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 raised 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 punishment, 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.

After that first day, I walked to school from my house almost every day. I would meet my friends on the street corner or walk down the hill one block to meet others before we crossed a little bridge, then climbed up another hill through a wooded lot until we reached the baseball field on the edge of Burton Elementary. We climbed a long set of stairs until we reached the main schoolyard. This took five minutes on the way to school (if you ran) or an hour on the way home, as we often would chat, play, and chase one another, especially when we got to the wooded lot full of places to explore and hide.

Ms. Ollie was also a reliable babysitter for my brother and me. She lived on the same street as Burton School, so I would walk with a different group of friends to her house on the days she watched us. Her house bordered the wooded area and playground in the neighborhood. There was also the neighborhood recreation center next door to Burton that offered afterschool activities, summer camps, dances, and sports competitions. Everything that I needed in my young world those days was within walking distance of my house.

My sheltered existence at Burton belied the turmoil that was bubbling throughout the Durham public school system. While I worked hard for good grades, played with friends, joined the safety patrol, and enjoyed the freedom to walk to and from schools, the corner store and library, angry voices were insisting on equal access for colored children to the schools beyond the confines of our neighborhoods.

One year before I began elementary school, the Wheeler v. Board of Education lawsuit outlined the general characteristics and challenges of our de facto segregated school system. It concluded that the practices of the Durham School Board were discriminatory, forcing children to attend same-race schools when better schools with more resources were closer to their homes.

As a result of the court decision resulting from these lawsuits in 1961, a couple of Negro children were allowed to attend their neighborhood schools. This debate never affected me because Burton was so close—I could see the school grounds from my front porch, so my parents would never have considered my going to a school in a white neighborhood just to integrate or even to benefit from a supposedly better school. Life was good. Besides, I was a star student at Burton, and I had excellent teachers who encouraged me. I didn’t realize or care that we didn’t have the resources of the white schools. We seemed to have what we needed. If the teachers or parents thought differently, we didn’t know about it.

Even though some Negro children were allowed to attend white schools, the Durham public school system did little to encourage racial integration on a large scale. During these early elementary school years, nothing changed for me. I never saw any white students. One of the ways that the Durham school system sought to keep the status quo of separate but equal was to build more schools in the rapidly growing Negro parts of the city.

So in 1968, a new elementary school was built in my neighborhood, named for R.N. Harris, the first black member of the Durham City Council and the first black man on the Durham City School Board (6). The letter I received in the summer of 1970 mandating that I move from one junior high school to another to achieve integration was really my second such letter from the Durham public school system. I received the first in 1968. I was not allowed to finish my sixth-grade and final year at Burton, but was ordered to move to R.N. Harris, the new elementary school for Negro children, located two blocks from Durham Technical Community College. Now I had to walk three times as far to school every day, but still there were no white students.

* * *

Going to church was a big part of my weekly family life, and it was not unusual to find me at church two to three times a week. My parents were dedicated churchgoers, and there was never a conversation about NOT going to church. It was the norm, the rule, just as natural as drinking sweet iced tea on a hot day.

We had Bible study on Wednesday nights. Thursday night was youth choir night, and Sundays were devoted to Sunday school and worship service. Many Sunday afternoons, we would also have singing programs and observances to mark special occasions. We attended Mount Zion Baptist Church on Fayetteville Street, down one block from North Carolina Central University’s present-day student union. It was a joyful place to be, with lots of families from surrounding areas and McDougald Terrace. My parents were very active in the church through choir, ushering, deacon duties, and seasonal activities—Easter egg hunt, Christmas recital. My brother and I were always busy at church.

Once church was over, we would return home to Sunday dinner, with family and friends stopping by to chat, visit, and rejuvenate before the new week. Mr. Smith (husband of my godmother) and Mr. Alston (the vice principal at Hillside High School and not related to my nursery school teacher) were two regular Sunday visitors. They never ate dinner, but they would sit around the table laughing and talking with the family.

Each summer, my mother would find out about all the Vacation Bible schools for churches in our area, and we would attend all of them. Classes were usually brief, divided by the ages of the children, and there was lots of socializing and outdoor playtime, along with a snack. My parents also sent me to Sunday school conferences, where I learned to memorize and recite Bible verses, pray, and sing glory to God.

I never resented attending church regularly, because in addition to pleasing my parents, it was also a great place to meet boys. The lack of reliable telephone communication, especially the cost for calling outside our exchange area, inhibited any budding romance, but it was fun in the moment. Besides, church proved to be a fertile place to feed my needs on so many levels, spiritually and physically. I spent much time building friendships, socializing and flirting with boys, sharing and fellowshipping with neighbors over plates of Southern fried chicken and other home-cooked favorites. I honed my oral skills, reciting Bible verses, memorizing my lines for the Christmas or Easter programs, and participating in regular Bible study discussion groups. I served on the youth usher board. I sang in the choir, and so did my parents and brother. Not a single talent was wasted or opportunity overlooked to praise the Lord in my household. To this day, I cannot understand anyone who ever claims to be bored. I’ve never had a boring day in my life.

* * *

My father worked two jobs at a time for most of my formative years, as did most of the black men I knew. In addition to his weekday job, he also had a job cleaning or cooking on the weekend, or helping to move the white doctors at the hospital into their new residences. If he did not have a second job to go to on a Saturday, he could be found in the garden in our backyard, a holdover from his youth growing up in rural Caswell County, N.C., where his family owned hundreds of acres and raised tobacco, chickens, pigs and cattle. Dad was always growing something or coming home with something that somebody else had grown, fished, hunted or slaughtered. My dad’s brothers had kept the family place in Pelham and made a good living from the bounty of their expansive farmland. Every visit to my uncles resulted in a return trip with a trunk full of seasonal vegetables, pecans and, of course, meat from a fresh hog kill or their fully stocked freezer.

Even though Dad moved away from Pelham and the family farm as soon as he finished high school, the hard-learned habits of his childhood never left him. As soon as warm weather appeared, Dad would start preparing, tilling the soil, and planning his garden. Living on that corner house in Durham, he made the backyard his canvas, plotting where to plant the tomatoes, string beans, and cucumbers. He eventually outgrew our quarter-acre backyard and started renting small plots to grow fresh vegetables, which he and my mother would can and pickle for the winter months. I learned to love fresh tomato and cucumber sandwiches, to shuck corn, and to snap green beans—although it would take many years before I acquired a taste for his beets and summer squash.

My parents tried to figure out where Rudy’s strengths were by enrolling him in one activity, then another. They bought him a saxophone, which stayed locked in the case. He seemed uninterested in academics or athletics. But eventually he found God’s gift to him—his beautiful baritone singing voice—which he has used to delight church audiences in and around Durham and neighboring states as a member of the “New Generation” singers. Under the leadership of Oren Marsh, one of the most talented pianists in the area, they offered a spiritually uplifting performance. They were young black men and women who booked Sunday afternoon gospel singing assignments, and all of them were as talented as the groups who were more nationally recognized. Everyone thought they would hit it big one day. Although they always seemed to be on the verge, it never happened, and the group disbanded after five years.

Today, Rudy has a beautiful daughter, who has married and has a son. He has maintained a strong relationship with his biological brothers and sisters, my cousins, and despite the nontraditional family arrangement, our relationship has always been a source of pride for all of us. My female cousins, Ella and Machael, Rudy’s sisters, are still my closest confidants.

My large and extended family included my maternal grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins who grounded me in love and tradition. Since I was blessed and cursed to have both of my parents come from farming families, I was destined to learn something about gardening despite my protests that I was a city girl.

My mother, now a city girl too, still felt it her duty to help out the family farming during the summers. Using her vacation days, she would take my brother and me to the country for harvest time. My grandma Mozella (short for Moses Ella); my aunts, Ruth, Frances, and Hazel; uncle Berry Lee, and cousins Larry and Little Joe would “pick ’bacca” for white landowners all over Granville and Vance counties in central North Carolina.

And you were never too young to be out in the fields—even if you couldn’t pick the tobacco. The older kids who got tired (usually after about 20 minutes) had to look after the younger ones who were too little. We would get up early before it got too hot and work through the morning, then take a break and work through early afternoon until somebody—usually my grandma—decided that we had worked long enough for that day. Homemade biscuits and a piece of smoked meat or tablespoon of sorghum molasses, packed in brown paper bags, made a hearty lunch. After a long morning working out in the sun, those sandwiches were the best food in the world. My mama’s sisters were fast workers, too. Wearing large-brimmed straw hats, they labored rapidly through the tobacco fields, filling up the wooden bins. We children often ran down the path to the edge of the property to fill pails and bring back the coldest drinking water you ever want to drink for the adults to let run down their parched throats. Outhouses near the fields provided relief when we needed to go. We always traveled in pairs to the outhouses—to make sure no one accidentally fell in.

Even if we were too little to take the leaves off the stalk, we found all kinds of other ways to amuse ourselves. We picked bugs and caterpillars off the tobacco, and when we had collected enough of them, we would hold a grand funeral—complete with memorized Bible verses, hymns, and eulogies for the dearly departed. To top off the day—if we had been good—Grandma would allow us to jump on top of the horse-drawn sleds headed back to the barn while the men would climb the rafters to string up the tobacco for drying. For the trip back to the house, we put towels on the car seats to protect them from our clothes, sticky with the sweet-smelling tar from the tobacco mingled with the sweat from the day’s activities. Bucket baths, dinner, and cold watermelon capped off a full day of summer fun.

My family, neighborhood, school, and church were all important pieces of my evolving identity, and there was a tight network of other people in whom my parents entrusted the care of my brother and me when they were not around. Adjoining our backyard was the house of Mr. and Mrs. Conaway. Mr. Conaway was a big, burly, guy with a broad smile and deep voice that shook the room every time he spoke.

“Hi, Mr. Bill!” I would call whenever I visited, which was often, since his wife, “Ms. Thelma,” was a frequent caretaker for my brother and me on the weekends. Both the Conaways worked for the tobacco factory, putting in long, hard days. Most of Mr. Bill’s second jobs were in the restaurant business, and he was a great soul-food cook—collard greens in fatback, pigs’ feet, black-eyed peas, cornbread—all cooked the right way—with lots of grease. He also owned dogs that he kept in a fence between his property and ours. My mother always complained about those barking dogs, but it was just accepted as one of his quirky ways, with nothing you could do about it. Many evenings I heard him at the fence, throwing scraps of food into the dog pen, encouraging them to bark at any trespassers, thieves, and unwanted visitors.

Ms. Thelma was always beautifully coifed, with her hair pressed and shining with Bergamot hair conditioner. She loved her hats and matching purses and was always buying things via the mail. She’d show me her Sears Roebuck catalog from which she had ordered underwear, stockings or a dress. I never understood the appeal of shopping by mail or even today’s modern equivalent of Amazon and e-commerce. But her habit kind of makes sense to me now—first, because she didn’t drive, and second, the use of catalogs reduced her need to interact with unwelcoming white retail establishments. Most of her grocery shopping was done at our corner store, which carried all the items that Mr. Bill loved to cook. Ms. Thelma often sent me to pick up items they needed, with a few pennies to buy something for myself. Ms. Thelma was not much of a cook herself, but she loved sweets and was another lady who indulged my sweet tooth without question.

Two people with the most lasting impact on my life were my godparents, John O. and Mary H. Smith, the same couple whose home had been the site for my parents’ wedding. Mr. Smith, a pipe-smoking, peanut eating, no-nonsense math teacher, taught in the Durham city schools most of his life. He taught at Hillside High many years and then at North Carolina Central University until he retired. Mr. Smith visited our home every week. He and my father would unwind from the previous week and prepare for the new one.

Mrs. Smith had moved from Hawley Middle School to become a highly regarded English teacher at Shepard Junior High many years before being reassigned to Rogers-Herr as part of efforts to integrate the Durham School system in 1970. The Smiths were a steady presence in my early life—and just as determined as my parents were that I would succeed. Both of their children, Nathaniel and Joyce, were proud college graduates. The Smiths showered us with educational gifts and books, usually with Afro-centric themes, for every birthday, Christmas or when I received some special recognition. I once received a set of playing cards with famous authors such as Walt Whitman on the cover so that I could remember them for English lit class—because, as Mrs. Smith said, I needed to be well-rounded and know “their history” as well as “our history.”

I was surprised they could find these books with black images because I never saw them in our library books or textbooks at school. I think Mrs. Smith got tired of my re-reading Heidi, Pippi Longstocking, Tom Sawyer, and Huckleberry Finn, my favorites. By the end of sixth-grade year, the Smiths had saved enough money to purchase a complete encyclopedia for us. It was an amazing collection especially designed for African Americans, with photos of prominent blacks all through. I treasured those books because I knew they cost a lot, and they reinforced the Smiths’ confidence that I would excel in my studies. Under the watchful eyes of my parents, the Smiths, my neighbors, my family, and other adults in my social circle, I was loved, safe, and protected. What else did I need?

LaHoma Smith (back row, second from right)
at College View Nursery.