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Transcription: [00:02:00]
{SPEAKER name="Faith Ringgold"}
—century, she was born in nineteen-hundred and three. I suspect that she was about, uh, she was a teenager here. I'd say about sixteen, maybe. Or, yeah, maybe sixteen or seventeen.

[00:02:16]
And I remember as a child I used to love to look at her in these, uh, pants, these riding pants — which were the style in those days — and this kind of beret she was wearing and the jacket.

[00:02:32]
Um, she met my father in New York. They both came up from, um, Florida — my mother was born in Palatka, Florida; my father was born in Jacksonville, Florida — and they both came up and lived in Harlem in the 'Gay Days' of the Harlem Renaissance and before, when Harlem was a really exciting cultural mecca.

[00:02:59]
Um, I had pictures of— I used to look at pictures of my mother and father, they used to take violin lessons and they would go on picnics, and they would, uh, be up playing their violins on the roof of their, um, buildings.

[00:03:17]
Um, but you know what happens with pictures when you look at them too much, they kind of disappear, so this is the only one that I have left of that, of that period.

[00:03:30]
Now here she is later on— I would suspect that this is the 1930s, um, when we used to go to Atlantic City every summer.

[00:03:42]
Uh, now you know the '30s was the Depression. My mother was a fabulous, uh, manager of money. She always knew how to get a vacation out of the small salary that my father made. I say small salary, but in those days—