by Wyomia Tyus
And then Ben Brown was there, and he was saying, “We got to get you someplace to stay. Everything is going to be okay.” Those kinds of things. The fire department people had come, but there was nothing they could do. There were no fire hydrants or anything, so whatever water they had was on the truck, and it wasn’t enough. All we could do was stand there and watch it burn.
The neighbors had managed to drag out a cedar wardrobe and the chair that my brother had had since he was two, which he still has. They saved about four things, and not the things that were important to me. Watching the flames, I kept thinking about our marble collection. But none of the trunks with our clothes or our marbles and other possessions were saved.
For my parents, the big question was: “What are we going to do now?” We had no insurance, none of that. Ben Brown owned the house; we were just renters—well, sharecroppers, basically. Tenant farmers. I really don’t know how that worked. We didn’t pay rent; my dad worked the farm and that was that. He must have got paid something, but what it was, I don’t know. We had lost everything—we didn’t even have any clothes except the clothes on our backs—and we didn’t know what we were going to do or where we were going to stay.
Fortunately, friends and family came and helped. I stayed with a childhood friend of mine, Elaine, my mom stayed with her mother and her youngest sister, and my dad and two brothers stayed with other friends. By the end of the week, Elaine’s family had found a place for us in the city. It had one bedroom, where my brothers slept while my dad, mom, and I slept in the living room; they had a bed and I had a rollaway, which was okay, because even though we had that big farmhouse, we were used to sharing. Lack of living space was not the problem. The problem was what losing the house had done to my dad.
We don’t know if it was bad wiring that caused the fire because they didn’t investigate things like that, and I don’t know if they talked to my father about it, but we were never told anything about what happened or how it happened. We never thought that it was foul play; we had lived there for my whole life, and if someone wanted to chase us out, they could have done it many years before. It was more that the fire was just too much for my dad. Everything he had saved for us was gone. We had a desk—a secretary, an old secretary—and people used to see it and offer him money for it, and he would say, “No—this is for my kids! I’m leaving it to them.” The secretary was not saved.
My father never recovered from losing the house. He was already ill, which we didn’t find out until after the fire. He had a thyroid condition, which they call Graves’ disease now, but then we called it goiters. At first he had a lump under his neck, and then his eyes started to bulge, but he wouldn’t go to a doctor; he just would not. When finally he went, the doctors were surprised that he was still walking around living because he was that sick. But he always said he wasn’t. “I’m going to be fine,” he would tell us, “just fine.”
He didn’t work every day after that; he was too sick, and all his spirit, everything, just left him. You could see that he was less of a person, less of a man. Because his promise to us, to his children, was, “As long as I’m living, you’re never going to have to work a day in your life because I’m going to take care of you.” He always wanted to make sure we were taken care of, that we were safe, but after the fire, he could not take care of us anymore, and the next year he passed away. The fire killed him. You could see it.
* * *
My dad passing, for me, was just like the fire for him. I couldn’t recover from it. I became a real recluse. That’s when I went to one-word answers and not communicating very much.
It was hard for my mom because she and I never had a really strong mother-daughter relationship. My relationship was always with my father. If I got sick or frightened at night, he would get up and take care of me. He would lie next to me on the bed, and he would talk to me, or he would sit and rock me to sleep. It was not so much that my mom and I had a rocky relationship; we just weren’t that close, which made it even more difficult for me when my dad passed. Even when he was still living, people used to say, “Anything ever happened to that man, that child is never going to make it.”
When he died, it was kind of like that. I just couldn’t think in my mind anything besides, What am I going to do? To have two devastating things happen right there, back to back, made me break. I just went totally inside myself. It lasted forever, ten years, I think—maybe right up until the time I ran in my second Olympics. And it would have lasted longer if it had not been for Mr. Temple.
Chapter 2.
“You Just Ran Yourself into Some Shoes . . .”
After my father passed away, I didn’t want to go home once the school day ended because I knew he wouldn’t be there, so I started playing basketball. Then I didn’t have anything to do once basketball season ended, so I started running track.
There were not a lot of options for women in sports at that time, and the options we did have were especially restricted because they were for girls. When I started playing basketball, girls couldn’t run up and down the court—you had to play half-court: three guards on one side, three forwards on the other, and you could only dribble three times before you had to pass or you’d be called for traveling. By the time I was a junior—maybe a senior—in high school, they allowed one person to roam from one side to the other. Of course I was designated to do that. I was not a shooter, but I could run up and down the court fast, and I could pass the ball. I had played like that already with my brothers; I always played that way when I wasn’t playing with the girls’ team.
Playing with the boys was what prepared me to be the athlete I became. And for me, playing with the boys was no big deal. Boys and girls are all about the same when they’re close in age and haven’t hit puberty. It’s just a matter of who is best at doing whatever it is you’re doing, not whether you’re a boy or a girl. And I always had that competitive edge; I wanted to win, to be the best. “I can do it better!” I would say. “Let me try!”
My brothers knew I was good, I guess, but I don’t think they thought about it that way. They just thought: This is what you do. If you played, you had to be better than the next person—you had to hold up your end. It didn’t matter if you were a girl or a boy. Everybody had to be that way. Or you got your butt whooped and then you had to take it and keep going. There were a couple of kids that were crybabies, but we always felt: That’s on you.
I didn’t win all the time, competing against my brothers; there were things that I was really good at, and there were things that they were really good at. For example, I was not very good at playing baseball; I could play outfield because I could chase the balls, but I wasn’t a good hitter. I didn’t like baseball anyway. Basketball, I was okay at, but like I said, I couldn’t shoot. We played football a lot, and I got knocked out a couple of times. My brothers would tell me, “Don’t run here!” And I would run there anyway. I knew what I wanted to do, and I knew I was pretty good at playing football. But when it came to riding a bicycle or climbing trees, I was good at that. And when it came to running, I was very good at that.
My brothers and I fought a lot because they always thought they could beat me. Which in some things they could. But I would never be the person to stop. They could knock me down twenty times, and I’d be back up fighting. “Could you just stay down?” they would always say. But I never would. My attitude was: You’re going to know you’ve been in this war. I might get the worst of it, but you’re going to know that you’ve been in a war. They taught me all of that. And it’s probably part of why I got my gold medals. My brothers always say they taught me everything about how to be tough.
All that ended, of course, when the house burned and we moved into the city. I was in junior high, which at the time only lasted for one year—the seventh grade. After that, in eighth grade, I started high school. By that time, I’d had all those years running and playing on the farm, so I guess it would have made sense for me to go out for track even if my dad hadn
’t died and I hadn’t needed somewhere to go besides home. But like I said: when I started running, it was just something to do after basketball season. Running kept me busy. It kept me out of trouble.
And I could run. I would go out on the track, and the coach would see me run, and she would say to me, “Can you run the sprints? Can you run the 100?”
In the beginning, I did not run the 100; I never ran any of the sprints. I high-jumped, long-jumped, and ran the hurdles. Those were the things I wanted to do, and I did them. I had no form, regardless of what I was doing; when I high-jumped, it was just sheer I can get over that bar! I’m a visual person, and I would watch someone jump and see what they did, and then go and almost duplicate it. Sometimes I would be good at it, and sometimes I would not, but basically I was high-jumping.
Same thing with the hurdles. No one taught me how to hurdle. I would run, almost stop, jump over, and then, because I had a lot of speed, I could make up for the stops. But hurdles are hard, and I finally came to the realization that there had to be a better way to get down that track—without banging up my knees! That’s how I started running the sprints: because running hurdles was brutal. Absolutely brutal.
Even after I had figured that out, I still wasn’t very consistent. I would only practice when I felt like it. Some days, I would just sit and look around and watch other people practice. Then when I did practice, my practice was pretty halfhearted. I knew enough to know that you had to jog around the field and run wind sprints, but I didn’t put in much effort. I don’t know why the coach let me get away with it, but she did. What could she say? Right from the start, I was winning. And I probably went to practice more than anybody else on the team. I and one other girl, Frances Dallas, lived walking distance from the track, but the other girls rode the bus. We were supposed to practice until five, though the bus would leave at four, so most girls weren’t ever at the whole practice. Mainly, though, the difference between them and me was that even when I was there, I was not all there. I had to do something to occupy myself, yet my heart wasn’t in it.
In high school, we had little track meets: Black schools would run against other Black schools in the surrounding towns and counties. At the end of the season, they had what they called the state meet at Fort Valley, Georgia, and that’s where all the different schools came to compete. There was a lot more competition: girls who were much better than us as well as some who were not. Girls from my school usually didn’t qualify for the Fort Valley meet, but my first year out I qualified for the sprints, and our relay team qualified as well, so my coach wanted us to go. I didn’t think my mom would let me, and I knew that if my dad had been living, I would definitely have stayed home. He was never big on us leaving; I could not spend the night away from home, ever.
But he was gone, and my mom let me go, and because I won there, I got to go to the national championship, which was held at Tuskegee University. Tuskegee was well known for sports and especially track—not to mention George Washington Carver and the Tuskegee Airmen. Alice Marie Coachman, the first Black woman to win an Olympic gold medal,[12] was from Tuskegee, and Tuskegee and Tennessee State’s women’s programs were pretty much similar; you knew that if you wanted to go to college and you wanted to be part of track, that’s where you went.
To qualify for the meet at Fort Valley, you had to run a certain time; to go on to Tuskegee, you had to place first or second at Fort Valley. I was the only girl from our school who got to go to Tuskegee. Frances Dallas didn’t qualify, and I think that was partly because she had gotten herself a boyfriend. There was a lot of backward thinking happening at that time. My school wasn’t going to let me go either, because I was a girl, and girls never went, and no girls had ever qualified before, so how could I go? Where was I going to stay? Who was going to take me? If I’d been a boy, it would not have been a problem; boys from my school had gone and were going, but according to the school leaders, I could not be in the car with the boys.
I wasn’t about to fight for it; I was not that engaged. But my coach fought, and she won, and that’s how I ended up going to Tuskegee in a station wagon with the boys. It was one of those extra-large station wagons, the kind that takes a long time to drive by you, with lots of room in the back. But I got the prime seat up front because of course I couldn’t sit back there with all those boys.
* * *
Fort Valley was where I first saw Edith McGuire competing, and right away I thought, What a pretty runner! She can run so good! At that point, I didn’t know that she had been training with Mr. Temple for one summer. I also didn’t know that Edith had lost her father at an early age, just like me, and that a fire had taken her family home; I wouldn’t find that out until later, when we were at Tennessee State together. At Fort Valley, all I knew was that she was from Atlanta and could really run—that she was running so pretty, and I was running so ugly, just trying to get from one end of the track to the other.
Two other girls from Atlanta, Gloria and Cynthia, had that pretty way of running too. My coach then was Coach Kimbrough, a very tall woman with really bowed legs—if she could have straightened her legs out, I bet she would have been six one. She was a classy type of woman, and when you looked at her you thought, Hmm, how did she get to be a PE teacher?
Coach Kimbrough and I watched the races together, and when she saw those Atlanta girls run she said, “You need to learn how to run like that.”
“Okay,” I said. “Somebody maybe should teach me.”
“You need to look at them,” she said, “and run like they run.”
Coach Kimbrough left at the end of that year, right before I went to Tennessee State for the summer program, and another woman, Miss Susie Bonner, became the coach. Miss Bonner had a little more knowledge about running and tried to help me with my form, but I didn’t really get better until I started to work with Mr. Temple.
Me and my second high school basketball and track coach, Miss Susie Bonner. (Photo courtesy of Fairmont High School, Class of 1963.)
* * *
I ran at Fort Valley in 1961, and that was when Mr. Temple first saw me. He came up to me after my race and started talking to me. I was fifteen, about to turn sixteen, and I was still not talking very much, so all I would say was, “Okay,” and, “Yes sir.” But I heard what he said to me: “I thought you looked really good. You look like you could get a lot better. I think that if you come onto my program, we could work on you. You need some work with your arms.” He told me the program was at Tennessee State, in Nashville, and it would last for a month.
Right away I thought: My mom is not going to let me go. And my dad would not have wanted me to go. I should not be leaving my house. Because my mom would let me go to Fort Valley for a meet, sure, but to go away for a month? To Nashville? That’s not happening, I thought. And how am I going to get there, anyway? All these thing were going through my mind, but I didn’t say anything, not anything at all, and finally he just said, “Well, you’ll be hearing from me.”
He was at Tuskegee too, but I didn’t know he was going to be there. He would do that; he would just go and scout and see who was there and sometimes not talk to anybody beforehand.
After my race at Tuskegee, he came up to me and said, “You looked a lot better today than at Fort Valley, so you’re doing well. You need to continue to do well, and not just on the track. You need to continue to do well at school too. And you need to remember: always be a lady.”
For some reason, that made me like him more; it made me appreciate him. Because it seemed like he was thinking about me and not just about how I could run. After that, he sent a letter to our house saying that he was coming to Griffin to see my mom and talk to her about the program.
My mom asked a friend of hers who had graduated from college and had kids in college, Miss Jessie Lee, to be there, to make sure that we understood everything that was involved. We sat in the living room when Mr. Temple came, my mom and Jessie Lee on the couch, Mr. Temple in a chair, and me cross-legged on the
floor, wearing my jeans, of course. Mr. Temple talked the most, explaining what it would be like for me to go to Tennessee State for the summer.
“It’s not going to be an easy job,” he told us. “It’s a lot of hard work.” He said there was a right way and a wrong way, and then there was his way, and if girls in the program couldn’t do things his way, “they go home with a comic book and an apple.” That’s what he would say: a comic book and an apple—so that you would have something to read and something to eat.
All I could think was, Oh. My. God!
He stayed for what seemed like a long time, more than an hour, going over the different points of his program. “You always got to be a young lady, got to have good morals, no getting in trouble. This is what I expect of the girls in my program.”
Oh wow, I thought.
Finally he said, “Well, what do you think?” And then he just looked at me.
What do I think?! “I think I would like to go,” I said. “I think—yeah.”
“Well, all right,” said Mr. Temple, and then he looked at my mom.
She just said, “Yes.”
They both—she and Miss Jessie Lee—thought that it was a good idea. That’s the presence that Mr. Temple had. But also, I think that it was more that my mom knew I needed to be away. Because I was still having trouble with losing my dad. I was still struggling and still not talking much, and she would tell me, “You need to talk more. You need to be yourself more.”