Ila Booker

Retired Teacher & Lifetime Member of Fourth Baptist Church
B. 1924

I was born in Norfolk and my mother moved [with me] back to Richmond when I was four years old.

Sunday mornings, we had to go to Sunday School but you heard the Wings over Jordan singing. And of course, when we left Sunday School, if you didn’t put your pennies in the Sunday School [collection plate], you went to the drugstore and bought candy.

They had the streetcars, and the tracks ran down 29th Street. I remember when they removed the tracks. The men worked in gangs and they would sing when they would pick up a track. They had some kind of chant they would sing.

Oakwood Avenue was all white, Confederates. They had their own Memorial Day, and they had a big parade. They had the Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall cadet corps and bands and everything. They marched down to Oakwood Cemetery and had a ceremony down there and then they shot the cannons. They didn’t celebrate Memorial Day like we did.

You didn’t have your refrigerators. People bought ice in blocks. And there was a man, he had his horse and buggy and he would go around. When he would come with that ice wagon, he’d make a line on the ice, and then you could chop it and it would go all the way through. You’d get chips and we would jump on the back of that cart to eat chips from the ice. And it was good.