As boy and young man, James Merritt Sharp labored in his father’s fields but he had a keen mind and craved education. For several years he attended a one-room log school near his home. Later, he used money saved from raising tobacco to attend Whitsett Institute near Greensboro, twenty-five miles away. He longed for college, but lacked money, and at eighteen, he began teaching children in a one-room school in the Madison Township. Within five years he had organized and built his own boarding school, Sharp’s Institute, not far from his father’s farm. He even won a post office for the community, and when postal authorities demanded that the community have a name, he thought its informal name, Bald Hill, inappropriate and called it Intelligence.
Sharp’s Institute, a two-story, white frame building with a big front porch and a bell tower with a railed lookout on top, opened in October of 1900 with 50 students. When Professor Sharp was not teaching, he was riding a bicycle over dusty and muddy wagon roads in the northern part of the state drumming up students. By 1906 enrollment had grown to 225, and progressive Governor Charles B. Aycock not only had visited Sharp’s Institute but had proclaimed it the best preparatory school in its area. Professor Sharp even had time to field and coach a team in his favorite sport, baseball. And he considered himself prosperous enough to wed.
On July 3, he married Annie Britt Blackwell. He had met her when her sister, who taught at his school, invited him to stay at her father’s home, a two-story farmhouse in Vance County, while he was bicycling on one of his recruiting trips. In an earlier day Annie Britt would have been a belle of the genteel Old South. Her grandfather had owned a huge tobacco and cotton plantation with many slaves, and although the family fortunes had been dissipated by the war, and the family members reduced to hardship and hard work, they clung to the refinement and social graces that their earlier wealth had granted them. Annie Britt didn’t like the rough-edged young country professor at first. He angered her when he jerked her horse. But later, when he invited her to join her sister as a teacher in his school, she accepted and was surprised to find herself attracted to him. Their plans to marry were already set when her father fell ill with Bright’s disease (a kidney disorder), and she left her job to attend him. Her father died shortly before the wedding, and she wore mourning clothes on her honeymoon to Baltimore and Washington.
Disaster struck the following year, when fire destroyed Sharp’s Institute. Unable to get financing to rebuild, a dejected James Sharp moved his bride to Rocky Mount in the eastern part of the state, where their first child, a daughter, was born on July 7. They named her Susie Marshall for Annie Britt’s adored younger sister and James’s admired father, continuing family traditions of naming children for other family members. Misfortune continued to plague James Sharp, however. He went bankrupt trying to sell insurance, causing his wife to lose her heirloom furniture.
Even before the fire, James Sharp had been reading law, and afterward he continued with greater purpose. For a few weeks he went to Wake Forest College north of Raleigh, where he took a law school review course under Dean N. Y. Gulley. At that time, North Carolina law required no formal education to take the state bar exam. James Sharp passed the bar and was granted his license on January 27, 1908. He moved his family back to Rockingham County and opened an office in Stoneville, not far from his family home. Later, he moved to the larger town of Madison, where his wife gave birth to two more children—a son, James Merritt, Jr., born on November 13, 1910; and a daughter, Sallie Blackwell, born four days before Christmas in 1911.
Finding his practice slow in building, James Sharp thought he saw greater opportunity in the land. He bought a farm on Turkey Cock Mountain near Martinsville, Virginia, just over the state line, and moved his family there. Like his father, he grew fruit and tobacco, but he intended his main source of income to be the trees on his land, and to this end he set up a sawmill. Again disaster struck, this time in the form of a forest fire that destroyed his timber, forcing him into his second bankruptcy, a hard blow to a man so proud.
A lawyer acquaintance in Reidsville, Ira R. Humphrey, heard of James Sharp’s plight and invited Sharp to join his growing practice. By this time there was a fourth child, Annie Hill, born at the mountain farm on February 19, 1914. James Sharp moved his family into a house on Piedmont Street in Reidsville and worked long hours to support them. But the tribulations that had plagued the family continued. Shortly after the move to Reidsville, James, Jr., called Man Boy by the family because of his stocky build and mature bearing, was discovered to have a brain tumor. James Sharp insisted that his son have the best care, despite cost, and took him to Richmond, where surgeons performed a craniotomy. Man Boy underwent two more operations and wore a constant skull dressing to contain his bulging brain lining before his death on September 29, 1916, six weeks short of his sixth birthday.
Annie Britt Sharp was devastated by her son’s death. She stood weeping by the grave, unwilling to leave, as the dirt was shoveled onto the small coffin. “Come on, we’ve got to go,” her husband said, taking her gently by the arm. “We’ve done all we can for the dead, now we’ve got to look after the living.”
By then the family had moved into a bigger house, on Maple Avenue, and another son, Thomas Adolphus, had been born (on July 24, 1915). Another daughter, Louise Wortham, was born in the house on Maple Avenue on August 29, 1917, but two months after her birth, James Sharp bought a two-story, white frame house with a low-hipped tin roof at 629 Lindsey Street, only a few blocks from his downtown office. The house stood beside the abandoned Reidsville Graded School, for which it had served as a teacherage. It was shaded in front by big oaks—a white oak on one side, a post oak on the other—and in back by black walnut trees. The sloping backyard provided plenty of room for a large garden, a few pigs, and a cow. This was the last move for James Sharp’s family. This house would become the family home for generations to come.
In this house four more children were to be born. Florence Abigail came on April 14, 1919. Twins James Blackwell and John Pomfret arrived on August 9, 1921. The coming of the twins was a joyous occasion. The whole family doted on them. James Sharp built a double carriage so that the older children could push them through the neighborhood. He also had a wide, wraparound front porch added to the house so they’d have a place to crawl and play. Later, he built a low rock wall topped with an iron picket fence across the small, grassless front yard to keep all the younger children from wandering into the busy street.
Until the arrival of the twins, all the Sharp children had drunk raw milk from the family’s Jersey cow, but Annie Britt worried about that and switched to dairy milk. The decision proved fatal. The twins and their older sister, Florence, all weakened by earlier bouts with whooping cough, fell desperately ill with colitis from tainted milk. James was first to die, on June 17, 1923. John followed on July 4, less than a month from his second birthday. Florence, then four, recovered from the brink of death but had to be taught to walk again.
A pall fell over the family. The life went out of Annie Britt Sharp. She sank into deep depression, ignoring all about her. She wore black and sat staring vacantly and wringing her hands. Her children, tended by their eldest sister Susie, then sixteen, tiptoed around her, fearful of the stranger she had become. As weeks dragged on, her husband worried that she might never recover. But Matilda Purcell, a black farmer’s wife who normally came once a week to help with the washing, ended the problem.
Matildy, as she was called, had been hired to cook for the family while Annie Britt was incapacitated. “Miz’ Sharp, it’s not right for you to set here and grieve like this,” Matildy told her one day. “And if you don’t stop it, the Lord’s goina punish you for it. He’s goina take another one of your chil’ren.” From that moment, Annie Britt began to rejoin her family. When she was her old self again, she signified her complete return by buying a new hat with pink flowers on it, an extravagance such as she rarely permitted.
A year later, on July 17, 1924, Annie Britt gave birth to her tenth a
nd final child, another son. She named him James Vance. She’d lost both sons named James and she was determined to have a child named for his father. Her mother-in-law told her that the Lord never intended for her to have a son by that name and her defiance would bring down His wrath. But this son proved healthy, strong, and smart, and Annie Britt had the satisfaction of proving her mother-in-law wrong.
Yet, two generations hence, brothers born into the Sharp family, great-grandchildren Annie Britt Sharp would never know, and ironically bearing the same names as her lost twins, John and James, would meet tragedy unfathomable to the family.
The recovery of Mother, as James Sharp had taken to calling his wife, signaled the beginning of a long, happy period for the Sharps. In Reidsville, James Sharp had found the success that long had eluded him. His hard work and pugnacious nature in the courtroom earned him respect and affection and caused the townspeople to defer to him and call him Mr. Jim.
“Mr. Jim was what they called a fighting lawyer,” his friend, W. C. “Mutt” Burton wrote of him in the Greensboro Daily News. “He gave his all to every case he took, thousand-dollar retainer or two-dollar fee, it didn’t matter. The pits of perdition could stir no blacker scowl than which darkened Mr. Jim’s brow at the merest suggestion that his client might be guilty as charged.”
“He makes the fur fly when wrought up,” the Reidsville Review said more succinctly.
Without question, Mr. Jim had a theatrical flair. A dapper man of medium height and build, he wore starched collars, bow ties, and wire-rimmed glasses. He was never without a hat outdoors—straw bowlers and Panamas in summer, fedoras in winter. Every morning as he left for work, his wife pinned a fresh flower in his lapel. His appearance, his conviction of the innocence of all his clients (“He just assumed that anybody who showed the good judgment to engage him as a lawyer had to be of good character,” explained Mutt Burton), his booming voice and emphatic way of speaking had their effects on juries. Many responded favorably to his familiar denunciation of the state’s case: “There is not one eye-oh-ta of evidence…”
Mr. Jim’s natural inclinations and talent for oratory led him to politics, and in 1925 and again in 1927 he served in the state Senate. But the pay was short and the time away from his practice costly, and after he lost his new Nash touring car in a garage fire in Raleigh, he decided there must be less expensive ways to serve his community. Later, he ran for the office of solicitor and for the position for which he hungered most, superior court judge, only to find defeat. He won the rural vote but lost in Reidsville, where his independent spirit had not found favor with the paternalistic American Tobacco Company, which dominated the town. He took his defeats without bitterness, however, and remained a strong force in the county’s Democratic Party.
Denied elective positions, he sought others, serving as county attorney, president of the Chamber of Commerce, and president of the county Farm Bureau (“He gets all the honors that don’t pay anything,” his practical mother observed). He was a Mason and a dedicated member of the fraternal Junior Order of United American Mechanics. For a while, because he loved the game, be even volunteered as treasurer of the local minor league baseball team, the Luckies, paying the players and going to every home game to retrieve the receipts. His wife had no taste for baseball, but she always went with him because she worried about him coming home alone with all that money.
Despite all of his duties, Mr. Jim still longed for the land, and several times, over his wife’s objections, he mortgaged his house to buy farms, which he usually allowed tenants to farm on shares. Often, though, afternoon found him slipping away from the office to putter in his fields.
Over all else, Mr. Jim treasured family. To his family he was utterly dedicated, and his wife and children worshiped him. But in the big house on Lindsey Street it was Annie Britt Sharp who reigned over the family’s daily life.
A short, thin woman with long, dark hair that she loved for her daughters to comb before she wrapped it atop her head, Annie Britt Sharp was blessed with a gentle, sweet disposition and complete devotion to her family. She loved birds and flowers (“I’m an outdoor girl,” she’d say) and books and music, and she worked, as the family put it, “like a Turk” for her brood. Heralded for her cooking, she prepared three big meals a day on a wood range in a poorly ventilated kitchen, baking bread and cakes and pies between, and on summer days she often emerged for a breath of fresh air, glistening with sweat, her clothes clinging to her. She worked in the garden, canned its bounty, churned butter, and made all of her own and her children’s clothing and all of the family’s sheets, pillow cases, and curtains, often embroidering them with fancy designs. She was the first up in the morning to stir the fires, the last to bed at night. The family often went to sleep to the hum of her sewing machine.
She looked constantly for ways to cut costs, reminding her children to stop dripping faucets, flick off lights, close doors to retain heat. “We can’t help Daddy make a living,” she said. “The only way we can help is by saving.”
She had little social life outside the home except for attending meetings with her husband and school activities for her children. She was grade mother for all of her children’s classes and an active member of the PTA. “I had so many in school at one time that at PTA meetings I stood so much at room count that I became a laughingstock,” she told an interviewer on being named Reidsville’s Mother of the Year.
To avoid conflict with Grandma Sharp, the family belonged to no church. Grandma Sharp believed there was only one way to Heaven and that was the Primitive Baptist way, which did not condone frills such as Sunday school. Her daughter-in-law, reared a Methodist, wouldn’t accept that. She wanted her children to attend Sunday school and took them every week to Main Street Methodist Church. The children knew to make no mention of it when they went on regular Sunday afternoon visits to Grandma’s house in the country. James Sharp raised no objections and even sometimes attended services at the Methodist church with his wife, although he usually picked apart the sermons at the Sunday dinner table. He couldn’t completely accept the Primitive Baptist doctrine, but he faithfully attended the monthly meetings of Reidsville’s small Primitive Baptist church and, ever the devoted son, regularly took his mother to her overnight associational meetings. “Your grandma would just curl up and die if she didn’t get to go to association,” Annie Britt told her children.
It was Mama who taught the children social graces, saw that they attended to their chores and studies, insisted that they get musical training, read to them from such works as Uncle Remus and the poetry of Edgar Guest, her favorite (when he came to lecture in nearby Greensboro, her husband took her to hear him, creating great excitement in the family). It was Mama who sang to them in the porch swing on summer afternoons, songs such as “Jimmy Crack Corn,” and “Froggy Went a Courtin’,” sometimes sad love songs that always made Louise run into the house in tears. It was Mama, too, who was the disciplinarian, a firm believer in “Dr. Switch.” James Sharp never raised a hand to any of his children. A simple inflection of his voice was all he needed to instill quiet and obedience.
Quiet was not a customary condition in the big house with its echo-producing, high-ceilinged rooms. “Chatter-box,” Mama called the house, because it was always alive with children’s voices, not only those of her own but of their friends as well. The house was a community gathering spot for ice-cream churnings and watermelon cuttings, candy pullings and popcorn poppings.
The Sharp children were taught honesty above all virtues. Industry and family pride were close behind. They knew that much was expected of them, and all became achievers and such proud defenders of integrity and family that some would consider them haughty. There was never any question that they would attend college. Both parents were determined that all of their children would get the higher education they had been denied, and that all, male and female, would go forth trained for careers, prepared to make their own ways.
Susie, the substitute mother, the
one to whom the other children always turned for decisions, was perhaps most studious of all. Scrap, she was called in her younger days, because of her love for brightly colored bits of cloth. Susie-Boosie-Stix-Stax-Stoosie, her sisters called her when Susie turned her scathing sarcasm on them. She wanted to be her father’s stenographer long before she could pronounce the word. In high school she tried out for the girl’s basketball team, failed, and turned to the debating team, which was coached by Judge Allen Gwyn, who had won the judgeship her father coveted. “He praised me to the skies, and I worked like a dog,” Susie remembered. She became a star on the debating team, and her father often drove her and the other team members to their matches in his second Nash touring car. So great were her skills that many people told her she should become a lawyer, like her father. “After a while,” she recalled, “I just went along with it.” She graduated as salutatorian of the Reidsville High School Class of 1924 and entered the Woman’s College of North Carolina, twenty-five miles away in Greensboro, taking courses designed to lead her to law school. At that time, no undergraduate degree was required to enter law school, and her plan was to spend two years at WC, as Woman’s College was called, before transferring to law school at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. The next child, Sallie, was five years behind her, and Susie knew that her parents couldn’t afford to have more than one child in college at a time. Susie was the only female in her law school class of sixty, only the fourth in the history of the school. An honor student, an editor of the Law Review, she passed the bar exam and was granted her license to practice a year before she got her degree in 1929. She joined her father in his work, becoming the first female lawyer in the history of Rockingham County. Her reception by the townspeople was wary. For years, the family would tell the story of the old black man who came to James Sharp’s office shortly after Susie joined his practice. “Are you that lady lawyer?” he asked. “Indeed, I am,” she said, thinking he might be a client. “What can I do for you?” “Nothing, ma’am,” he replied. “I just wanted to see what you looked like.”
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