Teacher


Notes:

•  Marriage License submitted Aug. 4, 1916 for Deborah Louise Spears and Stokely Rowe Gardner. - MCRC

•  "On a weekend night in Huntsville, we might spend time with a black family with whom we had a history, typically the Gardners. Their daughter Vanessa and niece Felicia were my buddies from Fellowship Presbyterian, home to the children of so many up-and-coming black Huntsvillians. Deborah Gardner, Van's mother, had been our kindergarten teacher. Her husband, Stokely, would cook us 'scrapple'- a delicious, thick white gravy with chunks of ambiguous red meat served on toast. We would wolf it down on Sunday mornings after a sleepover, and then hurry to church at Fellowship, where Stokely sang in the choir. The night before, the adults would have been hanging out in the Gardners' family room. Their music was the Stylistics, Les McCann, Quincy Jones. Sometimes they would play a Red Foxx album with blue references that I would overhear from upstairs but fail to comprehend." - Cashin


Related Links:

•  Cashin - The Agitator's Daughter: A Memoir of Four Generations of One Extraordinary African American Family, by Sheryll Cashin, 2008, page 162.

•  MCRC - Madison County Records Center, Marriage Licenses.