by Byron Pitts
The St. Katharine’s staff member and I, along with my parents, were all sitting in our living room. He asked to speak to my parents privately, but Mother assured him that whatever he had to say was fine to say in front of me. He had actually brought the results of some tests my parents had not yet seen. His words will always ring in my ears.
“I’m sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Pitts. Byron is functionally illiterate.”
My father frowned, my mother raised her hand to her mouth, and I looked puzzled. What does “functionally illiterate” mean? My parents were finding out that in all the years in school I hadn’t learned to read. I’d faked and finagled. It wasn’t that I couldn’t do the math: I could not read the directions. All these years and no one had noticed. Sweet, polite, quiet Byron could not read. I could recognize some words, identify names of certain locations, remember the words I’d memorized at the kitchen table, the name of my school on the side of the building, and the names of my siblings attached to magnets on the refrigerator. I could function, but I could not read. My mother would say years later that it was one of the few nights she cried herself to sleep. Usually knowing is better than not knowing, but initial shock has a pain all its own. She’s been asked on more than a few occasions, why didn’t you know sooner that Byron couldn’t read? The short answer: When did she have time? Two jobs, three kids, night school, and a cheating husband usually made for a very full day.
The anger and tension that often curled through our house like smoke up a chimney was suddenly replaced by sadness. Everyone felt it. Everyone dealt with it in different ways. My brother treated me like his best friend. My mother, whom I used to follow around the house, was now following me. This went on for weeks. As we searched for some resource, some long-term solution, my mother set out the short-term course.
“Okay, honey, if we’ve spent two hours on homework, we’ll try four hours. We will pray when we start. We’ll pray when we get tired. And we’ll pray when we’re done.”
Just the idea of working longer hours seemed to make her happy. As sad as I was at the time, I remember the joy I felt in anticipating the journey. I had no control over how poorly I read at the time, but I did have control over how hard I worked. That’s what you do if you’re Clarice Pitts’s child. You work hard.
“Smart people can think their troubles to the ground, honey,” she’d say. “We have to wrestle ours.”
Soon my father seemed disengaged from the process. He worked more overtime, or at least that’s what he told my mother, and stayed away from the house for longer hours. I don’t recall a single conversation we ever had after my diagnosis. Maybe he really was embarrassed. Relatives had long teased me, “You’re a Momma’s boy.” From that moment and every day since, I’ve been proud to be a Momma’s boy.
These were the darkest days of my life. It wasn’t simply the shame of not knowing how to read: it was not knowing where to start. Unsure where the bottom was, it felt as if I was falling. My mother was holding my hand, but we were both just falling. How easy it would have been for her to give up. Give up on me, give up on her abilities or responsibilities as a parent. This was a vulnerable time for both of us. A working-class family, we lacked the resources to do much more than pray and look to others for help. There wasn’t much help around, but the power of prayer was immeasurable. It created comfort where none existed. It revealed a path when earthly avenues seemed closed. And it provided strength that could be explained in no other way.
As my family prayed and looked for answers, a decision was made in school. I was removed from a regular classroom and placed in all remedial classes. I was about to spend fifth grade as one of “the basement boys.” Smart kids were taught aboveground; children like me were sent to the basement.
When I had taken classes aboveground, there were those giant glass windows to look through to the street below. The kids in the basement looked up at a window and saw only the feet of people passing by. Deep in my heart, I knew I didn’t belong there, or at the very least I had to escape. But I didn’t know how. The classroom size was smaller, and these were kids with whom I had rarely spent time. Many often seemed angry, some were violent, and none seemed hopeful. In my regular class, my friends talked and dreamed of becoming teachers, doctors, lawyers, or sports stars. In my new class, the answer was almost always “I ’ont know.” I don’t know. It’s the slogan for those without dreams or a path to follow.
For all the gloom of being a basement boy, this time also proved to be one of life’s great teachable moments. I truly believe that it is possible to find good in every moment, especially the difficult ones. Until this point, my academic life was mostly one failure after another. Each day the new challenge had been to find a way to hide. Once I was assigned to the basement, the days of hiding were finally just about over. I can still remember the glance from classmates in the morning. The bright kids, or at the very least, the normal kids walked upstairs, and my kind headed to the basement. I could feel the looks of disdain at the back of my head. Worse still, I could sometimes hear the whispers of pity or contempt. “There go the dummies, fresh off the short bus.”
No one at St. Katharine’s in the late 1960s and early 1970s took the bus to school, but the reference to the short bus was a reference to kids with learning, physical, or emotional disabilities who went to special schools or were taught in different classrooms. I once overheard two adults in the basement chatting in the hallway. “Today the basement, tomorrow prison.” It was clear the basement wasn’t a place you went to learn. It’s where you were warehoused until fate or the legal system had a place for you.
Many of those in the basement doubted their future, and so did many of those who were paid to be there to help us. Hopelessness breeds more hopelessness. It was the same for many of us in the basement. We tried covering up our academic deficiencies with attitude and bravado. At about five feet four and 90 pounds, thank God I was never able to pull off the tough guy act. My grandmother always said, “The good Lord gives us what we need.” I guess He knew I needed to remain skinny and sheepish until He got me through middle school.
There was a whole new look, language, and protocol in the basement. The classrooms were mostly bare. Not a lot of decorative and inspirational learning tools attached to the walls. The desks were older. Supplies and books were more scarce. Basement teachers spoke harshly. Class often started with “Sit down and shut up!” Much more time was devoted to discipline than to education. Almost all of my classmates were boys. An early morning shoving match meant we might spend much of the day in silence in a darkened classroom. I saw the principal and other administrators many times in the hallways upstairs. The janitors’ supply room was in the basement. Other than the teachers, the janitor was usually the only other adult down there. And there was a different approach to learning. We seemed to spend a great deal of time in group learning in the basement. We rarely had homework; assignments were completed in the classroom as a group. We still read aloud, but here the teacher would read first, then the entire class would repeat after her or him. Even blackboard assignments were done as a group. Upstairs, I always dreaded going to the blackboard alone, whether for math, reading, or history. Now we would go up two or three at a time.
Unlike many of my classmates, I still had an optimistic spirit. I still believed that, with hard work, success was possible. Upstairs, my optimism was met with skepticism and the clear sense I was naive or even stupid, but oddly, in the basement, at least some of my new friends welcomed me. Though shy and frequently bullied, I was mostly cheerful and could keep people entertained with humor or encouragement. As they did in sports, classmates often chose to work with me because I could make them laugh or lift their spirits. A favorite line from childhood on a ball field or in the classroom was always “We got this.” In other words, we can win. Upstairs, I was always alone and afraid at the blackboard, but here I could be the encourager.
“If John went to the store with three dollars and bought cereal for a dollar forty and gum
for fifty cents, how much money would he have left?” the teacher would ask. We were to write out her question and answer it at the blackboard.
“We got this,” I’d say through a ragged smile.
One boy would write; the other two would repeat the teacher’s sentence and help with spelling. I treated those exercises like a sporting event. We were a team. The question was the opponent. It was easier to rally the group around a sports challenge than an academic problem. We often got the answer wrong, but I took joy in the effort. Upstairs, success was almost always measured by achievement (getting the right answer, passing the test), but here, at least in my heart, success could be measured by effort. No one can always know the right answer, but you can always give your best effort.
Those days in the basement were an early lesson on how to redefine success. Take life in small bites, until you can take on more. Find our own pace and stick to it. In a regular classroom, I was a kid on a tricycle trying to keep pace with cars on a highway. In the basement, some of us had tricycles and some had even less. Admittedly, I had one major advantage over most of my classmates. I had Clarice Pitts. Life has taught me there is a fast-moving river that separates success from failure. It’s called giving up. Too many people drown in that river. As a boy in the basement, I was often caught in its undertow, but my mother was always nearby, screaming, encouraging, threatening, praying, and on occasion she’d even dive in to pull me out.
During my years in the basement at St. Katharine’s, I always felt embarrassment entering and leaving the basement, but the feeling would subside once I was settled in my seat. I resigned myself to the idea that maybe it was where I needed to be for the moment. But it would not be my destiny—God had something greater in store. But, without question, this was the least optimistic time of my life. And my parents’ fights were growing in frequency and intensity.
By sixth grade, I still hadn’t learned to read well. And I was feeling a greater separation from the so-called normal world, wondering if I would ever return to it. Often alone at home, I had few reliable friends. They included Butch, the family dog; Wilson (long before Tom Hanks in Castaway), the name on my favorite football; and my constant after-school companion: television. Every weekday afternoon and as much of the evening as possible was spent watching television. It was my window to the world and a good escape from my troubles. One afternoon while watching Captain 46, the local cartoon show, I saw (and heard) an ad for a reading program for adults who couldn’t read. I jotted down the number and told my mother. “Momma, if they can teach adults to read, then maybe it’s not too late for me.” We were both desperate by this time. She called the number and they agreed to try their program on me.
Days later, a man came to our house with a case that looked like it might have a small television set inside, which made me smile. But it wasn’t a TV. It was a microfiche machine along with a box of slides. There was never any clear-cut diagnosis as to why I couldn’t read, but we worked from the assumption that I missed the basics early on in grade school, fell behind, and either lost interest or couldn’t keep up. The machine was meant to take me back to the beginning. Both my parents and my brother were trained in how to operate the equipment.
Every day after school and after finishing my homework, I was to spend at least one hour with my reading machine, going through the slides reflected on the TV-like screen. It was repetition, rote, memorization. The first lesson was on the alphabet. Learning to recognize and sound out letters. What I should have learned at age four, I was finally getting at age eleven. The session was occasionally interrupted by my uncontrollable tears. I cried in hysterics. “I’m almost in high school, and I’m studying the alphabet? I really am a moron. People will laugh at me. I’ll never catch up.”
My mother reassured me. “You’re not a moron. Son, it doesn’t matter how you start, only how you finish. You can do this. We can do this.” So we did it, every single day, until the letters and then the words began to come more easily. I practiced until it became second nature.
One of the many great discoveries that came out of my illiteracy is the joy that can exist on the other side of heartache. It can be like the relief you feel after a good cry or the day after you get over the flu. It’s often easier to appreciate good health in the immediate days after an illness. When the pain is gone. Such was the case months after I began working with the reading machine. As I’ve mentioned, until this point any notes from the teacher were delivered home unopened to my mother. The words on the paper read like Braille to me. I never waited around to see my mother’s reaction because I could hear it soon enough. It was often “Byron! What the hell is this?” Rarely did teachers criticize my effort. It was always the outcome that fell short. But one day all that changed. Like a newborn to breast milk, I clung to my reading machine and quickly moved from the alphabet to simple sentences. Noun, verb, object. I was, in fact, reading. Well below grade average but reading nonetheless.
By the end of sixth grade there came another note from school. I remember running home with the note in my hand. The news was too big to fit in my bookbag. I bounced around the house like a ball in a pinball machine until my mother came home. In fact, I called to see if she could come home immediately.
“What’s wrong, son, why should I come home early?” Years earlier I’d actually set the kitchen on fire. Something about experimenting with a toaster. Anyway, my pleas for her to come home early were always met with some apprehension after that.
“No, Momma, it’s good news. Just get home early. I can’t tell you over the phone.”
“Okay, honey, I’ll be there as soon as I can,” she replied with an uneasy sigh.
Hours later I met her at the door. “I got a note from the teacher. Can I read it to you?” Those words had never come out of my mouth before. My eyes met my mother’s. We were both smiling. I cleared my throat.
“Mrs. Pitts, Byron is doing better in school. He is showing real pro . . . pro . . . progress.”
I looked up to see my mother with a big smile on her face and tears rolling down her cheeks. It would be the first and last time my mother and I cried together. They were tears of joy. Something so small remains one of the great highlights of my life. I believe she baked me a chocolate cake to celebrate.
Regardless of the obstacles in your way, one of the great wedges to get you past an obstacle is hard work. There’s almost a renewable fuel you get from working hard. The harder you push, the further you realize you can go. As I see it, success is just your work made public. Through the years I’ve come to enjoy the hard work on the way to success more than the actual achievement. It’s the joy of being in the midst of it. It’s like a great glass of ice water. Water’s good for the body almost any day, but after you’ve worked hard in the sun, is there anything better than a cold glass of ice water?
Hard work never lies. It may not always reward you in the ways and in the time you’d like, but it’s always honest. When you’ve worked hard, you know where you stand. You know what you’ve given. I’ve always believed that someone else could outthink me or outmaneuver me, but I only feared the person who could outwork me. Fortunately, I haven’t come across that person too often. It’s actually a pretty small fraternity: hard workers. Look at almost any successful person in any field, and you’ll find at least this one trait: an ability and willingness to work hard. It’s the great equalizer. It’s the one gift we can give to ourselves, too often overlooked as we “trade up” for a sexier approach. It’s not a shortcut; rather, it’s the straightest line to success. It’s also a great building block for acquiring other important life skills.
Every door that’s ever opened for me in life started by my knocking hard and sometimes even kicking, putting my shoulder against it, and if not patiently, then prayerfully, waiting for it to open or fall off its hinges. Even as a kid who couldn’t read, I knew I was fortunate. I had the gift. I knew how to work hard because my mother taught me.
And so it began. The first steps to
overcoming my childhood shame of illiteracy. Pure, raw, uncomplicated hard work. Except for a few school administrators and teachers, no one outside my immediate family ever knew I couldn’t read. Most days I was deathly afraid of failure, but I refused to let the outside world see it. The mask was coming off . . . but ever so slowly.
Years after that horrible day in the doctor’s office, I can still remember my mother’s words as we walked to her car: “Keep your head up, son. When we get home, we’ll pray about it. Work our way through it.” She rubbed the top of my head, pulled at my chin, and then took my hand. I’ve never walked with my head down since that day.
THREE
Quiet Discipline
And say unto him, Take heed, and be quiet; fear not, neither be fainthearted. . . .
—Isaiah 7:4
SUMMER WAS ALWAYS A welcome relief from the stress and strain of my school life. And summers meant time with my grandma, Roberta Mae Walden. If it was my mother who taught me the power of passion, it was my mother’s mother who taught me the strength that exists in calmness. For my mother it was discipline by force, but for my grandma it was quiet discipline. Both had the same goal: to be tough enough to survive any obstacle. But my grandmother wasn’t much of a talker. She was a doer. She’d show her love by making your favorite dessert from scratch. Each grandchild had a favorite. Mine was her chocolate cake with buttermilk. She wouldn’t say she loved you very often. She’d always just show you with a hug, a smile, or a laugh at a grandchild’s lame jokes. She wasn’t big on lecturing, and I never heard her raise her voice. I learned by her example.
As a boy, I spent most summers in Apex, North Carolina. My parents would always drop me off at the end of the school year. After an eight-hour drive from Baltimore, with R&B music and a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken in the car, they’d stay a day or two and then head back north. Grandma’s home address said Apex, but she lived in the community of Friendship, a spit of a town with two churches, no more than five hundred houses, and not a single traffic light. The Friendship of my youth was a place of dirt roads, open overgrown fields, and weekend barbecues after the local adult league baseball game. Tobacco was still king. Eventually, the tobacco fields would be replaced by subdivisions. So today the sweat-stained overalls of tobacco growers and vegetable farmers have been replaced by salivating developers in khaki pants and blue blazers. Raleigh is twelve miles from Friendship, and as the state capital has spread its boundaries, with Northerners and people from other parts of the country pouring into the South, towns like Apex and Friendship have blossomed into bedroom communities.