© Copyright 1999 James David Pearce
SENSE ENOUGH TO CROSS THE STREET
In Ahoskie, some discussion developed in the early '30s about whether there was a need for a "red light" where Main Street met the highway, the crossing that many of the town's children used to get to the new schoolhouse.
A lot of the citizens were all for it, and some of the most eager even proposed putting a second one a quarter-mile away at the intersection of the Winton highway and the St. John's road.
The proposal did have some opponents, however, and one of them showed up to speak up at a session with the town fathers.
He wanted a full explanation of what a "red light" was, how much it would cost initially, and how much it would cost to buy electricity to run it.
The answers didn't please him a bit.
"I'm 72 years old," the elderly fellow said, "and I'm here to tell you I've been crossing that highway since before it was a highway. I'm also here to tell you that the good God gave me eyes and gave me a brain, and I guess I've got sense enough to know when it's safe to cross the road and when it's not.
"You spend all the money you want, and you put up all the red lights you want, but by God there ain't no electrical or mechanical contraption going to tell me when I can cross the road and when I can't.
"If I see something coming, I'll wait. If there ain't nothing coming, I'm going to cross, red light or no red light."
His view didn't prevail, however, and now Academy Street has a whole bunch of red lights, a whole lot of vehicles and a whole lot of pedestrians ~ most of whom think twice before going against a red light.
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MISS GRACE AND THE SCHOOL BOOKS
My wife received a lot of her schooling under the watchful eyes of relatives.
In addition to Professor Milton Jenkins, she also studied under her "Aunt Grace" Parker, her father's sister, who guided many generations of Murfreesboro citizens through their elementary years.
"Miss Grace," as she was known to everyone in town, lived an active civic and church life until she was in her 90s.
She was very gentle and soft-spoken, and careful not to hurt anyone's feelings, but she also had some pretty definite ideas about certain people's characters.
Once I was discussing some Hertford County school personalities and the days of segregated public education with her. I mentioned my old principal at Ahoskie.
"Selfish, pompous, stuck-up," said Miss Grace.
Then I spoke about "J. R. Blank," a long-time superintendent of Hertford County schools who signed a lot of diplomas in the old days.
"Oh, yes, Mr. Blank," she said. "I remember him well. I recall once he visited my classroom in Murfreesboro. When he was getting ready to leave, he asked if there was anything we needed. I said, 'Mr. Blank, we certainly do need some new books. These we have are so old and torn that the children can barely make any sense from them.'
"He hesitated a while, and said he would have to think about it," said Miss Grace.
"Then he came back over to me," she said, "and he told me: 'Miss Grace, I certainly am going to get you some new books. And when you get them, you bundle up all these old, torn books you have here, and I'll take them over to the N(egro) schools. They'll be plenty good enough for them.'
"I told him, 'No, thanks, Mr. Blank. We'll keep the ones we have. If you get us new books, you get them new books, too.' "
~~~
Grace Parker
c. age 16
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BUDDY AND THE LYNCH GANG
Buddy, a black youth, was cutting grass in a yard in a Northampton County village in 1947 when he allegedly made some remarks and a move toward a white woman passing on the sidewalk.
She fled and informed the town cop, and he arrested Buddy and took him to the county jail in nearby Jackson.
That night, according to the jailer, several men wearing masks came in with guns, shot up the jail and tied him up, and forced Buddy into one of their waiting cars.
It was the next morning before they found the trussed-up jailer and the bullet holes, but nobody could find Buddy and the immediate assumption was that he had been lynched.
After a massive two-week-long search of the nearby forests by highway patrolmen, deputies and the National Guard, Buddy turned up unharmed in Philadelphia in the custody of a Baptist minister.
Pennsylvania wasn't about to let him come back to North Carolina to face a charge of "verbal assault," and the fellows who shot up the jail kept quiet for a while, so nobody knew for some time what really happened.
Later, however, one or two fellows hanging around a service station got drunk and started bragging about what they had planned to do before Buddy jumped and ran.
Eight or ten of them were charged with attacking the jail, but since it was only their word against each other, they got off with little more than slaps on the wrists.
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BEST-LAID PLANS
When I was a very young man, around the age of five, I was grievously irritated by some action of my older sister, Gwendolyn.
I figured that I could put this situation right by opening the gate to the back yard chicken pen, chasing out the chickens and then telling my daddy that Gwendolyn had done this mischief.
After putting the first part of the plan into action, I proceeded to the front yard, where my father was working on some project, and informed him of what had happened, fully expecting Gwendolyn to suffer some consequences.
The rest of the scheme didn't follow my script.
My daddy gave me a long, hard look, sat down on the front step and pulled me across his knees and proceeded to flail the daylights out of my backside.
He never once even questioned Gwendolyn.
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WALKING DISTANCE
During the war, Gwendolyn and I both worked at the newspaper office, which was about a mile from where we lived.
Her memory sometimes is better than mine, and she once asked me if I remembered how I used to take her to work on the crossbar of my bicycle. Not only did I not remember it, I couldn't even imagine it.
Even though she was two years older than I was, she was about a head shorter. And she was a good-looking young lady. I'm sure she really looked spiffy riding to work on the crossbar of my bicycle when she was 18 and I was 16.
Well, just before the war ended, I had to go. And right after I went, Gwendolyn's best boyfriend ~ Teeny Mizelle ~ came home from his tour in Europe.
Pretty quickly, they got married, and Gwendolyn quit the newspaper business and re-settled into smaller-town life in Colerain, Bertie County (really just across the county line and a few miles down the road from Ahoskie).
I guess "country girl" was an apt description of Gwendolyn ~ and it certainly was an apt description of our mother Nora.
For practically all her life, mama never lived anywhere but Hertford County, and it was really hard to find anywhere in Hertford County that didn't qualify as "country" ~ even if you grew up across from the train tracks down at No-Man's Land.
Like most "country girls," mama grew up knowing a lot about walking ~ to the school, to the store, to church, most anywhere.
For a few years in the 1920s after she married daddy, she got to do a good bit of riding in an automobile, but she never learned to drive and the automobile disappeared in the early '30s. So by the time daddy died and Gwendolyn got married after the end of WWII, mama once again knew a whole lot about walking to get where you needed to go.
When Gwendolyn and Teeny married, mama went down to visit (on Teeny's car) to check out her daughter's new hometown and the neighborhood where she was going to live.
Now Colerain, even today, is a quite compact place, and a real nice neighborhood. Fifty-five years ago, it was even more so.
About six "city" blocks.
Mama spent a day or two checking the place out, and then remarked:
"Gwendolyn," she said, "this really is a nice place to live.
"And you live in such a nice, convenient neighborhood.
"Why, you can walk to church ~ your children can walk to school ~ you can walk to the drugstore, and the grocery store ~ and you can walk to the post office.
"Why, Gwendolyn," she went on, "you can even walk to the cemetery!"
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CAPS AND T-SHIRTS
Seen stitched into the back of a baseball cap on a frail, elderly gentleman in the lunch line at K&S Cafeteria: "Been There, Done That. Can't Remember Any of It."
~~~
And on a T-shirt worn by a woman in her 50s or 60s: "Been Nowhere ~ Done Nothing."
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