Thelma Reed born June 2, 1917 died on Tuesday, March 6, 2012 in Buffalo, New York. She began to write her memoirs in her 70s and completed the book “Black Girl From Tannery Flats” at age 84.
She had a remarkable story, one that started in her birth place in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1917 that continued in Buffalo, New York after she migrated as a single mother with her son now famed novelist Ishmael Reed.
But read what Ismael Reed wrote about his mother after she published her memoirs in Counterpunch, February 2009.
I regret I didn’t meet her, but I’ll read the “Black Girl From Tannery Flats” soon and know I’ll carry her spirit inside of me.
Ishmael Reed, wrote, thousands of black American families have an unsolved murder or murders in their history, murders that affect their descendants,” a theme as a black Puerto Rican woman, I can relate to in my family difficult to divulge.
So I’m sure Thelma Reed’s story will touch my life deeply because she had compassion and understood forgiveness in her life and gave up her dreams caring for others, fulfilling her goals though late in life for this reason.
That’s what makes her a remarkable women. And Especially for women in Buffalo, New York honors her memory on Women’s history month in March 2012.
“When I called my mother from New York in 1966, excited because Doubleday had signed to publish my first novel, her response was that she was going to write a book, too. “Everybody else is doing it,” she added. Since she was burdened by a load of family responsibilities,I didn’t take her seriously. After my younger brothers and sister left home,my mother’s responsibilities lessened.
My grandmother and grandmother’s brother, for whom she had cared for many years, died, and my mother and stepfather sold their home and entered a senior citizens’apartment. In 1993, my stepfather died and, shortly afterwards, his mother, an Alzheimer’s patient, also died. My mother had been her caretaker for seventeen years.
After the death of the last person for whom she had taken upon herself to provide caretaker services,my mother settled in an apartment in a building owned by my youngest brother. It was here in 1998 that she began her book Black Girl From Tannery Flats, filling composition books with notes written in an elegant penmanship that is no longer required of school students.”
Especially for Women in Buffalo, New York 