Audio File
Transcript
First of all, I would like to say thank you for allowing me to be here. This is a surprise, but it’s an honor to sit here before you young people sharing with you my life, living here in the Hill District. My name is Darlene Moore, and I am 67 years old. 60 years I have lived in Hill District, born and raised around all these communities. I was born June 27, 1957, and I was born again here in the Hill District on Cliff St. is where my mom brought me home from the hospital. So from there, we moved around the Hill District in many different areas all over. My family, 7 girls and four boys, and my mother, she taught all of us everything, cook, clean, whatever, paint, clean the yard, take the trash out. She had values. We had to be in before the street lights come on. We had to be sitting on our door step, which was the best thing ever. We had friends that came around in our community where the street we lived on, and every parent knew every child. If you was doing something all the way downtown, it got home. When you got home, you may have been disciplined by 5 people before you got to your door and then you got disciplined too. They believed in raising up a child, disciplining them so they would not be in trouble, incarceration, and different places like that, to let them know that acts and things you may have engaged in was not proper. It was love, I thought as I grew up, I said “That was a lot of abuse,” you know? You know, because you had so many people saying words, or a little spanking here and there, but it was the best thing because I’m here today, and many other people are. If I didn’t grow up here in the Hill District, I believe that all communities back in that time was very fruitful and everybody was on the same accord, lifestyle, and thus when we are around elders, and we hear them, when they say what it was like when they grew up, which was very important, so anywhere I believe in the City of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh was a hub of love, was family orientated, and that it was a great place to live because you had a lot of great people who were building like the library, the Mellons, and a lot of Carnegie, you know, the railroads, you know, the steel mill, all these places were jobs for men and women who worked, who wanted to get a home, who wanted to live a different life from coming from down South than what they had to deal with down there. They felt more free. So wherever we would live at in Pittsburgh, from the North side, it’d be whatever. If we moved over there, was a great place to be. The Hill District was a great place to be and it still is. And I root for it, even though I’m living in another community now, I still root for it, all communities. Well, I did grow up here in the Hill, and I raised my children. Back then, we were a very wealthy community. But as our community had disintegrated for a moment, it was kind of a struggle because we had to travel, we had to find daycare, you know, services start coming in the Hill to help us. But it wasn’t enough to really meet a lot of our needs. So we supportively linked with one another, different family, friends and things like that. We would borrow, kind of like what we had to do back in the day. “You need some flour?” “Hey for real for real, can I have some of your food stamps till mines gets here?” You know, we had to lean on one another. We had to babysit, you know, one another’s children, you know. And then if we found time for ourselves, go to school to better ourselves until we got better. So we all made it. We all made it out of the community. But the community was a foundation for us and for our children because I have a son who’s in the Air Force. And he came back. He cried because we lived in public housing, he said “Mom, this looked like a place that’s been bombed.” He cried. He thought we were rich. My son thought we were rich. He didn’t know that we went without because we didn’t complain about it. We helped one another. We brought the children together. We did things together with them. We showed them a great life that we didn’t know we should have. We cried on one another’s shoulder. But that’s what he saw, and I was so very surprised about that. I said “What?” I said, “You know we was on welfare? You know, Mom had to do this and do that?” He’s like “No, ma. I didn’t know.”