
start
living
Now,
let's
and
in
M:
West
you
Oh,
Eighth
My
Street_
away
ran
that
and,
City
was
we know
as
now,
what
a lesbian
around
everything
year
did
you
woman?
nineteen--I
was
about
old.
J:
So,
that
would
be
around
nineteen
nineteen,
City
you
Okay.
twenty.
M:
Nineteen
J:
In
what
I never
M:
nineteen
twenty.
Street.
I had
J:
skip--'cause
New York
years
nineteen
fifty-two
me.
J:
seventeen
to
c3
two
twenty.
part
New York
thought
about
I lived
in
rooms
there.
you
Did
of
one
that
pick
That
that.
twenty
did
was
live?
♦
in
Twenty-Second
West
neighborhood
for
any
special
reason?
No,
that
me--
three
met
house.
Oh,
A girlfriend
no.
yes.
They
of
lived
next
•
in
mine
was
livin'
door
and
they
got
got
me
•
J:
Were
they
lesbians?
M:
Yup,
they
were
rooms
Lillian,
there
in
and
we--
that
lesbians.
house.
And they
And I stayed
3
there
'till
I
,
Mabel
Page
Hampton
J:
So that
around
there
eighteen
M:
then
back.
I went
1 i ving
and
name.
If
there
dollars
it
was
a bedroom,
J:
You remember
M:
I don't
think
Ten
dollars
work
know,
her
get
Well,
go to
you
I'll
M:
would
something,
and I went
then
Were
then
later.
it
apartment
was
three
I'd
come
lots
of
what
was
think
of
rooms
I paid
on the
and
ground
a big
paid
I think
She was a funny
work
for
for
rent?
parties
in
your
lesbian
parties
I paid
place.
Mr.
floor,
kitchen.
them more than
a week
to
anyhow--
like?
how much you
I went
I can
But,
a livingroom,
was funny.
there
I knew--oh,
name,
the
'cause
And,
back.
neigl1.borhood?
of
was
It
and,
think
What
apartment.
or
neighborhood
J:
a week.
come
I worked,
me go back.
that
of them.
stayed
show.
that
I can
and
a room
let
around
I'd
people,
the
Around
rest
the
in
Alright,
M:
all
times
kept
thirty--you
How long--
I was--different
J:
les·bians
nineteen
yeai~s'?
I always
Then
here
'till
I went away with
meantime>
away,
was
c4
ten
for
that
Then I
[Dandrick],
I had--
J;
Did
M:
Have what?
J:
Did
you
you
have
have
4
house?
in
your
house.
cE,
Pa,ge
Hampton
Mabel
M:
Not
in
my house.
Next
door,
this
girl,
she
'
had
four
time.
rooms
in
the
basement,
And sometimes
J:
Oh,
M:
We'd
food--chicken,
'cause
name?
the
rest
If
J:
pay
parties,
and
vegetables,
I'd
think
chip
you
in,
of
her
name,
the
up all
the
too_
a pay
party?
we'd
buy
and
salads
in
all
with
and
them
know.
you
know
And--what
I can
think
of
was
all
names.
So,
Or did
What's
different
parties
parties
pay
that.
salad--and
those
gave
about
have
I can
she
have
my girlfriends
bring
of
party.
tell
potato
I'd
her
we would
and
and
things,
and
you
the
paid
money
for
the
go form
things
you
party
the
to
brought
pay
to
rent
the
or
something?
M:
rent.
No,
We went
J:
no.
to
We didn't
a lot
Well,
talk
We went
and
you
meet
house,
maybe
pay
other
we just
less
give
of
those
about
to
a couple
women and
of
have
a lot
of
the
and
had
for
our
close
How many women would
M:
Sometimes
maybe
pay--where
You by your
J:
and
the
too.
that
dollars.
there
with
places.
dance
it
no parties
fun.
friends.
be there
would
more.
be twelve
•
5
But,
you
drinks
with
go
and
our
Pigs'
feet.
about?
or
fourteen--
•
lil
'
Hampton
Mabel
let's
in
J:
And,
M;
Oh, potato
see,
the
what
seldom
that
because
What
were
M:
Most
of
did
they
or
pig
to
eat?
feet,
chittlins.
peas,
and
And,
it
was
all
that
And sometime
black-eyed
them
of
girls
just
bring
their
supposed
there
women wearing
wore
them
of
them
to
in
of
them
And,
was
through
a car,
they
would
be
of
there
in
or
the
corn.
like
street.
Of
the
car
and
too,
single
anything
slacks,
women
was
suits.
the
had
of
party?
wore
them
a lot
the
They wore
slacks
come
most
at
suits.
have
good-lookin'
Were
single
the
were
on.
short
or
come
hair.
with
And,
was--
there
couples
but
were
there
a
women?
M:
the
have
we have?
was
had
six
slacks
of
any
they
J:
over
did
J:
five
their
lot
you
salad,
it
if
course,
most
else
would
we had.
Very
then
what
time
winter
stuff
c6
Page
Well,
come
there
and
bring--the
women with
to
jive
at
them,
over
bulldykers
you
there.
So,
--
J:
There
was
dancing?
M:
Oh,
Charleston--they
did
they
know.
danced
a little
up
bit
6
couples
used
And you
You wasn't
all.
yeah,
and
because
to
and
wasn't
supposed
a breeze.
of
come
the
everything.
to
look
They
did
Mabel
Page
Hampton
Do you
J:
records?
How was
the
The music
J:
Who?
M:
I think
records
I want
that
we used
to
save
as
M:
Hrnmm?
J:
Did
you
it
They were
records.
I got
some
bring
you.
to.
by
all
records~
who?
records
home
Some old,
You see,
with
women at
these
now.
old
the
I've
got
records
fire,
I tried
I could.
you
ever
was
to
dance
Did
records--was
Do you remember
much as
J:
what
music?
M;
some
to
remember
c7
meet
meet
anybody
that
you
parties,
took
Mabel?
home
across
the
hall?
M:
No,
No ..
no,
There
do that.
I didn't
was
I don't
do that.
Mildred
Green;
there
know,
I didn't
quite
a few
of
would
these
be
was
them.
Were these
J:
black
women,
or
unless
we ran
into
women too?
white
M:
had
a white
me,
I'd
had
a couple
Village
were
all
No,
white
rare
woman with
venture
and
very
out
of
with
any
girls--white
tell
them
girls,
and
They were
them.
about
we got
of
them.
girls--from
it
and
along
7
they
fine.
all
I just
someone
colored.
had
downtown
would
who
But
a ball.
in
I
The
come up.
They
Mabe 1 Han1pton
J:
you
that
Village
went
Do you
remember
to
Village
The
M:
Went to
J;
As a lesbian
'cause
you
the
first
time,
approximately,
a lesbian?
as
The Village?
knew
woman--that
that's
where
you went
to
The
lesbians
other
hung
out.
M:
tl1e
time.
started
the
I didn't
and
out
down there
acting
No,
in
at
first
know
got
in
time--I
''first
the
was
time''
show
with
surnmer--those--
the
the
Cherry
Lane
J:
And what
going
it.
at
the
After
at
So,
all
I
show-girls,
Then,
Theater.
down there
we'd
that
time,
therefore,
go
I was
I went
there--
nineteen
twenty,
M:
nineteen
was
around
we figure
this
was--this
was
right?
Yeah,
it
But you
lesbians
in
that
It
time.
was
down there
and
J:
in the
M:
knew that
The Village
was
a place
went?
M: Well,
Village
did
twenty.
J:
where
time
meet
I wasn't
up with
Did you ever
sure,
but
I knew
you
a few of them,
quite
go to
any bars
down in
seldom.
I didn't
could
go
see.
The
twenties?
Very
seldom.
Very
8
have
to
Mabel
go to
the
Like,
Jackie,
girls
from
had
Page
Hampton
all
bars
maybe,
the
the
women
have
the
the
houses.
women's
party,
a big
girls
remember
and
this
from
how the
nowadays,
Like,
were
go to
all
the
place/that--she
there.
Do you
themselves.
What
would
show--all
J:
or--
I would
because
c9
some
we call
that
words
called
women
ou1.~sel ves
they
used?
"lesbians··
Like,
you
said
"bulldagger"-M:
Yeah,
"ladylovers"--and
the
man,
wife,"
What
was
M:
Well,
I'll
J:
Right,
M:
And the
the
knew
woman
else?--
called
who wasn't
a butch?
tell
you,
the
butch
was
what
were
the
other
ladies
other
Did
mostly
like
other
yot1 use
Central
me very
the
like
the
What
Park
well,
word
my friend,
my
we heard
on Riverside
it?
is
It's
Now,
I used
9
to
II
S
t
UC l 't
when
Drive--not
thing?--we
other
West.
and
"stud"?
Mostly
yeah.
party
day.
called?
And we wot.1ld--
Sometimes,
a big
is
ladies--"This
blah.
Drive--what's
Street--no,
that
the
and
blah,
M:
there
and--What
know.
J:
Riverside
bulldykers
J:
blah,
to
11
"butch"--and--
you
we went
11
came
a hundred
there
was
go up to
through
and
tenth
a woman there
her
house.
Mabel
At her
house.
Oh, the
we had
J:
Oh,
M:
God!
that.
That
That
around
night--What
is
the
think
of
year
been
c10
two
women.
was
that,
around
Mabel?
nineteen--
I met Lillian.
no,
no,
nineteen
thirty-nine?
no,
It
no.
nineteen
I met
I can
have
around
No,
one
What
must
was after
was
between
about--
M: No.
that--'cause
if
marriage
So that's
like
Now,
the
talk
marriage
J:
as
Page
Hampton
her
in
back
thirty-two.
name?!--I'm
I can
before
eight--something
nineteen
woman's
her,
thirty
was
trying
a lot
tell
And,
of
to
think.
things.
Oh,
brother!
That's
M:
Anyhow--no,
Anyhow,
she
and
says,
she
for get
called
11
what
"Yes,
Mabel,"
door.
"No,
"You know,
can't
she
down to
get
Monroe
will
he was
He was
a faggot_
What church
M:
He's
to
We was livin'
down--her
J:
I got
marry
was
a hundred
door,
Florence--"--I
married.
"
.. "
and her
the
remember.
next
name- - "S11.e' s get ting
The Reverend
gay.
okay,
says,
last
going
going
ain't
she
says,
she's
mamma is
it
us next
Florence's
So Lillian
her
okay.
J:
marriage
them."
friend
and her
certificate
So that's
and
and
how I knew
he with?
and
10
fourteenth
Street
and
Saint
Mabel
Hampton
Nicholas
Page
Avenue.
So,
dressed
Oh,
anyhow,
was
I said,
you
fine,
he
"Alrigl1t.
know,
thirty/thirty-five
a fine
and
people
In their
house?
M:
In their
house.
natt1rally,
So,
must
there.
J:
guy.
11
there
ell
have
we
been
about
And big--
was
It
an apartment.
And,
I
,
think
thats
Hit
becoming
oh ten.
one
on
some
something.
Don't
get
yourself
them
World
in
trouble
She says,
are--you'll
get
me to
with
messed
that
"Don't
both.er
in
trouble."
yourself
woman who I--I
what
just
with
before
them
Now,
..no.
says,
those--'',
up
was
an Assembly
become
Lillian
do it.
I wouldn't
now?--people
War.
the
wanted
she
that.
like
That's
and
or
something
stories.
political,
woman
call
or
do you
the
Second
because
in
the
they
meantime,
I was--
remember
and
they
slippers,
go back
J:
Let's
M:
Oh,
J:
What were
what
you
M:
Wait
had
and
the
to
wedding
and
you
wedding
ceremony,
wearing
ceremony.
okay.
back
then?
Do you
Lillian--?
a minute
on tux--white
I had
the
now.
No,
neckties
the
and
girls
there
everything--and
I remember,
on a suit.
was
I had
on a white
my hair.
She
suit.
My hair
was
long.
I had
the
11
girl
fix
tro
•
Mabel
all
up,
down
all
around
And,
Lillian
rolled
come
it
arriving,
and
to
c12
more
J:
Was it
all
all.
[Elga},
And,
her
like
waved
it,
a fashion
people
M:
They had
J:
Both
the
her
Yeah,
women.
no men there
gave
How would
started
I knew--
that
All
course,
J:
see.
women?
wasn't
mother
it
and
[plate],
The guests
trucculently):
of
and
it
that
wedding.
this
I seen
There
in
like
look
and
women.
water
my face
M (a bit
that's
I put
always
we went
So,
all
Page
Hampton
outside
girl
the
was
it
minister--
who was marrying
away.
they
pants
dress
the
bride?
on .
•
M (with
The girl
think
had
she
had
different
the
arm.
of
more
a veil--a
had
white
trucculence):
wedding
shoes
dresses
And music
them?
dress
on.
on with
No,
and
And the
flower;
not
her
both
them.
veil--and
bride's
they
of
had
I
maids--they
flowers
on
was playing.
,
the
. had
J:
And how was the
bride
M:
Oh,
she
had
a real
Oh,
she
had
the
groom--the
woman who was
groom.
a gown
beautiful
on .
J:
gown.
12
bridal
gown.
She
f fl
Mabel
Hampton
Page
M:
The
J:
And what
M:
And the
other
She
dressed
pants.
white
bride
had
the
did
was
c13
gown on--
the
worn 1 have
other
woman had
in
on?
on pants.
white
too,
She had
and
on
so was the
bride.
The
passed
downtown
How did
J:
you
change
She
tell
was
had
and
I forget
down there,
had
a blood
back,
give
the
it
to
J:
said
at
the
man to
be your
the
and
and
voice
some
them
of
have
anyhow.
when
everything.
and
like
didn't
time,
back--went
Did
just
lawfully
J:
He said
M:
No,
anything
he
like
lawfully
be your
at
remember
ceremony?
Yes,
a heavy
test
like
so much
to
They
she
went
went
Everything
got
it,
a
brought
was
it
minister.
Do you
M:
woman to
the
looked
image
who,
thing
girl
apart--just
She
down there,
Brought
her
spitting
voice.
okay.
That
the
her
Hall!
do that?
know.
couldn't
do today.
City
they
M: I don't
fellow
at
say
Reverend
Monroe
anything--?
the
regular,
married--,
wedded
the
that
"Do you
[and[do
you
take
this
take
this
say
"two
husband?"
word
"man
think
he
11
?
He didn't
women... ?
I don't
13
did.
I don't
think
he
Mabel
Page
Hampton
did.
There
I could
was
hear
so many
her
people,
sayin',
J:
How old
M:
Well,
and
I was
so
two
people
cl4
far
And
back.
"Yes."
were
they,
the
getting
married?
And then,
thirty.
kiss
the
to
he
and
gay
was
marry
anyhow,
What
M:
I can't
he
was
that,
he
men and
I think
twenty-five,
and
knew
they
the
Monroe
Reverend
hisself.
J:
somebody.
was
after
bride,"
because
was
one
were
said,
wc)men.
all
And that's
other
was
"Now,
He knew
he
went
in
for--
women.
was
his
first
name?
remember
[Sis]
I'd
now.
would
Do you
know
have
his
first
know,
to
Mabel?
get
it
name.
from
But,
Monroe.
J:
Did
M:
I didn't
a lot
of
lesbians
that
you
knew
then
get
mar.r1e. d?.
I heard
about
woman who got
married.
home.
around.
hometown.
didn't
not
too
many.
mixed
up with
all
her
coming
come
killed
Her
give
many--not
but
husband
She
too
them,
We were
Her
know
and
him
Lillian
a day.
in,
another
from
and
right
He was
I heard
girl,
a big
he
there.
went
that
to
and
party,
must
have
She
school
a mean guy.
14
was
got
married.
about
she
and
slapped
from
together.
another
was
she
went
her
Lillian
He
s
Mabel
Hampton
Page
J:
made
it
easier
someplace
chance
met
Mabel,
for
do you
you
else--like
to
them
hospital,
Yes,
get
around
to
knew
they
like
that.
in
over
from
night
in
M:
all
to
the
were
and
to
out
you
wouldn't
the
theater
City
lived
to
that
the
mixed
head
a
New York,
to
you
the
went
one
women there.
And we start
I got
have
I even
I met
and
it.
in
Now,
anything.
from that
found
you
from
I knew
if
thdn
people.
meeting,
And then
spiritualism
town,
place:
gay.
New York
town?
meet
hospital
in
a lesbian
a small
political
the
be
living
a small
and
the
think
c15
to
I
talkin'
and
up in
woman was
a
lesbian.
J:
lesbian
was
really
this
good
a good
place
to
be a
in--.
M:
learn
So New York
Yes,
so much,
a very
and
you
see
place
to
be
so much,
and
a lesbian.
you
You
meet
so many
a lesbian?
Like
people.
Did
J:
other
towns,
you
M:
Brooklyn,
out
there
safe
here
lesbians
I never
went
New York,
a little
feel
know,
No,
I never
point.
you
went
nowhere
get
That's
maybe,
all.
15
up?
towns.
other
Brooklyn,
Jersey--well,
bit.
beat
to
but
as
•
in
That
was the
New York,
and
White
In The War,
Jersey;
Plains
you
Mabel
Hampton
couldn't
get
Page
me out
J:
gay
in
M:
places>
get
and
out
some
the
there
we'd
talk
and
and
we'd
I was
go to
I'd
night
sit
they'd
one
the
with
clubs
and
and
drink
there
drink
go to
in
show
my
up a breeze,
and
we'd
them's
and
meet
of
house
more.
J:
What
M:
All
I moved
Bronx.
all
i1 Harlem--in
a lot
Of course,
know.
you
they'd
of
around
yes.
a few--and
different
soda,
hang
Harlem?
Well,
people--quite
New York.
you
Did
community
of
c16
of
that
had
year
of
it?
is
that
happened
to
the
Bronx
to
happen
nineteen
in
in
before
between
I moved
to
the
forty-three.
The
So
Twenties
and
The
Forties.
J:
went
back
and
five
to
to
in
Do you
Yeah,
of
my hand
go in.
there's--I
forgot
I remembered
They'd
them--maybe
a white
the
names
of
any
places
you
Harlem?
M:
of
remember
be
playin'
more.
them
them.
the
You'd
like
the
go down the
mµsic.
And then
down there
place
now--just
I went
I went
and were
to
four
down the
treated
steps
village
very
•
nice.
J:
Tell·
us--I
remember--when
16
they
used
to
have
of
Mabel
those
big
drag
M:
went
Page
Hampton
to
dance~
Well,
those.
Those
drag
balls?
drag
balls
are
the
The women wore
pants
c17
'
di~ferent.
and
the
Everybody
men wore
dresses.
J:
M:
something
like
[or
Florence
with
that--because
What
in
the
Carol.
Avenue.
around
part
M:
That
But,
there
in
.
place,
or
happened
know?
New York
I remember,
The
was
Twenties,
Seventh
were
you
you
of
1960s,
But,
the
twenty-five
that
died,
[Millrose[
one
in
twenty-six--
around
the
time
Miller]
J:
me to
When was this?
That happened
were
they
with
Lillian.
where
in?
You took
I was
they?
were
Avenue--someplace
so many
see.
And then--
Get
of
in
they
them,
there
on Seventh
and
were
have
open
all
a nice
time.
J:
You also
M:
Boat
rides?
J:
That
there
M:
Oh,
told
me that
there
used
to
be boat
rides.
know
it
boat
rides
up
there
better
than
up the
all
night
yes.
was
What
some
is
her
I know my own.
Hudson,
long--and
you
know,
that's
17
women who ran
name
now?
And they'd
I mean
where
boat
rides?
I used
to
give
these
way up there--way
you'll
see
the
gay
Mabel
Page
Hampton
at.
people
And she-J:
What
M:
That's
around
year?
Can you
since
we've
That
was
call
on somebody
else
boat
rides.
of course,
[Post]
nineteen--
Oh,
Road
her
And,
for
or
boat.
those
been
is
those,
that?
here
her
but
in
Rose
would
off
go when
and
she
have
to
know the
of Boston
she's
Street,
Bronx.
I'd
would
sixty--think
sixty-sixth
the
name?
one woman lived
and
Everybody
I knew
remember
What
on a hundred
fifth--sixty-fifth
for
c18
sixtyshe
gave
was known
a boat
ride.
faggots--
J:
Was this
in
M:
No, no,
these
the
nineteen
fifties
or
forties
or--
Seventies,
and
those
rides--and
boat
we would
come
down into
The
Sixties
Hudson.
All
night
go up the
sometimes
in
the
day,
but
and
long,
mostly
at
of
the
city
loved
to
night.
J:
Mabel,
loved
more
that
you
with
a girlfriend--or
were
than
any
there
any
any
other
others--that
parts
you
go
parts--beautiful
parts
that
you
remember
I was
travelling
remember?
M:
so much--going
for--I
didn't
No,
I don't
away
with
have--Lillian
the
white
went.
18
because
people
that
I worked
She was on a couple
of
Mabel
them,
Hampton
but
I didn't
J:
walk
or
bother
There
parts
of
c19
just
liked
so much.
wasn't
the
Pa.ge
anyplace
city
that
M:
No.
in
J:
Uhm-hmmm.
M:
Let
me look
J:
Did
you
M:
No, I did
Here
that
you
to
you--
New York?
over
like
the
place.
Park
Central
or
did
you
like
the
•
river.
Park;
didn't
like
and
Crotona
Park.
there
and
we carried
sit,
food
Street.
*
and
Most
I loved
Crotona
we used
and
all
011., picnics.
M:
Picnics,
[Mel]
And there
J:
What
to
out
yeah.
downtown,
are
year
I -didn't
No, no.
river.
J:
I met
there.
the
not.
I go is
Park;
go out
there
Central
people's
I'd
there
like
homes--
go out
and--on
holidays,
and----
We had
see.
a beautiful
She
two women I can
lived
tell
time
in
out
River
you--
was this?
----------·----------------------------------*
Not being
a native
New Yorker,
I asked someone to
look this
up for me on the map to get the right
spelling.
For the record,
Crotona
Park is in the Bronx,
between
Treemont
and East
Treemont,
about
eight
or ten blocks
south
of Bronx Park with the zoo and garden.
(SA)
19
Mabel
Page
Hampton
M:
was [Mel]--oh,
[or Nel?J
[Mel]
in The Sixties.
around
hair
and
drive
she'd
from
was
She's
come uptown.
the
time
over
was crazy
it
she
would
She's
was knee-high
If there
gotten
gettin'
you can't
I know,
gonna
we'll
Do you
J:
get
ever
cuttin'
to
right?
loved
kick
She
And she
you knew,
ready
so religious,
M: Yeah,
a duck.
a woman that
was ever
we're
through
had a car.
to
M:
and now I'm
get
always
J:
[Mel],
was in The Sixties-'
women--ooooh,
my God.
She taught
you everything
J:
a woman,
her
butt.
do a thing-get
her
before--
her.
remember
Did you know women who liked
any
that
There
c20
to
anything
play
about
softball
sports.
or were
there
teams.
M:
about
care
special
No, all
the
women,
they
liked
the
them--softballs--they
about
any old
softball.
J:
I've
J:
What about
jewelry
got
that
cut
to
didn't
soft
it
you these
there
jewelry?
liked
to
women.
too
much
Didn't
outl
ask
women
care
questions?
Was there
wear,
or
any
how they
wore
things?
M: I don't
. that's
about
J:
know.
Most
everybody
had a watch,
Any special
significance
and
all.
What about
rings?
20
to
Mabel
Page
Hampton
c21
rings'?
M:
wore
in
No,
their
to
What
a shirt--a
when
when
you
had
I wasn't
Twenties,
sick
or
Can
you
or
Thirties,
one
of
when
That
all.
on and
I wear
would
How would
I was
flat,
know
low-heeled
you
was
what
a
you
shoes.
Even
socks.
thinking
Forties--when
couple
young,
Nobody
happen--I'm
or
the
died?
We all
got
the
woman's
of
in
lesbian
How did
you
The
couples
handle
got
that?
Later,
there.
There
was--oh,
I still
name.
you
make
a list
of
all
the
names
that
she
and
remember.
had--she's
of
ever
remember?
M:
end
outfit?
outfit,
a suit
What
think
can
they
no~- tlian
rings
favorite
tie.
J:
J:
you
your
workin',
M:
can't
was
My favorite
M:
was
more
up?
dress
suit--and
re
life.
J:
like
there'
the
No,
one
I have
'cause
Mabel
loves
name?
Well,
anyhow-We'll
think
who told
my tongue--"I
J:
to
don't
all
get
to
that
Lillian--oh,
know
of
of
the
it.
what
won1en. "
What
21
because
it
you
gonna
Oh,
would
just
was
on the
do with
what
happen
was
if
I
her
Mabel
Mabel
somebody
many people
woman.
but
I'll
that
tell
get
you the
sick
I wasn't
truth.
and die.
around
I was a lucky,
too
fortunate
The first--
The first
years
c22
died?
M:
J:
Did you hear
M:
Well,
funeral
old--and
went
Page
Hampton
to
the
I got
you'd
I went
hear
to,
along
and another
and carried
with
How did
M:
Well,
me.
about
all.
twenty-five
friend
of mine,
they
I was uncomfortable,
okay.
it
J:
and that's
of it,
I was more than
a girlfriend
funeral
any--?
of
women help
each
other
through
those
times?
They lived
together,
J:
friends
they
worked
and they
They worked.
together.
worked.
And when somebody
got
sick,
would
The friends
come and help
all
the
come?
M:
know--bring
food,
bring
of us had a little
would
money,
piece
and help
of money.
them--you
them out
'cause
Nobody was broke
all
then.
And-J:
Or did
lesbians
M:
Did you ever
stick
Well,
feel
lonely
as a lesbian,
Mabel?
together?
no,
I never
felt
22
lonely
because
I was
/61
Mabel
too
Hampton
busy
Page
working.
really--'cause,
you
see,
home
to
have
be workin'
a Lillian'd
be home
and
somebody
find
month--for
this
or two years--I'll
months
come
you'll
See,
two
for
before
c23
who
months
or
this
person,
that
I had
three
I'd
other
f.riends.
J:
But
you
had
had friends
lots--you
all
through--
M: I had plenty
onto
one
this
place
I would
person
and
go to
special?
too
long
the
other
You loved
M:
Oh, I loved
J:
Isn't
Because
you
Well,
the
the
theater--in
you liked
because
I was too--I
place.
And then,
the
if
hold
don't
know--
I got
lonely,
theater.
another
thing
couldn't
find
to the
that
that
in
theater.
theater?]
The German
made
New York
city.
another
I went
down to
--down
in
there
operas.
Can you
the
the
I went
a proper
name,
[German theater]
that
I didn't
but
theater.
that
[or
J:
friends,
a theater.
J:
M:
of
name
some
of
best
through
the
yeah,
I seen
that
the
plays
years?
that
you
saw
I know you saw
The Captive.
M:
there
was
other
Oh,
pl·ays
that--I
can't
23
so many times.
remember
them--but,
And then
do
Page
Hampton
Mabel
you remember,
it.
I went
that
thick.
left
· I've
it
you gave
back
about
J:
I don't
M:
Yeah,
your
always
you had
mother
Oh, the
M:
No,
I just
liked
alright,
but
J:
when you wore
a suit
the
night.
I don't
but
in
It's
that
about
long.
1, begin
I didn't
Is
that
to me, and
it
show--
it
an encyclopedia?
feel
for
2).
I can't
like
them.
answer.
a man,
mind the
So when you dressed
Time when
there.
Side
Never
care
every
you
book.
a question
women.
know whether
you gave
'cause
but
I just
I couldn't.
They were
men.
See.
however
you dressed,
and
you wanted--
M:
I was always
J:
But you knew you were
M:
Oh, yes.
with
everything
no encyclopedia.
girl,
I didn't
what
last
encyclopedia?
Now there's
them.
has
and about
it.
book
wasn't
it
(End Side
like
wide
in that
was a young
didn't
book
or what,
that
J:
M:
that
that
on earth--is
Hayes
and it
remember.
cherished
everything
Helen
and found
It's
with
me a book,
c24
low-heeled
dressin'
in a suit.
a woman--
I knew I was. a woman.
shoes--and,
in those
24
I dressed
days,
people--if
in
Mabel
they
you
seen
were
you
too
much with
low-heeled
J:
They
M:
And they
wearin'
wear
low-heeled
were
'em.
''Yes,"
on,
they
think
right.
were
'cause
shoes
I says,
right.
some
all
the
But that
people
didn't
would
ask
me
stop
me,
"You
I had
a lie
time?"
my
feets'
that
you
"Because
bad.··
them.
J:
All
and
Lillian,
joked
you
about
those
M:
the
years
called
eacl~
other
When I first
she
was
little
after
she
made
Little
Bear,
I was
the
Big
All
of
Mrs.
when,
the
we hit
little
Bear.
six
goin'
the
cards
with
"pop",
and
you
Bronx,
and
was
and
me mad,
Bear.
as
"Duchess".
I'd
call
And all
The Little
everything
cute,
would
I
you
her
our
The
friends
And Big
say
Mr.
Bear.
and
(Laughs).
( Pause
three
because
she
And then,
us
Duchess
her,
know.
knew
living
"mom" and
met
her
and
were
things--?
called
to
shoes
c25
queer.
from
for
Page
Hampton
on tape)
J:
You hit
M:
We hit
the
the
on forty-four.
thirty-nine.
.
Bronx?
Bronx.
This
We hit
And there
the
I met
25
was
nineteen
Bronx.
two
girls
forty-
And we moved
upstairs--
Mabel
Hampton
Frances
had
and
to
Billie--and
none..
And they
Page
Billie
had
Frances
was the
parties
had
Big
all
three
Cl1eese.
children,
And they
Billie
the
SlJ.e was
up there.
c26
still
man,
see?
would
go
parties.
And then
'round
the
that's
still
the
corner
you
moved
in,
I said
to
on 2ants
there,
M:
Oh,
that
out
moved
was
or it
no,
There's
just
no,
I didn't
a few of them
down
I looked
I says,
"A hundred
So,
says,
"You go to parties
''Yeah.
"
she
"Where'd
course,
drink]
to
we got
together
you're
we had
and
from
she
one
bound
What
year
you
live
and eleventh
all
Lillian,
J:
at
know the·re
to be--?
them,
but
and
the
way
in--when
spoke
to
we
us,
Billie
Billie.
and
had
everything.
says,
of
out
way we moved
came
"Hmmmm."
you
did
know
So they
one,
lives
She
quite
turned
Now, the
myself,
and
So,
[Florene].
someplace,
I remember--Frances
I says,
find
I met
from me now.
When you
lesbians
find
one
alive.
J:
were
next
to
to
'
was
is
the
find
this
to
at?"
Street."
much?"
do was
right
there.
other.
everybody
now we're
26
[say
a little
So,
But
that's
I mean,
else.
talking?
when
how
you
Mabel Hampton
M:
and we've
Oh, nineteen
been
Second
there
eleventh
And then
Bryce,
very
good-lookin'
you?
The
Is
M:
No.
light
not
I left
me to
Run for
J:
--
M:
No,
the
to
name--
about?
But she knew all
an office,
Mabel,
reasons
you
see?
because
didn't
about
you were a
do it?
told
a lesbian?
me not
in trouble.
say.
to.
These
No,
people
and you'll
hot-headed,
to
a
office?
Lillian
supposed
She was
talkin'
run for
you were
'cause
you're
And then,
we're
do that,
one of the
M:
it
woman's
Bryce.
She was married.
Did you not
you up 'cause
my thing-
woman.
she a lesbian
"You' 11 get
says,
I got
warden.
the
and
name)
Was that
lesbian?
was in a hundred
Bryce--that's
little
J:
J:
Street
Miss
And we wanted
see.
World War--I
(inaudible)
Miss
me.
World War [effect]
the
I was an air-raid
(a
you're
since.
The Second
Street.
a-ma-jigs.
· she
that--
World War.
M:
it,
and four--like
forty-three
ever
How did
J:
c27
Page
So leave
it
"Because,"
will
beat
say things
alone."
Okay with
alone.
you see,
Lenox Avenue.
we moved from hundred
I met some fine
27
girls
and eleventh
up there
on
Mabel
Hampton
number
nine
A Lenox
second
Street.
What kinds
J:
kind
of
work
into
they
did
M:
went
Avenue--that's
of jobs
I was doing
awhile,
for
And these
J:
The friends
other
Oh, they
chamber
others'
was
was all
around,
these
and
twenty-
women have?
What
then:
day's
work,
then
I
then--
and
women, what were their
jobs?
you were meeting.
that
M:
did
c28
do?
The jobs
a factory
a hundred
Page
had different
maid,
and
one
jobs"
was
in
cook,
the
and the
hospital
and
it
you know?
J:
Did anyone
drive
M:
No, I remember
a taxi
or do anything
like
that?
drive
a cab
didn't
because
keep
tabs
J:
describing
your
M:
helped
think
Frances
she
the
that
taxi
I met one woman who would
was hers.
I met
her,
but,
on her.
When you said
neighbors,
''Billie"--when
Billie
They had been
to
raise
those
and
together
Frances--?
years
children.
J:
When you said
Billie
was
a man,
or was
she
M:
I don't
know.
you were
'cause
had
Billie
And--
was the
man, did Billie
just~-?
I didn't
28
ask.
She looked
that
Mabel
Hampton
And,
way.
Page
of course,
she
that
looked
c29
and. she act
way,
that
way.
M; Well,
the
beat
J:
She
M:
Yes,
hell
would,
-she get
a couple
house
from
up
was
loving,
the
wasn't
children
you
know,
'cause
look
at
to
in her.
a private
house.
children?
the
but
her,
Frances--she
was fresh.
Frances
somebody
of drinks
else,
Frances
see,
live
She bought
when
up the
a private
there.
Now,
M: Yes,
you
mean?
(Laughs).
now.
get
one of th.ese
things,
I'll
her
not
on the
Grand
long
ago
(Pause
you
she,
adored
of Frances
me in
J:
that
she act?
• • •
out
Frances
street
How did
How do you mean?
J:
I started
send
them
to
s--
to Frances.
If
I
I met
Concourse.
on tape).
M:
She bought
one
J:
Mabel,
there
a lot
were
aware
A lot
of
was
of?
for
me.
of
physical
people
beating
violence
each
other
..
up?
M:
heard
go into
of
Well,
it--could
a club
I didn't
hear
and
get
about
half
go around
them,
half
you
drunk
29
people.
those
know,
and
you
I
a fight.
look
They
at
Mabel
Hampton
Page
somebody--bip!--they
then
that's
how the
men would
say,
that.
So,
didn't
go to
to
theater,
the
singin'
I didn't
the
left
and
men found
out
what
they
lessons
come that
place
so
I meat
old
around
with
with
those
have
and
all
like
I
and
why I was
lessons,
to
And the
people,
That's
up dancin'
I didn't
were.
bulldyker,"
them.
I took
But,
and
be bothered
runnin'
I took
with
up
them.
(inaudible).
J:
you
you
pal
and
right.
knockin'
"Here
c30
Would
you
be
ashamed
if
then
anybody
called
a bulldagger?
M:
started
rest
out.
'cause
I knew
that
was the
first
name that
See?
J:
Were
M:
And anytime
assured,
when
it--not
about
about
call
No,
you
ever
ashamed?
somebody
they
call
you,
you
about
called
that,
you
they
that--or
else
something,
know
something
they
wouldn't
you.
J:
Were
you
ever
M:
No, I never
ashamed
of being
was ashamed
and
a lesbian,
Mabel?
people
who was
We had
lovely
J:
ashamed.
The all
mingled
times.
We'll
stop
now.
30
never
in
with
got
each
around
other.
l6 i
Mabel
Hampton
(End
Page
of
tape).
31
c31
l•
•
I
ies, anc
che au·
the los
Wh
her be
in OUI
confro
lives,
suspec
wome
that i·
I Lift My Eyes to the Hill:
The Life of Mabel Hampton as Told
by a White Woman
hund1
Africa
withs·
In
break
black
each
book
for.
0
out 1
Joan Nestle
'
l
I hope that many of you had the privilege of meeting Mabel Hampton yourself. On Thursday nights, as many of you know, Ms. Hampton held
court at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, opening the mail and finding out
everyone's story. A devout collector of books on African American history and
lesbian culture, Ms. Hampton in 1976 had donated her lesbian paperback collection to the archives. Surrounded by these books and many others, she shared in
welcoming the visitors, some who had come just to meet her.
Another more public place you could always count on finding Ms. Hampton
in her later years was New York's Gay Pride March. From the early 1980s on,
Ms. Hampton could be seen strutting down Fifth Avenue, our avenue for the
day, marching under the Lesbian Herstory Archives banner, wearing her jauntily tilted black beret, her dark glasses, and a bright red T-shirt proclaiming her
membership in SAGE (Senior Action in a Gay Environment). Later in the
decade, when she could no longer walk the whole way, Ms. Hampton would be
the center of a mob of younger lesbian women all fighting for the right to push
her wheelchair down the avenue. Mabel Hampton, domestic worker, hospital
matron, entertainer, had walked down many roads in her life-not always to
cheering fans. Her persistent journey to full selfhood in a racist and capitalistic
America is a story we have not yet learned to tell in our lesbian and gay history
•
•
work.
Over the past ten years, I have been dazzled at our heady discussions of
deconstructionism, our increasingly sophisticated academic conferences on gender representation, the publication of sweeping communal and historical stud-
T (")(4
(Cle,s
~(l
Vl
~ ~ .f-11
V rt i ; ,I\
fre!;SJl]i';~
apar
for r
T
fina
rem
I
1
I
•
bac1
rem
togt
live
I
bou
me.
Reg
kill
do
1
and
•
m1
H2
WC
rn·
sh
I Lift My Eyes to the Hill: The Life of Mabel Hampton / 259
ies, and our brave biographies of revered figures in American history in which
the authors speak clearly about their subjects' sexual identity. But my grief at
the loss of Mabel Hampton turned my attention elsewhere.
When I was offered this honor, the Kessler Lecture, I knew I had to speak of
her because her life in this country was the story we are in danger of forgetting
in our rush of language and queer theory. I also knew that I would have to
confront a racist history in my own relationship to Ms. Hampton. Our two
lives, Ms. Hampton's and mine, first intersected at a sadly traditional and
suspect crossroads in the history of the relationships between black and white
women in this country. These relationships are set in the mentality of a country
that in the words of Professor Linda Meyers '' could continue for over three
hundred years to kidnap an estimated 50 million youths and young adults from
Africa, transport them across the Atlantic with about half dying unable to
withstand the inhumanity of the passage." (Bell, 11).
In some war111month of 1952, my small white Jewish mother took her
breakfasts in a Bayside, Queens, luncheonette. Sitting next to her was a small
black Christian woman. For several weeks they breakfasted together before they
each went off to work, my mother to the office where she worked as a
bookkeeper, Ms. Hampton to the homes she cleaned and the children she cared
for.
One morning, as Ms. Hampton told me the story, she followed my mother
out to her bus and as Regina sat down in her seat, she threw the keys to our
apartment out the bus window to Ms. Hampton, asking her to consider working
for her.
This working relationship did not last long, because of my mother's own
financial instability. I remember Ms. Hampton caring for me when I was ill. I
remember her tan raincoat with a lesbian paperback in its pocket, its jacket bent
back so no one could see the two women in the shadows on its cover. I
remember, when I was twelve years old, asking my mother as we did a laundry
together one weekend whose men's underwear we were washing, since no man
lived in our apa1t111ent."They are Mabel's,'' she said.
In future years, Regina, Mabel, and her wife, Lillian, became closer friends,
bound together by a struggle to survive and by my mother's lesbian daughterme. Ms. Hampton told me during one of our afternoons together that when
Regina suspected I was a lesbian she called her late that night and threatened to
kill herself if I turned out that way. "I told he~ she might as well go ahead and
do it because it wasn't her business what her daughter did and besides, I'm one
and it suits me fine."
Because Ms. Hampton and I later funned a relationship based on our commitment to a lesbian community, I had a chance much later in life, when Ms.
Hampton herself needed care, to reverse the image this society thrives on, black
women caring for white people. The incredulous responses we both received in
my Upper West Side apartment building, when I was Ms. Hampton's caretake~
showed how deeply the traditional racial script still resonates.
•
260 I Joan
· estle
To honor her, to touch .her again, to be honest in the face of race, O rei,u
,c._
e
1 ess of physical death, t~ ~hare the story of her O\Yn narrati·, e ~
t_h e bl~nkn
liberation-for
all these reasons-it
1s she I must \vrite about.
Ms. Hampton pointed t'he way her story should be told. Her legaev·0
~ocuments so carefully assembled for Deborah Edel, who had met Ms. HamPton
in the early seventies and who had all of Ms. Hampton's trust ' tell 1·0 n,o
uncertain ter111sthat her life revolved around t\vo major themes-her
material
struggle to survive and her cultural struggle for beauty. ·sread and roses, , he
worker's old anthem-this
is what the nagging voice wanted me to remember
the texture of the individual life of a working woman.
After her death on October 26, 1989, \vhen Deborah and I were gatherin
her papers, we found a box carefully marked, "In case I pass away see that Joan
and Deb get this at once, Mabel." On top of th pile of birth certificates and
cemetery plot contracts was a piece of lined paper with the following typed
•
entnes:
I
thl
un
I
1915-1919: 8B Public School 32, Jersey City
1919-1923: Housework, Dr. Kraus, Jersey City
1923-1927: Housework, Mrs. Parker, Jersey City
1927-1931: Housework, Mrs. Karim, Brooklyn
1932-1933: Housework, Dr. Garland, New York City
1934-1940: Daily housework, different homes
1941-1944: Matron, Hammarlund Manufacturing Co., NYC
1945-1953: Housework, Mrs. Jean Nate
1948-1955: Attendant, New York Hospital
1954-1955: General, daily work
Lived 1935: 271. West 122nd Street, NYC
Lived 1939-1945: West 111th Street, NYC
Lived 1945-current (1955) 663 East 169th Street, Bronx, NYC
Compiled in the mid-fifties when Ms. Hampton was applying for a position
at Jacobi Hospital, the list demanded attention-a
list so bare and yet so
eloquent of a life of work and home.
Since 1973, the start of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, I knew Ms. Hampton's story must be told, but I was not a trained historian or soci,ologist. I
attended every session I could o·n doing lesbian history work, and tog,ether \"le
tried to for111ulateth,e right questions that we thought would elicit the kind of
history we wanted: What did you call yourself in the twenties 1 How di,d you
and your friends dress in ·the forties? What bars did you go to? In the late
seventies, when I started doing oral history tapes with Ms. Hampton, l soon
learned how limited our methods were. Here is a typical early exchange:
].: Do you remember anything about sports? Did you know women who
liked to play softball? Were ther e any teams?
M.: o, all the women, they di,dn't care 'too much about them-softballs,
1
Ol
ch
't
Ol
l
C
r
1
I
I
'
I
I
I Lift My Eyes to the Hill: The Life of Mabel Hampton /
2 61
.
I
I •
''
they liked the soft women. Didn't care about any old softball. Cut it
out!
•
1 •
•
l
I
►
'
'I
J
•
'. t
t
I
I
'I
I soon realized that Ms. Hampton had her own narrative style tightly
connected to how she had made sense of her life, but it wasn't until I had gone
through every piece of paper she had bequeathed us that I had a deeper
understanding of what her lesbian life had meant.
Lesbian and gay scholars argue over whether we can call a woman a lesbian
who lived in a time when that word was not used. We have been very careful
about analyzing how our social sexual representation was created by medical
terminology and cultural terrors. But here was a different story. Ms. Hampton's
lesbian history is embedded in the history of race and class in this country; she
makes us extend our historical perspective until she is at its center. The focus
then is not lesbian history, but lesbians in history.
Preparing this essay gave me a new understanding of the saying Ms. Hampton loved to repeat. When she was asked, ''Ms. Hampton, when did you come
out?'' she always replied, "What do you mean? I was never in!'' The audience
always cheered this assertion of lesbian identity, but now I think Ms. Hampton
was speaking of something more inclusive.
Driven to fend for herself as an orphan, as a black working woman, as a
lesbian, Ms. Hampton always struggled to fully occupy her life, refusing to be
cut off from the communal, national, and world events around her. She was
never in, in any aspect of her life, if ''in'' means withholding the fullest
response possible from what life is demanding of you at the moment.
Ms. Hampton found and created communities along her way for comfort and
support, communities that engendered her fierce loyalty. Her street in the
Bronx, 169th Street, was her street, and she walked it as ''Miss Mabel," known
to all and knowing all, whether it was the woman representing her congressional district or the numbers runner down the block. How she occupied this
street, this moment in urban twentieth-century American history, is very
similar to how she occupied her life-self-contained
but always visible, carrying her own sense of how life should be lived but generous to those who
were struggling to make a decent life out of indecent conditions.
I cannot give you the whole of Ms. Hampton's journey, but I would like to
take you through Ms. Hampton's decades up to the 1950s by blending the
documents she left, such as letters, newspaper clippings, and programs, with
excerpts from her oral history and my interpretations and readings of other
sources.
These personal daily documents represent the heart of the Lesbian Herstory
Archives; they are the fragile records of a tough woman who never took her
eyes off the hilltop, never let racism destroy her love for her own culture, never
let the tyranny of class keep her from finding the beauty she needed to live,
never accepted her traditional woman's destiny, and never let hatred and fear of
lesbians keep her from her gay community.
l
I
t
•
1
I
f
l
'
It
i
•l
•••
'
•
•
J
I
.r.
t
l
•
I
I
I
•
t•.
•
I
•
i
'
t
'
I
I
I
••
•
f
I
•
'
•
''
262
/
Joan Nest le
None of it was easy. In each decade, right from the beginning M
had to run for her life.
' s. Hampton
We need to start the story in April 1963, when Ms. Hampton was d
to document her own beginnings so she would be considered for e ~sperate
0
by the city:
mp YTnent
To the county clerk in the Hall of Records, Winston-Salem, North
.
caro1Ina•
•
Gentlemen: I would appreciate very much your helping me to secure my b· h
~ape~s~
or_an~ re~ordyou may have on file, as to_my bi_rt~and _Proofof age as ~his
1nfo1111anon
1s vital for the purpose of my secunng a evil serY1ceposition in N
York.Listed below are the infonnation I have to help you locate any records ~:
y
may have.
.
I was born approximately May 2, 1902 in Winston-Salem. My mother's na
was Lulu Hampton or Simmons. I attended TeachPr'sCollege which is its narne
now at the age of six. My grandmother's name was Simmons. I lived there wi~
her after the death of my mother when I was two months old. It is very important
to me as it means a livelihood for me to secure any info1111ation.
by Jae
tl
Llrtd
\esbia.J
""ho'
chat h
create
lent a
in cht
Ev
press:
'' in t
gainf
Qurh
•
per10
the
t
whit•
were
On an affidavit of birth dated May 26, 1943, we find the additional inforrna..
tion: Ms. Hampton was of the Negro race, her father's full name was Joseph
Hampton (a fact she did not discover until she was almost twenty), and he had
been born in Reidsville, North Carolina. Her mother's birthplace was listed as
Lynchburg, Virgina.
This appeal for a record of her beginnings points us to where Ms. Hampton's
history began: not in the streets of Greenwich Village, where she sang for
pennies thrown from windows in 1910 when she ~as eight years old, or even
in Winston-Salem, where she lived on her grandmother's small far111from her
birth until 1909, but further into a past of a people, further into the shame of a
country.
Ms. Hampton's deepest history lies in the middle passage of the Triangular
Slave Trade and before that in the complex and full world of sixteenth-century
Africa. When Europe turned its ambitious face to the curving coastline of the
ancient continent and created an economic system based on the servitude of
Africans, Ms. Hampton's story began. The middle passage, the horrendous
crossing of the waters from Africa to this side of the world, literally and
figuratively became the time of generational loss. Millions died in those waters,
carrying their histories with them. This tragic "riddle in the waters," as the
Afro-Cuban poet Nicholas Guillen calls it, was continued on the land of the
Southern plantation system. Frederick Douglass writes, ''I have no accurate
knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it."
These words were written in 1845 and Ms. Hampton was born in 1902, but
now as I reflect on Ms. Hampton's dedication to preserving her own documents,
I read them as a moment in the history of an African American lesbian.
The two themes of work and communal survival that run so strongly
throughout Ms. Hampton's life are prefigured by the history of black working
women in the sharecropping system, a history told in great and moving detail
-
I'
C
t~
n
s
a
f
C
l
l
•
t
r
l
I
n
I Lift My Eyes to the Hill: The Life of Mabel Hampton / 263
by Jacqueline Jones in Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work,
and the Family from Slavery to the Present. Though Jones never mentions
lesbian women, Ms. Hampton and her wife of forty-five years, Lillian Foster,
who was born in Norfolk, Virginia, carried on in their lesbian lives traditions
that had their roots in the post-slavery support systems Southern black women
created at the turn of the century. The comradeship of these all-women benevolent and mutual aid societies was rediscovered by Ms. Hampton and Ms. Foster
in their New York chapters of the Eastern Star.
Even the work of both women, domestic service for Ms. Hampton and
pressing for Ms. Foster, had its roots in this earlier period. Jones tells us that
"in the largest southern cities from 50% to 70% of all black women were
gainfully employed at least part of the year around the turn of the century." In
Durham, North Carolina, closer to Ms. Hampton's birthplace, "during the
period of 1880-1910 fully one quarter of all black women 65 years and older in
the urban south were gainfully employed, a figure five times higher than for
white women'' (11.3). Very likely, both Ms. Hampton's grandmother and mother
were part of this work force.
•'
•
I
I
I'm Mabel Hampton. I was born on May 2, 1902, in Winston-Salem, North
Carolina, and I left there when I was eight years old. Grandma said I was so small
that [my] head was as big as a silver dollar. She said that she did all she could to
make me grow. One day she was making the bed and gettin' things together after
she fed the chickens. She never let me lay in the bed; I lay in the rocking chair,
and this day she put the clothes in the chair; when she carried 'em outside, she
forgot I was in 'em and shook the clothes out and shook me out in the garden out
on the ground. And Grandma was so upset that she hurt me.
My grandmother took care of me. My mother died two months after I was
born. She was poisoned, which left me with just my grandma, mother's younger
sister and myself. We had a house and lived on a street-we
had chickens, had
hogs, garden vegetables, grapes and things. We had a back yard, I can see it right
now, that back yard. It had red roses, white roses, roses that went upside the
house. We never had to go to the store for anything. On Saturdays we go out
hunting blackberries, strawberries and peaches. My girlfriends lived on each side
of the street, Anna Lou Thomas, Hattie Harris, Lucille Crump. Oh-OOh-O Anna
, Lou Thomas, she was good lookin', she was a good lookin' girl.
One day Grandma says, "Mabel I'm goin' to take you away." She left Sister
there and we went to Lynchburg, Virginia, because Grandma's mother had died. I
remember when I got there, the man picked me up off the floor and I looked
down on this woman who had drifts of gray hair. She was kind of a brownskinned woman and she was good lookin'. Beautiful gray hair she had. I looked at
her and then he put me down on a stool and I set there. They sang and prayed
and carried on. I went to sleep.
.
However pleasant Ms. Hampton's memories were of North Carolina, she had
no intention of returning there later in her life.
Lillian tried her best to get me to go to Winston-Salem. I says, "No, I don't want
to." She says, "You wouldn't even go to my home?" I says, "No, because with 1:1~
nasty temper they'd lynch me in five minutes. Because they would see me walkin
\
'
•
.
264 / Joan Nestle
down the street holdin' ~ands with some woman, they want to put me in Jail
Now I can hold hands W1th some woman all over New York, all over the Bron~
and everywhere else and no one says nothing to me."
•
J
t
l
When she was seven years old, in 1909, Ms. Hampton was forced to migrate
to New York. In her own telling, there is a momentous sense that she has lost
whatever safety she had in that garden of roses.
f
l
t
'
One morning I was in the bedroom getting ready for school [a deep sigh]. I heard
Grandma go out in the yard and come back and then I heard a big bump on the
floor. So I ran to the door and I looked and Grandma was laying stretched out on
the floor. I hollered and hollered and they all came running and picked her up and
put her on the bed. She had had a stroke. Grandma lived one week after she had
that stroke. My mamma's younger aunt, I'll nevPr furget it, was combing my hair
and I looked over at Grandma layin' in bed. It was in the morning. The sun was
up and everything. She looked at me and I looked at her. And when my aunt got
finished combing my hair, Grandma had gone away.
They called my mother's sister in New York and she came so fast I think she
was there the next day. I remember the day we left Winston-Salem. It was in the
summertime. We went by train and I had a sandwich of liver between two pieces
of bread. And I knew and felt then that things was going to be different. After
eating that sandwich I cried all the way to New York. My aunt tried to pacify me
but it didn't do no good, seems as if my heart was broken.
Taken to a small apartment
at 52 West 8th Street, Ms. Hampton met her
uncle, a minister, who raped her within the year.
In telling her story, Ms. Hampton has given two reasons for her running
away at age eight from this home: one involves a fight with a white girl at
school and the other, a terrible beating by her uncle after she had misspelled a
word. Whatever the exact reason, it was clear that Ms. Hampton had already
decided she needed another air to breathe .
•
My aunt went out one day and he raped me. I said to myself, "I've got to leave
here." He wouldn't let me sleep in the bed. They had a place where they put coal
at, and he put a blanket down and made me lay there. So this day, I got tired of
that. I went out with nothing on but a dress, a jumper dress, and I walked and
walked.
Here begins an amazing tale of an eight-year-old girl's odyssey to find a
place and a way to live. After walking the streets for hours, the young Ms.
Hampton came to "a thing in the ground, in the sidewalk, people was going
down there." A woman came by and thought she recognized the lost child.
"Aren't you Miss Brown's little girl?" Before Ms. Hampton could answer, the
woman placed a nickel in her hand and told her to go back home to Harlem. As
Ms. Hampton says, "that nickel was a turning point in my life." Instead of
going uptown, Ms. Hampton boarded a Jersey bound train and rode to the last
stop. She came above ground and walked until she found a playground. "I seen
all these children playin', white and black, all of them havin' a good time." She
1
I Lift My Eyes to the Hill: The Life of Mabel Hampton / 265
joined t~e child~en and played until it began to get dark. Two of the children
ook an interest 1n her, and she made up a story: "My aunt told me to stay here
t ntil she comes." The girl called to her brother, "You go get the cops, I'll try to
~nd her aunt." She brought a woman back with her, a Miss Bessie White, who
began to ask the child questions. Ms. Hampton: "I looked down the street and
from the distance I see the boy comin' with the cop, so I decided to go with the
woman. Bessie said, come, I'll take you home."
Ms.Hampton
remained with the White family until she was seventeen. One
rnemberof the family, Ellen, particularly stayed in her memory:
trr
l
1
t
'
I
•
{
'
'
t
•'
J
I seen a young woman sitting left of where I come in at. l say to myself, this is a
1
good-lookingwoman.I was alwaysadmiringsomewoman.Oh, and she was.She
had beautiful hair and she looked just like an angel. She got up out of the chair,
she was kind of tall, and she says, "You come with me." So she tuok me upstairs,
bathed me, and said, "We'll find you some clothes." She always talked very softly.
And she says, "You'll sleep with me.'' I was glad of that.
So I went and stayed with them. The other sister went on about lookin' for my
aunt. I knew she never find her. See I knew everything about me, but I kept quiet.
I kept quiet for twenty years.
Mabel Hampton, from the very beginning of her narrative, speaks with the
determination of a woman who must take care of herself. She will decide what
silences to keep and what stories to tell, creating for herself a power over life's
circumstances that her material resources seldom gave her.
For Mabel Hampton, the 1920s was a decade of both freedom and literal
imprisonment. In 1919, at seventeen, she was doing housework for a Dr. Kraus
of Jersey City. Her beloved Ellen, the first adult woman to hold Ms. Hampton
in her arms, had died in childbirth. With Ellen gone, Ms. Hampton's ties to the
White family loosened; she found work dancing in an all-women's company
that perfonned in Coney Island and had her first requited lesbian love affair.
She discovered the club life of New York. This is the decade that Ms. Hampton
paid a visit to the salon of XLelia Walker, the flapper daughter of Madame
Walker, and was amazed at the multiple sexual couplings she observed. She
perfonned in the Lafayette Theater and danced at the Garden of Joy, both in
Harlem. In this decade, she made the acquaintance of Ethel Waters, Gladys
Bentley, and Alberta Hunter. She was one of the 150,000 mourners who sang
"My Buddy" as the casket bearing Florence Mills, beloved singer, slowly moved
through the Harlem streets in 1927. This was Ms. Hampton's experience of the
period that lives as the Harlem Renaissance in history books.
But before all this exploration took place, Ms. Hampt~n was arrested for
prostitution by two white policemen and sentenced to three years in Bedford
Hills Reformatory for Women by a Judge Norris. As Ms. Hampton recounted
•
lt,
While we're standing there talking, the door opens.Now I know I had shut it.
And two white men walk in-great big white men. "We're raiding the house,"
one of them says. "For what?" "Prostitution,"he says. I hadn't been with a man
•
266 I Joan Nest le
~o time. I couldn't figure it out. I didn't have time to get clothes or nothin Th (
Judge she sat ~p there and says, "Well, only thing I can say is BedforJ.;, Ne
lawyer, no nothing. She railroaded me.
J-f
0
When Ms. Hampton talked about her prison experience, she dwelled on the
kindnesses she found there:
It was summertime and we went back out there and sat down. She (anothe
prisoner] says, "I like you." "I like you too." She said no more until time to go t~
bed. We went to bed and she took me in her bed and held me in her arms and I
went to sleep. She put her arms around me like Ellen used to do, you know and I
went to sleep.
•
'
•
But where Ms. Hampton found friendship, the board of managers of the
prison found scandal and disgrace. Opened 1n 1902 in a progressive era of prison
reforrtl, Bedford Hills under its first woman administrator, Katherine Davis,
accepted the special friendships of its women inmates. But in 1920, word that
interracial lesbian sex was occurring throughout the prison caused Davis to lose
her job. The new administrators of the prison demanded segregated facilities,
the only way, according to one of the men, interracial sex could be prevented.
I want to pause here to comment on both the generosity of Mabel Hampton
in sharing her prison experience with me and the impact her words had while I
read about this prison in Estelle Freedman's book Their Sister's Keepers.
By the time I was doing the oral history with Ms. Hampton she had left this
experience far behind. She told me that she seldom told anyone about it; she
would just say she had gone away. But toward the end of her life, Ms. Hampton
wanted the whole story to be told. She realized that her desire to be open about
her life was not popular with her peers. ''So many of my friends got religion
now,'' she would say. ''You can't get anything out of them." But because of Ms.
Hampton's courage to document the difficult parts of her life, my reading of
background history was transforxned.
When I read the following sentence in Freedman's book, ''By 1919, we are
told, about 75% of the prisoners were prostitutes, 70% had venereal disease, a
majority were of low mental ability and ten percent were psychopaths," I was
forced to see the women encoded in this list. Mabel Hampton was among these
counted women. We have a special insight, a special charge, in doing gay and
lesbian history work. We, of all peoples, have had our humanity hidden in such
lists of undesirables all our public days. I started this work on Mabel Hampton
because her life brought to the study of history the dignity of the human face
behind the sweeping summaries.
·
After thirteen months, Ms. Hampton was released from prison with the
condition that she stay away from New York City and its bad influences. But
Ms. Hampton could not contain herself. She spoke of a white woman with a
gray car whom she had met in Bedford coming to Jersey City to take her to
parties in New York. When a neighbor infonned on her, she was forced to
•
•
L
.t
t
•
f
..
f·
l
'•
••
l
•
•
I Lift My Eyes to the Hill: The Life of Mabel Hampton / 267
return and complete her sentence at Bedford. Ms. Hampton later described
e of the life that the state had declared criminal.
I ':f-1
5001
In 1923, I am about twenty years old. I had rooms at 120 West 122nd Street. A
girl friend of mine was living next door, and they got me three rooms there on
the ground floor-a bedroom, living room, and big kitchen. I stayed there until I
met Lillian in 1932. I went away with the people I worked for but I always kept
my rooms to come back to. Then I went into the show.
Next door these girls were all lesbians; they had four rooms in the basement
and they gave parties all the time. Sometimes we would have "pay parties." We'd
buy all the food-chicken
and potato salads. I'd chip in with them because I
would bring my girlfriends. We also went to "rent parties," where you go in and
pay a couple of dollars. You buy your drinks and meet other women and dance
and have fun. But with our house we just had close friends. Sometimes there
would be twelve or fourteen women there. We'd have pig feet, cl1ittlins. In the
winter time, it was black-eyed peas and all that stuff. Most of the women wore
suits. Very seldom did any of them have slacks or anything like that because they
had to come through the streets. Of course, if they were in a car, they wore the
slacks. Most of them had short hair. And most of them was good-lookin' women
too. The bulldykers would come and bring their women with them. And you
wasn't supposed to jive with them, you know. They danced up a breeze. They did
the Charleston; they did a little bit of everything. They were all colored women.
Sometimes we ran into someone who had a white woman with them. But me, I'd
venture out with any of them. I just had a ball. I had a couple of white girl friends
down in the village. We got along fine. At that time I was acting in the Cherry
Lane Theater. I didn't have to go to the bars because I would go to women's
houses. Like Jackie (Moms) Mahley would have a big party and all the girls from
the show would go. She had all the women there.
•
i
I
•
•
J
,I
•
...
•
t
•
\
.
In addition to private parties, Ms. Hampton and her friends were up on the
latest public lesbian events. Sometime in February 1927, Ms. Hampton attended
the new play that was scandalizing Broadway, The Captive. Whatever her
material struggle was in any given decade, Ms. Hampton sought out the cultural
images she needed. Here, is how she remembered that night at the theater:
..l
•
•
,'
ij,
J
-·
l
•
(
i
'
lt
.
;
Well, I heard about it, and a girlfriend of mine had taken me to see this play, The
Captive. And I fell in love-not only with The Captive, but the lady who was the
head actress in it. Her name was Helen Mencken. So I decided I would go backI had heard so much talk about it. I went back to see it by myself. I sat on the
edge of my seat! I looked at the first part of it, and I will always think that woman
was a lesbian. She played it too perfect! She had the thing down! She kissed too
perfect, she had everything down pat! So that's why I kept going back to see it
because it looked like to me it was part of my life. I was a young woman, but I
said, now this is what I would like to be, but of course, I would have to marry and
I didn't want to marry [the play focuses on the seduction of a married woman by
the offstage lesbian], so I would just go on and do whatever I thought was right
to do. So I talked to a couple of my friends in Jersey City. I carried them bad~
paid their way to see it, and they fell in love with it. There was plenty of wome_n
in that audience and plenty of men too! They applauded and applauded. This
same girl with the green car, she knew her-Helen
Mencken-and she carried
~
1
...
~
•
I
•
•
'
•
268 /
Joan Nestle
yo
me backstage and introduced me. Boy, I felt so proud! And she sa ,,
I
you like the show?" I said, "Because it seems a part of my life and
1Why do
what I hope to be." She says, "That's nice. Stick to it! You'll be all righ:\ arn and
J:•
it thi
firrnl
f
t
The twenties ended with Mabel Hampton living fully "in the life"
.
piece together another kind of living both from her day work and ;tying to
chorus line jobs. Later, when asked why she left show business sh rom her
"Because I like to eat."
' e replied,
The Depression that befell the country in 1929 did not play a large l .
M s. H ampton ,s memories,
. per haps because she was already earning ro ehtn
5
marginal income. We know that from 1925 until 1937 1 she did day work fuc
or t ha
e
family of Charles Haubrick. Ms. Hampton carefully saved all the letters fr
her employees testifying to her character:
orn
"Dec. 12, 1937. To Whom It May Concern: This is to certify that the bearer
Mabel Hampton has worked for me for the last 12 years doing housework off
and on and she does the same as yet. We have always found her honest and
industrious."
Reading these letters, embedded as they were in all the other documents of
Ms. Hampton's life, is always sobering. So much of her preserved papers testify
to an autonomous home and social life, but these letters sprinkled through each
decade remind us that Ms. Hampton's life was under surveillance by the white
families that controlled her economic survival.
.
In 1935 Ms. Hampton was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church at St.
Thomas the Apostle on West 118th Street, another step in her quest for
spiritual comfort. This journey included a lifelong devotion to the mysteries of
the Rosicrucians and a full collection of Marie Corelli, a Victorian novelist with
a moralistic bent. She ended the decade registering with the U.S. Depa1t111entof
Labor trying to find a job. She is told, "We will get in touch with you as soon
t
as there is a suitable opening."
The event that changed Ms. Hampton's life forever happened early on in the
decade, in 1932. While waiting for a bus, she met a woman even smaller than
herself-''dressed
like a duchess," as Ms. Hampton would later say-Lillian
•
Foster .
Ms. Foster remembered in 1976, two years before her death, that "Fortyfour years ago I met Mabel. We was a wonderful pair. I'll never regret it. But
she's a little tough. I met her in 1932, September 22. And we haven't been
separated since in our whole life. Death will separate us. Other than that I don't
want it to end."
Ms. Hampton, to the consternation of her _more discreet friends, dressed in
an obvious way much of her life. Her appearance, however, did not seem to
bother her wife. Ms. Foster went on to say, "A lady walked in once, Joe's wife,
and she .say, 'You is a pretty neat girl. You have a beautiful little home, but
where is your husband?' And just at that time, Mabel comes in the door with
her key and I said, 'There is my husband.' " The visitor added, "Now you know
t
t
Li
sout
•
faflll
put
(leaJ
0 eo--
1he
fost
ches
1
des 1
and
Del
Ha
a
r
!
I Lift My Eyes to the Hill: The Life of Mabel Hampton
/
if chat was your husband, you wouldn't have said itl" to which Ms. Foster
firmlyreplied, "But I said it!''
Lillian Foster, born in 1906 in Norfolk, Virginia, shared much of the same
southern background of Ms. Hampton, except that she came from a large
farnily. She was keenly aware that Ms. Hampton was "all alone," as she often
put it. Ms. Foster worked her whole life as a presser in white-owned dry
cleaning establishments, a job, like domestic service, that had its roots in the
neo-slavery working conditions of the urban South at the turn of the century.
These many years of labor in underventilated back rooms accelerated Ms.
Foster's rapid decline in her later years. But together with a group of friends,
these two women created a household lasting forty-six years.
This household with friends took many shapes. When crisis struck and a fire
destroyed their apart1nent in 1976 (part of the real estate "''ars that were gutting
and leveling the Bronx), Ms. Foster and Ms. Hampton came to live with me and
Deborah Edel until they could move back to their apartment house. Later Ms.
Hampton described our shared time as an adventure in lesbian families:
Down here it was just like two couples, Joan and Deborah and Mabel and Lillian;
we got along lovely, and we played, we sang, we ate, it was marvelous[ I will
never forget it. And Lillian, of course, Lillian was my wife. I had Joan laughing
because I called Lillian "Little Bear," but when I first met her in 1932, she was to
me, she was a duchess-the
grand duchess. Later in life I got angry with her one
day and I called her the "little bear," and she called me "the big bear," and of
course that hung on to me all through life. And now we are known to all our
friends as the "big bear" and the "little bear."
'
•
,
•
•
t
\.
lt
Ms. Hampton saved hundreds of cards signed "little bear," but when she
appealed to government officials or agencies for help, as she often did as their
housing conditions deteriorated, she said Ms. Foster was her sister.
In a letter to Mayor Lindsay in 1969, she wrote,
Dear Mr Mayor,
I don't know if I am on the right road or not, but I am taking a chance;
now what I want to know is can you tell me how I can get an apart11tent, I
I
l
have been everywhere and no success. I am living at the above address
[639 E. 169th St., Bronx] for 26 years but for about the past 10 years the
building has gone down terribly. For two years we have no heat all winter,
also no hot water. We called the housing authority but it seems it don't
help; everywhere I go the rent is so high that poor people can't pay it and
I would like to find a place before the winter comes in-with rent that I can
afford to pay. It is two of us (women) past 65. I still work but my older
sister is on retirement so we do need two bedrooms. If you can do
something to help us it will be greatly appreciated. Thanking you in
advance,
I remain, Miss Mabel Hampton.
•
l
l
r
•
;
'.
\
t
•••
l
t
t
t'
t
I
I
270
I
Joan
Nestle
. l
Th. 1s etter
· f
/il--.
or me one of the most important documents w e have ·
Lesb1an Herstory Archives. Ms. Hampton's request for a safe and warmin the
for her and Ms. Foster now marks the starting point of all m h·15t0home
inquiry-how did you survive?
y
rical
l•
In a document of a different sort, the program for a social event 5
by Jacobi Hospital, where she was employed for the last twenty yea~onstred
0
working life, we discover that a Ms. Mabel Hampton and Ms. Lillian ;
her
are sitting at table 2 5. These two women negotiated the public worldam_p~on
1
term that allowed expressions of affection and demanded a recognition 0~ h .a
• •
t e1r
1nt1macy.
There is a seamless quality to Ms. Hampton's life that does not fit our us l
paradigm for doing lesbian history work. Her life does not seem to be organi:~
around w~at we have come to see as th~ usual rites o~ ~ay passage, like coming
out or going to the bars. Instead she gives us the vision of an integrated lif
where the major shaping events are the daily acts of work, friends, and soci~
organizations, where the major definers of these territories are class and rac~
an d where she expects all aspects of her life to be respected.
Another indication of how Ms. Hampton expected that her life would be
taken as it was is that in every letter preserved by Ms. Hampton there is a
greeting or a blessing for Ms. Foster in its closing, whether the correspondent
is a friend or for111eremployer. "I do hope to be able to visit you and Lillian
some evening for a real chat and a supper by a superb cook! Do take care of
yourself and my best to Lillian," Dolores, :1944."God bless and keep you and
Lillian well always, I wish I could see you both some times," Jennie, 1977.
The 1940s were turbulent years, marked by the international war abroad and
the national unrest at home. While black American soldiers were fighting the
arniies of racial supremacists in Europe, their families were fighting the racist
dictates of a Jim Crow society at home. Harlem, Detroit, and other American
cities would see streets become battlefields.
For African American working women like Ms. Hampton, the forties was the
decade of the slave markets, the daily gathering of black women on the street
corners of Brooklyn and the Bronx to sell their domestic services to white
women who drove by looking for cheap labor. In 1940 Ms. Hampton was part
of this labor force, as she had been for over twenty years, working year after
year without workmen's compensation, health benefits, or pension payments.
In September :1940she received a postcard canceling her employment with
one family: "Dear Mabel, please do not come on Thursday. I will see you again
on Friday at Mrs. Garfinkels. I have engaged a part time worker as I need more
frequent help as you know. Come over to s~e us."
Ms. Hampton did not let her working difficulties dampen her enthusiasm for
her cultural heroes, however, and on October 6, 1940, she and Ms. Foster were
in the audience at Carnegie Hall when Paul Robeson commanded the stage. The
announcement for this concert is the first document we have reflecting Ms.
Hampton's lifelong love of the opera and her dedication to African American
cultural figures and institutions.
1s
t
.
I
.
I
''
I
I Lift My Eyes to the Hill: The Life of Mabel Hampton /
271
In 41, perhaps in recognition of her perilous situation as a day worker, Ms.
19
f-{arnpton secured the job of matron with the Hammarlund Manufacturing
cornpanY on West 34th Street, assuring her entrance into the new social
security system begun just six years earlier by Franklin Roosevelt.
she still took irregular night and day domestic employment so she and Ms.
foster could, among other things, on May 28, 1946, purchase from the American Mending Machine Company one Singer Electric Sewing Machine with
console table for the price of $100.00. She leaves a $44.00 deposit and carefully
preserves all records of the transaction.
On February 20, 1942, we have the first evidence of Ms. Hampton's involvement in the country's war efforts: a ditto sheet of instructions from the American Women's Voluntary Services addressed to all air raid wardens. It reads,
During the Ge1111anattack on the countries of Europe, the telephone was often
used for sabotage thereby causing panic and loss of life by erroneous orders. We
in New Yorkare particularly vulnerable in this respect since our great apart111ent
houses have often hundreds even thousands under one roof. ... The apartr11ent
house telephone warden must keep lines clear in time of emergency. Type of
person required: this sort of work should be particularly suited for women whose
common sense and reliability could be depended upon.
In August Ms. Hampton worked hard for the Harlem branch of the New
York Defense Recreation Committee, trying to collect cigarettes and other
refreshments for the soldiers and sailors who frequented Harlem's USO. In
December 1942 she was appointed deputy sector commander in the air warden
service by Mayor La Guardia. This same year she also received her American
Theater Wing War Service membership card. Throughout 1943 she served as
her community's air raid warden and attended monthly meetings of the Twelfth
Division of the American Women's Voluntary Services Organizations on West
116th Street. During all this time, her country maintained a segregated anny
abroad and a segregated society at home.
In January and February 1944, she received her fourth and fifth war loan
citation. This support for causes she believed in, no matter how small her
income, continued throughout Ms. Hampton's life. In addition to her religious
causes, she sent monthly donations to SCLC and the Martin Luther King
Memorial Fund, and by the end of the seventies she was adding gay organizations to her list.
On March 29, 1944, Ms. Hampton attended the National Negro Opera
Company's perfonnance of La Traviata. This group believed in opera for the
masses and included in its program a congratulatory message from the Upper
West Side Communist Party. On its board sat Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary
McCloud Bethune, both part of another moment in lesbian history. In 1952 this
same company presented Ouanga, an opera based on the life of the first king of
Haiti, Dessaline, who, the program says, "successfully conquered Napoleon's
annies in 1802 and won the Black Republic's fight for freedom." Ms. Hampton
was in the audience .
•
.
I
I
•
I
I
!
•
t
•
'I
'
l.
J
i
•
•
I
l
272
I Joan Nestle
cf
Y
Continuing her dedication to finding the roses amidst the bread, on Novem.
ber 12, 1944, Ms. Hampt?n heard Marian And~rson sing at Carnegie Hall and
added the program of this event to her collection of newspaper articles abo
the career of this valiant woman.
ut
Ms. Hampton's never-ending
from home, and Ms. Foster was
their Bronx apartment on 169th
the war's end, and which would
death in 1978.
pursuit of work often caused long absences
often left waiting for her partner to return to
Street, into which they had moved in 19 , at
45
remain their shared home until Ms. Foster's
f
I
I
I
.
•
Dear Mabel:
Received your letter and was very glad to hear from you and to know
that you are well and happy. This leaves me feeling better than I have
since you left. Everything is ok at home. Only I miss you so much I will
be glad when the time is up. There is nobody like you to me. I am writing
this on my lunch hour. It is 11 pm. I am quitting tomorrow. I don't see
anyone as I haven't been feeling too well. Well the 1/2 hour is up. Nite nite
be good and will see you soon.
Little Bear
In 1948 Ms. Hampton fell ill and was unable to work. She applied for home
relief and was awarded a grant of $54.95 a month, which the agency stipulated
should be spent the following way: $27.00 for food; $21.00 for rent; $ .55 for
cooking fuel; $ .80 for electricity; $ 6.oo for clothing; and for personal incidentals she is allotted $1.00. But from these meager funds she managed to give
com£ort to friends.
Postcard, August 9, 1948:
Dear Miss Lillian and Mabel:
The flowers you sent were beautiful and I liked them very much. I
wear the heart you sent all the time. It was very nice to hear from you
both. I am feeling fine now. I hope you are both in the best of health.
Love Doris
In 1949 Ms. Hampton wrote to the home relief agency, telling the case
worker to stop all payments because she had the promise of a job.
The decade that began in war between nations and peoples ended in Ms.
Hampton's version of history with a carefully preserved article about the
international figure Josephine Baker. Cut out of the March 12, 1949, issue of
the Pittsburgh Courier are the following words:
•
.
Well friends, fellow Negroes and countrymen, you can stop all that guesswork
and sur11using about Josephine Baker. This writer knew Edith Spencer, Lottie Gee,
Florence Mills, knew them well. He has also known most of the other colored
women artists of the last thirty years. His word to you is that this Josephine
Baker eminently belongs. She is not a common music hall entertainer. She has
been over here for a long time, maybe 2 5 years. The little old colored gal from
!
•
•
•
..
•
•
I Lift My Eyes to the Hill: The Life of Mabel Hampton / 273
back home is a French lady now. That means something. It means for a colored
person that you have been accepted into a new and glamorous and free world
where color does not count. It means that in the joy of the new living you just
might forget that "old oaken bucket'' so full of bitter quaffs for you. It means that
once you found solid footing in the new land of freedom, you might tax your
mind to blot out all the sorry past, all the old associations, to become alien in
spirit as well as in fact. It pleases me folks to be able to report to you that none of
this has possessed Josephine. I tested her and she rang true. What she does is for
you and me. She said so out of her own mouth. Her eyes glistened as she
expostulated and described in vivid, charged phrases the aim and purpose of her
work. She was proud when I told her of Lena [Horne] and of Hilda [Simms]. "You
girls are blazing trails for the race," I commentated. "Indeed so," she quickly
retorted. After she had talked at length of what it means to be a Negro and of her
hope that whatever she did might reflect credit on Negroes, particularly the
Negroes of her land of birth, I chanced a leading question. "So you' re a race
woman," I queried. I was not sure she would understand. But ~ht:!did. "Of course
I am," she replied. Yes, all the world's a stage and Josephine comes out upon it for
you and for me.
In my own work, I have tried to focus on the complex interaction between
oppression and resistance, aware of the dangers of romanticizing losses while at
the same time aggrandizing little victories, but I am still awed by how a single
human spirit refuses the messages of self-hatred and out of bits and pieces
weaves a gar1nent grand enough for the soul's and body's passion. Ms. Hampton
prized her memories of Josephine Baker, Marian Anderson, and Paul Robeson,
creating for herself a nurturing family of defiant African American women and
men. Her lesbian self was part of what was fed by their soaring voices. When
the New York Times closed its obituary on Ms. Hampton with its words, "there
are no known survivors," it showed its ignorance of how ari oppressed people
makes legacies out of memory.
We are now entering the so-called confonning fifties, when white middleclass heterosexual women, we have been told, were running in droves to be
married and keep the perfect home. Reflecting another vision, Ms. Hampton
added newspaper clippings on the pioneer sex-change personality Christine
Jorgensen. From 1948 until her retirement in 1972, Ms. Hampton worked in
the housekeeping division of Jacobi Hospital, where she earned for herself the
nickname "Captain" from some of the women she worked with and who kept
in touch with Ms. Hampton until their deaths many years later. Here she met
Jorgensen and paid her nightly visits in her hospital room. From Ms. Hampton's
documents: a Daily News article of December 1, 1952, "Ex-GI Becomes Blond
Beauty," contains a letter written by Jorgensen explaining to her parents why
there is so much consternation about her case, concluding, "it is more a problem
of social taboos and the desire not to speak of the subject because it deals with
the great hush hush, namely sex."
Ms. Hampton began the decade earning $1,006.00 for a year's work and
ended it earning $1,232.00. Because of lack of money, Ms. Hampton was never
able to travel to all t e places in the world that fascinated her; but in this decade
fI
•I
'
i
f
274 / Joan Nestle
she added hundreds of pages of s~amps to her overflowing albuIJls, little squares
of color from Morocco and Zanzibar, from the Philippines and Mexico.
/
Throughout her remaining years, Ms. Hampton continued with her eyes
the hilltop and her feet on a very earthly pavement. She always had very lit~[~
money and always was generous. In the 1970s Ms. Hampton discovered senio
citizen centers and "had a ball," as she liked to say, on their subsidized trips t~
Atlantic City. She lost her partner of forty-five years, Lillian Foster, in 1978.
':fte~ almost drifti~g aw~y in mourning, she f~und new energy and a loving
family 1n New Yorks lesbian and gay community. She had friendly visitors
from SAGE and devoted friends like Ann Allen Shockley, who never failed to
visit when she was in town. She marched in Washington in the first national
lesbian and gay civil rights march. She appeared in films like Silent Pioneers
and Before Stonewall. In the early eighties she gave her power of attorney to
Deborah Edel, whom she trusted completely and with whom she had shared so
much. In 1987 she accompanied Deborah and her lover Teddi to California so
she could be honored at the West Coast Old Lesbians Conference.
She eventually had to give up her fourth-floor walk-up Bronx apartment
and move in with Lee Hudson and myself, who along with many others cared
for her as she lost physical strength. On October 26, 1989, after a second stroke,
Ms. Hampton finally let go of a life she loved so dearly.
I would like to end this essay where it began, with the memories many of
you have of this indomitable woman who gave this country her working life
and her support in time of national emergencies but who received so little social
protection.
Ms. Hampton never relented in her struggle to live a fully integrated life, a
life marked by the integrity of her self author~hip-"If
I give you my word,"
she always said, ''I'll be there''-and
she was.
On her death, her sisters in Electa Chapter 10 of the Eastern Star Organization honored her with the following words: ''We wish to express our gratitude
for having known Sister Hampton all these years. She became a member many
years ago and went from the bottom to the top of the ladder. She has served us
in many capacities. We loved her dearly. May she rest in peace with the angels."
Class and race are not synonymous with problems, with deprivation. They
can be sources of great joy and communal strength. Race and class, however, in
this society are manipulated markers of privilege and power. Ms. Hampton had
a vision of what life should be; it was a grand, simple vision, filled with good
friends and good food, a wann home, and her lover by her side. She gave all
she could to doing the best she could. The sorrow comes because she and so
many others have to work so hard for such basic human territory.
"I wish you knew what it's like to be me" is the challenge posed by a society
divided by race and class. We have so much to learn about the victories, the
sweetnesses, as well as the losses. By expanding our models for what makes a
life lesbian or what is lesbian about history, we will become clearer about
contemporary political and social coalitions that must be forged to ensure all
•
3~
{
(
.
•
I Lift My Eyes to the Hill: The Life of Mabel Hampton / 2~5
our liberations. We are just beginning to understand how these identities or
constructs shape lesbian and gay lives. We will have to change our questions
and our language of inquiry to take our knowledge deeper. Class and race,
always said together as if they mean the same thing, may each call forth their
own story. The insights we gain will anchor our other discussions in the
realities of individual lives, reminding us that bread and roses, material survival
and cultural identity, are the starting points of so many of our histories.
In that spirit, I will always remember our Friday night dinners at the
archives, with a life-size cut-out photograph of Gertrude Stein propped up at
one end of the table; Ms. Hampton sitting across from my partner, Lee Hudson;
Denve~ the family dog, right at Ms. Hampton's elbow; and myself, looking past
the candlelight to my two dear friends, Lee and Mabel, all of us carrying
different histories, joined by our love and need of each other.
Ms. Hampton addressed the 1984 New York City Gay Pride Rally as follows:
"I, Mabel Hampton, have been a lesbian all my life, for eighty-two years, and I
am proud of myself and my people. I would like all my people to be free in this
countrj and all over the world, my gay people and my black people."
Note
This speech was delivered as CLAGS's first annual David R. Kessler Lecture in Lesbian
and Gay Studies on November 20, 1992. It was transcribed by Sarah Atatimur, the& r p I)
transcription made possible from a grant from the &1tr11e11fet1Rdafi9a, 61e'<'- l\A'11Lo--Ot'-''"
Works Cited
Bell, Derrick. Facesat the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism. New York:
Basic Books, 1992.
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of FrederickDouglass-An American Slave,
Written by Himself. 1845. Reprint, Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1960.
Freedman, Estelle B. Their Sisters' Keepers:Women's Prison Refor111
in America, 18301930. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981.
Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family
from Slavery to the Present. New York: Basic Books, 1985 .
•
•
VA~
,._ 1
It~
\ .-\
l qI
VJ'"
O
~
(
on
• • • •
ad
Mabel
1
'O
and L1111an;
ate~
san,
here
1t
was
an
are
,
CO
lo
0
,
8
In
ous.
•
•
-I
Bu
wh~n
had Jon
I first
met
I call
1
h
9)2
1n
•
, sh
s11
h t
th
h
0
o
•
•
•
B
h
B
Bar,
and
of
And now qe•re
B
t,
co
kno n
o
1
0
n
h
o
--
.... ..
~----
3cJ
'
•
-···
•
--------
_-1\ never
'
considered
CJ-•
•
I I
L
'
little:·-Jittle
when I was
~p~ble
r1ed
then
every
'
the
men would
So,
t.,
try
therefore,
,o1ng something
to
they
I
•
didn't
I
'
and my uncle
I went
people
•
to work
.
o'n my but tons
a.nd ·I didn't
1 ike
•
'
nothine;
like.
'
.
'
meant
'
'
'
even
I
me
touch
' I had so much '
gbi,ng "to· scho61
'
'
'
'
,
~irl
house,
•
me and
marrying.
'
IC'
rape
to
•
to 'me·· 1)eca.11se·· they
And if
ybu do something
I
I
i:1ere always
I don't
I
like
,
I
,
'
'
Good·riddens
•
I don't
bother
with you.,
'
Joan:
You _knew--this··
I\
I
Mabel:
any sense
age
t'
that
you would
never
f'
I
•
thRt
I
'
••I
t)."-••<''
early
From a very
yo~.
!
'.!I
•
11
•
'
I '
very·· ear.ly · age
I
•
see
a
from
marry.
I
'to
,,
'
'
• I
•
'
'
I .would
' '
never
. .
11
•
,•
'
Joan :--And--tha
~
'f>1a}?e·l: That
And right
up until
t, ...meant
meant
I
;i:
I pass
•
I
,
. '
still
'
working.
Lt,1 11 an--
)W
that
~ght.
nd lots
I
And
I believe
d
1
of peop e on
0
1932' to 197.8
~
bit
went
teeth
fa
sou,
•m tha , I am, just
\i:
about
to
jump ine
she
,t
sees it
correct.
becguse
myself
anything)
she sees
I be li eve
I
'
and
'
I
and
on •
11
,
•
f
of my .~omen.
r
We quRrreled
a little
part.
t but we just
haPPY now
when she used
10 1
'
I
I
know she's
.'
•
had,' to 'alwa:y,8: \'{,ork,',il?-4:
.~'1:e; ,alw..~r~ '.w9,r,~f,?,;••'• ,,
away I'm
And I took care
We didn't
were together.
.ybe that's
all:
tongue and
that
--•.
I
•
i'label:
I
I didn't
.',I. .
l,,,
marry.
something ' that I didn't
like.
'
'
you had,
to
··work·
to·--tal<e"··care
·
of·
your-self
.
'
in marrying
.....•
she
sees,
that
I'm
eincarnation
in r
'
•
'
'Of~like
Joan
- Mabel
to•, wear
you
•
•
me 11's clothes
•
tailored,
skirt
I like
to wear
and blouse
a-nd'"-•th·l-tY·gs=•%u~ou'
•
•
•
I I
I
I
' I
'
,J
I
'
I
dress
caP,
and the
Because
I never
I don•t
take
liked
UP•
~he women and what
!,at:
but
like
the
men that
And I always
they
I never
stood
', .. I 'I
'
' 'I I
,~
'"
I II
kind
~
I ·,
I\''
that.
the
•
pant'
'
'
myself
I
'
be,t'ng a 'man.·
.,
I
considered
much.
• ,, •. ,.
of .'
But I•~ike
I
and the
'
I
pants.
and things
' I '
~
• ,,.
I always
'
- Yes ■
'
I
•
Mabel
.
·I
l
,.
I
And anything
took up hetag
I·don•t
like
a woman because
for.
I •
I liked
•
'
•
•
'
'
.
'
Mabel:
I had quite
a lot
as
part
comes
of my. f r 1 ensd
of the
that
way they
were
dressed
known as studs
and the stud
You see, because_th~Y
dr,e,ssed ni~ely
an~ short hair and
I think.
.'
bother
my a r, I didn't
But I didn't
care I ke}Jt
hi
things
like tl1at.
~pans
and shoes.
I
just liked
the suits,
and th
t
t11 i th
the hair.
to be
I
_just
wanted
anyt~i11g.
'
I didn't
want to be tied down
to. '
'
'
myself.
'
I
'
.
•
'
•
•
•
OBITUARIES
THE "NEW YORK TIMBS
.TUESDAY,
OCTOBER
31, 1989"
•
•
•
,--<\
t~ ' l )
\.
t'
•'\
,I
J •
•
t
'
~--t
,· · \ Gay
(
,\
~
•
... '
Rights Advocate, 8 7
I
•
•
Mabel Hampton, an advocate in the
gay rights movement, died of pneumonia Thursday at St. Luke's-Roosevelt
Hospital Center. She was 87 years old
and lived in Manhattan.
•
Ms. Hampton, a native of -Winston
l Salem, N.C., ·had been a dancer in
. earlier years. In 1974, \Vith three other
j women, she founded the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Manhattan, a collec- · ·
tio11 of lesbian books and art if acts including her personal library.
.. She was an annual participant
in the
city's Gay and Lesbian Pride March
and was its grand 1na1..shal in 1985.
There are no immediate • survivors.
......
..
abel
g us.
abel
not
see
dead.
her
who meant
This
et,
is
You can
neighbors
ts.
•
Hampton
was
and
the
her
MAbel
long
and
good
ton is
part
of
to
her,
that
walks
made
their
many
talks
j ,'l ~ Bro'I'"greeting
all
a
whom are
the
street
so many years
Foster.
life,
of
in
home for
Lillian
and
strees,
taking
was
partner
friends,
and
down 169th
so much
Lillian
work
breathes
striding
commmunity
life
and
She
Here
on 169th
life
filled
with
here
today.
Mabel
•
never
F)\
survival
energy
of
this
communitv. .,
She
leave.
~bel loved
~~
the
l>\
life
so
much
that
her
passions
will
life
,.•...:_
c-om-r...ad.e s - h e r 1 o v e o f c a r r i d e s a n d b a c o n
ng,
be our
her
enthusiastic
support
of
and
the long night
bu~ rides
e.~ t ~ r (\-t ,,r-tt \ 11·c \,
~ u\N-'--~~ ___ _
in
meeting
new
friends
and
1 .;~
to
her
dear
Atlantic
an d e g g s
Mets,
her
love of
n e✓ ,l p J , ,,()··~ ; ='>• ••
A the joy she
City,
____
•._,.'
her
devotion
to
old
.
ht and
concern
lamations
of
for
her
her
dear
right
•
in
l1ope
ones,
her
h~~
lo have heard
Ms.
I
:fe was generous
\them of
i n the
to
Libby
love
whomever
HAmpton's
famous
and
and
brave
difficult
and
er
Denver,
she
whoppee
choose
know
encompassing
proud
~1
to.
All
that
her
of
yes
enough
to
become
alone;
she
knows
of
poems
times.
I
~bel
too
•
Hampton
lS
rds,
her
love
ngs,
her
charm
which
echo
in
will
t,
gave
1
ity
you
is
we will
of
stubborn
my word,
too
rare,
not
folk
sayings,
memories.
I will
too
be able
her
turn
could
our
leave
to
remembered
to
a loolc
Mabel
s t i c l< b y
precious
to
to
Mabel
leave
us
bits
that
Hampton
i t , ''
and
could
always
she
lay
said,
did.
This
not
those
be forgotten.
alone
either,
·~
6
h<"; , ~ r.
"
•
•
l
•
•
rom
..lf·
tl
L
r
ti
11
11 r
r
ll
•
p
d
r
.
p
h
qu
d m ,
11 m
h r
c
h_r
n
h us
Lh
1
nd
r
n
1
,
\
ould
h
· f MAbe 1
would
,~as
t
w
hr
to
do
not
stop
h d no h'ng
mon hs
p
ll
\ 11 n
no h'ng
wh n
r
•
n r o s · t y;
y u,
v
h ,
•
not
hou
r d
nd
p
d d
u n
•
i
n
m r c
m hr
f-
f
•
P~,
her
hat
gre
she
test
laundry
so
much work
so
h v
for
•
·er
Frid
to
'
r n
d'f
g ver _
I \ ould
times
and
and
yes
; her
nt
person
'.Ssed
check
in
wise.
never
Mabel
little
the
gifts
showered
on is
not
pirit
soars
from
to
the
the
lcnew who she
from
dead;
above
two
known.
saw
flinched
help
to
w re
ever
others
of
from
ands
and
•
caring
floating
She
was
also
of
was,
she
her
grace
of
had
had
as
trulv
spirit,
a fullness
amazing
.,
self
of
life
into
herself
of
family.
a
allowed
most
created
she
child
a little
selected
to
was
challenge
change
she
brave
the
the
to
During
whom she
elegant
In
worlds,
enthusiastic
boys
struggle
on
1abel
young
heart
yet,
that
sit
it.
or·es.
ho\v
be as
was
nt
Ab-1,
said
abel
She
11ampton
brad
have
ab'l"ty
y differ
rom v
rd
of
leganc
h
,~ond,er
rs,
I have
and
sl
Som
fiends
10
•
her
he
sh
, · h
c
loved
,1om n
s,
1.
had
last
at
, ook
gr
how
•
urn·
j
n r,
·1 be
hr
n d room,
d r
lmso
d
dinn
n 1
C
pr
m•
I would
nd
b 1
being
~1Abel
opportunity,
us.
•
Mabel
take
Page
Han1pton
you
horn~ until
it's
tl-ian
me.
this
And
sl1e
"Wl1at.' s youi'T name?"
do yoi,1 know
I says,
11
1\Jo.
Sl1e says,
tlnti
Yo1.1're
in
you're
was
taller
at?"
City
Jersey
know
"f-Iow did
I -.iust
taller--she
11
corr1e here?"
.Jome on,
my
She
told
because
it's
me to
sit
"
I I r◄
left
.. "
City.·•
Jersey
}tOL"l
1 s11.e ca1ne baclr.
and
bit
wl1ere
"Al r i gl1.t, '' sl1e
late,
will
''
1 don't
Sl1e said,
here
says,
"mabel,
11
And they
aunt.
a little
"Mabel.
11
your
woman was
I says,
I says,
for
r i gl1 t . "
" A 11
So,
time
f6
·boyfriend
in
the
bar.
getting
Sr1e di'?anked
·•
a lot.
was
\.T:
Was
M:
Black.
So,
she
So,
they
7th
or
wl1i te
she
says,
"(:ome
lived--now,
8th
and
or
black'?
I ' 11 ta.ke
or1 ..
she
somewhere
live
goin'
b.er
on Fifth
into
l1ome to
mo tl1er.
Street.
Grove
"
That
Street-•
somewhere
She
around
says,
in
11
I didn't
there.
Con1e or1,
now.
find
those
things.
11
6
l
----------------------
Page
J.via
be 1 Hampton
I'
that
111
boy
..
and
cop--!
the
I krow
she
So
took
I thanked
"I'll
says,
tell
She
says,
the
cop,
I
shut
to
kj_sst_,d
II
All
II
n.
"Come
n1e "goodbye.
got
lady's
ays
up
Sl1e says,
hand.
T}~e girl
girl.
the
11
T'he cop' 11 tl1ir1k
know wl1at
to
tell
"
She
you."
through
that
lady's
aunt,
yol1r
and
l1im. "
yo1.1 tell
"Alright,
this
So I go on with
cut
and whe
the
So
them.
of
"Al'
_ rig~ lt" .
ys
I says,
Sle
d see
total
me by
the
Is
I dor1 t
cou
when
I' 1n tl1inking
and lcoked.
I turned
tl1i11.king
£7
11im."
We wall-{ed ..
woman.
like
streets
we were
doing
in
We walked
..
The
this
Park
She was a trifle
•
1nc)rn1ng
.
bit
•
taller
or
tl1an
something
Okay>
walked
and
and
walked
and
all
says,
was
She
me.
like
so
she
walked
some
n1y
have
that
'cause
took
me,
and
walked,
been
a woman
I haven't
and
we walked
then
around
grown
and
we walked,
five
see.
walked
and
and
walked,
more.
private
"I-fe.1..e' s
must
• i,::> C:
houses.
motl-ier,
" and
Nice1
private
s11.e ope11ed
7
houses.
a ,gat.e,
and
live
went
Mabel
Hampton
J:
Page
We have
(Tape
is
to
was
We went
a gate.
And she
on a porch.
I says,
a second.
paused).
Opened
and
stop
£8
'' 1iss
says,
up
a flight
"My name
is
3tairs
of
Bessie."
Bessie?"
•
Sl1e says,
"Yes.
taller
than
a little
So,
good
I looked
lookin'
C
._)o
You have
going
Sl1e looked
at
not
too
me,
at
but
I says
her.
me and
She was
smi 1 ed ..
much.
to
11
1nyself,
Gee,
she
s
."
she
,
"
to
back
,.Mamma, I brought
.sa y s ,
take
to
of
ca1"9e
visit
her
l1er
boyfriend
''That'
or
stay
some
lost
back-
- ''
girl
..
S11.e was
bing.
l1ome r10 tin1e.
I'll
s okay.
a little
I goin
'cause
Mamma sa 'trs
., ' '' You d(Jn' t
Sl1e says,
you
"
be back."
•
So,
by
the
she
hand
I says,
In
lighter
says,
the
than
went
and led
''Y es,
room
all
,...h
,:> e s ai . d ,
I said,
So,
n1a , am .
•
of
"Miss
sl1.e said,
She
us.
stairs,
says,
and Mamma took
a bj_g
"Yot.1're
Sr),
man and
Mother
El le~r1 Wl1i te.
girl."
another
11
says,
Miss
girl
\'Thi te.
''
White."
a11nt.
"That's
me
IC
a grey-haj_red
"Who learr1t
"My
down the
me in.
sat
"My nan1e is
I said,
on back
you
how i..,o tallt'i'
I go t.o scl-1001.
verj?
nice.
8
11
··
"
She
saic_i,
''You
11
Sl1e
Mabel
I sai, . d
gave
Page
Han1pton
II
y es,
ma ' am.
I'd
II
ate
t]1e
f9
the
sandw:i.cl1
girl
rr1e.
d
So,
she
I tl1inl{
at
•
she
the
you
grace
.
what
she
,....., ()
C
didn't
'
"
he
eay·c.
►J
• ~
look
gonna
tl1e
be
'
him,
I
my head
Ellen
I sai,:l
said,
to
man,
said
and
She
told
me to
and
she
my head
says,
this
sit
sat
to
.girl
at
dawn
just
say
my
" -t,ha·t.' s
"Pappa,
him
and
l1as
l1ad
all.
I
si ttin,
girl
light
here's
I can
l.111til
a girl
fir1d
''Yo,1' 11 nevei.,.
a1:. tr1e
that's
he1."' people
tl1em. ''
find
my eggs.
sl1e
"T'hat'
son1e
nothin'.
"Ellen,
myself,
ate
biscuits,
like
girl--the
"Mamma,
1ny ~elf,
.. P.3.ppa,
said
awhile
to
some
sl1e
I didn't
II
says,
for
1.1s
..
I just
table:..-she
wit11.
To me,
dropped
"Y ea l1
had
I bowed
tc.1 the
t.urr:1.ed t.o tl1e
She
of
at
and
Sl1e s.3.ys,
him.
and
t]1e table,
at
me,
sl'1e turned
1.1p.
eggs
some·t.hing.
down
watching
call
bringing
end
I sat
sit,
S,o,
or
11.3.d bc1con
table.
like
some
scrambled
can
sleep
s good.
9
with
I like
me.
I I
her.
Good
.. ''
I
t1abel
looking·,
-
balls
great
Light
tall.
because
Her
skin.
it
had
I have
c1f fire."
brown
she
f 1()
Page
Han1pton
-
all
hair
wrapped
her
was
longer
than
tu.rned
up and
was
picture.
mine
around
like
that.
she
got
I'll
eating,
me to
take
you
she
to
"'vi7hen you
says,
the
bathroom
and
tl1rough
get
you
can
she
says,
with
come
bec1 . "
my
''Y es,
I say,
~o--she's
I'm
and
up
na.med
in
goir1g
ma , am.
situation
just
like
an ordinary
and
rooms
downstairs.
There
ki tcl1en.
her
after
1nother--so
"Mom1ny,
1...oon1."
the
Now? the
II
at
their
house
co1ne
was
different.
'fhere
today.
r ot1
was
house
01.1·t.
011
was
the
rooms
upstairs
f ro1n the
porch
a stove--everything--table,
diningroom,
everyt.l1ing.
after
So,
l
I got
bathroom--gave
me a towel
See;
didn't
cry.
washed
my face
in
there
out,
and
put
it
clothes
to
couldn't
-
got
--
__ ____
-......,
eating,
and
I was
one
she
washed
and
a little
Miss
things
very
and
on,
I know
find
out
who I was--where
'cause
I'd
10
she
Ellen,
she
I come
left
So,
woman.
from
and
me to
the
I still
wash.
nightie
shoes
see,
to
my hands
put
took
White
stubborn
on,
do that
-
done
gave
me--went
brought
it
searched
from.
everything
she
my
She
behind
me.
Mabel
I didn't
leave
papers
So,
But
and
she
I knew
r1ever
it
in
things
and
says,
he
the
was
told
i--ernembe1~ tl1at
011, she
M:
Yes.
next
we goi~ to
h er.
start
sit
train--the
they
much
about
older
Much older
'ti).
me tight--oh,
my uncle,
here
and
come
t]1ey
nineteen
than
than
would
How old
J:
beca
with
came
park
was
or
I was
went
back.
she?
twenty.
you.
And when
me.
11
to1norrowc
they
I lived
the
been
people
given,
that
in
have
was
arms--held
So,
that
story
must
J:
I slept
on the
yotir
I had
and
me to
M:
for
them
a minister,
I l1ad to
girl,
lool{
I told
and
her
it
I left
description
shoppj_ng
me in
park,
"We'll
tl·1en1.
that
the
I had.
with
find
fll
Page
Han1pto11
so
she
held
comfortable,
up a breeze.
morning
we got
1.1p,
abot:t.t
ir1qui1~j_n'
mothei .. told
and
tl1.is
11er,
"Now,
We ca11' t. keep
b:id.
fl
(Suddenly,
\
l·1ave to
much
louder).
M:
She
must
J:
Oh,
she
11:
Yes.
her
arms--held
girl,
I slept
have
was
'
was she?
How old
send
me in
~a1· d
I)ad . ~
been
much
Mucl1 older
nineteen
th·n
tl1ar1 me.
me tight--oh,
I was
up a breeze.
11
'
'ca
1
-
·1sA
\..,
we'd
Ellen?
about
older
"No
or
twenty.
you.
And wl1en
so
sl1.e l1eld
comfortable,
Ellen?
I
Mabel
Page
Hampt,on
So)
we got
nex·t
to
rno1:ning
start
we got
inquirin'
mother
and
l'.lp,
about
this
told
f12
l-ier,
We can't
kid.
11
N·ow,
keep
II
h er.
(Suddenly,
hav·e
to
his
1n1-1cl1
her
send
hand
to
Dad
lotlder).
scl1ool.
up my dress,
I-!e was
11
feelin'
J:
When did
t1:
That
said,
the
my pussy,
that
"No,
'cause
first
one
and
I told
we'd
eve1 .. 1.~an
Ellen.
happen?
abot1.t
l1appened
sj_x montl1s
seven
01~
1nonths
later.
Okay,
bring
you
to
up
1'1:
next
door
to
around
there
in
Italian
out
the
Second
house
most
was white
people
So
she
says
e ery
par
e.r
H
I
0.
told
I didn't
But
II
H
I kne
ause
e.
d th~m
d l i 11 l1e1:
day.
next
door
that
as
so,
and
"You don't
t
a
second
Italian
lookin'
'cause
says,
was
and
party
woman
the
Okay~
day.
this
the
to
Tl1en we' 11
date.
a searching
find
go back
Italians,
for
and
they
this
give
woman.
remember
where
were
them
the
hews
tryin'
nas
1
Mamrna called
going
send
They couldn't
dRscription
I come from.
.ncle
t
to
of
place?"
the
I knew my
us was--
Everytl1ing
people.
them
to
,ruld
m~s~ \ith
I
.Knew
kill
m-.
Mabel
you
Hampton
know he'd
her.
the
kill
Whenever
So,
They ain't
nothin'
So,
I just
nobody
by
tl1e
me up
in
school.
donJt
know,
Monmouth
t}1e
of
l{ids
---------
went
tc•
a girl.
ain't
I come
we'll
put
figured
fron1
was
they
her
11--"
told
the
[Kolb]--Monmouth
in
So,
Jersey.
teacher
and
Tl1i.r·ty-Two.
I didn't
school.
sigr1ed
tl1ey
there,
I
[Kolb]--
I think
Street--Thirty-Two.
everybody.
And
I got
try
to
along
beat
tl1.e
wi tl1.
up nobody
scared.
M:
Yes,
l
what
[Kolb]
Was it
I playAd
Ma1111na,
yeai ... somebody
and
J:
we all
They
missin'
T1'1ey figure
lt
was
have
them_
for
They
now.
tell
that.
that
and
about
New York
tl1e
t1~1e scl1ool
didn't
,cause
and
Street
a word
days--nothin'.
s21id,
And,
why I wouldn't
I had
anything
think
of
I was too
'cause
They
end
but
me,
New York.
Eller1
~1aybe
all
said
them
tl1en
to
about
about
let
So that's
passed--three
thought
ot1t
11llmber
spoke
days
churches;
*
another.~
they
two
f13
Page
black
in
to
Jersey
worry
was
the
same.
ith
the
kids,
and
whit
City
students
was black
it
anything
about
I mean,
and
the
------------------
too?
me hittin'
I went
Italian
---
and white.
---
to
somebody
Sunday
boys
-----
and
school
girl
-------
This murder
hasn't
been mentioned
in any transcr·
ts
up to now, but the videotaped
interview
ith
Mabel indicate~
that
her aunt wanted
money from her grandmother
to get this
man ut of some sort
of scrape.
If theres
further
13
Mabel
Hampton
reference
were
wanted
to
very
nice.
get
a little
ragged--the
of
"new
I'll
this
cross-reference
Naturally,
bit,
girl
"--I
the
Italian
know.
you
d fj ght
boys,
They
the1n
and
they
would
that
run
me
was
the
cry
or
er1d
that.
So,
•
tianscript
another
fl4
(SA)
pag'e.
they
in
Page
sorry
that
all
went
J:
Did
you
for
I was
didn't
even
tell
kissed
me.
I didn't
wanted
After
to
discovered
nothing.
Ellen
tell
where
M:
\vhere
I'd
year.
lonely,
Mabel,
or
to
do anythingw
feel
but
lived
you
like
M:
Miss
White
get
rid
about
that
See,
all
from
or
feel--·like
mother
woma1 that
from?
Nobody
notl·1i.ng.
kn.ew
otl1e1" kids
the
and
had
How did
fatl1er.
you
an orphan?
said
me and
that
that
And they
no missin'
he
first
I
Mabel.
feel
see.
the
come
you'd
come
with
of
was
See,
her.
How dj_d. you
a year,
nothin'
get
stubborn
About
they
Did
too
J:
J:
feel?
ever
Ellen.
I come from
family,
a whole
your--
M:
where
for
maybe
was
read
he'd
they
wanted
a good
the
looked
was
14
for
the
me.
mc,ney
and
way to
papers--it
Many years
person.
said
my aunt
do it.
didn't
later
say
I
He didn't
and
uncle
what
look
was
Mabel
brought
to
story
f15
that
comes
in
part
of
the
showed me how to
do
on another
altogether.
work
and
that,
M:
Housework.
Showed
son
a light
parks
·1
t1ere
was
night
I slept
So,
she
I would
tell
ber.
she
a girlfriend
had
loved
This
were
they
in
me.
him sat
up to
her
down to
other
out
talkin'
talk
girlfriend's
to
wanted
was.
So,
tl1e
every
during
end
later--she
one
Ellen
of
told
s rnotl1er.
house,
thjs
her.
night,
1
the
was
Everything
to
her
girl.
happened
I belon~ed-
take
wante d to
a good
at
and
that.
was
lived
was
would
mother
house.
found
was
His
anything
a private
like
Benny,
like
B enny
She
that
She wished
man told·--they
and
And,
And she--I
things
saw Ellen
it.
named
And he
l
w~er_
him.
I know
arms.
ho11ses.
was out
that
h ere
want
her
private
mother
and
in
and
she
playgrounds
and
And Ellen
fellow
looking.
'cause
gay--now
another
int
cook
things.
good
didn't
Ellen
street,
girl
and
Ellen
Ellen
with
' s a pause
marry
day,
goin'
me how to
me those
felJ.ow--was
Ellen.
to
showed
was
little
marry
know.
of work?
Nobody
c~o,
you
What kind
EJ.len
me to
things,
J:
see.
was
he started--they
Pappa,
different
there.
the
So,
them.
So, then
he
Page
Hampton
and
and
his
Ellen
I wasn't
,
Mabel
Hampton
And,
the
Ellen,
nobody
friends
goi11
"I' 11 see
to
"W}1y
Sl1e said,
"Because
there
this
man,
and
she
says,
don, t malte
Bl1t Ellen
that
d beer1
sl1
me and
in
J
~ays,
my family?"
She's
my fa1nily.
on,
been
she
at
the
wanted
him
That's
the
C'h
•., e won't
live
man,
to
See,
and
marry
way
to
she
I think
it
her
I figured
marry
wl1en
Now,
time.
them.
another
by
together--them
gay
I understand
Benny
II
her.
have
out.
it
anyone
if
else
"
didn't
love
the
man!
Sl1e did11't
care
nothing
damn guy.
So,
anyhow,
every
eat
Ellen
understand
daughter.
So,
and
going
had
girlfriend's
come
I didn't
things
a white
must
they
See,
are
about
I ,vant
They
11
else.
to
1na1...ry
So
s.
motheI
do that
you
11
tl1at.
mar ~y nobody
would
means
accidentally
you
to
t]1e
can't
enny
I
f16
c11ild."
women.
was
scl1ool--see,
Sl1e said,
"If
hel:'
I' 11 see
will.
sl1e don't
So that
two
told
mother
else
that
first
yot1r
Page
and
motl·1e.1.. and
day
figured
it
or
so,
So,
talk.
sl1e
don't
know what
wound
up marrying
and
says,
the
out
and carried
they
would
I ··told
EJ. len.
"Wl-iy do
answer
I have
was
her
Benny.
16
and
eat
So,
to
talk
Ellen
marry
mother
She
on.
would
and
goes
cry
to
I
E,enny?"
gave
her,
her
but
she
t
, ~
ll>I
Mabel
Ha111pton
J:
said
Pa.ge
she
been
was
about
funny
Talk
the
first
the
She
J:
And you
were
M:
I can't
exactly
J:
Twelve
M:
No,
kissed
three
years
remember
•
.
older
fourteen
than
years
I mt1st
that.
old
because
have
I felt
M:
Oh,
J:
Good
M:
I don't
I didn't
I felt
know.
funny
or
bad
know
bad
believe
funny?
or
onto
And I held
funny.
I know
good.
her
was
a
so tight.
older
you' re
it
than
yot.1
you
say
"
are.
,~e were
tell
nevei--
co,
in
me,.,
from
bed,
the
s11.e
there
so
says,
on,
I' 11 find
"Bt1.t
she
S11.e says,
I laug1'1ed..
took
me under
her
I went--she
had
to
know where
I
asked
her
was
so
interested
in me.
just
ijhy
don't
she
N"ant hei-- to
get
in
ti--ouble
out.
it
\here
"I
later.
me.
Wh.y?
"I
You
how old?
I was
or
J:
Sl1e says,
you.
kissed
you.
kissed
me about
no ..
kissed
feeling.
she
or thirteen?
thirteen
she
ti1ne
first
woman that
M:
when
funny
about
f 17
~ent.
with
"You' 11
11
wirgs.
Okay
The mo her
And,
any
he said
of
t e
1'1abel
Page
Hampton
Granma
sa
s
I called
'' Sh
her
Granrna,
house
and
hand
M:
I stayed
wit}
J:
W re
going
M:
I was
J:
And,
M:
No, I didn't
yo1
going
djd
like
I'd
she
would
I told
her,
and
she
to
f at11e1 ..--and
much
would
comir1'
blame--it
don't
was--if
they'd
the
put
get
of
take
days
turned
child
it
on
time?
their
house.
for
them
I ' d _;ome h m ~
helped
told
them
tell
the
hjm
Ellen
with
the
and
next
how
cooled
sl1e
knew that
wouldn't
Pappa
gii~lf
speak
1.~iend' s
down.
s wl1.y I don't
11
a].ways--in
Tl1ese
old.
tl1ose
care
fresh
t11.e
days,
was or how old
man was doin'
18
his
the
he
l1er
a child
put
That's
me up to
says,
t,l1e chiJ.d.
to
day--'cause
ai ...ound--that'
how young
trying
arms.
'til
They
around--"
care
her
mad at
so1ne people--Mamrna.
children
from
was
and
it
me next
sl1e wo·uld
a couple
for
whole
nobody.
Pappa
me in
take
And Mamma--Mamma
too
years.
I mean--and
beat
was holdin'
stay
Whit~.
Did you wcrk
too?
"
m
the
right
work with
I looked,
Then
to
school
t
rouble.
that.
knew.
house
no
r fiv
tr
school
to
in to
will
f
know what
my dress.
she
get
namA was Ellen
them
to
to
live
you
you work
you
everytime
when
rier
her
did
under
night
but
How long
all
And,
going
J:
do my chores-
and
t
ain
f18
somethin',
it
I
can
do
Thy
M:
I gu ss
J:
Why do you
1:
Well,
J:
I think
to
M:
Protect
what.
J:
Protect
the
family
M:
Protect
the
family?
J:
Right,
M:
And Pappa,
right.
you'rP
Why is
th
hell
they
t?
hink?
I don't
know.
protect
they
What
he
--
becaus
don't
want
g nna--
to
beljeve
that
someone
do that.
run,
and
sill
J:
run,
stay
run,
run
there
'til
went
Ellen
you
Did
M:
I loved
because
on for
Well,
quite
are
yo1.1 s1..1re VIThat
ma , an1.
o:r· your
street
come
Mrs.
them
all.
to
from
the
at
hit
other
me,
and
girl's
I'd
house
work.
White?
I didn't
Ellen
to
school,
can' ·t understand
say,
"Y es,
mad and
to
nrotect
him
pay
me,
any
see,
and
she
look
that
awhile.
I went
"I
get
love
I had
and
Salem,
down the
J:
attention
he'd
yo1-1 t,old
and
Mrs.
110w yol1.r
1ne was
White,
aunt
left,
you.
at
No~"1,
so?"
II
,gra.ndn1ot11er,
•
or
·t]1e
l1ouse
wi tl1
j~ lowe1~s-
me
-
Mabel
Hampt
M·
ye rs
later
Nothing,
that
I told
found
they
then,
'I
I'll
giv
couldn't
have
I'd
happened.
they
1
the
do something
days,
out
the
that
like
t
to
go to
is
she
said,
So,
I stayed
r it
like
out
it
cop.
th
c p because
the
It
see.
That's
and
people
happened
what's
IJay~,
ha
"
the
first
thing
ran
away
r
that
had
like
wrong
with
a man
ould
In those
understand.
grownup
happen.
She
s
kn win'
believe
you
child,
h
11
tha
the
They wouldn't
and
didn't
find
wr n
wa.
I was fresh
that
a young
parents
it
up und
that.
to
y didn't
ou 1e a go d girl.
we11t
cop
like
T
l{new s metl ing
you.
stood
want
d tell
something
"I
l1a
I didn't
ut.
it
n
s
to
it
It wa
n thing
And Ha1nma says,
"But
f2
g
n
it
all
he
said,
the
plann
not
world
today.
how old
'cause
with
them
I was quite
I was.
five
for
an old
I clon' t
years.
child
when I left
kr1ow
them
I--J:
Seventeen,
M:
Eighteen
( 1 ape
1
c11ts
ejghteen?
years
off
at
old.
I went
pc int,..
tl1is
20
to--
End
Sj de
1) ..
d
Mabel
Page
Han1pton
f21
•
You got
J:
I got
the
a job.
You graduated
M:
Eight
they
B,
kind
after
That's
a job.
J:
11.ighest
What
from
that's
of
I graduated
from
8B.
Eighth--
all,
see,
because
A11d I finished
went.
job?
tl1e
eight-B
Eight-B,
was
and
then
I left.
•
J:
Do you
M:
No,
J:
Okay,
11:
I can't
know
what
year?
Do you
have
any
idea--
?
'
years
or
t
1 il{e
night
tl1.ey
and
Mabel
if
woman done
wasn't
sleep
you'd
to
She
anything
sick
and
be
or
a baby
so
wake
J:
How did
M:
Oh,
girl,
she
she
to
me.
she
She
could
wasn't
after
take
five
I left
married,
11
them.
I
and
the
told
says,
mysteriol1sly.
nothin'.
didn't
got
and
--a11d
was
school>
Ellen
happens
clied
something
It
I left
them:
]1ad
out.
out.
when
ta.lkir1'
were
it
that
figure
leave
Nov-1, she
l1abel .. "
figure
'cause,
him.
one
figure--
we'll
something
How I come
didn,
I can't
husband-my baby
You take
You take
my baby
and
I always
believe
that
the
sicl~.
She
Ellen
C
.:Jee,
baby.
just
went
up anymore.
you
feel?
I seer1
so
surprised.
21
much
dor1e
to
people
tr1at
~to
iO'r
Ma·bel
the
beginning,
n1ontl1s
the
Page
Hampt.,on
and
won't
be he1"'e with
When. Benny
1
'I've
I'm
seen
six
one
was
abc)ut
and
colored.
or
So,
and
to,
won't
baby
bu1 ...1."?y ·the
went
to
under
take
how
sleep
a couple
sl1e told
hin1.
She
The
City
she
sc:tys,
So,
..
put
and
of
all
woke
in
Jived
All
M=
When I think
to
next
to
for
11
take
care
J.c)ng as
as
She
prepare
nigl1t.
You know,
she
''But
says,
as well
so many
under
how treacherous
go around
her
tomorrow
that
to
baby
up.
come
Who?
s
might
boy--white
a white
family.
my
T11e oldest
gi.rls.
for
So,
it.
believe
stay
can
of
up
I've
are
there
them
you
J:
sa
says,
moJ~ning."
'til
live
He was
old.
one
never
and
and
"Mabel
We sat
11
I see
sl1
not.
I cculdn't
it.
years
s11.e, 11 be
they
will
children--boys
fo11rteen
a shotgun
o
..
know how I've
tl1ern.
baby
The
1
believe
s rigl1t.
don't
ruel
about
us. "
r1ig:l1t,,
t}1at
seven
baby.
Tl1at
you
'round
there.
I couldn't
had
the
wife
right
she
wants
came
yot1r
sittin'
So,
only
baby's
said,
old.''
bal)y
the
f23
different
but
the1n,
people
shootin'
I've
lived
I should
are.
all
things,
the
women
and
men.
the--
each
about
how peopl
do each
th
r--
other.
morning
"Benny
st
y
d
1
n
t.
/0
'
__
11111111111
.....
Mabel
I liked
The
Page
Han1pton
because
other
children
So,
the
was
a brunette.
J:
Okay,
,~hite.
M:
Yeah,
they
J:
So,
M:
Cleaning
and
like
no,
before
I doin'?
see.
and
doing
for
them
woman with
she
a mother.
cleaning
and
J:
You were
M:
Uhugh.
like
me very
was
quite
as
na1nes
were.
taught
of
the
well.
I at
She
hair.
their
them?
care
something,
grey
And she
taking
where
ad or
for
liked
that,
wasn't
I tl1inl{
blonde.
was white--
And she
an
A little
•
white.
you
I did
Or maybe
Ellen.
This
that.
[Bamberger]
son
named
were
were
I answered
a middle-aged
now,
child's
f25
and
what
was
and
this
woman was
was
old
like
I was
cook
real
good.
old.
me how to
eighteen,
nineteen
So many things
happened
years
old
at
tl1e time'?
me in
one
These
are
two years--
year--or
J:
in
to
the
This
of the
beginning
M:
So,
on this
It. had
I stayed
other
was
with
jot--the
to
nineteen
around
nineteen
be.
It
them
about
other
job
twenty.
twenties.
had
to
two
with
be.
years,
the
then
two
I come
children.
•
in
t lo
Mabel
Pa,ge f 26
Harnpto11
[Bamberger]
In
and
the
them--he
meantime,
down below
She's
a tall,
mixed
grey
Sl1e would
I falls
these
with
and
she
was
to
and
she
a colored
Her
black
tl1ing·s
brin.g
for
chj_ldren.
good-lookin'
hair,
a lawyer,
was
woman
name
was
woman with
so
nice.
n1e an.d
who worked
[Drummond].
beautiful,
Oh,
take
never--
she
was
n1e places
so
and
nice.
lil~e
that.
But,
maybe
like
the
in
M:
I don't
know.
in
the
How did
M:
Oh,
street
men,
and
porch
and
talk
about
their
talk
in
were
gay.
Now,
were
queer
'cause
an offhand
moved
to
know,
way to
keep
I know they're
I'd
had
the
They
see_
gay
men.
just--somebody--
with
with
up
me,
fun
part.
would
but
switch
I got
more
it
was
out.
they
They
And
on
set
wouldn't
around
and
knowin
that
they
then
I knew
they
so many girlfriends
26
and
and
I got
think
thing
see
me from
gay,
women,
that
l1ello"
them,
into--I
think
come up and
you
life,
some
he].lo,
mixed
mixed
have
tal~,
with
always
how you
had
Street--I'll
to
out.
sometl1ing--"Hello,
White
usAd
find
them?
By getting
Miss
fellows
meet
would
patched
by getting
And,
women.
too?
Never
know
or
life
I got
you
you
see.
with
the
meantime,
J:
that,
[Siegler]
these
Was she
on the
mixed
gay
J:
that
were
Mabel
Page
Hampton
f27
queer.
many
girlfriends--when
that
were
Well>
I think
church.
met--there
we would
all
I need.
days
laugh
So then,
what's
her
dear's
name!
there
got
you
say
had
was--wait
I went
was
and
was
you
you've
to
fill
in.
lots
of
How
girlfriends
aueer-::1.
M:
•
See,
Already!
J:
off
church
and
and
at
name
to
a minute
a couple
I would
talk,
meet
you
know .
goin'
that
time,
I was
now?
Don't
tell
I went
now.
of
times
girls
in
just
a girl
me I forgot
about
named--
my little
Her name was Viola--Viola·[Bellfield].
a staunch--oh,
we used
boy,
to
go to
I
church,
They were
with
and
to
She
bed
and
have
a
same
age,
see.
ball.
But
they
J:
Was she
older
than
M:
We both
were
'round
was
all
New York
you?
about
people--not
the
Jersey
people,
see .
.
I'm
then
that
quite
out
of
Jersey.
I began
to
These
go to
J:
What
M:
She
gave--[Sisuva]?
as tall.
was
all
New York
womens,
see.
theater~
did
she
reminds
look
me something
What s that
1
[Laquita].
like,
girl's
honey?
of--what
name?
that
girl
She wasn't
And
Pa
1 H mp o
e f ....
..
•
brina.
11,
n
11.
but
I u
h
t
wn't
qu·t
as
r
g
m.
s methi11g
Shew
}1 l
, I
And
ld
t·ll
as
h
a 1 niglt
H r
1
h r
h
n
d
•
.f
r
J
•
A
•
r
n
sh
nd ~tay
ut
1
of hr
•
Mabel
Page
Han1pton
'cause,
when
different
they
way,
say
wouldn't
get
ready
thinkin'
to
an.ything
know who I was.
And,
dinner;
their
for
and--what's
me,
J:
Piggy.
M:
Piggy
on the
talk
in
language
no language
So,
liv
they
M:
Catch
onto
Miss
White
liked
[Siegler]
k
track,
make
and
want
their
house
biscuits
a
I
them
to
and
have
and
things
name?
friend--they
and
get
of
ready
I wouldn't
were
were
a couple
would
just
more
talk.
know what
they
saying.
like
would
to
sit
were
And I wouldn't
I didn't
want
talk
them
to
know--
see
her.
She
business.
my business.
I went
them.
I went
Street.
Then
they
talk
take
n rally
1
the
in
to
to
see
her.
And I just
and-J:
would
go to
talk
would
I didn't
always
'cause
all
Know your
lorkin',
~here
so
J:
din
kept
at
to
his
they
I knew what
saying.
'cause
to
friend
and
they
me off
fella's
and
his
porch
Pig
t
in
and
all
used
that
talk,
throw
I used
mother
that--Piggy
out
at
to
f29
s
about
you--yotr
they
~hat
you
did
in
New Y rk
girlfriends--wh-n
~ou
d
J
ak
0
th-y
om
m --Pi
S
see
d
'
Mabel
know
I'm
found
it
to
Page
Han1pton
So,
queer.
out.
I can't
I was
gain'
me a birthday
give
that
Piggy
gay
men--and
formed
and
of
them
it
was
gay.
in,
see
was
bring
me in.
there.
the
now,
'cause
in
M:
No
was in
J:
Where?
M:
Now,
this
let's
lived--
see.
a few
So,
of
these
girls
they
one
tell
em
That's
the
in
when
and
l1ad drinks
so
those
And every
it.
I walked
tl1ey
me in
point
they
and
I think--
Was this
in Jersey,
quite
party?
that
wanted
bring
think--did
when
J:
Piggy--Piggy
to
how they
they
and
men in
them--I
a party
know
girls
some
there
form
them
was
i.t
everything
they
did
I can
walked
to
And told
how--1
They wanted
and included
for--how
because,
party.
wanted
party
was
with
thern--'cause
they
the
figure
f30
New Jersey
see,
Young girl.
in
New York?
New York.
that
I had
See,
or
was
met
His
Piggy's
at
Piggy
mother
house-
long
time
was very
before
nice
and
\
all
like
around
that.
them
And I know t]1ey
just
to
hear
likt~
they
that
it. was
a gi ving-ot1t
They
didn't
tell
do11't
J:
know
the
Dj_d you
it's
name
what
were
would
they
me> arid
tl1.ese
party
for
or
anything.
already
see
30
queer,
so I would
say.
gi1"'ls
a 'butcl1--and
yourself
as
So it
l~ave
that
butch?
hang
seems
told
was
tl1em
1ne ~
Page
Han1pton
Mabel
M:
think
about
because
any
them.
See,
so nice
that
from
everything
up with
one
married
just
Ellen
that
why I didn't
bother
people.
he
told
Back
And,
catch
to
caught
So,
party.
this
know
me,
God
he'd
cut
my
they
re
going
to
have
butch--
how many
,t,.
[Benny]
and
butches.
them
Quite
walked
sl1e * says
And
open.
he
woman--great
me.
this
for
when
fell
if
her,
didn't
I don't
She
and
so that's
M:
can't
me,
me,
party
mouths
to
I didn't
period.
I got
to
coming-out
them.
"It
I liked
husband
But
their
women,
hooked
J:
of
liked
was nice
married
above--her
this
just
was
her
I got
throat.
I
'em,
Ellen
connected
with
No,
f31
to
in
a few
the
room,
othei .. gi1~ 1,
t]1e
be."
·· Tl1at'
says,
s her."
Sc) they
had
been
talkin'
all
along.
And them
faggots
boys,
then--they
did
you
and
I couldn't
keep
I said,
come
us
11
they
in
the
talk
to
I clidn'
come
up and
dark?
t
my
possi'ble
II
want
-----------------------It's
up there--we
tl1.ey
...
to.
hu,g and
And I'm
Sv-1eetie"
called
.. --as
tb.ey
"Wl1y
kiss,
on my porch
sittin'
tl1ey
them
called
tl1.eir
··
------·--··------------------Mabel
n1ay
ha,,e
31
said
11
Pen.ny"
instead
of
L
I/ 6
Mabel
B nny.
really
Page
Han1pton
Was Benny,
Ell n's husband,
gay?
Did he and Mabel
stay
in touch
after
Ellen
died'
For how long?
it was some partyall
night
long.
Well,
'cause
J:
Was it
M:
There
mostly
few white,
all
and
girlfriend
at
work
And,
out
white
them
and
J:
Do you
M:
Well,
that.
jacket
and
But
I never
like
th,3.t.
(stammering,
the
night
was
arty?
white
women
I knew
colored.
you
I was
For
Did
there?
have
a
yourself?
by
I always
alone.
what
you
reason,
managed
I don't
lncw
remember
I tell
what
you,
and
Or else
I had
blouse
blouse.
got
in
z·ight
with
know,
wore
to
jacket.
with
wear,
but
I alway.:>
white--white
women--going
I just
party?
the
to
nothing
and
I dress
a co]ored
I don't
you
to
skirt,
bed
with
simply
inaudible).
J:
What, do you
1nean,
tl1at
M:
I never
right
in--for
with
a
me--
suit--skirt
like
not
the
few.
Or were
alone.
liked
then
girlfriend
alone.
at
people
men there,
very
party?
be
white
my friends
were
I was
a grey
dressed
of
the
everybody
wore
and
was white
there
M:
to
black
Who was your
J:
•
f32
a person
got
and
you
tl1en
r, .-,
yo11
neve1,.
"got
instance,
go to
bed
into
you
with
spend
them,
I
It?
•
Page
f :33
get
away
Everybody
I knew
had
right
me to
Mabel Hampton
you
knoww
it.
But
But why did--
M:
In
I wanted
and
take
what
wot1.ldn't
way,
of
I didn't
feel
from
on a hundred
basement--it
had
was
it
for
if
Even
me--they
from
come
in
it,
I
I wanted
·three
the
rooms--I
you
M:
Not
often.
it
because
t]1ey
would11't
J:
to
just
known
so
an apa1:-tment
Street
in
a lovely
And,
the
My
time.
next
long--lived
I don't
in
door
know,
·to
I was
by
·time.
But
from
had
apartment.
J:
away
love
me the
When I got
twenty-second
I'd
got
all
f rier1d.s..
and
friends--girls--that
Or you
my own.
to
do it.
New York
made
managed
somebody.
And I r1ad so 1nany
myself
I always
somebody
something
it.
done
J:
somebody,
and
I never
be
So,
had
sex?
I never
I was
good
women,
didn't
people
afraid
me like
to
.YOU
didn't
Ellen
you
didn't
make
love
at
M:
Yeah,
yeah,
that's
J:
Which
one,
honey?
M:
All
them
into
with
would
let
all?
right.
one.
I ran
it.
do me bad
or
was.
lov-re t.o women?
malte
and
of
bothered
them
make
Or you
love
to
you?
.J ,J
Mabel
Hampton
husband
Page
J:
So,
M:
Yes,
want
to
you
did
have
I had
some
your
throat
I was
with
slit
sex.
'cause,
some.
f34
why would
that
if--remember?--you
told
rn.e--
M:
don't
Well,
know how he
her,
J:
But
M:
That
blamed
they
dragged
me into
I never
wanted
knew
was
it
Now,
the
in
then
bed
the
her
with
you
me.
her
to
the
make
He found
love
to
be
out.
I
her?
he.
And the
And she was after
home.
And with
caught
in
some
heard
tl1roat.
wife.
out--
I was after
danger,
me!
that,
with
a married
way,
if
him
the
blame
That's
how she
I called
it
woman
'cause
bed.
outs.
catch
"I' 11 catcl1
tl~e
under
wouldn't
husband
that--
say
I was
"
I
you.
her,
I 11.ad been
in
woman.
"-T:
Makin.g
M:
Uhmhum.
bed?
I'd
did
I hadn't
if
I' 11 cut
found
his
Sittin'
J:
But
you
M:
Not
to
draw
the
line
J:
How old
M:
011,
love?
else
do you
down playin'
cards?
What
just
said
to
everybody.
from
were
I was
you
goin'
me you
Just
then
think
we were
doing
make
love?
didn't
some
people,
see,
and
on.
at
in
that
my
time?
twe11·ties--abol1t
twenty-
Mabel
Page
I-Ian1pton
£35
five.
J:
Can you--
M:
No,
it
was
before
twenty-three--twenty-three,
I was
I was
J:
Now,
M:
Now that's
J':
Sl1.ould
we've
to
got
where
in
twenty-five
Bedford.
tell
that
all
because
the
story,
rest
honey.
of
the
things
•
1.n.
con1e
getting
we ].eave
t.}1,at, for
day?
another
·yot1
tired?
(Tape
J:
clicks
Tell
and
off
the
on again
Bedford
I was
immediately).
story.
workin'
woman had
for--this
three
boys.
now,
tell
and
di
her
orce
otl1er
J:
Don't
M:
This
you
their
J:
Thats
alright.
M:
It
one,
was
•
M:
three
I can't,
boys.
Let's
but
went
this
talk
it's
She went
a divorce--or
And she
w
three.
two,
gettin>
he was--n
•
mouth.
right
names.
him.
from
your
woman had
was
husband
man
cover
·s
about
all
with
she
this
a story
all
in
Don t woiry
you.
•
in
was
otler
one.
I worke
She
away.
gettin'
an.
a
Thi
ne.
b
t
m.
..
Mabel
Hampton
an.d
woma11,
divorce
she
from
l'lad
her
tl1ree
tl'le
is
boys,
She
husband.
Where
straigl1t.
Japan
man,
was
•
•
M:
he
There
is
a Japan
controlled--he
J:
That's
M:
In
order
J:
But
it's
M:
I have
sl1e was
and
to
gett,j.n'
can't
marry--I
a
it
get
Point?
J:
this
f36
Page
I don't
•
alright,
honey.
to
be because
Has
Point.
had--it
know,
was
a great
amount
doesn't
make
a
got
to
It
honey.
of
difference.
bring
him
to
bring
things
back,
I've
in.
if
alright
you
can't
remember
exactly.
And she,
left
me--the
Now,
this
to
she
went
away--It
boys
went
away--she
man--oh,
Lord,
something,
it
white
And he--stop
man.
1narried
her ..
wealthy
woman,
up all
the
no business.
remember
She
money
it
divorced
and
or
Th.at's
her
was
what
me of
reminds
.
to
make
a summer
left
is
his
his
name .
th.ere---l"te
her
the
husband.
me with
name?
did
how she
he
do?
come
to
come
fle's
rnai--ried
She
to
He did
divorce
in.
month.--and
the
house.
Everytime
husband--something
what
story
I see
a very
fine
l1e1~.
I-le
·had been
do--did
he use
something
him,
a
and
he had
she
,0
( 2-{
Mabel
was
Page
Hampton
goin'
comes
with
here
very
But
where
she
this
happened.
lived
Viola--[Bellfield],
girl--she
girls
are,
I went
they
soda
a11d stuff.
you,
there's
he
So,
stay
at .
So,
he
with
me.
Jersey
in
So,
used
to
the
to
pick
that
next
in
"Oh,
him
out
the
Viola,
would
up
City
We'll
his
a
mind
family--
"Yes.
"
at?"
and
be
gettin'
them
she--now,
about
you
how these
buy
I said,
yeah.
of
know
they
too
Jersey
there,
couple
you
her
I pick
from
Viola,
name--colored
a man so's
to
Wl1ere will
him
her
a cabaret.
stayin'
his
up
That's
Avenue.
And,
man asked
I said,
I wrote
bring
a cabaret.
come
I was
See,
somebody
Viola,
was
to
attached
11
had
Morningside
that
we go to
says,
she
me of
Viola--Viola,
this
a story
Now,
II
like
us would
asked
in
I think
and
reminds
much.
anyhow
all
She
man4
this
f37
at
ready
was
going
where
to
I work
to
go back
everything.
He
to
days.
address
and
boyfriend.
\
\.T:
Was . he
M:
No!
Wait'll
I tell
thought
about
knew
he
He was
you.
no gay
Wasn't
it
at
in
love
with
he would
take
us
I wasn't
said
gay?
the
man.
gay
nothin'
It
time.
him,
to
the
He was
didn't
and
she
cabaret.
about
worry
wasn't
no gay
him.
man.
I neve1."
me 'cause
in
love,
I
and
,J (
Mabel
Pa,ge
Han1pton
At the
cabaret
[Henderson]
or
the
What's
Ethel
girl's
J:
Billie
M:
No,
So,
waited
did.
she
for
in--him
and
jackets
or
there
of
Wasn't
walked
in--great
I says,
I says,
you
the
was
door;
sit
at
nobody
"What
same
age.
one,
out
do jtou
We dressed
the
door
waiting
'till
let
him
we get
we're
I had
And two
and
man
and
While
I know
there.
I
11
o'clock--this
nine
Now,
and
boyfrier1d
my
tl1ere.
I opens
opens.
white
"We' re
the
we go on out.
else
big
other
my house.
he's
and
door
that
·tl1.e.1~e, and
we' 11
friend--now,
the
He says,
around
was
II
and
something
door.
now?
name
about?
it
They came about
at
talkin',
were
at--Viola
them.
his
them
take
was
child's
so much
Billie,
" 011,.. yes.
a soda,
He knocks
we read
wasn't
it
"I'll
you
give
the
Fletcher
Holiday?
All
He says,
I think,
of--what's
name
I sai . d ,
S o,
playin',
a couple
Waters.
will
was
f 38
white
our
standin'
shut
the
men
men.
want'?
1:·aidin'
11
tl1e
11.ouse.
It
''Fo1. .. what?''
He says,
"Presti
I hadn't
been
with
he
says.
"Come on,"
ttl.tion.
"
a man no time.
'' come
on.
Get
I couldn't
you1"
coat.
figure.
Get
you1"
c a
they
and
l1at.
Thy
t
fing
rprinte
peculiar
An
one
of
They
set
M:
Sure
it
After
about
So,
takin'
time
M:
Yes,
that
to
11
and
front
today
on the
his
Just
us tw1 girls.
d set
his
I could
own wife
wn moth
pick
her!
Hair,
corner.
there's
r
find
up.
lesbians.
They don't
I guess
they'd
know nothing
have
tellin'
go around
thiowed
people
key
the
that
you're
No.
And,
a judge.
woman.
of
h w up.
or
Next
next
mornin',
mornin',
nothin'.
So,
now.
I tried
we was
had
Ain't
to-
·I says,
(inaudible)."
you
.image
didn't
Bedford,
overnight.
of
H
H
les--
know
Why'd
up.
were
other.
no clothes
A little
[Norris],
set
we were
the
a
up.
in
lesbians.
g,
fellows.
HA set
You don't
get
'' I didn't
was
I got
we stayed
in
you
you two
But
See.
us.
two
I
him.
J:
we were
this,
th
th
fellow.
h y gt
n
w1
v i"'ythi
this
J:
everything
at
abut
He st--
about
d
thing
Neither
up.
·
'e111 up for?"
Just
eyes,
I said,
nobody--she
like
little
Judgie.
I looked
everything!
if
that
must
don't
be her
look
mother.
The
spit
at
he:t
like
Jean
Mabel
She
say
is
and
nothin'.
from
other
kid
this
could
to
spend
that
girl
Okay,
f i.1~st
She
railroaded
only
tl1 ing
I can
the
she
was
night.
from
That
for
now,
next
thing,
up to
so that
when
I hit
develops
Mabel's
City
make
came
he
is
she'd
think
that
I
man--and
this
for.
I was
Bedford
The
and
it
Bedford
was
a strange
voice
me.
And the
what
tape
Jersey
prostitution.
that's
(The
railroaded
would
cops
l1appened
I was the
me.
So they
the
t]1ing
point
say,
kid.
prove
there
told
fellow
"Wel]
sl1e
f40
. ··
No lawyer,
other
had
tip there
sat
'Bedford
oldest
come
Page
Hampton
sent.
this
echoing
reverberating
The
[ I1 ...isl1.rr1an].
sound
back
at
this
and
forth).
t.all,
Big,
tell
me your
anyt.hing;
mc,ntl1,
storyJ
3ent
and
11
that.
lil{e
He sat
judge
haridsome
she
(Tape
get
ends
said,
He said,
"Because
And I' 11 tell
down-·-11im
me here.
he
[Irishman].
and
his
She had
payed
for
at
thj.s
0
you
wife--an.d
you
don't
one.
"
told
Now,
look
like
·n1e wl1.y this
to
send
up so man.y people
so
many
peopJ~e.
point).
you
··
a
'
)
I
.
'--J
.T)
N
.del
n
ly,
1.
Thi
M:
Yes.
i.
l )
T p
N
,
•
"'
198~
Y,
d :>f y , r
-T·.
th
ta
I
J.
t
ill
l
r.
w
..•
f
I
l
.11
1 ' 5
~t.
t
d b t
thP
Mi
•
• ITI
.r
--- -
'r .
•
l
.J
t
l
-r .
1
•
•
-
•
•
•
•
l
•
•
•
•
•
I
1
l.
•
,
w
•
B j
r .,
,
f
a
c. l
l
h
I '
J
y
l
I
n
?
?
•
1
t I
1
1 Il w th
l"
2
...
I
I
t r
•
,
•
•
•
•
'
•
f
I
•
•
•
'
•
I '
T
h,
l .
C
I'
'
t
•
•
J (1
•
..
I
•
1
t
•
-
,
I
l
•
•
•
I
.
r '
11
Kn w I
i:,
\
nev
y
sl1
a <J
d
c
) <-
1--
:1
1
I..
body.
1
Hew do ycu
J:
~
f~~l
tit
l
nJw?
Tl1e sa
abo
v1~ll
1 -
I dor 't
ar_,
1
p
1
pl ~nty
J:
al<
i
~
•
tpl~
l
tl in1
1
of
f th
t<_r
:;r-cat
-e
-use
lot
c)f
p
ve
1)....
e~
c ..
f!i
111ly Bedford
1::.-· tl1ey
a:i
er le
1...111..,d
l1as
al
cv._r
Ar1d th,.;1,., 'r
lot
~1
w ,11en~ goo:l.
of
won
- wl :>
j aj 1
1
f tlem,
z
rn t
T
9nd th,y
wasn't
lesbi
n~-
wa~n'
ley
gay
•
•
J:
l i
f
,1
1:
l
l:
Y.
t
•
t
I
'
T
•
•
♦
i .
•
,.:,
-
-
..,.
1
•
'
y
l
•
th_
l
. dn ' t
l
y
\.
l
-
ti1ne:-.
'rhe1e'
a
t
1:lo sn'
they
w]1at
<>r--not
s ~r,
· are
it
ow
I
l
•
fo
5
g '
;
1
11
t
1I
... 11 .
k y
l' :
M:
'
he r.1 y
•
·r110
...,d . n
,... 1e
t
get
)
•
ll
T:
11n lmI
..
Al
11, ., s l
I
ays
t
11
I ' J 1 l 1a~,
said
l
L
L l
1 il~e
f 11
t
I
1
.._ .
11
....
7
..1.
.r ..... .:.
•
•
(
I
-
W1
♦
1
'1
M nhattar
lJ
•
•
1 'V
M
•
!
--
J
...,
}c
}
•
1
•
J_
l
\.I
J.
(.
.
B .. t t · .f?u
r.,;i
?
1n;: 1 ,
3
a
1
'
l
~ L11 .
0
1. '
.,..
.,
.1
rJ - l,
(30
•
,
•
I
I
•
•
,
l
l
•
l
r
W
l
•
'
11
•
,
•
•
•
•
•
'
y
•
l
1
'
l
1
l
l
1
l
I ...
t
•
•
•
•
•
1
•
•
l
..
•
t
\
•
•
· 11
r
l
l
I
•
t
•
P..nd
l:
•
•
J:
M:
m_r.
t,
11 1
1
• 1
A11d
vi7t
t
I
1
l
•
j j
,
l y
{ 1..... .
11 _.
• I
0
I
l l
1 .
11 y
I
•
I
I
- 1
•
•
•
I
•
J.
•
•
'
•
I
•
l
'
•
f
. in
-
I
I
, I
f
C
•
•
tl1
'
:1
g . .r 1
r · Pd 1n
y r
ll.
+
....
l
f
•
I
•
1i
•
t
•
l .
n
•
•
•
'
Laf
T
P
tt
.
Tl
' . 1: ....
. I
•
l
-
*
C
w 1-)
d,
w ...
. k?
-
r
r
r
t
•
f F
d g~
lit·
'k
l
n ... ., l 1s,
:! 1 · r1t. · -Coin
l'
.l
!
ly
l)
--
-
-
--
p
'
•
,_
rt.
C
11is1
-
•
0
l
V
~y
ti
11
lu
l)
i
,11
1 on1 •
f E m
]
ge :ll
w
(
I
M
•
-
..Lllg
.'
\
t
t
1
i
I
y
1 l
I
•
•
J
'.1
t-
....J
•
•
,.J
a
•
'T
N
•
,
w
W1
s
f ct
•
J..n,
n a m cl in -
ar. :l
fl .. t '.._ t
r.; ,
1 •
l
ed 1n
c-·
-
-·- ---
-
-
I
t t
•
t;
s
-
.
. · ik .-
I
•
•
l
Tl R
T
(.lUt.
~
1
l
l
y r arr·
I
•
'
1 i l\._ t
I di dn ' t
I
...
.
l
.-
-
•
_,
n1
n t, l i
't
.1.nA
d rl t J_
r •
( f E m
t
id --, C A
t ti fl
t - \/y 1"" r r- )f f
m "'
.
. _,
)
5 M
1
t l)j 'klu
J
rd g A
1 n t l - r.o n 1 1111 i ._.,
•
•
{j_
)
)
•
j_
[ g
gedly
5~
1 0
· 3d, p lit·
'
'
9
•
•
v_ ~y ·el
(
8
'
'
1
l
en..,
th
-
•
1
l
l i
--
ma
ry
w s
in
0
•
l
n.
J
1:
*
]
r
I .
•
~·------
-
t.} .
t
r
s
,
T
.. u
tl
•
II
tl
•
-
l .
II
-
•
•
•
'
'
r
•
,
•
l
'
f
•
r
t
,
r
•
•
1
•
l
l
p
b
t
d'd
1
lll
l bl
it h
1
•
I
•
B, · n'
V
, r
•
l
I
?
,
t_ ,,
Cl
•
'
'
'
.r
r
L ,
. Il
-
'
•
l
,;J
w
l
•
t
t
l
•
•
Wl
h
•
1
,
•
•
w·
l
l
(
-
_ 1 t,_l
1
V
•
•
'?
•
1
d
w
~
C
l
{
•
ll
:l .
r
I
•
1
-
11
n~Fi
) I
Ial
y'd
r OU l 1 ~ w. tl
•
pl
n 1
,
tl
w, 1J :.in t
-
..l.
t
t d--t1
0
.r
.l •
1
it
I
t
.. w
.]
~b
•
11
1
b
1
l
· ar _ the re
:-,1ta
1
wit
1
,
1
, , 1,
y
•
l'1
OrJ.,
.n
t evt..:rybJdy.
All
of
..
1
t
w
WJn1e1
tjffi
gay_
w r
J.
t}1
y
11e1\.
i g
~i h
h
' s
g
y'
I d'dn'
t
t
•
no
[ li
b
,
1 ( t 1e 1.. d .
trl
J
•
1
t
W
t
wa
.1
aL
i
g
JI
..-:J -
1n
]
~
l
1lg
U
l
l
t
.l 1
•
1
1
l .
--1
t ~}
•
n
ir
.
I
e~
•
tl
'
11 y u i
t
,
•
•
•
y
f
w
M-
Th
in
I
•
in
-
L
red
F
l'.l
Y U
111
F
It
•
•
l.
.::i
..
. 1
l
,
U '"'
F rt i
J_
' t
A
a
..
I
M.
•
T
ti
d F r
J:
t
1i 1 .
0
y
•
- I
1
A d
,. w
l
T
y
..
1
ki
T·
u
•
♦
1
•
l
•
•
t
a
'
•
r1.
n .
t
d
h
r
I
•
•
l
. l
•
•
l
r
•
T
1·
•
•
]
+
1
1
tl
•
r
.J..
t.
1~
T
1
tl , r
.
}
h
n
r
f
tap.
l 1
1 .l
l
wi
t
l
I
•
•
h
'
ame b ~1 from
11
t
1
Bed·
rd
ln
1
b
w
Hill~?
b3
J:
In betvieen
'
k fr
_"lat1 se
Bedfo
d.
Wt;re
ba
yo
A 1th
t
l'l w J r - _,y
l. ir
Ri g l t .
M:
Yeah.
J:
Lt'~
Wh t
yot1
M-
That
.
-
When I cam
u •
•
h
M:
h :,r1 f _1~ t l a
Bently
'
et
T•
•
W 1]
g - Could
I
'
ylu
r1embe.r '?
I
·
,J
1
A.:;_,
r · n1 m 1e
t
12
tal~
3 li
tl
a
tt
GJ~Jy
g
t
H
- n
"
11 t .
1
•
)
r
d
•
•
1 s
•
•
,-
t.
wa,
'
•
•
•
1
l iI
d,
y
lI
f t
t
l
..l
g
-
'
...
d
7 11
h
•
1:r
0 ,
\ '""me1..
i
...
•
.
. d them.ft
-Y
•
dy
1
...t
A
1
m
I
t"
C
1
f
}
Il
•
1.
r
h
•
w
•
I
t
•
1
•
•
T
•
s
l
'
'
'
•
•
•
INTERVIEWWITH MABELHAMPTON
(M)
Interviewer:
Joan
Nestle
J:
This
is
M:
Today
J:
Seventh
this
is
tape
about
Mabel's
Mabel
the
to
Joan
Nestle
New York
to
New York
is
the
or
and
first
Twenty-eighth--
twenty-eight,
Mabel
life
Well,
City
J:
New York
December
in
I don't
Hampton,
New York
question
know.
is,
and
City
in
we're
as
what
But
anyway,
doing
a
a lesbian.
year
did
you
come
City?
M:
•
(J)
or
I'll
turn
Jersey
away
from
that.
That
We' re
just
interes·ted
I come
City?
No, New York City.
City.
M:
in
'
New York
City.
Okay.
1
Let's
see,
nineteen--
I
l'iabel
when
and
Pag
Hamp on
I came
to
York
e
City--you
see,
I
as
c2
goi
g
hen
you
ack
s
ar
forvards.
J:
that's
Okay,
J:
lell,
I'll
hen
you
alright,
say,
first
don
t--
nineteen--
hit
the
ci
y.
irst
city.
it
M:
the
it
ha
city.
J:
A ound
11:
Y al
~
J:
But
you
M:
Y ah
was
tla
.
nineteen--now
•
for
irl.
a li
o J fts y Ci
day~
i i g
r
•
1
0
'
•
T
ld
at.
h
m
•
y
I
y
•
•
l
ou
l .
•
•
as
a few
you
•
•
•
er
I came
m
•
0
bu
ut
y
J:
came
•
yo
U C
Mabel
Page
Hampton
M:
aunt
brought
I came
that
happened
start
living
Now,
let's
and
in
M:
West
you
Oh,
Eighth
My
Street_
away
ran
that
and,
City
was
we know
as
now,
what
a lesbian
around
everything
year
did
you
woman?
nineteen--I
was
about
old.
J:
So,
that
would
be
around
nineteen
nineteen,
City
you
Okay.
twenty.
M:
Nineteen
J:
In
what
I never
M:
nineteen
twenty.
Street.
I had
J:
skip--'cause
New York
years
nineteen
fifty-two
me.
J:
seventeen
to
c3
two
twenty.
part
New York
thought
about
I lived
in
rooms
there.
you
Did
of
one
that
pick
That
that.
twenty
did
was
live?
♦
in
Twenty-Second
West
neighborhood
for
any
special
reason?
No,
that
me--
three
met
house.
Oh,
A girlfriend
no.
yes.
They
of
lived
next
•
in
mine
was
livin'
door
and
they
got
got
me
•
J:
Were
they
lesbians?
M:
Yup,
they
were
rooms
Lillian,
there
in
and
we--
that
lesbians.
house.
And they
And I stayed
3
there
'till
I
,
Mabel
Page
Hampton
J:
So that
around
there
eighteen
M:
then
back.
I went
1 i ving
and
name.
If
there
dollars
it
was
a bedroom,
J:
You remember
M:
I don't
think
Ten
dollars
work
know,
her
get
Well,
go to
you
I'll
M:
would
something,
and I went
then
Were
then
later.
it
apartment
was
three
I'd
come
lots
of
what
was
think
of
rooms
I paid
on the
and
ground
a big
paid
I think
She was a funny
work
for
for
rent?
parties
in
your
lesbian
parties
I paid
place.
Mr.
floor,
kitchen.
them more than
a week
to
anyhow--
like?
how much you
I went
I can
But,
a livingroom,
was funny.
there
I knew--oh,
name,
the
'cause
And,
back.
neigl1.borhood?
of
was
It
and,
think
What
apartment.
or
neighborhood
J:
a week.
come
I worked,
me go back.
that
of them.
stayed
show.
that
I can
and
a room
let
around
I'd
people,
the
Around
rest
the
in
Alright,
M:
all
times
kept
thirty--you
How long--
I was--different
J:
les·bians
nineteen
yeai~s'?
I always
Then
here
'till
I went away with
meantime>
away,
was
c4
ten
for
that
Then I
[Dandrick],
I had--
J;
Did
M:
Have what?
J:
Did
you
you
have
have
4
house?
in
your
house.
cE,
Pa,ge
Hampton
Mabel
M:
Not
in
my house.
Next
door,
this
girl,
she
'
had
four
time.
rooms
in
the
basement,
And sometimes
J:
Oh,
M:
We'd
food--chicken,
'cause
name?
the
rest
If
J:
pay
parties,
and
vegetables,
I'd
think
chip
you
in,
of
her
name,
the
up all
the
too_
a pay
party?
we'd
buy
and
salads
in
all
with
and
them
know.
you
know
And--what
I can
think
of
was
all
names.
So,
Or did
What's
different
parties
parties
pay
that.
salad--and
those
gave
about
have
I can
she
have
my girlfriends
bring
of
party.
tell
potato
I'd
her
we would
and
and
things,
and
you
the
paid
money
for
the
go form
things
you
party
the
to
brought
pay
to
rent
the
or
something?
M:
rent.
No,
We went
J:
no.
to
We didn't
a lot
Well,
talk
We went
and
you
meet
house,
maybe
pay
other
we just
less
give
of
those
about
to
a couple
women and
of
have
a lot
of
the
and
had
for
our
close
How many women would
M:
Sometimes
maybe
pay--where
You by your
J:
and
the
too.
that
dollars.
there
with
places.
dance
it
no parties
fun.
friends.
be there
would
more.
be twelve
•
5
But,
you
drinks
with
go
and
our
Pigs'
feet.
about?
or
fourteen--
•
lil
'
Hampton
Mabel
let's
in
J:
And,
M;
Oh, potato
see,
the
what
seldom
that
because
What
were
M:
Most
of
did
they
or
pig
to
eat?
feet,
chittlins.
peas,
and
And,
it
was
all
that
And sometime
black-eyed
them
of
girls
just
bring
their
supposed
there
women wearing
wore
them
of
them
to
in
of
them
And,
was
through
a car,
they
would
be
of
there
in
or
the
corn.
like
street.
Of
the
car
and
too,
single
anything
slacks,
women
was
suits.
the
had
of
party?
wore
them
a lot
the
They wore
slacks
come
most
at
suits.
have
good-lookin'
Were
single
the
were
on.
short
or
come
hair.
with
And,
was--
there
couples
but
were
there
a
women?
M:
the
have
we have?
was
had
six
slacks
of
any
they
J:
over
did
J:
five
their
lot
you
salad,
it
if
course,
most
else
would
we had.
Very
then
what
time
winter
stuff
c6
Page
Well,
come
there
and
bring--the
women with
to
jive
at
them,
over
bulldykers
you
there.
So,
--
J:
There
was
dancing?
M:
Oh,
Charleston--they
did
they
know.
danced
a little
up
bit
6
couples
used
And you
You wasn't
all.
yeah,
and
because
to
and
wasn't
supposed
a breeze.
of
come
the
everything.
to
look
They
did
Mabel
Page
Hampton
Do you
J:
records?
How was
the
The music
J:
Who?
M:
I think
records
I want
that
we used
to
save
as
M:
Hrnmm?
J:
Did
you
it
They were
records.
I got
some
bring
you.
to.
by
all
records~
who?
records
home
Some old,
You see,
with
women at
these
now.
old
the
I've
got
records
fire,
I tried
I could.
you
ever
was
to
dance
Did
records--was
Do you remember
much as
J:
what
music?
M;
some
to
remember
c7
meet
meet
anybody
that
you
parties,
took
Mabel?
home
across
the
hall?
M:
No,
No ..
no,
There
do that.
I didn't
was
I don't
do that.
Mildred
Green;
there
know,
I didn't
quite
a few
of
would
these
be
was
them.
Were these
J:
black
women,
or
unless
we ran
into
women too?
white
M:
had
a white
me,
I'd
had
a couple
Village
were
all
No,
white
rare
woman with
venture
and
very
out
of
with
any
girls--white
tell
them
girls,
and
They were
them.
about
we got
of
them.
girls--from
it
and
along
7
they
fine.
all
I just
someone
colored.
had
downtown
would
who
But
a ball.
in
I
The
come up.
They
Mabe 1 Han1pton
J:
you
that
Village
went
Do you
remember
to
Village
The
M:
Went to
J;
As a lesbian
'cause
you
the
first
time,
approximately,
a lesbian?
as
The Village?
knew
woman--that
that's
where
you went
to
The
lesbians
other
hung
out.
M:
tl1e
time.
started
the
I didn't
and
out
down there
acting
No,
in
at
first
know
got
in
time--I
''first
the
was
time''
show
with
surnmer--those--
the
the
Cherry
Lane
J:
And what
going
it.
at
the
After
at
So,
all
I
show-girls,
Then,
Theater.
down there
we'd
that
time,
therefore,
go
I was
I went
there--
nineteen
twenty,
M:
nineteen
was
around
we figure
this
was--this
was
right?
Yeah,
it
But you
lesbians
in
that
It
time.
was
down there
and
J:
in the
M:
knew that
The Village
was
a place
went?
M: Well,
Village
did
twenty.
J:
where
time
meet
I wasn't
up with
Did you ever
sure,
but
I knew
you
a few of them,
quite
go to
any bars
down in
seldom.
I didn't
could
go
see.
The
twenties?
Very
seldom.
Very
8
have
to
Mabel
go to
the
Like,
Jackie,
girls
from
had
Page
Hampton
all
bars
maybe,
the
the
women
have
the
the
houses.
women's
party,
a big
girls
remember
and
this
from
how the
nowadays,
Like,
were
go to
all
the
place/that--she
there.
Do you
themselves.
What
would
show--all
J:
or--
I would
because
c9
some
we call
that
words
called
women
ou1.~sel ves
they
used?
"lesbians··
Like,
you
said
"bulldagger"-M:
Yeah,
"ladylovers"--and
the
man,
wife,"
What
was
M:
Well,
I'll
J:
Right,
M:
And the
the
knew
woman
else?--
called
who wasn't
a butch?
tell
you,
the
butch
was
what
were
the
other
ladies
other
Did
mostly
like
other
yot1 use
Central
me very
the
like
the
What
Park
well,
word
my friend,
my
we heard
on Riverside
it?
is
It's
Now,
I used
9
to
II
S
t
UC l 't
when
Drive--not
thing?--we
other
West.
and
"stud"?
Mostly
yeah.
party
day.
called?
And we wot.1ld--
Sometimes,
a big
is
ladies--"This
blah.
Drive--what's
Street--no,
that
the
and
blah,
M:
there
and--What
know.
J:
Riverside
bulldykers
J:
blah,
to
11
"butch"--and--
you
we went
11
came
a hundred
there
was
go up to
through
and
tenth
a woman there
her
house.
Mabel
At her
house.
Oh, the
we had
J:
Oh,
M:
God!
that.
That
That
around
night--What
is
the
think
of
year
been
c10
two
women.
was
that,
around
Mabel?
nineteen--
I met Lillian.
no,
no,
nineteen
thirty-nine?
no,
It
no.
nineteen
I met
I can
have
around
No,
one
What
must
was after
was
between
about--
M: No.
that--'cause
if
marriage
So that's
like
Now,
the
talk
marriage
J:
as
Page
Hampton
her
in
back
thirty-two.
name?!--I'm
I can
before
eight--something
nineteen
woman's
her,
thirty
was
trying
a lot
tell
And,
of
to
think.
things.
Oh,
brother!
That's
M:
Anyhow--no,
Anyhow,
she
and
says,
she
for get
called
11
what
"Yes,
Mabel,"
door.
"No,
"You know,
can't
she
down to
get
Monroe
will
he was
He was
a faggot_
What church
M:
He's
to
We was livin'
down--her
J:
I got
marry
was
a hundred
door,
Florence--"--I
married.
"
.. "
and her
the
remember.
next
name- - "S11.e' s get ting
The Reverend
gay.
okay,
says,
last
going
going
ain't
she
says,
she's
mamma is
it
us next
Florence's
So Lillian
her
okay.
J:
marriage
them."
friend
and her
certificate
So that's
and
and
how I knew
he with?
and
10
fourteenth
Street
and
Saint
Mabel
Hampton
Nicholas
Page
Avenue.
So,
dressed
Oh,
anyhow,
was
I said,
you
fine,
he
"Alrigl1t.
know,
thirty/thirty-five
a fine
and
people
In their
house?
M:
In their
house.
natt1rally,
So,
must
there.
J:
guy.
11
there
ell
have
we
been
about
And big--
was
It
an apartment.
And,
I
,
think
thats
Hit
becoming
oh ten.
one
on
some
something.
Don't
get
yourself
them
World
in
trouble
She says,
are--you'll
get
me to
with
messed
that
"Don't
both.er
in
trouble."
yourself
woman who I--I
what
just
with
before
them
Now,
..no.
says,
those--'',
up
was
an Assembly
become
Lillian
do it.
I wouldn't
now?--people
War.
the
wanted
she
that.
like
That's
and
or
something
stories.
political,
woman
call
or
do you
the
Second
because
in
the
they
meantime,
I was--
remember
and
they
slippers,
go back
J:
Let's
M:
Oh,
J:
What were
what
you
M:
Wait
had
and
the
to
wedding
and
you
wedding
ceremony,
wearing
ceremony.
okay.
back
then?
Do you
Lillian--?
a minute
on tux--white
I had
the
now.
No,
neckties
the
and
girls
there
everything--and
I remember,
on a suit.
was
I had
on a white
my hair.
She
suit.
My hair
was
long.
I had
the
11
girl
fix
tro
•
Mabel
all
up,
down
all
around
And,
Lillian
rolled
come
it
arriving,
and
to
c12
more
J:
Was it
all
all.
[Elga},
And,
her
like
waved
it,
a fashion
people
M:
They had
J:
Both
the
her
Yeah,
women.
no men there
gave
How would
started
I knew--
that
All
course,
J:
see.
women?
wasn't
mother
it
and
[plate],
The guests
trucculently):
of
and
it
that
wedding.
this
I seen
There
in
like
look
and
women.
water
my face
M (a bit
that's
I put
always
we went
So,
all
Page
Hampton
outside
girl
the
was
it
minister--
who was marrying
away.
they
pants
dress
the
bride?
on .
•
M (with
The girl
think
had
she
had
different
the
arm.
of
more
a veil--a
had
white
trucculence):
wedding
shoes
dresses
And music
them?
dress
on.
on with
No,
and
And the
flower;
not
her
both
them.
veil--and
bride's
they
of
had
I
maids--they
flowers
on
was playing.
,
the
. had
J:
And how was the
bride
M:
Oh,
she
had
a real
Oh,
she
had
the
groom--the
woman who was
groom.
a gown
beautiful
on .
J:
gown.
12
bridal
gown.
She
f fl
Mabel
Hampton
Page
M:
The
J:
And what
M:
And the
other
She
dressed
pants.
white
bride
had
the
did
was
c13
gown on--
the
worn 1 have
other
woman had
in
on?
on pants.
white
too,
She had
and
on
so was the
bride.
The
passed
downtown
How did
J:
you
change
She
tell
was
had
and
I forget
down there,
had
a blood
back,
give
the
it
to
J:
said
at
the
man to
be your
the
and
and
voice
some
them
of
have
anyhow.
when
everything.
and
like
didn't
time,
back--went
Did
just
lawfully
J:
He said
M:
No,
anything
he
like
lawfully
be your
at
remember
ceremony?
Yes,
a heavy
test
like
so much
to
They
she
went
went
Everything
got
it,
a
brought
was
it
minister.
Do you
M:
woman to
the
looked
image
who,
thing
girl
apart--just
She
down there,
Brought
her
spitting
voice.
okay.
That
the
her
Hall!
do that?
know.
couldn't
do today.
City
they
M: I don't
fellow
at
say
Reverend
Monroe
anything--?
the
regular,
married--,
wedded
the
that
"Do you
[and[do
you
take
this
take
this
say
"two
husband?"
word
"man
think
he
11
?
He didn't
women... ?
I don't
13
did.
I don't
think
he
Mabel
Page
Hampton
did.
There
I could
was
hear
so many
her
people,
sayin',
J:
How old
M:
Well,
and
I was
so
two
people
cl4
far
And
back.
"Yes."
were
they,
the
getting
married?
And then,
thirty.
kiss
the
to
he
and
gay
was
marry
anyhow,
What
M:
I can't
he
was
that,
he
men and
I think
twenty-five,
and
knew
they
the
Monroe
Reverend
hisself.
J:
somebody.
was
after
bride,"
because
was
one
were
said,
wc)men.
all
And that's
other
was
"Now,
He knew
he
went
in
for--
women.
was
his
first
name?
remember
[Sis]
I'd
now.
would
Do you
know
have
his
first
know,
to
Mabel?
get
it
name.
from
But,
Monroe.
J:
Did
M:
I didn't
a lot
of
lesbians
that
you
knew
then
get
mar.r1e. d?.
I heard
about
woman who got
married.
home.
around.
hometown.
didn't
not
too
many.
mixed
up with
all
her
coming
come
killed
Her
give
many--not
but
husband
She
too
them,
We were
Her
know
and
him
Lillian
a day.
in,
another
from
and
right
He was
I heard
girl,
a big
he
there.
went
that
to
and
party,
must
have
She
school
a mean guy.
14
was
got
married.
about
she
and
slapped
from
together.
another
was
she
went
her
Lillian
He
s
Mabel
Hampton
Page
J:
made
it
easier
someplace
chance
met
Mabel,
for
do you
you
else--like
to
them
hospital,
Yes,
get
around
to
knew
they
like
that.
in
over
from
night
in
M:
all
to
the
were
and
to
out
you
wouldn't
the
theater
City
lived
to
that
the
mixed
head
a
New York,
to
you
the
went
one
women there.
And we start
I got
have
I even
I met
and
it.
in
Now,
anything.
from that
found
you
from
I knew
if
thdn
people.
meeting,
And then
spiritualism
town,
place:
gay.
New York
town?
meet
hospital
in
a lesbian
a small
political
the
be
living
a small
and
the
think
c15
to
I
talkin'
and
up in
woman was
a
lesbian.
J:
lesbian
was
really
this
good
a good
place
to
be a
in--.
M:
learn
So New York
Yes,
so much,
a very
and
you
see
place
to
be
so much,
and
a lesbian.
you
You
meet
so many
a lesbian?
Like
people.
Did
J:
other
towns,
you
M:
Brooklyn,
out
there
safe
here
lesbians
I never
went
New York,
a little
feel
know,
No,
I never
point.
you
went
nowhere
get
That's
maybe,
all.
15
up?
towns.
other
Brooklyn,
Jersey--well,
bit.
beat
to
but
as
•
in
That
was the
New York,
and
White
In The War,
Jersey;
Plains
you
Mabel
Hampton
couldn't
get
Page
me out
J:
gay
in
M:
places>
get
and
out
some
the
there
we'd
talk
and
and
we'd
I was
go to
I'd
night
sit
they'd
one
the
with
clubs
and
and
drink
there
drink
go to
in
show
my
up a breeze,
and
we'd
them's
and
meet
of
house
more.
J:
What
M:
All
I moved
Bronx.
all
i1 Harlem--in
a lot
Of course,
know.
you
they'd
of
around
yes.
a few--and
different
soda,
hang
Harlem?
Well,
people--quite
New York.
you
Did
community
of
c16
of
that
had
year
of
it?
is
that
happened
to
the
Bronx
to
happen
nineteen
in
in
before
between
I moved
to
the
forty-three.
The
So
Twenties
and
The
Forties.
J:
went
back
and
five
to
to
in
Do you
Yeah,
of
my hand
go in.
there's--I
forgot
I remembered
They'd
them--maybe
a white
the
names
of
any
places
you
Harlem?
M:
of
remember
be
playin'
more.
them
them.
the
You'd
like
the
go down the
mµsic.
And then
down there
place
now--just
I went
I went
and were
to
four
down the
treated
steps
village
very
•
nice.
J:
Tell·
us--I
remember--when
16
they
used
to
have
of
Mabel
those
big
drag
M:
went
Page
Hampton
to
dance~
Well,
those.
Those
drag
balls?
drag
balls
are
the
The women wore
pants
c17
'
di~ferent.
and
the
Everybody
men wore
dresses.
J:
M:
something
like
[or
Florence
with
that--because
What
in
the
Carol.
Avenue.
around
part
M:
That
But,
there
in
.
place,
or
happened
know?
New York
I remember,
The
was
Twenties,
Seventh
were
you
you
of
1960s,
But,
the
twenty-five
that
died,
[Millrose[
one
in
twenty-six--
around
the
time
Miller]
J:
me to
When was this?
That happened
were
they
with
Lillian.
where
in?
You took
I was
they?
were
Avenue--someplace
so many
see.
And then--
Get
of
in
they
them,
there
on Seventh
and
were
have
open
all
a nice
time.
J:
You also
M:
Boat
rides?
J:
That
there
M:
Oh,
told
me that
there
used
to
be boat
rides.
know
it
boat
rides
up
there
better
than
up the
all
night
yes.
was
What
some
is
her
I know my own.
Hudson,
long--and
you
know,
that's
17
women who ran
name
now?
And they'd
I mean
where
boat
rides?
I used
to
give
these
way up there--way
you'll
see
the
gay
Mabel
Page
Hampton
at.
people
And she-J:
What
M:
That's
around
year?
Can you
since
we've
That
was
call
on somebody
else
boat
rides.
of course,
[Post]
nineteen--
Oh,
Road
her
And,
for
or
boat.
those
been
is
those,
that?
here
her
but
in
Rose
would
off
go when
and
she
have
to
know the
of Boston
she's
Street,
Bronx.
I'd
would
sixty--think
sixty-sixth
the
name?
one woman lived
and
Everybody
I knew
remember
What
on a hundred
fifth--sixty-fifth
for
c18
sixtyshe
gave
was known
a boat
ride.
faggots--
J:
Was this
in
M:
No, no,
these
the
nineteen
fifties
or
forties
or--
Seventies,
and
those
rides--and
boat
we would
come
down into
The
Sixties
Hudson.
All
night
go up the
sometimes
in
the
day,
but
and
long,
mostly
at
of
the
city
loved
to
night.
J:
Mabel,
loved
more
that
you
with
a girlfriend--or
were
than
any
there
any
any
other
others--that
parts
you
go
parts--beautiful
parts
that
you
remember
I was
travelling
remember?
M:
so much--going
for--I
didn't
No,
I don't
away
with
have--Lillian
the
white
went.
18
because
people
that
I worked
She was on a couple
of
Mabel
them,
Hampton
but
I didn't
J:
walk
or
bother
There
parts
of
c19
just
liked
so much.
wasn't
the
Pa.ge
anyplace
city
that
M:
No.
in
J:
Uhm-hmmm.
M:
Let
me look
J:
Did
you
M:
No, I did
Here
that
you
to
you--
New York?
over
like
the
place.
Park
Central
or
did
you
like
the
•
river.
Park;
didn't
like
and
Crotona
Park.
there
and
we carried
sit,
food
Street.
*
and
Most
I loved
Crotona
we used
and
all
011., picnics.
M:
Picnics,
[Mel]
And there
J:
What
to
out
yeah.
downtown,
are
year
I -didn't
No, no.
river.
J:
I met
there.
the
not.
I go is
Park;
go out
there
Central
people's
I'd
there
like
homes--
go out
and--on
holidays,
and----
We had
see.
a beautiful
She
two women I can
lived
tell
time
in
out
River
you--
was this?
----------·----------------------------------*
Not being
a native
New Yorker,
I asked someone to
look this
up for me on the map to get the right
spelling.
For the record,
Crotona
Park is in the Bronx,
between
Treemont
and East
Treemont,
about
eight
or ten blocks
south
of Bronx Park with the zoo and garden.
(SA)
19
Mabel
Page
Hampton
M:
was [Mel]--oh,
[or Nel?J
[Mel]
in The Sixties.
around
hair
and
drive
she'd
from
was
She's
come uptown.
the
time
over
was crazy
it
she
would
She's
was knee-high
If there
gotten
gettin'
you can't
I know,
gonna
we'll
Do you
J:
get
ever
cuttin'
to
right?
loved
kick
She
And she
you knew,
ready
so religious,
M: Yeah,
a duck.
a woman that
was ever
we're
through
had a car.
to
M:
and now I'm
get
always
J:
[Mel],
was in The Sixties-'
women--ooooh,
my God.
She taught
you everything
J:
a woman,
her
butt.
do a thing-get
her
before--
her.
remember
Did you know women who liked
any
that
There
c20
to
anything
play
about
softball
sports.
or were
there
teams.
M:
about
care
special
No, all
the
women,
they
liked
the
them--softballs--they
about
any old
softball.
J:
I've
J:
What about
jewelry
got
that
cut
to
didn't
soft
it
you these
there
jewelry?
liked
to
women.
too
much
Didn't
outl
ask
women
care
questions?
Was there
wear,
or
any
how they
wore
things?
M: I don't
. that's
about
J:
know.
Most
everybody
had a watch,
Any special
significance
and
all.
What about
rings?
20
to
Mabel
Page
Hampton
c21
rings'?
M:
wore
in
No,
their
to
What
a shirt--a
when
when
you
had
I wasn't
Twenties,
sick
or
Can
you
or
Thirties,
one
of
when
That
all.
on and
I wear
would
How would
I was
flat,
know
low-heeled
you
was
what
a
you
shoes.
Even
socks.
thinking
Forties--when
couple
young,
Nobody
happen--I'm
or
the
died?
We all
got
the
woman's
of
in
lesbian
How did
you
The
couples
handle
got
that?
Later,
there.
There
was--oh,
I still
name.
you
make
a list
of
all
the
names
that
she
and
remember.
had--she's
of
ever
remember?
M:
end
outfit?
outfit,
a suit
What
think
can
they
no~- tlian
rings
favorite
tie.
J:
J:
you
your
workin',
M:
can't
was
My favorite
M:
was
more
up?
dress
suit--and
re
life.
J:
like
there'
the
No,
one
I have
'cause
Mabel
loves
name?
Well,
anyhow-We'll
think
who told
my tongue--"I
J:
to
don't
all
get
to
that
Lillian--oh,
know
of
of
the
it.
what
won1en. "
What
21
because
it
you
gonna
Oh,
would
just
was
on the
do with
what
happen
was
if
I
her
Mabel
Mabel
somebody
many people
woman.
but
I'll
that
tell
get
you the
sick
I wasn't
truth.
and die.
around
I was a lucky,
too
fortunate
The first--
The first
years
c22
died?
M:
J:
Did you hear
M:
Well,
funeral
old--and
went
Page
Hampton
to
the
I got
you'd
I went
hear
to,
along
and another
and carried
with
How did
M:
Well,
me.
about
all.
twenty-five
friend
of mine,
they
I was uncomfortable,
okay.
it
J:
and that's
of it,
I was more than
a girlfriend
funeral
any--?
of
women help
each
other
through
those
times?
They lived
together,
J:
friends
they
worked
and they
They worked.
together.
worked.
And when somebody
got
sick,
would
The friends
come and help
all
the
come?
M:
know--bring
food,
bring
of us had a little
would
money,
piece
and help
of money.
them--you
them out
'cause
Nobody was broke
all
then.
And-J:
Or did
lesbians
M:
Did you ever
stick
Well,
feel
lonely
as a lesbian,
Mabel?
together?
no,
I never
felt
22
lonely
because
I was
/61
Mabel
too
Hampton
busy
Page
working.
really--'cause,
you
see,
home
to
have
be workin'
a Lillian'd
be home
and
somebody
find
month--for
this
or two years--I'll
months
come
you'll
See,
two
for
before
c23
who
months
or
this
person,
that
I had
three
I'd
other
f.riends.
J:
But
you
had
had friends
lots--you
all
through--
M: I had plenty
onto
one
this
place
I would
person
and
go to
special?
too
long
the
other
You loved
M:
Oh, I loved
J:
Isn't
Because
you
Well,
the
the
theater--in
you liked
because
I was too--I
place.
And then,
the
if
hold
don't
know--
I got
lonely,
theater.
another
thing
couldn't
find
to the
that
that
in
theater.
theater?]
The German
made
New York
city.
another
I went
down to
--down
in
there
operas.
Can you
the
the
I went
a proper
name,
[German theater]
that
I didn't
but
theater.
that
[or
J:
friends,
a theater.
J:
M:
of
name
some
of
best
through
the
yeah,
I seen
that
the
plays
years?
that
you
saw
I know you saw
The Captive.
M:
there
was
other
Oh,
pl·ays
that--I
can't
23
so many times.
remember
them--but,
And then
do
Page
Hampton
Mabel
you remember,
it.
I went
that
thick.
left
· I've
it
you gave
back
about
J:
I don't
M:
Yeah,
your
always
you had
mother
Oh, the
M:
No,
I just
liked
alright,
but
J:
when you wore
a suit
the
night.
I don't
but
in
It's
that
about
long.
1, begin
I didn't
Is
that
to me, and
it
show--
it
an encyclopedia?
feel
for
2).
I can't
like
them.
answer.
a man,
mind the
So when you dressed
Time when
there.
Side
Never
care
every
you
book.
a question
women.
know whether
you gave
'cause
but
I just
I couldn't.
They were
men.
See.
however
you dressed,
and
you wanted--
M:
I was always
J:
But you knew you were
M:
Oh, yes.
with
everything
no encyclopedia.
girl,
I didn't
what
last
encyclopedia?
Now there's
them.
has
and about
it.
book
wasn't
it
(End Side
like
wide
in that
was a young
didn't
book
or what,
that
J:
M:
that
that
on earth--is
Hayes
and it
remember.
cherished
everything
Helen
and found
It's
with
me a book,
c24
low-heeled
dressin'
in a suit.
a woman--
I knew I was. a woman.
shoes--and,
in those
24
I dressed
days,
people--if
in
Mabel
they
you
seen
were
you
too
much with
low-heeled
J:
They
M:
And they
wearin'
wear
low-heeled
were
'em.
''Yes,"
on,
they
think
right.
were
'cause
shoes
I says,
right.
some
all
the
But that
people
didn't
would
ask
me
stop
me,
"You
I had
a lie
time?"
my
feets'
that
you
"Because
bad.··
them.
J:
All
and
Lillian,
joked
you
about
those
M:
the
years
called
eacl~
other
When I first
she
was
little
after
she
made
Little
Bear,
I was
the
Big
All
of
Mrs.
when,
the
we hit
little
Bear.
six
goin'
the
cards
with
"pop",
and
you
Bronx,
and
was
and
me mad,
Bear.
as
"Duchess".
I'd
call
And all
The Little
everything
cute,
would
I
you
her
our
The
friends
And Big
say
Mr.
Bear.
and
(Laughs).
( Pause
three
because
she
And then,
us
Duchess
her,
know.
knew
living
"mom" and
met
her
and
were
things--?
called
to
shoes
c25
queer.
from
for
Page
Hampton
on tape)
J:
You hit
M:
We hit
the
the
on forty-four.
thirty-nine.
.
Bronx?
Bronx.
This
We hit
And there
the
I met
25
was
nineteen
Bronx.
two
girls
forty-
And we moved
upstairs--
Mabel
Hampton
Frances
had
and
to
Billie--and
none..
And they
Page
Billie
had
Frances
was the
parties
had
Big
all
three
Cl1eese.
children,
And they
Billie
the
SlJ.e was
up there.
c26
still
man,
see?
would
go
parties.
And then
'round
the
that's
still
the
corner
you
moved
in,
I said
to
on 2ants
there,
M:
Oh,
that
out
moved
was
or it
no,
There's
just
no,
I didn't
a few of them
down
I looked
I says,
"A hundred
So,
says,
"You go to parties
''Yeah.
"
she
"Where'd
course,
drink]
to
we got
together
you're
we had
and
from
she
one
bound
What
year
you
live
and eleventh
all
Lillian,
J:
at
know the·re
to be--?
them,
but
and
the
way
in--when
spoke
to
we
us,
Billie
Billie.
and
had
everything.
says,
of
out
way we moved
came
"Hmmmm."
you
did
know
So they
one,
lives
She
quite
turned
Now, the
myself,
and
So,
[Florene].
someplace,
I remember--Frances
I says,
find
I met
from me now.
When you
lesbians
find
one
alive.
J:
were
next
to
to
'
was
is
the
find
this
to
at?"
Street."
much?"
do was
right
there.
other.
everybody
now we're
26
[say
a little
So,
But
that's
I mean,
else.
talking?
when
how
you
Mabel Hampton
M:
and we've
Oh, nineteen
been
Second
there
eleventh
And then
Bryce,
very
good-lookin'
you?
The
Is
M:
No.
light
not
I left
me to
Run for
J:
--
M:
No,
the
to
name--
about?
But she knew all
an office,
Mabel,
reasons
you
see?
because
didn't
about
you were a
do it?
told
a lesbian?
me not
in trouble.
say.
to.
These
No,
people
and you'll
hot-headed,
to
a
office?
Lillian
supposed
She was
talkin'
run for
you were
'cause
you're
And then,
we're
do that,
one of the
M:
it
woman's
Bryce.
She was married.
Did you not
you up 'cause
my thing-
woman.
she a lesbian
"You' 11 get
says,
I got
warden.
the
and
name)
Was that
lesbian?
was in a hundred
Bryce--that's
little
J:
J:
Street
Miss
And we wanted
see.
World War--I
(inaudible)
Miss
me.
World War [effect]
the
I was an air-raid
(a
you're
since.
The Second
Street.
a-ma-jigs.
· she
that--
World War.
M:
it,
and four--like
forty-three
ever
How did
J:
c27
Page
So leave
it
"Because,"
will
beat
say things
alone."
Okay with
alone.
you see,
Lenox Avenue.
we moved from hundred
I met some fine
27
girls
and eleventh
up there
on
Mabel
Hampton
number
nine
A Lenox
second
Street.
What kinds
J:
kind
of
work
into
they
did
M:
went
Avenue--that's
of jobs
I was doing
awhile,
for
And these
J:
The friends
other
Oh, they
chamber
others'
was
was all
around,
these
and
twenty-
women have?
What
then:
day's
work,
then
I
then--
and
women, what were their
jobs?
you were meeting.
that
M:
did
c28
do?
The jobs
a factory
a hundred
Page
had different
maid,
and
one
jobs"
was
in
cook,
the
and the
hospital
and
it
you know?
J:
Did anyone
drive
M:
No, I remember
a taxi
or do anything
like
that?
drive
a cab
didn't
because
keep
tabs
J:
describing
your
M:
helped
think
Frances
she
the
that
taxi
I met one woman who would
was hers.
I met
her,
but,
on her.
When you said
neighbors,
''Billie"--when
Billie
They had been
to
raise
those
and
together
Frances--?
years
children.
J:
When you said
Billie
was
a man,
or was
she
M:
I don't
know.
you were
'cause
had
Billie
And--
was the
man, did Billie
just~-?
I didn't
28
ask.
She looked
that
Mabel
Hampton
And,
way.
Page
of course,
she
that
looked
c29
and. she act
way,
that
way.
M; Well,
the
beat
J:
She
M:
Yes,
hell
would,
-she get
a couple
house
from
up
was
loving,
the
wasn't
children
you
know,
'cause
look
at
to
in her.
a private
house.
children?
the
but
her,
Frances--she
was fresh.
Frances
somebody
of drinks
else,
Frances
see,
live
She bought
when
up the
a private
there.
Now,
M: Yes,
you
mean?
(Laughs).
now.
get
one of th.ese
things,
I'll
her
not
on the
Grand
long
ago
(Pause
you
she,
adored
of Frances
me in
J:
that
she act?
• • •
out
Frances
street
How did
How do you mean?
J:
I started
send
them
to
s--
to Frances.
If
I
I met
Concourse.
on tape).
M:
She bought
one
J:
Mabel,
there
a lot
were
aware
A lot
of
was
of?
for
me.
of
physical
people
beating
violence
each
other
..
up?
M:
heard
go into
of
Well,
it--could
a club
I didn't
hear
and
get
about
half
go around
them,
half
you
drunk
29
people.
those
know,
and
you
I
a fight.
look
They
at
Mabel
Hampton
Page
somebody--bip!--they
then
that's
how the
men would
say,
that.
So,
didn't
go to
to
theater,
the
singin'
I didn't
the
left
and
men found
out
what
they
lessons
come that
place
so
I meat
old
around
with
with
those
have
and
all
like
I
and
why I was
lessons,
to
And the
people,
That's
up dancin'
I didn't
were.
bulldyker,"
them.
I took
But,
and
be bothered
runnin'
I took
with
up
them.
(inaudible).
J:
you
you
pal
and
right.
knockin'
"Here
c30
Would
you
be
ashamed
if
then
anybody
called
a bulldagger?
M:
started
rest
out.
'cause
I knew
that
was the
first
name that
See?
J:
Were
M:
And anytime
assured,
when
it--not
about
about
call
No,
you
ever
ashamed?
somebody
they
call
you,
you
about
called
that,
you
they
that--or
else
something,
know
something
they
wouldn't
you.
J:
Were
you
ever
M:
No, I never
ashamed
of being
was ashamed
and
a lesbian,
Mabel?
people
who was
We had
lovely
J:
ashamed.
The all
mingled
times.
We'll
stop
now.
30
never
in
with
got
each
around
other.
l6 i
Mabel
Hampton
(End
Page
of
tape).
31
c31
l•
•
I
ies, anc
che au·
the los
Wh
her be
in OUI
confro
lives,
suspec
wome
that i·
I Lift My Eyes to the Hill:
The Life of Mabel Hampton as Told
by a White Woman
hund1
Africa
withs·
In
break
black
each
book
for.
0
out 1
Joan Nestle
'
l
I hope that many of you had the privilege of meeting Mabel Hampton yourself. On Thursday nights, as many of you know, Ms. Hampton held
court at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, opening the mail and finding out
everyone's story. A devout collector of books on African American history and
lesbian culture, Ms. Hampton in 1976 had donated her lesbian paperback collection to the archives. Surrounded by these books and many others, she shared in
welcoming the visitors, some who had come just to meet her.
Another more public place you could always count on finding Ms. Hampton
in her later years was New York's Gay Pride March. From the early 1980s on,
Ms. Hampton could be seen strutting down Fifth Avenue, our avenue for the
day, marching under the Lesbian Herstory Archives banner, wearing her jauntily tilted black beret, her dark glasses, and a bright red T-shirt proclaiming her
membership in SAGE (Senior Action in a Gay Environment). Later in the
decade, when she could no longer walk the whole way, Ms. Hampton would be
the center of a mob of younger lesbian women all fighting for the right to push
her wheelchair down the avenue. Mabel Hampton, domestic worker, hospital
matron, entertainer, had walked down many roads in her life-not always to
cheering fans. Her persistent journey to full selfhood in a racist and capitalistic
America is a story we have not yet learned to tell in our lesbian and gay history
•
•
work.
Over the past ten years, I have been dazzled at our heady discussions of
deconstructionism, our increasingly sophisticated academic conferences on gender representation, the publication of sweeping communal and historical stud-
T (")(4
(Cle,s
~(l
Vl
~ ~ .f-11
V rt i ; ,I\
fre!;SJl]i';~
apar
for r
T
fina
rem
I
1
I
•
bac1
rem
togt
live
I
bou
me.
Reg
kill
do
1
and
•
m1
H2
WC
rn·
sh
I Lift My Eyes to the Hill: The Life of Mabel Hampton / 259
ies, and our brave biographies of revered figures in American history in which
the authors speak clearly about their subjects' sexual identity. But my grief at
the loss of Mabel Hampton turned my attention elsewhere.
When I was offered this honor, the Kessler Lecture, I knew I had to speak of
her because her life in this country was the story we are in danger of forgetting
in our rush of language and queer theory. I also knew that I would have to
confront a racist history in my own relationship to Ms. Hampton. Our two
lives, Ms. Hampton's and mine, first intersected at a sadly traditional and
suspect crossroads in the history of the relationships between black and white
women in this country. These relationships are set in the mentality of a country
that in the words of Professor Linda Meyers '' could continue for over three
hundred years to kidnap an estimated 50 million youths and young adults from
Africa, transport them across the Atlantic with about half dying unable to
withstand the inhumanity of the passage." (Bell, 11).
In some war111month of 1952, my small white Jewish mother took her
breakfasts in a Bayside, Queens, luncheonette. Sitting next to her was a small
black Christian woman. For several weeks they breakfasted together before they
each went off to work, my mother to the office where she worked as a
bookkeeper, Ms. Hampton to the homes she cleaned and the children she cared
for.
One morning, as Ms. Hampton told me the story, she followed my mother
out to her bus and as Regina sat down in her seat, she threw the keys to our
apartment out the bus window to Ms. Hampton, asking her to consider working
for her.
This working relationship did not last long, because of my mother's own
financial instability. I remember Ms. Hampton caring for me when I was ill. I
remember her tan raincoat with a lesbian paperback in its pocket, its jacket bent
back so no one could see the two women in the shadows on its cover. I
remember, when I was twelve years old, asking my mother as we did a laundry
together one weekend whose men's underwear we were washing, since no man
lived in our apa1t111ent."They are Mabel's,'' she said.
In future years, Regina, Mabel, and her wife, Lillian, became closer friends,
bound together by a struggle to survive and by my mother's lesbian daughterme. Ms. Hampton told me during one of our afternoons together that when
Regina suspected I was a lesbian she called her late that night and threatened to
kill herself if I turned out that way. "I told he~ she might as well go ahead and
do it because it wasn't her business what her daughter did and besides, I'm one
and it suits me fine."
Because Ms. Hampton and I later funned a relationship based on our commitment to a lesbian community, I had a chance much later in life, when Ms.
Hampton herself needed care, to reverse the image this society thrives on, black
women caring for white people. The incredulous responses we both received in
my Upper West Side apartment building, when I was Ms. Hampton's caretake~
showed how deeply the traditional racial script still resonates.
•
260 I Joan
· estle
To honor her, to touch .her again, to be honest in the face of race, O rei,u
,c._
e
1 ess of physical death, t~ ~hare the story of her O\Yn narrati·, e ~
t_h e bl~nkn
liberation-for
all these reasons-it
1s she I must \vrite about.
Ms. Hampton pointed t'he way her story should be told. Her legaev·0
~ocuments so carefully assembled for Deborah Edel, who had met Ms. HamPton
in the early seventies and who had all of Ms. Hampton's trust ' tell 1·0 n,o
uncertain ter111sthat her life revolved around t\vo major themes-her
material
struggle to survive and her cultural struggle for beauty. ·sread and roses, , he
worker's old anthem-this
is what the nagging voice wanted me to remember
the texture of the individual life of a working woman.
After her death on October 26, 1989, \vhen Deborah and I were gatherin
her papers, we found a box carefully marked, "In case I pass away see that Joan
and Deb get this at once, Mabel." On top of th pile of birth certificates and
cemetery plot contracts was a piece of lined paper with the following typed
•
entnes:
I
thl
un
I
1915-1919: 8B Public School 32, Jersey City
1919-1923: Housework, Dr. Kraus, Jersey City
1923-1927: Housework, Mrs. Parker, Jersey City
1927-1931: Housework, Mrs. Karim, Brooklyn
1932-1933: Housework, Dr. Garland, New York City
1934-1940: Daily housework, different homes
1941-1944: Matron, Hammarlund Manufacturing Co., NYC
1945-1953: Housework, Mrs. Jean Nate
1948-1955: Attendant, New York Hospital
1954-1955: General, daily work
Lived 1935: 271. West 122nd Street, NYC
Lived 1939-1945: West 111th Street, NYC
Lived 1945-current (1955) 663 East 169th Street, Bronx, NYC
Compiled in the mid-fifties when Ms. Hampton was applying for a position
at Jacobi Hospital, the list demanded attention-a
list so bare and yet so
eloquent of a life of work and home.
Since 1973, the start of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, I knew Ms. Hampton's story must be told, but I was not a trained historian or soci,ologist. I
attended every session I could o·n doing lesbian history work, and tog,ether \"le
tried to for111ulateth,e right questions that we thought would elicit the kind of
history we wanted: What did you call yourself in the twenties 1 How di,d you
and your friends dress in ·the forties? What bars did you go to? In the late
seventies, when I started doing oral history tapes with Ms. Hampton, l soon
learned how limited our methods were. Here is a typical early exchange:
].: Do you remember anything about sports? Did you know women who
liked to play softball? Were ther e any teams?
M.: o, all the women, they di,dn't care 'too much about them-softballs,
1
Ol
ch
't
Ol
l
C
r
1
I
I
'
I
I
I Lift My Eyes to the Hill: The Life of Mabel Hampton /
2 61
.
I
I •
''
they liked the soft women. Didn't care about any old softball. Cut it
out!
•
1 •
•
l
I
►
'
'I
J
•
'. t
t
I
I
'I
I soon realized that Ms. Hampton had her own narrative style tightly
connected to how she had made sense of her life, but it wasn't until I had gone
through every piece of paper she had bequeathed us that I had a deeper
understanding of what her lesbian life had meant.
Lesbian and gay scholars argue over whether we can call a woman a lesbian
who lived in a time when that word was not used. We have been very careful
about analyzing how our social sexual representation was created by medical
terminology and cultural terrors. But here was a different story. Ms. Hampton's
lesbian history is embedded in the history of race and class in this country; she
makes us extend our historical perspective until she is at its center. The focus
then is not lesbian history, but lesbians in history.
Preparing this essay gave me a new understanding of the saying Ms. Hampton loved to repeat. When she was asked, ''Ms. Hampton, when did you come
out?'' she always replied, "What do you mean? I was never in!'' The audience
always cheered this assertion of lesbian identity, but now I think Ms. Hampton
was speaking of something more inclusive.
Driven to fend for herself as an orphan, as a black working woman, as a
lesbian, Ms. Hampton always struggled to fully occupy her life, refusing to be
cut off from the communal, national, and world events around her. She was
never in, in any aspect of her life, if ''in'' means withholding the fullest
response possible from what life is demanding of you at the moment.
Ms. Hampton found and created communities along her way for comfort and
support, communities that engendered her fierce loyalty. Her street in the
Bronx, 169th Street, was her street, and she walked it as ''Miss Mabel," known
to all and knowing all, whether it was the woman representing her congressional district or the numbers runner down the block. How she occupied this
street, this moment in urban twentieth-century American history, is very
similar to how she occupied her life-self-contained
but always visible, carrying her own sense of how life should be lived but generous to those who
were struggling to make a decent life out of indecent conditions.
I cannot give you the whole of Ms. Hampton's journey, but I would like to
take you through Ms. Hampton's decades up to the 1950s by blending the
documents she left, such as letters, newspaper clippings, and programs, with
excerpts from her oral history and my interpretations and readings of other
sources.
These personal daily documents represent the heart of the Lesbian Herstory
Archives; they are the fragile records of a tough woman who never took her
eyes off the hilltop, never let racism destroy her love for her own culture, never
let the tyranny of class keep her from finding the beauty she needed to live,
never accepted her traditional woman's destiny, and never let hatred and fear of
lesbians keep her from her gay community.
l
I
t
•
1
I
f
l
'
It
i
•l
•••
'
•
•
J
I
.r.
t
l
•
I
I
I
•
t•.
•
I
•
i
'
t
'
I
I
I
••
•
f
I
•
'
•
''
262
/
Joan Nest le
None of it was easy. In each decade, right from the beginning M
had to run for her life.
' s. Hampton
We need to start the story in April 1963, when Ms. Hampton was d
to document her own beginnings so she would be considered for e ~sperate
0
by the city:
mp YTnent
To the county clerk in the Hall of Records, Winston-Salem, North
.
caro1Ina•
•
Gentlemen: I would appreciate very much your helping me to secure my b· h
~ape~s~
or_an~ re~ordyou may have on file, as to_my bi_rt~and _Proofof age as ~his
1nfo1111anon
1s vital for the purpose of my secunng a evil serY1ceposition in N
York.Listed below are the infonnation I have to help you locate any records ~:
y
may have.
.
I was born approximately May 2, 1902 in Winston-Salem. My mother's na
was Lulu Hampton or Simmons. I attended TeachPr'sCollege which is its narne
now at the age of six. My grandmother's name was Simmons. I lived there wi~
her after the death of my mother when I was two months old. It is very important
to me as it means a livelihood for me to secure any info1111ation.
by Jae
tl
Llrtd
\esbia.J
""ho'
chat h
create
lent a
in cht
Ev
press:
'' in t
gainf
Qurh
•
per10
the
t
whit•
were
On an affidavit of birth dated May 26, 1943, we find the additional inforrna..
tion: Ms. Hampton was of the Negro race, her father's full name was Joseph
Hampton (a fact she did not discover until she was almost twenty), and he had
been born in Reidsville, North Carolina. Her mother's birthplace was listed as
Lynchburg, Virgina.
This appeal for a record of her beginnings points us to where Ms. Hampton's
history began: not in the streets of Greenwich Village, where she sang for
pennies thrown from windows in 1910 when she ~as eight years old, or even
in Winston-Salem, where she lived on her grandmother's small far111from her
birth until 1909, but further into a past of a people, further into the shame of a
country.
Ms. Hampton's deepest history lies in the middle passage of the Triangular
Slave Trade and before that in the complex and full world of sixteenth-century
Africa. When Europe turned its ambitious face to the curving coastline of the
ancient continent and created an economic system based on the servitude of
Africans, Ms. Hampton's story began. The middle passage, the horrendous
crossing of the waters from Africa to this side of the world, literally and
figuratively became the time of generational loss. Millions died in those waters,
carrying their histories with them. This tragic "riddle in the waters," as the
Afro-Cuban poet Nicholas Guillen calls it, was continued on the land of the
Southern plantation system. Frederick Douglass writes, ''I have no accurate
knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it."
These words were written in 1845 and Ms. Hampton was born in 1902, but
now as I reflect on Ms. Hampton's dedication to preserving her own documents,
I read them as a moment in the history of an African American lesbian.
The two themes of work and communal survival that run so strongly
throughout Ms. Hampton's life are prefigured by the history of black working
women in the sharecropping system, a history told in great and moving detail
-
I'
C
t~
n
s
a
f
C
l
l
•
t
r
l
I
n
I Lift My Eyes to the Hill: The Life of Mabel Hampton / 263
by Jacqueline Jones in Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work,
and the Family from Slavery to the Present. Though Jones never mentions
lesbian women, Ms. Hampton and her wife of forty-five years, Lillian Foster,
who was born in Norfolk, Virginia, carried on in their lesbian lives traditions
that had their roots in the post-slavery support systems Southern black women
created at the turn of the century. The comradeship of these all-women benevolent and mutual aid societies was rediscovered by Ms. Hampton and Ms. Foster
in their New York chapters of the Eastern Star.
Even the work of both women, domestic service for Ms. Hampton and
pressing for Ms. Foster, had its roots in this earlier period. Jones tells us that
"in the largest southern cities from 50% to 70% of all black women were
gainfully employed at least part of the year around the turn of the century." In
Durham, North Carolina, closer to Ms. Hampton's birthplace, "during the
period of 1880-1910 fully one quarter of all black women 65 years and older in
the urban south were gainfully employed, a figure five times higher than for
white women'' (11.3). Very likely, both Ms. Hampton's grandmother and mother
were part of this work force.
•'
•
I
I
I'm Mabel Hampton. I was born on May 2, 1902, in Winston-Salem, North
Carolina, and I left there when I was eight years old. Grandma said I was so small
that [my] head was as big as a silver dollar. She said that she did all she could to
make me grow. One day she was making the bed and gettin' things together after
she fed the chickens. She never let me lay in the bed; I lay in the rocking chair,
and this day she put the clothes in the chair; when she carried 'em outside, she
forgot I was in 'em and shook the clothes out and shook me out in the garden out
on the ground. And Grandma was so upset that she hurt me.
My grandmother took care of me. My mother died two months after I was
born. She was poisoned, which left me with just my grandma, mother's younger
sister and myself. We had a house and lived on a street-we
had chickens, had
hogs, garden vegetables, grapes and things. We had a back yard, I can see it right
now, that back yard. It had red roses, white roses, roses that went upside the
house. We never had to go to the store for anything. On Saturdays we go out
hunting blackberries, strawberries and peaches. My girlfriends lived on each side
of the street, Anna Lou Thomas, Hattie Harris, Lucille Crump. Oh-OOh-O Anna
, Lou Thomas, she was good lookin', she was a good lookin' girl.
One day Grandma says, "Mabel I'm goin' to take you away." She left Sister
there and we went to Lynchburg, Virginia, because Grandma's mother had died. I
remember when I got there, the man picked me up off the floor and I looked
down on this woman who had drifts of gray hair. She was kind of a brownskinned woman and she was good lookin'. Beautiful gray hair she had. I looked at
her and then he put me down on a stool and I set there. They sang and prayed
and carried on. I went to sleep.
.
However pleasant Ms. Hampton's memories were of North Carolina, she had
no intention of returning there later in her life.
Lillian tried her best to get me to go to Winston-Salem. I says, "No, I don't want
to." She says, "You wouldn't even go to my home?" I says, "No, because with 1:1~
nasty temper they'd lynch me in five minutes. Because they would see me walkin
\
'
•
.
264 / Joan Nestle
down the street holdin' ~ands with some woman, they want to put me in Jail
Now I can hold hands W1th some woman all over New York, all over the Bron~
and everywhere else and no one says nothing to me."
•
J
t
l
When she was seven years old, in 1909, Ms. Hampton was forced to migrate
to New York. In her own telling, there is a momentous sense that she has lost
whatever safety she had in that garden of roses.
f
l
t
'
One morning I was in the bedroom getting ready for school [a deep sigh]. I heard
Grandma go out in the yard and come back and then I heard a big bump on the
floor. So I ran to the door and I looked and Grandma was laying stretched out on
the floor. I hollered and hollered and they all came running and picked her up and
put her on the bed. She had had a stroke. Grandma lived one week after she had
that stroke. My mamma's younger aunt, I'll nevPr furget it, was combing my hair
and I looked over at Grandma layin' in bed. It was in the morning. The sun was
up and everything. She looked at me and I looked at her. And when my aunt got
finished combing my hair, Grandma had gone away.
They called my mother's sister in New York and she came so fast I think she
was there the next day. I remember the day we left Winston-Salem. It was in the
summertime. We went by train and I had a sandwich of liver between two pieces
of bread. And I knew and felt then that things was going to be different. After
eating that sandwich I cried all the way to New York. My aunt tried to pacify me
but it didn't do no good, seems as if my heart was broken.
Taken to a small apartment
at 52 West 8th Street, Ms. Hampton met her
uncle, a minister, who raped her within the year.
In telling her story, Ms. Hampton has given two reasons for her running
away at age eight from this home: one involves a fight with a white girl at
school and the other, a terrible beating by her uncle after she had misspelled a
word. Whatever the exact reason, it was clear that Ms. Hampton had already
decided she needed another air to breathe .
•
My aunt went out one day and he raped me. I said to myself, "I've got to leave
here." He wouldn't let me sleep in the bed. They had a place where they put coal
at, and he put a blanket down and made me lay there. So this day, I got tired of
that. I went out with nothing on but a dress, a jumper dress, and I walked and
walked.
Here begins an amazing tale of an eight-year-old girl's odyssey to find a
place and a way to live. After walking the streets for hours, the young Ms.
Hampton came to "a thing in the ground, in the sidewalk, people was going
down there." A woman came by and thought she recognized the lost child.
"Aren't you Miss Brown's little girl?" Before Ms. Hampton could answer, the
woman placed a nickel in her hand and told her to go back home to Harlem. As
Ms. Hampton says, "that nickel was a turning point in my life." Instead of
going uptown, Ms. Hampton boarded a Jersey bound train and rode to the last
stop. She came above ground and walked until she found a playground. "I seen
all these children playin', white and black, all of them havin' a good time." She
1
I Lift My Eyes to the Hill: The Life of Mabel Hampton / 265
joined t~e child~en and played until it began to get dark. Two of the children
ook an interest 1n her, and she made up a story: "My aunt told me to stay here
t ntil she comes." The girl called to her brother, "You go get the cops, I'll try to
~nd her aunt." She brought a woman back with her, a Miss Bessie White, who
began to ask the child questions. Ms. Hampton: "I looked down the street and
from the distance I see the boy comin' with the cop, so I decided to go with the
woman. Bessie said, come, I'll take you home."
Ms.Hampton
remained with the White family until she was seventeen. One
rnemberof the family, Ellen, particularly stayed in her memory:
trr
l
1
t
'
I
•
{
'
'
t
•'
J
I seen a young woman sitting left of where I come in at. l say to myself, this is a
1
good-lookingwoman.I was alwaysadmiringsomewoman.Oh, and she was.She
had beautiful hair and she looked just like an angel. She got up out of the chair,
she was kind of tall, and she says, "You come with me." So she tuok me upstairs,
bathed me, and said, "We'll find you some clothes." She always talked very softly.
And she says, "You'll sleep with me.'' I was glad of that.
So I went and stayed with them. The other sister went on about lookin' for my
aunt. I knew she never find her. See I knew everything about me, but I kept quiet.
I kept quiet for twenty years.
Mabel Hampton, from the very beginning of her narrative, speaks with the
determination of a woman who must take care of herself. She will decide what
silences to keep and what stories to tell, creating for herself a power over life's
circumstances that her material resources seldom gave her.
For Mabel Hampton, the 1920s was a decade of both freedom and literal
imprisonment. In 1919, at seventeen, she was doing housework for a Dr. Kraus
of Jersey City. Her beloved Ellen, the first adult woman to hold Ms. Hampton
in her arms, had died in childbirth. With Ellen gone, Ms. Hampton's ties to the
White family loosened; she found work dancing in an all-women's company
that perfonned in Coney Island and had her first requited lesbian love affair.
She discovered the club life of New York. This is the decade that Ms. Hampton
paid a visit to the salon of XLelia Walker, the flapper daughter of Madame
Walker, and was amazed at the multiple sexual couplings she observed. She
perfonned in the Lafayette Theater and danced at the Garden of Joy, both in
Harlem. In this decade, she made the acquaintance of Ethel Waters, Gladys
Bentley, and Alberta Hunter. She was one of the 150,000 mourners who sang
"My Buddy" as the casket bearing Florence Mills, beloved singer, slowly moved
through the Harlem streets in 1927. This was Ms. Hampton's experience of the
period that lives as the Harlem Renaissance in history books.
But before all this exploration took place, Ms. Hampt~n was arrested for
prostitution by two white policemen and sentenced to three years in Bedford
Hills Reformatory for Women by a Judge Norris. As Ms. Hampton recounted
•
lt,
While we're standing there talking, the door opens.Now I know I had shut it.
And two white men walk in-great big white men. "We're raiding the house,"
one of them says. "For what?" "Prostitution,"he says. I hadn't been with a man
•
266 I Joan Nest le
~o time. I couldn't figure it out. I didn't have time to get clothes or nothin Th (
Judge she sat ~p there and says, "Well, only thing I can say is BedforJ.;, Ne
lawyer, no nothing. She railroaded me.
J-f
0
When Ms. Hampton talked about her prison experience, she dwelled on the
kindnesses she found there:
It was summertime and we went back out there and sat down. She (anothe
prisoner] says, "I like you." "I like you too." She said no more until time to go t~
bed. We went to bed and she took me in her bed and held me in her arms and I
went to sleep. She put her arms around me like Ellen used to do, you know and I
went to sleep.
•
'
•
But where Ms. Hampton found friendship, the board of managers of the
prison found scandal and disgrace. Opened 1n 1902 in a progressive era of prison
reforrtl, Bedford Hills under its first woman administrator, Katherine Davis,
accepted the special friendships of its women inmates. But in 1920, word that
interracial lesbian sex was occurring throughout the prison caused Davis to lose
her job. The new administrators of the prison demanded segregated facilities,
the only way, according to one of the men, interracial sex could be prevented.
I want to pause here to comment on both the generosity of Mabel Hampton
in sharing her prison experience with me and the impact her words had while I
read about this prison in Estelle Freedman's book Their Sister's Keepers.
By the time I was doing the oral history with Ms. Hampton she had left this
experience far behind. She told me that she seldom told anyone about it; she
would just say she had gone away. But toward the end of her life, Ms. Hampton
wanted the whole story to be told. She realized that her desire to be open about
her life was not popular with her peers. ''So many of my friends got religion
now,'' she would say. ''You can't get anything out of them." But because of Ms.
Hampton's courage to document the difficult parts of her life, my reading of
background history was transforxned.
When I read the following sentence in Freedman's book, ''By 1919, we are
told, about 75% of the prisoners were prostitutes, 70% had venereal disease, a
majority were of low mental ability and ten percent were psychopaths," I was
forced to see the women encoded in this list. Mabel Hampton was among these
counted women. We have a special insight, a special charge, in doing gay and
lesbian history work. We, of all peoples, have had our humanity hidden in such
lists of undesirables all our public days. I started this work on Mabel Hampton
because her life brought to the study of history the dignity of the human face
behind the sweeping summaries.
·
After thirteen months, Ms. Hampton was released from prison with the
condition that she stay away from New York City and its bad influences. But
Ms. Hampton could not contain herself. She spoke of a white woman with a
gray car whom she had met in Bedford coming to Jersey City to take her to
parties in New York. When a neighbor infonned on her, she was forced to
•
•
L
.t
t
•
f
..
f·
l
'•
••
l
•
•
I Lift My Eyes to the Hill: The Life of Mabel Hampton / 267
return and complete her sentence at Bedford. Ms. Hampton later described
e of the life that the state had declared criminal.
I ':f-1
5001
In 1923, I am about twenty years old. I had rooms at 120 West 122nd Street. A
girl friend of mine was living next door, and they got me three rooms there on
the ground floor-a bedroom, living room, and big kitchen. I stayed there until I
met Lillian in 1932. I went away with the people I worked for but I always kept
my rooms to come back to. Then I went into the show.
Next door these girls were all lesbians; they had four rooms in the basement
and they gave parties all the time. Sometimes we would have "pay parties." We'd
buy all the food-chicken
and potato salads. I'd chip in with them because I
would bring my girlfriends. We also went to "rent parties," where you go in and
pay a couple of dollars. You buy your drinks and meet other women and dance
and have fun. But with our house we just had close friends. Sometimes there
would be twelve or fourteen women there. We'd have pig feet, cl1ittlins. In the
winter time, it was black-eyed peas and all that stuff. Most of the women wore
suits. Very seldom did any of them have slacks or anything like that because they
had to come through the streets. Of course, if they were in a car, they wore the
slacks. Most of them had short hair. And most of them was good-lookin' women
too. The bulldykers would come and bring their women with them. And you
wasn't supposed to jive with them, you know. They danced up a breeze. They did
the Charleston; they did a little bit of everything. They were all colored women.
Sometimes we ran into someone who had a white woman with them. But me, I'd
venture out with any of them. I just had a ball. I had a couple of white girl friends
down in the village. We got along fine. At that time I was acting in the Cherry
Lane Theater. I didn't have to go to the bars because I would go to women's
houses. Like Jackie (Moms) Mahley would have a big party and all the girls from
the show would go. She had all the women there.
•
i
I
•
•
J
,I
•
...
•
t
•
\
.
In addition to private parties, Ms. Hampton and her friends were up on the
latest public lesbian events. Sometime in February 1927, Ms. Hampton attended
the new play that was scandalizing Broadway, The Captive. Whatever her
material struggle was in any given decade, Ms. Hampton sought out the cultural
images she needed. Here, is how she remembered that night at the theater:
..l
•
•
,'
ij,
J
-·
l
•
(
i
'
lt
.
;
Well, I heard about it, and a girlfriend of mine had taken me to see this play, The
Captive. And I fell in love-not only with The Captive, but the lady who was the
head actress in it. Her name was Helen Mencken. So I decided I would go backI had heard so much talk about it. I went back to see it by myself. I sat on the
edge of my seat! I looked at the first part of it, and I will always think that woman
was a lesbian. She played it too perfect! She had the thing down! She kissed too
perfect, she had everything down pat! So that's why I kept going back to see it
because it looked like to me it was part of my life. I was a young woman, but I
said, now this is what I would like to be, but of course, I would have to marry and
I didn't want to marry [the play focuses on the seduction of a married woman by
the offstage lesbian], so I would just go on and do whatever I thought was right
to do. So I talked to a couple of my friends in Jersey City. I carried them bad~
paid their way to see it, and they fell in love with it. There was plenty of wome_n
in that audience and plenty of men too! They applauded and applauded. This
same girl with the green car, she knew her-Helen
Mencken-and she carried
~
1
...
~
•
I
•
•
'
•
268 /
Joan Nestle
yo
me backstage and introduced me. Boy, I felt so proud! And she sa ,,
I
you like the show?" I said, "Because it seems a part of my life and
1Why do
what I hope to be." She says, "That's nice. Stick to it! You'll be all righ:\ arn and
J:•
it thi
firrnl
f
t
The twenties ended with Mabel Hampton living fully "in the life"
.
piece together another kind of living both from her day work and ;tying to
chorus line jobs. Later, when asked why she left show business sh rom her
"Because I like to eat."
' e replied,
The Depression that befell the country in 1929 did not play a large l .
M s. H ampton ,s memories,
. per haps because she was already earning ro ehtn
5
marginal income. We know that from 1925 until 1937 1 she did day work fuc
or t ha
e
family of Charles Haubrick. Ms. Hampton carefully saved all the letters fr
her employees testifying to her character:
orn
"Dec. 12, 1937. To Whom It May Concern: This is to certify that the bearer
Mabel Hampton has worked for me for the last 12 years doing housework off
and on and she does the same as yet. We have always found her honest and
industrious."
Reading these letters, embedded as they were in all the other documents of
Ms. Hampton's life, is always sobering. So much of her preserved papers testify
to an autonomous home and social life, but these letters sprinkled through each
decade remind us that Ms. Hampton's life was under surveillance by the white
families that controlled her economic survival.
.
In 1935 Ms. Hampton was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church at St.
Thomas the Apostle on West 118th Street, another step in her quest for
spiritual comfort. This journey included a lifelong devotion to the mysteries of
the Rosicrucians and a full collection of Marie Corelli, a Victorian novelist with
a moralistic bent. She ended the decade registering with the U.S. Depa1t111entof
Labor trying to find a job. She is told, "We will get in touch with you as soon
t
as there is a suitable opening."
The event that changed Ms. Hampton's life forever happened early on in the
decade, in 1932. While waiting for a bus, she met a woman even smaller than
herself-''dressed
like a duchess," as Ms. Hampton would later say-Lillian
•
Foster .
Ms. Foster remembered in 1976, two years before her death, that "Fortyfour years ago I met Mabel. We was a wonderful pair. I'll never regret it. But
she's a little tough. I met her in 1932, September 22. And we haven't been
separated since in our whole life. Death will separate us. Other than that I don't
want it to end."
Ms. Hampton, to the consternation of her _more discreet friends, dressed in
an obvious way much of her life. Her appearance, however, did not seem to
bother her wife. Ms. Foster went on to say, "A lady walked in once, Joe's wife,
and she .say, 'You is a pretty neat girl. You have a beautiful little home, but
where is your husband?' And just at that time, Mabel comes in the door with
her key and I said, 'There is my husband.' " The visitor added, "Now you know
t
t
Li
sout
•
faflll
put
(leaJ
0 eo--
1he
fost
ches
1
des 1
and
Del
Ha
a
r
!
I Lift My Eyes to the Hill: The Life of Mabel Hampton
/
if chat was your husband, you wouldn't have said itl" to which Ms. Foster
firmlyreplied, "But I said it!''
Lillian Foster, born in 1906 in Norfolk, Virginia, shared much of the same
southern background of Ms. Hampton, except that she came from a large
farnily. She was keenly aware that Ms. Hampton was "all alone," as she often
put it. Ms. Foster worked her whole life as a presser in white-owned dry
cleaning establishments, a job, like domestic service, that had its roots in the
neo-slavery working conditions of the urban South at the turn of the century.
These many years of labor in underventilated back rooms accelerated Ms.
Foster's rapid decline in her later years. But together with a group of friends,
these two women created a household lasting forty-six years.
This household with friends took many shapes. When crisis struck and a fire
destroyed their apart1nent in 1976 (part of the real estate "''ars that were gutting
and leveling the Bronx), Ms. Foster and Ms. Hampton came to live with me and
Deborah Edel until they could move back to their apartment house. Later Ms.
Hampton described our shared time as an adventure in lesbian families:
Down here it was just like two couples, Joan and Deborah and Mabel and Lillian;
we got along lovely, and we played, we sang, we ate, it was marvelous[ I will
never forget it. And Lillian, of course, Lillian was my wife. I had Joan laughing
because I called Lillian "Little Bear," but when I first met her in 1932, she was to
me, she was a duchess-the
grand duchess. Later in life I got angry with her one
day and I called her the "little bear," and she called me "the big bear," and of
course that hung on to me all through life. And now we are known to all our
friends as the "big bear" and the "little bear."
'
•
,
•
•
t
\.
lt
Ms. Hampton saved hundreds of cards signed "little bear," but when she
appealed to government officials or agencies for help, as she often did as their
housing conditions deteriorated, she said Ms. Foster was her sister.
In a letter to Mayor Lindsay in 1969, she wrote,
Dear Mr Mayor,
I don't know if I am on the right road or not, but I am taking a chance;
now what I want to know is can you tell me how I can get an apart11tent, I
I
l
have been everywhere and no success. I am living at the above address
[639 E. 169th St., Bronx] for 26 years but for about the past 10 years the
building has gone down terribly. For two years we have no heat all winter,
also no hot water. We called the housing authority but it seems it don't
help; everywhere I go the rent is so high that poor people can't pay it and
I would like to find a place before the winter comes in-with rent that I can
afford to pay. It is two of us (women) past 65. I still work but my older
sister is on retirement so we do need two bedrooms. If you can do
something to help us it will be greatly appreciated. Thanking you in
advance,
I remain, Miss Mabel Hampton.
•
l
l
r
•
;
'.
\
t
•••
l
t
t
t'
t
I
I
270
I
Joan
Nestle
. l
Th. 1s etter
· f
/il--.
or me one of the most important documents w e have ·
Lesb1an Herstory Archives. Ms. Hampton's request for a safe and warmin the
for her and Ms. Foster now marks the starting point of all m h·15t0home
inquiry-how did you survive?
y
rical
l•
In a document of a different sort, the program for a social event 5
by Jacobi Hospital, where she was employed for the last twenty yea~onstred
0
working life, we discover that a Ms. Mabel Hampton and Ms. Lillian ;
her
are sitting at table 2 5. These two women negotiated the public worldam_p~on
1
term that allowed expressions of affection and demanded a recognition 0~ h .a
• •
t e1r
1nt1macy.
There is a seamless quality to Ms. Hampton's life that does not fit our us l
paradigm for doing lesbian history work. Her life does not seem to be organi:~
around w~at we have come to see as th~ usual rites o~ ~ay passage, like coming
out or going to the bars. Instead she gives us the vision of an integrated lif
where the major shaping events are the daily acts of work, friends, and soci~
organizations, where the major definers of these territories are class and rac~
an d where she expects all aspects of her life to be respected.
Another indication of how Ms. Hampton expected that her life would be
taken as it was is that in every letter preserved by Ms. Hampton there is a
greeting or a blessing for Ms. Foster in its closing, whether the correspondent
is a friend or for111eremployer. "I do hope to be able to visit you and Lillian
some evening for a real chat and a supper by a superb cook! Do take care of
yourself and my best to Lillian," Dolores, :1944."God bless and keep you and
Lillian well always, I wish I could see you both some times," Jennie, 1977.
The 1940s were turbulent years, marked by the international war abroad and
the national unrest at home. While black American soldiers were fighting the
arniies of racial supremacists in Europe, their families were fighting the racist
dictates of a Jim Crow society at home. Harlem, Detroit, and other American
cities would see streets become battlefields.
For African American working women like Ms. Hampton, the forties was the
decade of the slave markets, the daily gathering of black women on the street
corners of Brooklyn and the Bronx to sell their domestic services to white
women who drove by looking for cheap labor. In 1940 Ms. Hampton was part
of this labor force, as she had been for over twenty years, working year after
year without workmen's compensation, health benefits, or pension payments.
In September :1940she received a postcard canceling her employment with
one family: "Dear Mabel, please do not come on Thursday. I will see you again
on Friday at Mrs. Garfinkels. I have engaged a part time worker as I need more
frequent help as you know. Come over to s~e us."
Ms. Hampton did not let her working difficulties dampen her enthusiasm for
her cultural heroes, however, and on October 6, 1940, she and Ms. Foster were
in the audience at Carnegie Hall when Paul Robeson commanded the stage. The
announcement for this concert is the first document we have reflecting Ms.
Hampton's lifelong love of the opera and her dedication to African American
cultural figures and institutions.
1s
t
.
I
.
I
''
I
I Lift My Eyes to the Hill: The Life of Mabel Hampton /
271
In 41, perhaps in recognition of her perilous situation as a day worker, Ms.
19
f-{arnpton secured the job of matron with the Hammarlund Manufacturing
cornpanY on West 34th Street, assuring her entrance into the new social
security system begun just six years earlier by Franklin Roosevelt.
she still took irregular night and day domestic employment so she and Ms.
foster could, among other things, on May 28, 1946, purchase from the American Mending Machine Company one Singer Electric Sewing Machine with
console table for the price of $100.00. She leaves a $44.00 deposit and carefully
preserves all records of the transaction.
On February 20, 1942, we have the first evidence of Ms. Hampton's involvement in the country's war efforts: a ditto sheet of instructions from the American Women's Voluntary Services addressed to all air raid wardens. It reads,
During the Ge1111anattack on the countries of Europe, the telephone was often
used for sabotage thereby causing panic and loss of life by erroneous orders. We
in New Yorkare particularly vulnerable in this respect since our great apart111ent
houses have often hundreds even thousands under one roof. ... The apartr11ent
house telephone warden must keep lines clear in time of emergency. Type of
person required: this sort of work should be particularly suited for women whose
common sense and reliability could be depended upon.
In August Ms. Hampton worked hard for the Harlem branch of the New
York Defense Recreation Committee, trying to collect cigarettes and other
refreshments for the soldiers and sailors who frequented Harlem's USO. In
December 1942 she was appointed deputy sector commander in the air warden
service by Mayor La Guardia. This same year she also received her American
Theater Wing War Service membership card. Throughout 1943 she served as
her community's air raid warden and attended monthly meetings of the Twelfth
Division of the American Women's Voluntary Services Organizations on West
116th Street. During all this time, her country maintained a segregated anny
abroad and a segregated society at home.
In January and February 1944, she received her fourth and fifth war loan
citation. This support for causes she believed in, no matter how small her
income, continued throughout Ms. Hampton's life. In addition to her religious
causes, she sent monthly donations to SCLC and the Martin Luther King
Memorial Fund, and by the end of the seventies she was adding gay organizations to her list.
On March 29, 1944, Ms. Hampton attended the National Negro Opera
Company's perfonnance of La Traviata. This group believed in opera for the
masses and included in its program a congratulatory message from the Upper
West Side Communist Party. On its board sat Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary
McCloud Bethune, both part of another moment in lesbian history. In 1952 this
same company presented Ouanga, an opera based on the life of the first king of
Haiti, Dessaline, who, the program says, "successfully conquered Napoleon's
annies in 1802 and won the Black Republic's fight for freedom." Ms. Hampton
was in the audience .
•
.
I
I
•
I
I
!
•
t
•
'I
'
l.
J
i
•
•
I
l
272
I Joan Nestle
cf
Y
Continuing her dedication to finding the roses amidst the bread, on Novem.
ber 12, 1944, Ms. Hampt?n heard Marian And~rson sing at Carnegie Hall and
added the program of this event to her collection of newspaper articles abo
the career of this valiant woman.
ut
Ms. Hampton's never-ending
from home, and Ms. Foster was
their Bronx apartment on 169th
the war's end, and which would
death in 1978.
pursuit of work often caused long absences
often left waiting for her partner to return to
Street, into which they had moved in 19 , at
45
remain their shared home until Ms. Foster's
f
I
I
I
.
•
Dear Mabel:
Received your letter and was very glad to hear from you and to know
that you are well and happy. This leaves me feeling better than I have
since you left. Everything is ok at home. Only I miss you so much I will
be glad when the time is up. There is nobody like you to me. I am writing
this on my lunch hour. It is 11 pm. I am quitting tomorrow. I don't see
anyone as I haven't been feeling too well. Well the 1/2 hour is up. Nite nite
be good and will see you soon.
Little Bear
In 1948 Ms. Hampton fell ill and was unable to work. She applied for home
relief and was awarded a grant of $54.95 a month, which the agency stipulated
should be spent the following way: $27.00 for food; $21.00 for rent; $ .55 for
cooking fuel; $ .80 for electricity; $ 6.oo for clothing; and for personal incidentals she is allotted $1.00. But from these meager funds she managed to give
com£ort to friends.
Postcard, August 9, 1948:
Dear Miss Lillian and Mabel:
The flowers you sent were beautiful and I liked them very much. I
wear the heart you sent all the time. It was very nice to hear from you
both. I am feeling fine now. I hope you are both in the best of health.
Love Doris
In 1949 Ms. Hampton wrote to the home relief agency, telling the case
worker to stop all payments because she had the promise of a job.
The decade that began in war between nations and peoples ended in Ms.
Hampton's version of history with a carefully preserved article about the
international figure Josephine Baker. Cut out of the March 12, 1949, issue of
the Pittsburgh Courier are the following words:
•
.
Well friends, fellow Negroes and countrymen, you can stop all that guesswork
and sur11using about Josephine Baker. This writer knew Edith Spencer, Lottie Gee,
Florence Mills, knew them well. He has also known most of the other colored
women artists of the last thirty years. His word to you is that this Josephine
Baker eminently belongs. She is not a common music hall entertainer. She has
been over here for a long time, maybe 2 5 years. The little old colored gal from
!
•
•
•
..
•
•
I Lift My Eyes to the Hill: The Life of Mabel Hampton / 273
back home is a French lady now. That means something. It means for a colored
person that you have been accepted into a new and glamorous and free world
where color does not count. It means that in the joy of the new living you just
might forget that "old oaken bucket'' so full of bitter quaffs for you. It means that
once you found solid footing in the new land of freedom, you might tax your
mind to blot out all the sorry past, all the old associations, to become alien in
spirit as well as in fact. It pleases me folks to be able to report to you that none of
this has possessed Josephine. I tested her and she rang true. What she does is for
you and me. She said so out of her own mouth. Her eyes glistened as she
expostulated and described in vivid, charged phrases the aim and purpose of her
work. She was proud when I told her of Lena [Horne] and of Hilda [Simms]. "You
girls are blazing trails for the race," I commentated. "Indeed so," she quickly
retorted. After she had talked at length of what it means to be a Negro and of her
hope that whatever she did might reflect credit on Negroes, particularly the
Negroes of her land of birth, I chanced a leading question. "So you' re a race
woman," I queried. I was not sure she would understand. But ~ht:!did. "Of course
I am," she replied. Yes, all the world's a stage and Josephine comes out upon it for
you and for me.
In my own work, I have tried to focus on the complex interaction between
oppression and resistance, aware of the dangers of romanticizing losses while at
the same time aggrandizing little victories, but I am still awed by how a single
human spirit refuses the messages of self-hatred and out of bits and pieces
weaves a gar1nent grand enough for the soul's and body's passion. Ms. Hampton
prized her memories of Josephine Baker, Marian Anderson, and Paul Robeson,
creating for herself a nurturing family of defiant African American women and
men. Her lesbian self was part of what was fed by their soaring voices. When
the New York Times closed its obituary on Ms. Hampton with its words, "there
are no known survivors," it showed its ignorance of how ari oppressed people
makes legacies out of memory.
We are now entering the so-called confonning fifties, when white middleclass heterosexual women, we have been told, were running in droves to be
married and keep the perfect home. Reflecting another vision, Ms. Hampton
added newspaper clippings on the pioneer sex-change personality Christine
Jorgensen. From 1948 until her retirement in 1972, Ms. Hampton worked in
the housekeeping division of Jacobi Hospital, where she earned for herself the
nickname "Captain" from some of the women she worked with and who kept
in touch with Ms. Hampton until their deaths many years later. Here she met
Jorgensen and paid her nightly visits in her hospital room. From Ms. Hampton's
documents: a Daily News article of December 1, 1952, "Ex-GI Becomes Blond
Beauty," contains a letter written by Jorgensen explaining to her parents why
there is so much consternation about her case, concluding, "it is more a problem
of social taboos and the desire not to speak of the subject because it deals with
the great hush hush, namely sex."
Ms. Hampton began the decade earning $1,006.00 for a year's work and
ended it earning $1,232.00. Because of lack of money, Ms. Hampton was never
able to travel to all t e places in the world that fascinated her; but in this decade
fI
•I
'
i
f
274 / Joan Nestle
she added hundreds of pages of s~amps to her overflowing albuIJls, little squares
of color from Morocco and Zanzibar, from the Philippines and Mexico.
/
Throughout her remaining years, Ms. Hampton continued with her eyes
the hilltop and her feet on a very earthly pavement. She always had very lit~[~
money and always was generous. In the 1970s Ms. Hampton discovered senio
citizen centers and "had a ball," as she liked to say, on their subsidized trips t~
Atlantic City. She lost her partner of forty-five years, Lillian Foster, in 1978.
':fte~ almost drifti~g aw~y in mourning, she f~und new energy and a loving
family 1n New Yorks lesbian and gay community. She had friendly visitors
from SAGE and devoted friends like Ann Allen Shockley, who never failed to
visit when she was in town. She marched in Washington in the first national
lesbian and gay civil rights march. She appeared in films like Silent Pioneers
and Before Stonewall. In the early eighties she gave her power of attorney to
Deborah Edel, whom she trusted completely and with whom she had shared so
much. In 1987 she accompanied Deborah and her lover Teddi to California so
she could be honored at the West Coast Old Lesbians Conference.
She eventually had to give up her fourth-floor walk-up Bronx apartment
and move in with Lee Hudson and myself, who along with many others cared
for her as she lost physical strength. On October 26, 1989, after a second stroke,
Ms. Hampton finally let go of a life she loved so dearly.
I would like to end this essay where it began, with the memories many of
you have of this indomitable woman who gave this country her working life
and her support in time of national emergencies but who received so little social
protection.
Ms. Hampton never relented in her struggle to live a fully integrated life, a
life marked by the integrity of her self author~hip-"If
I give you my word,"
she always said, ''I'll be there''-and
she was.
On her death, her sisters in Electa Chapter 10 of the Eastern Star Organization honored her with the following words: ''We wish to express our gratitude
for having known Sister Hampton all these years. She became a member many
years ago and went from the bottom to the top of the ladder. She has served us
in many capacities. We loved her dearly. May she rest in peace with the angels."
Class and race are not synonymous with problems, with deprivation. They
can be sources of great joy and communal strength. Race and class, however, in
this society are manipulated markers of privilege and power. Ms. Hampton had
a vision of what life should be; it was a grand, simple vision, filled with good
friends and good food, a wann home, and her lover by her side. She gave all
she could to doing the best she could. The sorrow comes because she and so
many others have to work so hard for such basic human territory.
"I wish you knew what it's like to be me" is the challenge posed by a society
divided by race and class. We have so much to learn about the victories, the
sweetnesses, as well as the losses. By expanding our models for what makes a
life lesbian or what is lesbian about history, we will become clearer about
contemporary political and social coalitions that must be forged to ensure all
•
3~
{
(
.
•
I Lift My Eyes to the Hill: The Life of Mabel Hampton / 2~5
our liberations. We are just beginning to understand how these identities or
constructs shape lesbian and gay lives. We will have to change our questions
and our language of inquiry to take our knowledge deeper. Class and race,
always said together as if they mean the same thing, may each call forth their
own story. The insights we gain will anchor our other discussions in the
realities of individual lives, reminding us that bread and roses, material survival
and cultural identity, are the starting points of so many of our histories.
In that spirit, I will always remember our Friday night dinners at the
archives, with a life-size cut-out photograph of Gertrude Stein propped up at
one end of the table; Ms. Hampton sitting across from my partner, Lee Hudson;
Denve~ the family dog, right at Ms. Hampton's elbow; and myself, looking past
the candlelight to my two dear friends, Lee and Mabel, all of us carrying
different histories, joined by our love and need of each other.
Ms. Hampton addressed the 1984 New York City Gay Pride Rally as follows:
"I, Mabel Hampton, have been a lesbian all my life, for eighty-two years, and I
am proud of myself and my people. I would like all my people to be free in this
countrj and all over the world, my gay people and my black people."
Note
This speech was delivered as CLAGS's first annual David R. Kessler Lecture in Lesbian
and Gay Studies on November 20, 1992. It was transcribed by Sarah Atatimur, the& r p I)
transcription made possible from a grant from the &1tr11e11fet1Rdafi9a, 61e'<'- l\A'11Lo--Ot'-''"
Works Cited
Bell, Derrick. Facesat the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism. New York:
Basic Books, 1992.
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of FrederickDouglass-An American Slave,
Written by Himself. 1845. Reprint, Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1960.
Freedman, Estelle B. Their Sisters' Keepers:Women's Prison Refor111
in America, 18301930. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981.
Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family
from Slavery to the Present. New York: Basic Books, 1985 .
•
•
VA~
,._ 1
It~
\ .-\
l qI
VJ'"
O
~
(
on
• • • •
ad
Mabel
1
'O
and L1111an;
ate~
san,
here
1t
was
an
are
,
CO
lo
0
,
8
In
ous.
•
•
-I
Bu
wh~n
had Jon
I first
met
I call
1
h
9)2
1n
•
, sh
s11
h t
th
h
0
o
•
•
•
B
h
B
Bar,
and
of
And now qe•re
B
t,
co
kno n
o
1
0
n
h
o
--
.... ..
~----
3cJ
'
•
-···
•
--------
_-1\ never
'
considered
CJ-•
•
I I
L
'
little:·-Jittle
when I was
~p~ble
r1ed
then
every
'
the
men would
So,
t.,
try
therefore,
,o1ng something
to
they
I
•
didn't
I
'
and my uncle
I went
people
•
to work
.
o'n my but tons
a.nd ·I didn't
1 ike
•
'
nothine;
like.
'
.
'
meant
'
'
'
even
I
me
touch
' I had so much '
gbi,ng "to· scho61
'
'
'
'
,
~irl
house,
•
me and
marrying.
'
IC'
rape
to
•
to 'me·· 1)eca.11se·· they
And if
ybu do something
I
I
i:1ere always
I don't
I
like
,
I
,
'
'
Good·riddens
•
I don't
bother
with you.,
'
Joan:
You _knew--this··
I\
I
Mabel:
any sense
age
t'
that
you would
never
f'
I
•
thRt
I
'
••I
t)."-••<''
early
From a very
yo~.
!
'.!I
•
11
•
'
I '
very·· ear.ly · age
I
•
see
a
from
marry.
I
'to
,,
'
'
• I
•
'
'
I .would
' '
never
. .
11
•
,•
'
Joan :--And--tha
~
'f>1a}?e·l: That
And right
up until
t, ...meant
meant
I
;i:
I pass
•
I
,
. '
still
'
working.
Lt,1 11 an--
)W
that
~ght.
nd lots
I
And
I believe
d
1
of peop e on
0
1932' to 197.8
~
bit
went
teeth
fa
sou,
•m tha , I am, just
\i:
about
to
jump ine
she
,t
sees it
correct.
becguse
myself
anything)
she sees
I be li eve
I
'
and
'
I
and
on •
11
,
•
f
of my .~omen.
r
We quRrreled
a little
part.
t but we just
haPPY now
when she used
10 1
'
I
I
know she's
.'
•
had,' to 'alwa:y,8: \'{,ork,',il?-4:
.~'1:e; ,alw..~r~ '.w9,r,~f,?,;••'• ,,
away I'm
And I took care
We didn't
were together.
.ybe that's
all:
tongue and
that
--•.
I
•
i'label:
I
I didn't
.',I. .
l,,,
marry.
something ' that I didn't
like.
'
'
you had,
to
··work·
to·--tal<e"··care
·
of·
your-self
.
'
in marrying
.....•
she
sees,
that
I'm
eincarnation
in r
'
•
'
'Of~like
Joan
- Mabel
to•, wear
you
•
•
me 11's clothes
•
tailored,
skirt
I like
to wear
and blouse
a-nd'"-•th·l-tY·gs=•%u~ou'
•
•
•
I I
I
I
' I
'
,J
I
'
I
dress
caP,
and the
Because
I never
I don•t
take
liked
UP•
~he women and what
!,at:
but
like
the
men that
And I always
they
I never
stood
', .. I 'I
'
' 'I I
,~
'"
I II
kind
~
I ·,
I\''
that.
the
•
pant'
'
'
myself
I
'
be,t'ng a 'man.·
.,
I
considered
much.
• ,, •. ,.
of .'
But I•~ike
I
and the
'
I
pants.
and things
' I '
~
• ,,.
I always
'
- Yes ■
'
I
•
Mabel
.
·I
l
,.
I
And anything
took up hetag
I·don•t
like
a woman because
for.
I •
I liked
•
'
•
•
'
'
.
'
Mabel:
I had quite
a lot
as
part
comes
of my. f r 1 ensd
of the
that
way they
were
dressed
known as studs
and the stud
You see, because_th~Y
dr,e,ssed ni~ely
an~ short hair and
I think.
.'
bother
my a r, I didn't
But I didn't
care I ke}Jt
hi
things
like tl1at.
~pans
and shoes.
I
just liked
the suits,
and th
t
t11 i th
the hair.
to be
I
_just
wanted
anyt~i11g.
'
I didn't
want to be tied down
to. '
'
'
myself.
'
I
'
.
•
'
•
•
•
OBITUARIES
THE "NEW YORK TIMBS
.TUESDAY,
OCTOBER
31, 1989"
•
•
•
,--<\
t~ ' l )
\.
t'
•'\
,I
J •
•
t
'
~--t
,· · \ Gay
(
,\
~
•
... '
Rights Advocate, 8 7
I
•
•
Mabel Hampton, an advocate in the
gay rights movement, died of pneumonia Thursday at St. Luke's-Roosevelt
Hospital Center. She was 87 years old
and lived in Manhattan.
•
Ms. Hampton, a native of -Winston
l Salem, N.C., ·had been a dancer in
. earlier years. In 1974, \Vith three other
j women, she founded the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Manhattan, a collec- · ·
tio11 of lesbian books and art if acts including her personal library.
.. She was an annual participant
in the
city's Gay and Lesbian Pride March
and was its grand 1na1..shal in 1985.
There are no immediate • survivors.
......
..
abel
g us.
abel
not
see
dead.
her
who meant
This
et,
is
You can
neighbors
ts.
•
Hampton
was
and
the
her
MAbel
long
and
good
ton is
part
of
to
her,
that
walks
made
their
many
talks
j ,'l ~ Bro'I'"greeting
all
a
whom are
the
street
so many years
Foster.
life,
of
in
home for
Lillian
and
strees,
taking
was
partner
friends,
and
down 169th
so much
Lillian
work
breathes
striding
commmunity
life
and
She
Here
on 169th
life
filled
with
here
today.
Mabel
•
never
F)\
survival
energy
of
this
communitv. .,
She
leave.
~bel loved
~~
the
l>\
life
so
much
that
her
passions
will
life
,.•...:_
c-om-r...ad.e s - h e r 1 o v e o f c a r r i d e s a n d b a c o n
ng,
be our
her
enthusiastic
support
of
and
the long night
bu~ rides
e.~ t ~ r (\-t ,,r-tt \ 11·c \,
~ u\N-'--~~ ___ _
in
meeting
new
friends
and
1 .;~
to
her
dear
Atlantic
an d e g g s
Mets,
her
love of
n e✓ ,l p J , ,,()··~ ; ='>• ••
A the joy she
City,
____
•._,.'
her
devotion
to
old
.
ht and
concern
lamations
of
for
her
her
dear
right
•
in
l1ope
ones,
her
h~~
lo have heard
Ms.
I
:fe was generous
\them of
i n the
to
Libby
love
whomever
HAmpton's
famous
and
and
brave
difficult
and
er
Denver,
she
whoppee
choose
know
encompassing
proud
~1
to.
All
that
her
of
yes
enough
to
become
alone;
she
knows
of
poems
times.
I
~bel
too
•
Hampton
lS
rds,
her
love
ngs,
her
charm
which
echo
in
will
t,
gave
1
ity
you
is
we will
of
stubborn
my word,
too
rare,
not
folk
sayings,
memories.
I will
too
be able
her
turn
could
our
leave
to
remembered
to
a loolc
Mabel
s t i c l< b y
precious
to
to
Mabel
leave
us
bits
that
Hampton
i t , ''
and
could
always
she
lay
said,
did.
This
not
those
be forgotten.
alone
either,
·~
6
h<"; , ~ r.
"
•
•
l
•
•
rom
..lf·
tl
L
r
ti
11
11 r
r
ll
•
p
d
r
.
p
h
qu
d m ,
11 m
h r
c
h_r
n
h us
Lh
1
nd
r
n
1
,
\
ould
h
· f MAbe 1
would
,~as
t
w
hr
to
do
not
stop
h d no h'ng
mon hs
p
ll
\ 11 n
no h'ng
wh n
r
•
n r o s · t y;
y u,
v
h ,
•
not
hou
r d
nd
p
d d
u n
•
i
n
m r c
m hr
f-
f
•
P~,
her
hat
gre
she
test
laundry
so
much work
so
h v
for
•
·er
Frid
to
'
r n
d'f
g ver _
I \ ould
times
and
and
yes
; her
nt
person
'.Ssed
check
in
wise.
never
Mabel
little
the
gifts
showered
on is
not
pirit
soars
from
to
the
the
lcnew who she
from
dead;
above
two
known.
saw
flinched
help
to
w re
ever
others
of
from
ands
and
•
caring
floating
She
was
also
of
was,
she
her
grace
of
had
had
as
trulv
spirit,
a fullness
amazing
.,
self
of
life
into
herself
of
family.
a
allowed
most
created
she
child
a little
selected
to
was
challenge
change
she
brave
the
the
to
During
whom she
elegant
In
worlds,
enthusiastic
boys
struggle
on
1abel
young
heart
yet,
that
sit
it.
or·es.
ho\v
be as
was
nt
Ab-1,
said
abel
She
11ampton
brad
have
ab'l"ty
y differ
rom v
rd
of
leganc
h
,~ond,er
rs,
I have
and
sl
Som
fiends
10
•
her
he
sh
, · h
c
loved
,1om n
s,
1.
had
last
at
, ook
gr
how
•
urn·
j
n r,
·1 be
hr
n d room,
d r
lmso
d
dinn
n 1
C
pr
m•
I would
nd
b 1
being
~1Abel
opportunity,
us.
•