Early Childhood(1928 – 1941)

“We could always move back to texas because we got so much family there (in reference to searching up our ancestry)”

“What I remember about that [living on the border of New Mexico and Texas] is every morning when my mother and father would get up and get ready for work. They clean us up and sit us on our porch. And we stay on the porch till they come back home. Ya, i remember dat, we’d knock on the house, go inside the house, come back outside.”

“Why would you have to wait outside on the porch for your parents?” 

“Cuz we was toddlers, ya know?”

[She moves on] “I remember now going to my grandma’s spot in Los Angeles. She had a beautiful space. She lived right on Central Avenue and… it gonna come back to me and I’ll have a pencil in my pocket or something [short stoccatic giggles]. But we go straight on Central Avenue, past the Lincoln theatre, then turn right. They close to the church that they’s was going to. Because when my dad died, they had the funeral at the church.”

“The reason I know this is because the original owner of the funeral home is the signature on my dad’s death certificate. All that is in the archives, but it takes them too long to find it (shaking her head in frustration) cuz I called the church and asked them if they had a record of my aunt and uncle being members of the church and they never did answer me. They just assured me: ‘ohhh yesss, we are gonna do that’”

(She looks at me and pauses with the most emotionless face, then continues with a giggle)

Lula Mae Fowler Spears was born on January 21, 1928, in Anthony, New Mexico, a twin town north of Anthony, Texas.

She was born in an adobe house with the assistance of a doula in Anthony, NM. To this day, we are still unable to track her first birth certificate and are in the process of restating it retroactively.

“We would sing and rhyme to each other, we wouldn’t talk.”

Lula mae referencing herself and her siblings hanging out

Early Adulthood (1941 -1951)

To be continued…