Janetta Pegues shares her store of her parents moving from the South to live in Chicago:
I’ve always had that sense of adventure.
Where do you think you get from?
Probably from my Mother to a certain extent. My mother, just like many blacks tired of the Jim Crow South and wanted to move to the north, promised land at that time to explore different opportunities. She came, she actually lied and told her mother, my grandmother, that she was pregnant and at that time if you got pregnant no decent self-respecting family would allow you to have a child out of wedlock so you have to get married. So she lied and told her parents that she was pregnant so that she can come north with her first husband and so there is this ritual of all these women in Arkansas to examine my mother, feeling on her neck, and ‘Oh ya, you big.’ meaning she was pregnant. Well, she didn't get pregnant until 2 years later but she was able to come to Chicago. so she was an adventurous spirit, one who defied convention, if you will, she did what she had to do to come out of the Jim Crow South so that was kind of her sense of adventure. A similar thing from my dad as well my dad was known as Dancing John and quite the Ladies Man, he and my mother met at a club and again I’m not exactly sure of his track here to the north and I know that they met in Chicago. And again that sense of adventure was passed down to me. Not only that, my mother’s oldest brother, Tansel, did the same thing. Came up north on trains. I understand that based on where you were, the train got you to certain places in the north. If you were in Arkansas or Mississippi, the train got you to Chicago. My Mother’s oldest sister got to Detroit.
Recorded by Francesco DeSalvatore on June 13, 2018