Making Up for Lost Time

Home, though, was here. And here, many African American children spent much of their time at the house or at school. Many parents didn't like to bring their children into town, where Aldrena is driving right now, because town was where the full force of inequality hit you. In town, everything was segregated: the movie theater, the churches, the hospital, where you had to walk, she remembers, down a dim corridor to the room where the doctor saw you. In town, the white neighborhoods had sidewalks and good street lighting, and the black neighborhoods didn't. In town, if you wanted to shop for clothing, you entered the department store through a side door, told a clerk what you wanted, and the clerk got it. Many parents did not want to subject their children to this, so they often kept them home, shielding them from a white world that seemed, to the children, foreign and frightening.

And before they did visit town, Aldrena remembers, their mother would share cautionary tales. Writing her papers has brought back one vivid memory of a black man who got arrested for stepping off a curb. "I don't know why they arrested him," she says, because her mother never told her, exactly, what law the man had violated. And that was the thing: Parents never gave an explanation; they simply told you how to behave and what to do.

"Call them Mr. and Mrs.," says her sister, Arlean Jones, sitting in the front seat with Aldrena, remembering what their mother used to tell them. "And they would call your mother 'aunt,' and your father 'uncle.' And sometimes, your parents would snatch you. They knew who the mean white people were, and if they saw one of them coming, they would snatch you away, and you wouldn't know why you were being snatched.

"When I think back over it," Arlean says, "they were scared to death of your saying something that would get yourself in trouble."

"Your self-esteem was shattered," is how Henry Cabarrus puts it, later, about the impact of these interactions. Henry, who was old enough during the closures to be aware of the rhetoric, recalls one white leader saying that he would rather his children be "baked in the oven" than sent to school with blacks. He remembers sitting around with his cousins, joking and wondering what it would feel like to be cooked. But the impact wasn't funny. "When you have such strong white resistance against you as a person, such that they take away the most fundamental thing -- education -- if someone can take that away from you, your esteem is so small that it is hard to be aggressive, hard to be outgoing. You're always looking over your shoulder for who is going to attack or criticize."

"You can't grow up with a lot of backbone," is how Aldrena puts it.

And while Aldrena clearly has backbone, the silence surrounding segregation had its effect. Because she was coached as a child to keep her mouth shut, because her mother did not want to discuss social inequalities, Aldrena internalized the idea that silence is the way to deal with adversity. And silence, for her, was enforced in other ways. When it became apparent that schools would stay closed for quite some time, Aldrena and two brothers were sent to Baltimore to stay with relatives. Her father had recently died, and her mother used his life insurance payment to send them. So Aldrena lived apart from her mother for most of her adolescence, the time in a girl's life when she most needs a mother to confide in. Her relatives had their own children to take care of and treated the newcomers with something less than affection. Aldrena knows that her mother sent money and food, good country food that the Prince Edward children craved and had grown up on -- ham and greens -- and that she never got any of it.

"Why didn't you?" asks Mykhayla, incredulous. "Who would eat it?"

"They would," explains Aldrena, who remembers being served hot dogs and pork and beans, day after day. And then Aldrena turns to Arlean, who is older, finished high school before the closings and left a few days after her own graduation to work in New York. She moved back recently to retire. "Do you think Mama knew how they treated us in Baltimore? Do you think she knew?" she asks. Then she answers her own question: "I think she knew, but she just wanted us to get some schooling."

And what else happened during that period? Aldrena doesn't remember the classes she took, the grades she got, the children she played with. After the schools reopened, she came back home to finish high school; there was a nominally integrated public high school then, though almost all white students stayed at the private academy. She attended a two-year business school in Washington and went to work for the federal government. She married, lived abroad -- her husband worked for the Navy -- raised two daughters, divorced. And, throughout, she thinks, the habit of silence affected every aspect of her life. "I didn't have the ability, if you will, to question or to speak out about anything that may have been bothering me. It was also the case in the workplace; if something I felt was unjustly done, I didn't bring it to anybody's attention. And I think also in my marriage, if something was bothering me, I would keep it internal."

She and her siblings never talked about the closings. Her older brother did not return to high school, and as a result, his literacy level prevents him from being appointed a supervisor at the factory in Appomattox where he works, at an age where he would very much like to have a desk job. Her younger brother moved to New Jersey and so does not qualify for the scholarships. The scholarships are "the stupidest thing I've ever heard of," says Arlean, because of the inequality they have reestablished, between those who suffered and qualify for state money, and those who suffered but don't.

Nevertheless, Aldrena has resolved to come to terms with the past; she also enrolled in an online course at Northern Virginia Community College, called Write Your Life Story. The instructor helped her find new strategies for recollection. "One thing she had us do was look at an old picture of ourselves," says Aldrena, who has only one photo from that period. It's a snapshot of her and her brothers, after they had returned from Baltimore and were getting ready to catch a bus that would take them, finally, back to school. "The instructor asked us to look at the faces, to see if they evoked anything, and I was looking at these pictures, and it was like nobody was really smiling. It was almost like a mystery, what feelings we were feeling standing there, getting ready for school. We weren't excited."