On the first day of school, I sat in the front row of my English class just as I had done so many times back home. The teacher was an aging Southern belle named Ms. Smith with leathery skin and blue eyes turning gray with age. Her voice was pleasant and her twang delectable. I remember her well, but not just for the accent.
With about six minutes of the first class remaining, Ms. Smith announced that an African was amongst us. The students looked around for a real-life National Geographic experience. I honestly didn’t know she was talking about me. After all, I’d never been called “the African.”
“Come on now! Introduce yourself to the class and tell them what your name means!” Ms. Smith insisted.
She walked over to my desk and told me to stand up. Everyone stared. I was mortified. I knew they were looking for tribal marks, some proof of my ethnicity.
“Good day,” I said proudly, after a moment’s hesitation. “I bring greetings to you all from Ghana. I am Mary Akua Spio.”
My words fell like laughing gas bombs. With each syllable, the class laughed louder and louder. My manner of speech apparently amused the entire class. And my outfit didn’t help matters any. In my attempt to look American, I wore cowboy boots and a large belt, similar to the one boxers receive when they win a match. Huge and shiny.
“Mary? What about Obtunde or something like that? What? Did you change your name at the airport?” one student yelled out.
“You speak English good for an Afkan,” another student quipped. Doesn’t she mean, “I speak English well”? I thought to myself.
I became a piñata for the class’s questions and insults. “What did you do with the tree you lived in when you left Africa?” I remember one student yelling.
Hoping to return control to the class, Ms. Smith interrupted. “So, Mary, what are your dreams? What do you want to be in the future?”
Blinking back tears, I answered, “A rocket scientist.” Once again the class exploded into laughter.
“Oh dear! That’s like saying you want to be the Easter Bunny! You ought to study something like physical education, where you get a chance to swing around, just like back home. Besides, you gotta be real smart to be any kind of scientist!” Ms. Smith was now having her own fun with me.
Soon after, the bell rang and everyone dispersed. I sat frozen for a few minutes, feeling numb, filled with disbelief. Later that day, I met with the guidance counselor and things grew worse. Without giving me any evaluative tests, she concluded I wasn’t smart enough to take classes like physics and calculus. The counselor’s words were the final jabs through my soul. In an instant, all my dreams seemed to go down the drain.
Although I had completed physics and calculus courses in Ghana, I was put back into basic algebra. Teachers and counselors told me my primary focus should be getting rid of my African accent. I felt hopeless. If they were right, if my IQ really was low, what could my future possibly hold?
After graduation, I left South Carolina for New York and got a job at McDonald’s. I knew I could flip burgers and mop floors, but I wanted to be so much more. After hearing a commercial I enlisted in the air force and served for almost five years, earning enough money to attend college full-time. I studied hard, received an additional scholarship and headed off to Syracuse University to study electrical engineering.
Several years later, I found myself trudging through the brutal Syracuse winds, arms and legs frozen cold from the icy snow. It was time for my senior design review, the event every engineer dreads. The design review panel consists of a couple of professors and representatives from the engineering industry, and they can be an intimidating bunch.
We stood in the back of the class, squirming impatiently, as we watched the review panel approach our lab stations one by one. I was reminded of Don Shaw, our lab instructor, and the inspections we had endured for semesters. During Don’s inspections, he would always stop at Lab Station 10 and ask, “Do you know whose lab station this is?” He’d then answer his own question with a mouth full of theatrics. “This is the lab station of Eileen Collins, the first space shuttle commander! Yes, this is the station that Eileen used.” Even though I had used Lab Station 10 for more than three years, everyone still called it the Space Commander’s Lab Station.
As the review panel approached Lab Station 10, the head of the panel asked in a booming voice, “Whose lab station is this?” I could hear my heart pounding as I made my way to the front of the classroom. This time the question would have far greater implications than ever. I hesitated for a few seconds, biting my lips, tears not far from my eyes, and I answered their question with these words, “Ahem. . . mine.” I glanced over at Don Shaw, wondering if he had a better answer for the review board. Smiling through tears of his own, he nodded in encouragement.
The panel drilled me about my design. I tried to remain calm throughout the endless torture. I spoke slowly, answering their questions, but soon the words flowed with the inspiration and reason behind my senior design project. My words were not perfect, but this time I knew they were beautiful. I felt it. Everyone in the room did. In that instant, nothing else mattered. The African had spoken; this time they were proud. They were happy to see her. I felt the unique reverence for life that only a death-defying (or life-defining) moment can create. I didn’t want to stop speaking. I wanted to be heard forever.
Then came the announcement that I’ll never forget: “Congratulations, you are this year’s winner of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering) Design and Implementation Award!” The class cheered. People came over to talk to me. Some people asked me questions about the project, while others asked me about things they had been dying to know since our freshman year. Still others expressed their deep respect and admiration. Later that week, I learned I would be graduating number one in my electrical engineering class. It was an honor and a blessing.
After leaving Syracuse University, I continued on to Georgia Tech for graduate studies in deep space communications. I have since worked on heat-seeking probes for the NASA SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program, designed orbits for rockets bearing communication satellites, sent a rocket into space with my signature on it, and engineered technology that allowed George Lucas to deliver Star Wars episode II digitally. The Boeing Company recently bought and patented four of my inventions in deep space science.
Ms. Smith was right. The Easter Bunny and a rocket scientist do have something in common: the unbelievable. Today, I walk through life proud of the African heritage of which I was once ashamed. Who knows what that class back in South Carolina felt in the instant they almost crushed my dreams? Maybe, through the teasing, they caught a glimpse of the woman I would ultimately become: Mary A. Spio, independent inventor and American rocket scientist. Something unbelievable.
Mary Spio
Miz Moore
How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers’ names.
Alice Walker
I grew up in a time when you could leave the doors unlocked while you took a walk to the A&P for groceries— back when there were real grocery stores in a black neighborhood. Back when you knew most of the neighbors and who their children were. Back when folks seemed to be mindful of who was hangin’ out with your kids. Back when you knew that if your children did something they shouldn’t have, someone in the neighborhood would let their momma or daddy know for sure. And back when everybody knew “Miz Moore.”
Miz Moore had six children of her own, but at some point she became Momma to almost every child in the neighborhood. Everyone, that is, except the bully and the “evil one” (today they’d probably call him a sociopath). We lived in a neighborhood where nearly every household had two working parents struggling to make sure the newly acquired mortgages were paid. Newly acquired, because when we first moved in, there were only two black families in the neighborhood. Within five years, few white families remained.
Miz Moore made the conscious decision
to stay home and raise her children. To compensate, she did lots of things to save money, from returning milk bottles for a refund to canning or freezing anything she could get. She would pick vegetables out of someone’s overabundant garden and turn them into something fantastic. We looked forward to the chow chow or relish she made to go with a pot of beans and a skillet of hot cornbread. We’d shuck bushels of fresh corn for hours on the back porch, peel tomatoes or whatever else for canning in anticipation of her making something special, like homemade ketchup, or her special grape juice.
Carol Jane, our next-door neighbor and best friend of my younger sister, used to love to come over every day and ask for a couple of thick, salty slices of Miz Moore’s homemade canned dill pickles, sometimes staying to talk over whatever was on her mind. Most kids who knew her thought Miz Moore could solve any problem. I distinctly remember the day when Larry, Carol’s older brother, went limping over, blood pouring from his knee, with a couple of his friends. He and his friends had been playing with a BB gun, and he’d been shot. The problem was that his mother had ordered him not to play with guns. He sat there with his leg propped up in the green vinyl-covered chrome dining room chair, trying to convince Miz Moore she could somehow fix his knee, even though it was clear the shots had caused some major damage, far more than a Band-Aid’s worth.
He kept saying over and over, “Miz Moore, you can fix anything; I know you can.”
After several minutes, she convinced him that she had to call his mother—a nurse.
Miz Moore was a peacekeeper, a friend, a bit of a superwoman. Once, she stood at the end of the walk, her five-foot-two frame drawn to full height. She shook her finger at a considerably taller and mean neighborhood child, telling him to get on back down the street after he had chased down another boy. He had run for his life and stood behind her, shaking his fist at the retreating figure as though he could actually do something.
She was a child advocate before it became popular. Back then, child abuse was not treated as the crime it is today. We knew who was being mistreated on the block. After we begged her, she even went down the street and tried to talk with our friend’s mother about her drinking and the beatings that came with her drinking. I remember how we nervously listened outside the front door while Miz Moore calmly spoke with her. I don’t recall whether it helped in the long run, but I think he got a few days’ reprieve from the beatings.
Miz Moore knew how to relate to the young. I still remember the day when we were practicing one of the latest dances—the Four Corners. She came in and watched for a while, much to our embarrassment. Back then, this dance was deemed risqué.
We expected disapproval, but she just remarked, “That doesn’t look much different than the ‘snake hip’ we used to do when we were young.”
We asked her what that was and without warning, she broke out into a hip-swinging, gyrating move that brought howls of surprise from all of us. Miz Moore could dance! She not only knew how to do the snake hip, she could cha-cha, bop, swing and waltz. And she taught us all of them.
As poor as the family was, she always managed to have a meal on the table at dinnertime. You could tell when funds and food were low. If it was the middle of the week and there was yellow puddin’ cake with a creamy, warm, chocolate sauce or a blackberry cobbler, you knew she was trying to make up for having served whatever she’d concocted for dinner, which was always somehow extra tasty to us.
If we asked her to repeat a dish from the week before, she’d say, “I’m not sure what I put in it; I just used whatever I could find in the freezer.”
The old freezer in the basement was magical: There was always something in there, even when there seemed to be nothing. Miz Moore could see past the surface; she was a little magical herself. I believed she could make lemonade without lemons. She always found a way.
Recently, we sat around her house in the afterglow of a tremendous Thanksgiving feast with childhood friends and relatives streaming in from their own family dinners. I reflected upon the results of all the caring, the tears, the sharing, the fears that came with the journey she had taken to this point in her life. It was especially touching to see grown men from the old neighborhood, sitting around laughing about old times and paying Miz Moore the respect and the love she had earned from the days long ago—while they relayed stories about their adventures they thought she didn’t know.
It was even more wonderful to consider that with her courage, her innovation, her strength, creativity and tenacity, she managed to bring up six children, none of whom are in jail or on drugs. Being poor was not an acceptable excuse for not being the best you could be— whatever you decided to become. And those who decided to marry brought up their children with the same style and class. All of her grandchildren completed college; one is pursuing a Ph.D. All of them see some connection between their success and Miz Moore, also known as Grammy, Gram, Grandmother, even Mom by adults who tend to adopt her as their own.
I find myself smiling sometimes, when I am seeking a solution to a seemingly impossible task or when I have been victorious in a given situation. My creativity and tenacity were often the only things I brought to the table. I recall what Miz Moore always told me, “Nothin’ beats a failure but a try.”
In my own way I’m hoping I become a Miz Moore, passing on the same strong wisdom, love and life example to the generations to come. Since Miz Moore is my momma, I know I’m off to a good start!
Edwina Joyce Moore
Living History
I made up my mind not to move.
Rosa Parks
Working at the Greensboro Health Care Center was rewarding. Especially knowing David.
David came to the nursing home after I had been there but a short time. Possessed of a quiet countenance and mild demeanor, David worked as a custodian. He was color-blind. I don’t mean literally, but rather David didn’t see black or white when he looked at people. He saw what he called “gray.” Observing his daily contact both with the elderly residents and the staff of the home, I discovered David treated all with dignity and respect.
He was a nature lover and often took his lunch outside, where I would find him reading Thoreau. I would frequently “brown-bag” as an excuse to join him and listen to his wisdom on the beauty of God’s gifts to be found in nature. Our friendship grew, yet remained casual (work-related), so I was quite surprised when one day in late January 1983, David asked me to join him for breakfast on February 1 at the downtown Woolworth’s lunch counter. The date and occasion of our breakfast didn’t register in my mind as significant. That would change forever.
You can imagine my shock when I walked into the Woolworth’s on February 1 to find the lunch counter packed and reporters with cameramen from all the national television networks focusing on David and three other African American gentlemen.
What in the world . . . ? I asked myself. David caught my eye, smiled and motioned me through the throng of onlookers and the media to take a stool beside him.
“David,” I whispered. “What is all this about?”
“Gary, I wanted you to join me for an anniversary breakfast.”
“Anniversary? Whose anniversary?” I asked dumbly.
“Today is the twenty-third anniversary of the Woolworth sit-ins.”
“You mean . . . you?”
David just shyly smiled and nodded. I quickly learned that “David,” the same man who would take the time out of his busy day to read to an elderly nursing home resident or spend his lunch hour watching the birds and flowers, was David Richmond, one of the four students from A&T University in Greensboro, North Carolina, who took a seat at the once “whites only” lunch counter at Woolworth’s and thus began the nationwide movement known as “sit-ins” to desegregate restaurants. I was in the presence of living history.
It was cold on February 1, 1960. The icy winds sweeping down North Elm Street in downtown Greensboro were second only to the icy reception that David Richmond and his three fellow students received at th
e Woolworth’s. Taking stools at the counter, they endured the dagger stares from the secretaries, bankers, clerks and lawyers having lunch.
“Fear?” David remembered. “Sure we were afraid. We were four scared college kids challenging the status quo. Separate but equal was being defied. Jim Crow, nearly one hundred years after our emancipation, was on his deathbed.
“We were four very frightened young men, but our quest for recognition as equals allowed me and my fellow students to overcome that fear. We were only four, but we were not alone. The spirit of our fathers—their bondage, their blood, their tears and sweat from which this republic was built, their sacrifices made, both at home and on the battlefields overseas, to keep this nation free—their courage was in us.”
It’s true, there were only four, but on February 2 there would be ten; then fifty. Across this great land the numbers grew daily to merge into one voice, one message, one song: equality.
David Richmond passed away in 1991. His friendship, guidance and belief in a “gray society” will forever remain a part of my heart, mind and soul. His quiet wisdom, thoughtful perspective, rare insight and deep understanding of the human condition is something I shall always miss.
Gary K. Farlow
©2003. Reprinted with permission of Jerry Craft.
White Water
Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: “I’m with you kid. Let’s go.”
Maya Angelou
The “For Whites Only” signs over the water fountains in H. L. Green’s Store really bothered me. I’d seen the signs before, because I spent more time in Green’s than any other place. They had cloth in the back, stacked as high as possible on tables, and more came in boxes each week. Momma loved picking through the piles, and when she got off work some evenings we headed to Broad Street. If there was a new shipment of fabric, I knew how to amuse myself while Momma searched for hidden treasures.