What Joyce Has To Say About That - Part I
As some of you know, I was taken in and raised by an amazing woman, Joyce June Hayes.
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Joyce has raised over 70 kids in her lifetime. Raised in Chicago, she was a pioneer in the Civil Rights Movement and then moved to San Francisco to open a children’s theater program in the most rundown neighborhood in town. In addition to, as she puts it, learning what pimps and avocados were, she also quickly learned that many of the kids she worked with had no where to go, a problem that only got worse with the Crack epidemic in the 80s. And so she took them in, and turned her work running children’s theater into a full time child care of sorts. We came with a whole range of background stories, most of her kids are black and now Latino, and we spread out over generations. But we all ended up somehow as Joyce’s Kids. A term that is still known by almost anyone you run into on the streets of San Francisco’s Tenderloin.
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Over the years I have tried to get her to write more of her stories, and to film her when I’m around. Last summer we did an oral history interview with Story Corps. The audio quality is not great, but her stories and her history and what she has to say all are. I’m going to attempt to slice the interview into chapters. And so, above, is Chapter 1 of “What Joyce Has To Say About That.” (My back up editors will help me work out the sound problems before the next chapter goes up, next week.)
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This first chapter comes at the close of our interview, where I totally wrongly remember a story she’s told me, and she corrects me with how she watched MLK on TV from Chicago, as she was a single teenage mother, and he was giving his I Have A Dream Speech. She then tells of meeting JFK on his campaign, and then how, at age 14, she was the first to integrate a camp for children with disabilities and how a mob gathered with stones to protest that action. This interview was recorded before the recent happenings with the Tea Party and on immigration. But what this woman has seen and lived still serves as a map for these modern times.
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In honor of Mother’s Day, and since I feel so lucky to have access to such a woman in my life, I share with you the wisdom of a civil rights pioneer and a loving and hysterical woman who has a lot to say and, for the most part, finds a way to say it without cussing up too much of a storm in this interview. Enjoy!
