by Anita Hill
Eleven of my brothers and sisters attended segregated schools. In 1958 JoAnn was the first to begin her education at the integrated Eram School. Neither she nor I, who followed her in 1962, ever attended segregated schools. Interestingly, Eram School was integrated because of fiscal necessity rather than because of the mandates of the law. Eram was a rural school district whose size in a dwindling farm community would have required its closing without the numbers of black children who still resided in the area. Rather than close, the board made the choice to integrate in 1958, and Carlene, John, JoAnn, and Ray began attending there. Prior to attending Eram, Ray had been in classes at Lone Tree.
All of my brothers, except for one, chose to go into the military following high school. My parents waited patiently at home as each went off to duty. Amazingly, only one, Albert, Jr., was involved in combat. The promises of the military to give young men the opportunity to see the world was fulfilled in my brothers. The promise to promote their educational development was not as readily fulfilled. Yet each enlisted in a branch of the service one after the other, until my youngest brother, Ray, broke the chain. Ray chose to go directly into college.
My school life and activities were typical of girls in rural Oklahoma in the 1960s and 1970s. When I began my formal education, there were five children at home. Carlene, John, Ray, JoAnn, and I each day began with the near-half-mile walk to the bus stop. Ray, JoAnn, and I traveled north to the two-room elementary school at Eram. Carlene and John, though they earlier had attended Eram Grade School, were bused south to the segregated high school in Grayson. At Eram grades one through four studied together in one room with a single teacher and grades five through eight with another. In each classroom four rows of aqua-blue seats with attached desktops faced a single blackboard. Each row was designated for a single grade, which averaged about eight students. Next to the blackboard was a huge gas heater that heated the entire room. Due to my nearsightedness, I often sat near the front and close to the heater. Accordingly, I was often scalding hot while my classmates in the rear shivered.
My first-grade teacher was Mrs. Johnson, whose husband taught in the other classroom, where my brother was. Later Mrs. Broadhead, then Mrs. Morton and Miss Pope—all women, all white—taught each of the four classes in her charge each of the required subjects. Mrs. Harris and her husband, Lee Wade Harris, rounded out the school staff as cook and bus driver/janitor, respectively. Under Mrs. Broadhead and her successors, I excelled, often doing the next grade’s work in order to be challenged. But the highlight of my promotion from grade to grade was that it brought me away from the inner wall and the cloakroom and closer to the outer wall of the schoolroom and the area I loved most. I knew from grade one that, once in the fourth grade, I would be allowed to sit next to the wall. I could hardly wait—for underneath the large windows was the room’s library. There, lining the shelves were the encyclopedias, geography books, and the Nancy Drew mystery series just waiting for me to finish my work.
In grades one through three, when I finished an assignment early, I would ask permission to cross the room to the library. But by the fourth grade I could simply reach out and pull whatever I wanted from the shelf without leaving my seat or drawing attention to my idleness. I liked my schoolwork and did well in it, but I loved reading the library books even more. Perhaps they were a greater incentive to complete my assignments quickly and correctly. By the end of fourth grade, having read all of the books in the first library, I was anxious for the promotion to the next set of books.
The peacefulness of my family life continued through most of my childhood. Yet at about the time when the outer world seemed to be in chaos with war, antiwar demonstrations, civil rights protests and rioting, personal crisis disrupted our idyllic existence. One evening during the fall of 1967, my parents left my sister JoAnn and me alone at home. Usually when my parents had to be away in the evening, we went with them, or one of my older brothers, John or Ray, stayed with us. However, on this night my parents were going to the hospital to visit my Aunt Sadie, who was critically ill from a stroke she had just suffered. My brother John had left home for the air force, and Ray, the only other sibling still at home, was playing in his senior year of high school football. JoAnn was fourteen and I was eleven; by today’s standards of latchkey and otherwise independent children, we were certainly old enough to be left alone for a few hours. Yet this was the first time that I remember we were left alone. Since our closest neighbors were miles away, we felt fairly isolated and we imagined that every dog bark foretold some terrible misfortune about to befall us. We teased each other, laughed, and did our normal sibling squabbling about whose turn it was to wash and whose to dry. Upon finishing our homework and chores we waited for our parents to come home with some news of our aunt.
As the night wore on, the time when we were sure our parents should have been home passed. Our joking and bickering ended and real fear crept in. At midnight the dogs began to bark to warn of a car’s approach. We quickly hid in our parents’ closet until we could be sure that it was really our parents and brother. By this time, we were convinced that the dreaded stranger would arrive before our family. We knew our parents would not knock. Tom Barnett’s knock on the door sent us into a small panic. But the news the neighbor brought was even worse. Our parents and Ray had been in an accident and had been taken to the hospital. Thus began the winter of 1967: Aunt Sadie was in the hospital suffering from a stroke from which she would soon die; my father and mother and brother snatched away without warning in the middle of the night; and my brother John enlisted in the armed forces as a private during the escalation of the Vietnam War.
My mother came home from the hospital within two weeks of the accident. Her major injury was a broken collarbone. After her return home, the household returned to some semblance of normalcy. My father’s injuries, however, were more extensive and severe, including a collapsed lung and a shattered right arm. He had to be taken to the hospital in Tulsa, over an hour by car from where we lived. From my one visit with my father in the hospital, I remember him covered in bandages and strapped to countless sustaining and monitoring devices. Even as a child I knew the reason for the visit: that it might be the last time I saw my father alive. The prognosis for his survival was very poor. We were grateful that my father proved the doctors wrong—he lived—but never spoke of the danger of his condition. After what in a child’s mind seemed an interminable stay in the hospital, he came home for a recovery that lasted throughout the winter. He was in and out of bed, and my mother, my sister, and I were constantly tending his shattered arm. We bathed and massaged it, hoping to revive it from its now paralyzed state, though I never believed that the therapy was adequate for or scientifically related to his full recovery. Still, he did recover partial use of the arm.
In the meantime, the farmwork, which during winter consisted mostly of feeding the cattle and pigs, continued. During the winter of 1967 the work fell on Ray and my mother. This was a precursor for the following winter. That year, with my father ill again and Ray away at school, the chore of feeding over a hundred head of cattle fell on my mother, JoAnn, and me. My mother was the muscle of the operation weighing 130 pounds. At ages fifteen and eleven, neither JoAnn nor I weighed more than 90 pounds. The winter of 1967 was cold and dismal. Often my body quivered—the response of a frightened adolescent who had not yet learned to express such an intense fear of loss.
Everything in my life and in the world seemed completely upended and uncontrollable. I was eleven years old and for the first time ever I was more frightened by the world than I was intrigued by it. Quietly, I had always soaked up life’s experiences. I loved schoolwork; even test taking. In the evening when my chores were completed and before I did my homework, I watched the national news with intense interest. I even enjoyed some, but admittedly not all, of the rigors of farmwork. Now, however, I wanted to retreat.
My life with my family had been more than just the farmwork. My sisters and brothers were my best frien
ds. I rode the bicycle I shared with JoAnn. I played basketball on a dirt court with Ray. On Saturdays when my parents went to town for the family groceries and left us at home, I listened to the 45s that John played for us while Ray and Carlene danced. In the springtime Jo Ann and I picked blackberries along the roadsides. In the fall we fished the mud holes together for crawdads—one of JoAnn’s favorite activities. Even on the farm there were always sounds and sights that were pleasant, bright, and exciting—the greens of the spring peas, the croaking of the tree frogs, the glimmer of the fireflies that we called lightning bugs.
Yet in 1967 and 1968 everything in the bright world of sunshine, green grass, and purple and yellow flowers appeared to be covered with a gray film. Gone was the brother who entertained us with his love of music, the one who went streaming through our house with its seven-foot ceilings playing an imaginary game of basketball. John was gone—first to an air force base in San Antonio, then to Germany, mercifully not Vietnam, where one of his friends from high school had already died. I wrote him, but the letters he sent home could not take the place of his presence or give any assurance that he was safe from the war.
All around me people seemed to speak in hushed tones perhaps due to the fact that my father needed rest and quiet. I had never been a noisy child but I was even more quiet now, believing that it was the only way to save my father’s life. The strain hit us all. My mother was tired and not altogether healed. Each of us carried with us the stress of the injuries and recovery period. Remnants of the stresses remained for months. We could have each retreated into our own hurt, and left alone, perhaps I would have. However, our circumstances did not allow it. We were so accustomed to functioning as a unit that we continued, even in our healing, to do so. Work, church, and school continued. In particular, farmwork had to be done regardless of sickness or death. We continued to attend church. Our neighbors and our community expected it. And Ray, JoAnn, and I continued with school. Our parents’ misfortune and the death of our aunt were no excuse for irresponsibility.
By 1968 my world and the world outside my home and family were changing dramatically. The county school board closed Eram as integration began to happen throughout the school system. I would transfer to Morris for junior high school. Even aside from the integration, going to school in Morris represented major change in my early life. Morris was a town—albeit a small town—with paved streets. It had a bank, a feed store, a hardware store, and a drugstore where, if I were lucky, I could buy ice cream while my mother shopped for groceries at Gale’s Market. Eram was just a school, standing alone, surrounded by fields of hay.
Though Ray started at the segregated Grayson High School, by 1967 he was attending the newly integrated Morris High School, along with JoAnn. Ray’s negative experiences with integration included having to be escorted out of Glenpool, Oklahoma, by local police because the fans there objected to his playing on the Morris High School football team. Amid the racist taunts and jeers his bus was led out of town after his team had won the game.
In my own transfer to Morris, I saw new opportunities—opportunities that were never realized. What I did realize was the signficance of race. My first experience with the tensions of integration occurred in Morris, which, despite the integration of its schools, remained an all-white town. Though not a “sundown” town in the purest sense, no blacks resided in Morris. We bought our groceries there, and went to the post office there, but we did not live there. Even as late as 1983, when a black family started building a home on the outskirts of town, arsonists destroyed it before it could be completed.
But even though the social structure set very real lines of demarcation between blacks and whites, my parents insulated us from extreme forms of racism. I often wonder at how they were able to do so, in a society not unlike the Deep South, where so much racial division still remained. By the time I was born my parents had many years, even generations, of experience living and raising children in a segregated society.
Despite the early Supreme Court challenges to Oklahoma’s racial separatism and despite the fact that the very first lunch counter sit-in took place in Oklahoma City in 1962, much of the civil unrest experienced in the South escaped Oklahoma. Those of us living in rural areas of Oklahoma watched the movement on television and read about it in the newspapers. As a family we watched and waited in silence, though each member, I suspect, wondered how our lives would be changed by what we saw and heard about. I was at home when the announcement of the assassinations came over the airwaves. In April 1968, as we ate our dinner on a balmy evening, reports of Dr. Martin Luther King’s death came on the nightly news. My father spoke of it in knowing terms. It was “predictable,” he declared, given the intense hatred King’s denouncement of segregation had brought. My mother agreed.
We did not customarily talk of politics at home, and though this tragic event provided a rare opportunity, we did not speak of politics then, either. Nor did we speak of the assassination at all the following day at school. In June, with Ray, I watched the news films of the shooting of Robert Kennedy. Still no discussion from my parents of the politics of our times—the times that would change their children’s future. The times were so different than those my parents had known that they knew no language in which to speak about them. My parents’ lives were more like their own parents’ than the lives of their children. Uncertain of the relevance of their observations, they mostly kept quiet. We never discussed why the family never ate at the lunch counter in Newberry’s during our trips to Okmulgee but instead ate our Dairy Queen hamburgers in the car. Or why the rural black folks gathered and shopped at Norman’s Grocery Store rather than the larger and newer Neal’s, where the whites gathered and shopped. Or why black people were always interred by Dyer’s, Ragsdale’s, or Brown’s funeral homes and never one of the white-owned mortuaries, whose names even today I’m not aware of. The civil rights movement was a remote and abstract experience. In Oklahoma we certainly identified with its goal, but its activities never reached the rural areas except over the television.
There were few incidents of physical resistance to the integration at Morris in my experience. When I arrived there as an eighth grader, Ray and the five other black students in his class had paved the way. Though the black boys had opportunities to mainstream in the high school culture in sports, the black girls’ access to the fields of distinction in school culture—cheerleading and homecoming activity—remained limited. None of the black girls were encouraged to participate on the girls’ basketball team, which in Morris had a history of state championships. For me it was all the same. I was not athletic, nor did I think myself beautiful in the homecoming queen way. I had a pleasant round face that from age seven was adorned with glasses thick enough to correct my nearsightedness, and that did not seem to change much with age. I looked and indeed was very bookish. I remained that way during high school and college.
Much of the classwork came easy, the rest I studied so intensely at times that my father worried. The time that I spent talking to my friend Pocahontas Barnett on our recently acquired telephone came only after I had completed my homework. Being bookish paid off, however, as I graduated at the top of my high school class, an honor that had been denied JoAnn. When she graduated from Morris High School three years earlier, she was told that even though her grades technically put her at the top of the class, the fact that she had transferred into the Morris system in the middle of the freshman year made her ineligible to be valedictorian. That honor went instead to her friend Clara Ivy, who, since elementary school, had been used to the top spot in her classes at Morris. JoAnn was made salutatorian. JoAnn, who even by then had developed a pretty good temper, did not complain, though she must have been hurt deeply. When I graduated, none of my classmates seemed surprised or disturbed that I was first in the class, least of all the salutatorian that year, my friend Susie Clark. And next year Susie and I went off to college at Oklahoma State University, in Stillwater, together.
I always kn
ew that I would go to college, though only a few of my classmates from high school would. As you can imagine in a family of our size, a good amount of energy was funneled to me, the youngest child. And along with the energy came an equivalent amount of expectation. Fortunately for me, I enjoyed the experience of being taught and learning from my family. My sister Joyce still teases me about reading over and over again the first book I ever owned. She claims she still remembers all of the lines in Green Eggs and Ham! This is a testament to her patience with me.
Fortunately, I grew up during a time when social forces were such that I might have a better opportunity to realize my family’s and my own expectations. In ways small and large, from school lunch programs to student grants and loans, they enhanced my opportunities for a better life than the one enjoyed by my parents and grandparents. I no doubt have benefited from affirmative action programs, which looked at my race, gender, and background and determined whether I would be admitted. But I am not ashamed of this fact, nor do I apologize for it. Such programs provided me with the opportunity to prove myself, no more, no less. After admission, my success or failure would be determined by my efforts. I do not consider myself either more or less worthy than my colleagues in the same programs.
My parents raised their children to love and leave home because they knew they had no other chance there at a better life. And in just the same order they’d been born, every two years, almost like clockwork, each of my brothers and sisters left home for school or to enter the military. There were few employment opportunities to keep us home. Okmulgee County had, at the time of my birth, a population of approximately 40,000, of which about 7,000 were black. The primary sources of jobs were related to agriculture and were relatively limited. The peanut plant located in Okmulgee, the seat of Okmulgee County, served as the station where most of the local farmers brought their crops for weighing and processing. It provided seasonal work for a few. Work that was dirty and dangerous. Prior to the time of OSHA regulations, several accidents occurred at the plant, one of which, involving the only son in a neighboring family, was fatal. The entire community grieved. As each offered the family condolences, many questioned whether it might have been prevented.