Category: Growing Up Southron

When I was five, growing up in Lumberton NC in the early ’50s, our first house was on a corner lot across from a lumber yard and beside a cotton mill. (We had a window air conditioner but couldn’t run it because the wind-borne cotton fibers would clog the filter.)

I played sometimes with a little girl – Sharon – who lived behind us. She was usually dirty and wore clothes that had seen better days, and had a habit of eating dough balls that she carried around with her. They also were usually dirty and had seen better days.

One day we were playing in my back yard when an older black woman walked by. She was dressed (as housekeepers/maids often were in that era) in a dress, apron, and cap, all made of white cotton.

Sharon looked up as she passed and, in a matter-of-fact greeting carrying no emotion of any kind whatsoever, said, “Hey, n*****.”

The woman actually seemed to deflate, as if being weighed down at the shoulders and simultaneously punched in the stomach. I will never forget her expression, her posture, and her visible sadness.

Though I couldn’t put it in words at the time, I knew, from my instinct and upbringing, that the old sayings were true. Beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder … and I hope that beautiful woman had someone to tell her that when she got home.

I do not blame anyone other than myself. And I do not speak for anyone but myself.

My education began in Asheboro, NC where I attended kindergarten. I remember nothing of the experience. We moved to Lumberton, NC, where I started school at the aforementioned JPM Elementary, a building whose architecture spoke of many decades of processed children. My sole goal in elementary school was to earn the coveted white Sam Browne belt of a crossing guard (a goal spawned by a framed Norman Rockwell-styled classroom picture of a child crossing guard hit by a car – titled “No Greater Love” as I recall.

We moved to Greensboro, NC at the end of 1959, mid-semester of my sixth grade year. From that point on, my academic ‘career’ nose-dived, for a variety of reasons. I attended Kiser Jr. and Greensboro (Grimsley) Sr. high schools, graduating in 1966. Those years produced in me a strong sense of what general path I wanted to pursue in life.

Alas, I was not strong enough to do what I knew was best. Instead, I did what my mother wanted me to do, for what she thought were very good reasons. From that point on, my education consisted of a series of mistakes, all entirely of my own making, made for what I also thought were good reasons, though not really what I wanted to be doing, more what I thought was expected of me by others.

My college education began at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, because I thought highly of their school of journalism (without actually knowing anything about it). My time there was two of the most miserable years of my youth. At UNC I was awash in a sea of people to whom I could not relate, try as I might. And I did try, assuming my misery was all me (which in one sense it was).

After an interlude with Uncle Sam, I enrolled at Guilford College in continuing education. Same result, different school. After a job change, I enrolled in Johns Hopkins Evening College. Same result, different school – again. [Note: I did earn two degrees at Hopkins; and, while I say “different school”, sharp-eyed readers will note a commonality.]

The moral of this story? Well, if there is one, I suppose it goes along these lines:

• the best education you can get is the one you give yourself
• never ignore the still small voice; it knows you better than anyone
• learn to produce something tangible, preferably something useful

I knew those lessons in elementary school, and consistently failed to act on them, to my regret. Do not be me. It is (almost) never too late. Act now.