Going to School in Black and White

by Cindy Waszak Geary

  My parents and I were also worried about the quality of my education. Though it embarrasses me to say this now, there was a perception that black teachers would not be as good as white teachers, and that they would not hold us to the same high academic standards as those in the predominantly white schools in other districts. I was a serious student, and academics were important to me. I worried that I would fall behind my white peers at other schools whom I would be competing with for college admission in three years.

  * * *

  On my first day of school at Hillside—and every school day for the next three years—my mother drove me and my friend and neighbor, Judith, to school in the morning and picked us up in the afternoon. Though “busing” became synonymous with desegregation in the 1970s, busing was not an essential feature of the Durham plan for junior high or senior high school students. I could have gotten vouchers to take the city bus—a trip that would have required changing buses in downtown Durham—but my parents vetoed that plan (and I didn’t argue with them) because of their worries about safety and the time it would have taken me to get to and from school.

  I had never even seen the Hillside school building before “the letter” brought me to my first day of classes there. It was no farther from where we lived than Durham High, but it was in a part of town we never had any reason to visit. When we drove up that first day, we saw a big brick building with lots of students, black and white but mostly black, standing around outside waiting for the bell to ring. The building was not very different in appearance from Durham High School, other than possibly being a little older. If you walked through it while it was empty of students, I doubt there would be anything about it that would have made you think, “This is the black high school.” Even if you looked from the front steps out at the houses that bordered Hillside’s campus, you might wonder which middle-class neighborhood this was and be surprised you had not seen it before.

  That first muggy September morning at Hillside, my mother marked our arrival at my new school with her usual lump-in-the-throat, tear-in-the-eye goodbye, and a series of “behave yourself,” “be safe,” “stay away from trouble” admonitions. I was well practiced in being at a new school, and whatever her reservations about the whole situation were, she was sure I would be all right; I’m sure I thought so, too. Not because I was especially outgoing or self-confident. On the contrary, it was because I was shy and did not want to stand out—I was happy to go unnoticed and fit in and do what high school students do, whatever that turned out to be. I stepped out of our blue Pontiac that morning focused on finding my way into this new and different world.

  Photo courtesy of Shepard Yearbook, 1969-70

  LaHoma Smith in seventh grade

  Photo courtesy of Rogers-Herr Yearbook, 1969-70

  Cindy Waszak in ninth grade

  3—Growing Up Black in Durham Before Desegregation

  Three

  Growing Up Black in Durham Before Desegregation

  LaHoma

  I was born in Durham—delivered at Lincoln Hospital on Fayetteville Street, eight blocks from our house. Almost all Negro children needing to be birthed in Durham and surrounding areas were born in Lincoln Hospital. Lincoln was initially financed by the Duke family, and it was commonly believed they provided the money to ensure that white Southerners would be protected from diseases that might be contracted from their Negro cooks and maids. So even though my mother had been working as an LPN at Duke Hospital for several years, she could not give birth to me there. Duke did not open its doors to an integrated patient population until many years later. Duke Hospital also had black janitors, orderlies, technicians, and cooks in the cafeteria. Black employees, yes; black patients, no.

  The day I was born, my mother drove herself to the hospital because my father was already at work in Chapel Hill, and it was impossible to get word to him that she was in labor. He learned of my birth when he got home later that evening. I spent my first night home from the hospital at the home of my godparents, John O. and Mary H. Smith. The Smiths, no blood relation, have cared for and looked after my parents and me all my life.

  * * *

  My mother, Jessie, met Mrs. Smith in 1948 at Hawley High School in Creedmoor, North Carolina—approximately one mile from where I live today. My mother was a student, and Mrs. Smith was the cute, poised, young, substitute teacher, who, according to my mother, didn’t take any monkey business from her pupils. She was always impeccably dressed and feminine, belying the depth of her intellect and force of her opinions.

  My mother, who had grown up on a farm and labored in tobacco fields as a sharecropper all her young life, longed to become a nurse, but there were no nursing schools for colored girls in that rural area. If she wanted to become a nurse, she would have to move to the big city of Durham. However, the culture of the late 1940s did not usually permit or make it easy for single young Negro women to live independently. So my grandmother implored the worldly Mrs. Smith (who had made her home two blocks from North Carolina Central University in a neighborhood of other intellectually gifted Negro educators) to let my mother stay with her while she attended nursing school. After she and her husband, Mr. Smith, discussed the request, they agreed to allow my mother to rent a room while she completed her schooling as part of the first classes of Negro women to become LPNs at Duke Hospital. Fifty years later, Duke would honor the living members of that group in a ceremony and dinner for their significant roles as “Trailblazers” in Duke’s history.

  * * *

  One day in early March 1950, my mother began her usual routine, checking in on the new patients and emptying bedpans. These were still the early days of introducing the young Negro nurses to the all-white patient population. Sometimes the patients expressed their displeasure at having these colored girls enter their room or assist with their hygienic care. So it happened on this early spring morning that a particularly unsatisfied white man had berated Mom for getting too close to him when she tried to remove his bed pan full of urine. Apologizing for upsetting him, she turned to get out of the room as quickly as she could, trying to avoid his hate-filled rant.

  In her haste, she didn’t notice the oversize hospital bed being steered down the hall by a young male orderly (who would today be referred to as a medical technician). The two collided, and Mom spilled urine all over him. She apologized to the as-yet-unknown man, tears flowing, and kneeled to pick up the pan. She looked up again to seek forgiveness from the person she had run into. She later recounted that she thought that this was the worst day of her life.

  Luckily, she told me, there wasn’t a patient on the bed. But that wasn’t the only thing that changed her fortunes that day. As she looked at the young guy trying to assess the damage to his clothes and himself, she saw that he didn’t seem angry. In fact, he was kind of amused. He started laughing, and “Boy,” my mother recalled, “was he good looking—a Negro Clark Gable, mustache and all.” We have lots of photos of Adolphus, my daddy. She wasn’t lying about his looks. The rest of the fairy-tale romance happened quickly. Courtship, love, and then marriage six months later. She was 21; he was 23. Unable to afford a big wedding, they got married in the living room of the Smiths’ house. I came along seven years later.

  Although they had managed to save enough to put a down payment on a new house on Plum Street, my young parents were still living paycheck-to-paycheck, and they did not have heat in their new home. They eventually brought me to the 1,400-square foot, three-bedroom, one-bath rancher at the intersection of Plum and Lawson Street in Southeast Durham. It was an all-Negro neighborhood of working-class families that had first broken ground there in the early 1950s. My parents were one of the first families to buy a house in the new development. Both with regular jobs, my parents were able to take out a $35,000 mortgage for their little house with the dirt driveway.

  * * *

  My mother had two failed pregnancies before my arrival. She tried once again after me, but to no avail, so by the age of 3, I had been rais
ed in a household as an only child with a lot of doting adults looking after me. About that time, however, my aunt and her husband were going through an ugly separation. She had also just given birth to her 10th child. I was too young to know exactly what was going on, but the aftermath of this turmoil resulted in the sudden appearance in our household of my cousin, and now brother, Rudy.

  Rudy was about 2 years old, a scrawny little guy who was probably just as confused as I was about this new living arrangement and separation from his nine brothers and sisters. I doubt my mother and her sisters fully understood the impact of what they decided to do, but there is no doubt that family came first, and as I became more aware, I respected their decision to keep their sister’s children together in the family. We are bound forever as cousin siblings.

  * * *

  Over the years, Rudy and I had been in most of the houses on the first block of Plum Street for one reason or another. We knew everyone on the 700 block of Plum Street and many people on Sima, Lawson, Bernice, and Bacon streets nearby. Boys and girls played together on the corners and in the streets, and we knew each other by name; we knew their siblings’ and parents’ names, too. They were mostly two-parent families—families such as the Thorpes (whose son invited us to his birthday parties only to beat us up), the Fields, the Marables, the Bostons, the Roysters, the Davises. All the fathers would cut grass on Saturday mornings in the contest for most beautiful yard. They shared conversations on front lawns and across driveways about clipping hedges and bushes, and trimming weeds around the sidewalks that provided easy access from one end of the street to the other.

  Our immediate next-door neighbors were the Longs, who ran a florist shop. Next to them was Mr. Long’s elderly mother, Ms. Minnie. One day I was out in my yard playing, and Ms. Minnie called me over.

  “Honey child,” she said. “I hear you doing real good in school.”

  I did not have to think long to know where she had heard that. There were no secrets among the adults in my life, and my good grades were a source of pride for my parents.

  “Yes ma’am,” I confirmed.

  “Well, come over here a minute; I got something I want you to do for me.”

  So I ran over to her house because she always had a treat, something sugary to give me, and I was a willing subject. Fifth-grade report cards had just come out, and I was hoping she had some sweet potato pie for one smart little girl. I climbed the steps to her screened porch where she kept an eye over the neighborhood. Ms. Minnie was our “neighborhood watch” before that phrase was coined.

  I opened the door and waited for her to hand me something deliciously sweet, usually a piece of cake or pie in a brown paper bag—but she didn’t give whatever it was to me right away.

  “Do you know how to write?” she asked.

  I could not tell whether she was serious.

  “Yes ma’am.” Of course I knew how to write, I thought to myself; who doesn’t know how to write?

  Miss Minnie said, “I need you to write a letter to a friend of mine who is in a rest home and I probably won’t be able to see her soon. Can you do that?”

  “Yes ma’am, I sure can,” I replied. I noticed that she already had a few sheets of stationery lying beside her chair.

  “Take this paper, and let’s see how you do.”

  So I sat down and wrote the first of many letters that summer until Ms. Minnie died. At first I thought that Ms. Minnie, who my Mom tells me was in her 70s then, was too old to write letters, but it became increasingly obvious that Ms. Minnie could not read. I later learned (but not from Ms. Minnie—she had too much pride) that they did not teach black girls to read when she was growing up, and the responsibilities of working and raising a family surpassed any personal ambitions to learn how to read or write.

  Ms. Minnie would feign supervision of my work to see if I was writing down everything she told me, but I realized that she was admiring my neat cursive writing on her beautiful sheets of paper. She would smile and give her approval, “Yes, it looks all right,” before I could seal and address the envelope.

  We fell into a routine. Ms. Minnie would call out to me when she saw me in the yard, as she had that first time, and I would go over to write letters to her family and friends. In the letters she described her health and her church activities, and she commented on the weather. She slowly paced herself to make sure she included all the highlights of her daily existence on Plum Street.

  Once in a while, Ms. Minnie would reach for a foil-wrapped bag. She would take a little pinch and shove it into her mouth. As she pondered the next line or waited for me to read what she had already dictated, she would shift her body to the left to spit out a little black juice from her snuff-filled lips. She dabbed at the corner of her mouth with the handkerchief lying across her lap. I didn’t like the odor from the spittle, but I got used to it. Besides, Ms. Minnie always paid me for my letter writing—usually 25 cents, or whatever coins she had in her change purse. And 25 cents could buy a lot of candy and comic books in 1968.

  * * *

  Two blocks over from my house was McDougald Terrace, one of several all-black housing projects in Durham. I spent a lot of time there because my favorite babysitters were the Prince sisters. My mother loved and trusted them. My brother and I would go there after school and wait until my father came home to pick us up. There were always lots of kids to play with and never a lack of fun things to do and places to explore. McDougald Terrace is where I learned a lot of important facts of life, including the truth about Santa Claus. Did I really believe that big fat white guy in a red suit was messing around at night, going from house to house in our neighborhoods? Spoken in those plain words, their logic was hard to argue with.

  The residents of Plum Street and McDougald Terrace were not very different from each other, and any conceivable differences were not easily discernible. I didn’t see or feel a distinction. To the contrary, there was a strong sense of community, one established by the proximity of our domiciles. We also were part of the larger racial superstructure of these neighborhoods that effectively segregated our daily existence from white Durham through the schools we attended, the churches we prayed in, the stores where we shopped, and the social and civic activities in which we were engaged. Black factory workers and police officers, black janitors and custodians lived next door to black teachers and preachers. We were all members of the separate racial cocoons that divided Durham.

  * * *

  One of the points of pride on Plum Street was College View Nursery School—today it would be called a preschool. College View was a private preschool for “those black children destined for greatness,” as Ms. Alston, the founder, and the parents, family and friends who invested their money to send us there would say. My brother and I both attended CVN, which competed with Scarborough Nursery for the best and most promising young black children in Durham.

  Many of the children at College View were from my neighborhood, but children of the black teachers and small business owners and professionals from other parts of Durham came, too. Ms. Alston was known as a strict disciplinarian with high standards of academic preparation and conduct for her 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old college-bound protégés. We were introduced to basic concepts of reading, writing, and arithmetic. We also prepared theater performances for our parents, who shared in the costs for costumes and stage props, and who helped finance our day trips around town to black-owned businesses and professionals.

  Ms. Alston, typical of most black adults, believed in the Old Testament’s stricture “spare the rod, spoil the child,” and the rod was not spared on my behalf. Ironically, if I complained or even mentioned to my parents that I had been punished, they would thank Ms. Alston for correcting my breach of conduct and then take me home to discipline me again. As a quick learner, I tried to keep these episodes to a minimum. Ms. Alston never had too many problems with me. Respecting adults and their rules served me well throughout primary and secondary school days.

  Corporal punishmen
t, or physical punishment for bad behavior, was the norm in many black homes and schools when I was growing up in Durham. I learned later through academic literature and reflections with friends that this was not as common a practice in many white families. Some social psychologists have posited that these punishment behaviors were institutionalized in black communities as a way to instill fear of authorities and to protect their children from straying from accepted rules of behavior (5). The best way to ensure that their children would be safe from Jim Crow laws, attitudes and dispositions, both written and unwritten codes of conduct prevalent throughout the South, was to make sure that we were aware of how to obey rules and what would happen to us if we didn’t obey them. My friends and I serve as witnesses of the application of this theory. Ms. Alston was the second (my parents were the first) of my many teachers who would continue to reinforce this code of conduct.

  * * *

  Preschool now conquered, I was ready to move to my next educational challenge—first grade. But I needed new school dresses—not pre-school play clothes. Because this was such a special occasion, my mother said she would buy, not sew, my new clothes. We also bought pencils, paper, erasers, and a book bag to hold all the supplies that my mother was sure I needed. Mom took me to school that first day seemingly without a second thought. The teacher gave me a bright smile, asked my name and had me stand on a scale to measure my height and weight. She told me to find a seat.

  I looked around for a familiar face from College View, but seeing none, I just stood there, not wanting to make a mistake with this first big decision of elementary school. I stood there for a little too long, and I heard the teacher repeat herself, “Sit down please.” As I finally moved toward an empty chair, a girl looked up and smiled at me. So I sat down and smiled back at her. Angela, or Skeeter as I would learn to call her, and I became fast friends and are still friends today.