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    Grants Chapel Alley
    Grants Chapel Alley
    Grants Chapel Alley
    Ebook110 pages1 hour

    Grants Chapel Alley

    By Ray Kania

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    About this ebook

    Grants Chapel Alley is based on true events. Good days were when life was merely unpleasant. The tiny houses that were behind Grants Chapel Alley were modeled after slave cabins. This was life in Macon, Georgia in 1950.
    These cabins were built with tin roofs and no inner walls or ceilings, even in the winter. The rent for each "home" was $6.00 a month and owned by a realty company. Included were a couple of light bulbs, a gas stove on the rear porch and a cold faucet. And there was an outhouse for each home. A regular commode was put in later by the realtors and placed in the middle of each bedroom with a white curtain around for privacy.
    There were no chances for advancing in the local commerce, since all good jobs were off limits to Black men and women in general. Education in the public schools and college were off limits to those of "color".
    In general, Black people in Macon, Georgia had no opportunities to work at a decent job. Blacks were allowed a few menial jobs, with women receiving work as maids, cooks, childcare, while Black men had to look hard to find any job.
    Being a Black man in Macon means you kill time until you die. But one year at the city morgue there was a death count of one White man, one White woman and 58 Black women.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRay Kania
    Release dateAug 3, 2014
    ISBN9781310626289
    Grants Chapel Alley
    Author

    Ray Kania

    Ray Kania is a writer whose work has appeared in a variety of publications, from scholarly journals to the sports pages of newspapers. Ray is also an artist and photographer (Magazine covers of of Florida Living,The Orlando Sentinel Insight, newspapers, articles and books.) Ray uses pen and ink, and color pencil.Kania, a former Vietnamese/Thai-Lao interpreter, was the senior coordinator (USAFSS) for National Security Agency intelligence gathering missions along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. During this period, as a personal project, he collected information that would lead to an ethnography of the So people of Northeast Thailand. Included in the study is a phonetic alphabet, the first for this spoken language. (Documentation)As a licensed private investigator in the early 1980s he worked undercover for a NASA contractor.Kania signed a SAG agreement to work in movies and commercials from 1984-85. He did work on the CBS series SPACE and in the movie D.A.R.Y.L., including precision driving for chase scenes so the stunt drivers could do their thing on the Orlando East-West Expressway.As a Marshallese police officer, he was directly involved with operations against Russian (Soviet) special forces units at Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands from 1986-1988. He was part of an operation against the Russian efforts to gather data from the impact zone on Illeginni Island on Feb.13,1987 on orders from President Reagan (Documentation)Kania also worked on a contract for the Air Force Space Command at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida and later as a federal officer at Kennedy Space Center, protecting the space shuttle, astronauts and KSC facilities. Click image.He has written about a number of diverse subjects as a result of his travels and eclectic interests. They include: Southeast Asia (politics, sociology, and language), sports, physical fitness, nature, Pacific Islanders, intelligence gathering, and human interest. His latest effort has been the publication of his 7 epub books.He has participated in several sports (primarily basketball and soccer) at several levels, from college to a prison league. Along the way he has collected BA degrees in philosophy and political science from the University of Central Florida. Among his language skills are a working knowledge or better (speaking, reading and writing) of Spanish, Thai, Vietnamese and Arabic. (little or no active use for over 15 years.)Partial list of credits/clients:Asian Survey, September 1980, Volume XX, Number 9, Explaining Recent Vietnamese Behavior, Lee E. Dutter and Raymond S. Kania.Florida LivingSt. Petersburg Times, high school sports, North Suncoast.The Asia MailThe Orlando Sentinel (Insight) Tropical Isles Play Lab For U.S. Defense Tests. Oct. 30, 1988.South Pacific’s Paradise Lost: Ebeye Has Become Slum In The Marshall Islands. April 23, 1989.Journal of the Siam Society, January 1979, Volume 67 part 1, Patron, His Majesty the King, The So people of Kusuman, northeastern Thailand, Raymond S. Kania and Siriphan Hatuwong.Vietnam MagazineRay Kania's ThelastGringo.com is archived in the University of Texas, San Antonio Immigration/Borderlands Web Collection. It contains well-documented articles on the uncontrolled immigration across the U.S. southern border.Ray has been a member of the Eastern Florida State College Foundation Heritage Society since 2002 and a sponsor of the annual Eastern Florida State College (Melbourne Campus) Student Art Exhibit at the King Center for the Performing Arts. He provides scholarships for best of show in two dimensional, three dimensional, and the Ray Kania Award of Excellence categories.2004 – Ray was the model for the winning image in the SEPPA, Southeastern Professional Photographers of America contest, international competition. It was the First Place winner in male image, illustrative category, and Best of Show. The image was also on the 2005 SEPPA calendar and at the Imaging Asia convention in South Korea.

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      Book preview

      Grants Chapel Alley - Ray Kania

      Grants Chapel Alley

      © 2014 Ray Kania, All Rights Reserved

      ISBN # 9781310626289

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      * * * *

      Grants Chapel Alley is based on true events. Good days were when life was merely unpleasant. The tiny houses that were behind Grants Chapel Alley were modeled after slave cabins. This was life in Macon, Georgia in 1950.

      These cabins were built with tin roofs and no inner walls or ceilings, even in the winter. The rent for each home was $6.00 a month and owned by a realty company. Included were a couple of light bulbs, a gas stove on the rear porch and a cold faucet. And there was an outhouse for each home. A regular commode was put in later by the realtors and placed in the middle of each bedroom with a white curtain around for privacy.

      There were no chances for advancing in the local commerce, since all good jobs were off limits to Black men and women in general. Education in the public schools and college were off limits to those of color.

      In general, Black people in Macon, Georgia had no opportunities to work at a decent job. Blacks were allowed a few menial jobs, with women receiving work as maids, cooks, childcare, while Black men had to look hard to find any job.

      Being a Black man in Macon means you kill time until you die. But one year at the city morgue there was a death count of one White man, one White woman and 58 Black women.

      * * * *

      Table of Contents

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Chapter 10

      Chapter 11

      Chapter 12

      Chapter 13

      Chapter 14

      Chapter 15

      Chapter 16

      Chapter 17

      Chapter 18

      Chapter 19

      Chapter 20

      Chapter 21

      Chapter 22

      Chapter 23

      Chapter 24

      Chapter 25

      Chapter 26

      Chapter 27

      Chapter 28

      Chapter 29

      Chapter 30

      Chapter 31

      Chapter 32

      Chapter 33

      Chapter 34

      About Ray Kania

      * * * *

      Chapter 1

      That old house in Macon, Georgia was the first permanent place I can remember. Everything before that were little snippets of memories; old houses and old women, never the same place. A big white room with high ceilings and white lights and people dressed in white, murmuring something about me. Then nothing. I had been at that house for two years, Aunt Lil told me. I completed the first grade at the orphanage and was late starting the second grade. So I missed a year and would be behind.

      And every time I looked down at Grants Chapel, a hundred yards at the bottom of the alley, I got a sinking feeling in my stomach that I couldn’t identify but I felt it in the air. I just wanted to be somewhere else, a happy place. Whatever that was. There was nothing here. It was a place they sent you when you did something wrong.

      Below me, gray smoke drifted among tiny black houses while a few black figures trudged through a heavily discolored, sandy street-the result of decades of wind-blown coal dust.

      I leaned against the unpainted, rotting banister and looked through the slats, my hands resting on the railing. Grants Chapel Alley jutted off of a sharp curve on Second Street and descended one hundred yards before making an abrupt turn left onto deep sand. Two blocks farther it ran into the pavement of Jeff Davis Street. Wyche Street extended from Grants Chapel Alley at the turn but hooked to the right where it wound up on Second Street.

      Grants Chapel, an old wooden church, served the colored community but I never saw more than 7 people there, including the pastor. It stood at the junction of the two unpaved streets. From my vantage point on the porch, I could look right down the aisle to the pulpit. The sides of the church consisted of fading white paint, pockmarked by numerous bare spots where the coating had been freed by the harsh middle Georgia environment and deposited on the adjacent barren soil. The only plant near the church was a chinaberry tree, its color dulled by smoke hanging in the warm autumn sun.

      Directly across from Aunt Lil’s home, a two-story red brick firehouse fronted on Second Street. To the right, in a triangular plot of dirt, several firemen sat under the shade of a large pecan tree.

      A tiny white house, balanced precariously on brick stilts, hugged the slope next to the firehouse. Two other homes, put together with very little money and no particular plan, faced each other at the lower end of the alley, the unofficial boundary for the Colored folks.

      These two homes,with tar paper roofs and unpainted walls, served as temporary dwellings for transient White families with little hope of improving their station in life.

      A yellow and green city bus, belching diesel smoke from the rear, stopped at the tree to let a passenger off. The driver exchanged a few words with one of the portly fireman, then headed south again along Second Street to the Macon city limits.

      Grants Chapel Alley began where the pavement ended. The alley, as far as the church, consisted of one long slab of Macon’s finest red clay. It was also dry, and moments after a taxi came speeding off of Second Street and down to the colored section, sliding from side to side, it made the turn by the church into deep, coal dust-speckled sand.

      Thick, red dust swirled in the air and drifted toward the porch. I ran inside and peered out as the cloud dropped a thin layer of powder on everything.

      What are you looking at, Danny? Oh, the dust again. I wisht it would rain.

      Aunt Lil maneuvered her ample girth on spindly legs down the front steps. She grabbed a water

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