The StoryCorps project and Sherry's baby pictures

On our recent adventure, last January, Sherry and I squeezed among the throng that came an hour early to get a seat in Atlanta's Georgia-Pacific auditorium. The occasion: a special live taping of the weekly author interview program, Between the Lines. Host former First Lady of Atlanta, Valerie Jackson, instructed us on the proper etiquette during the taping (strict silence) and to save our questions for the Q&A after the show. Then, she introduced and welcomed her guest.

As the ace interviewer with the velvet voice engaged StoryCorps founder and journalist Dave Isay in an informal conversation (shown in the photo), he shared stories of love and healing from the largest oral history project in the nation’s history. Many are in his latest book, Listening is an Act of Love: A Celebration of American Life from the StoryCorps Project.

Dave Isay on telling stories

• Stories tell who we are. They are the poetry, grace, and wisdom of people walking down the street or sitting next to us on the bus.
• People want to know that they matter and that they won’t be forgotten.
• We all own family secrets, which can be destructive so we need to talk about what’s real and important and to put things out in the open.
• Everybody can participate in telling stories (directly; not through politicians, journalists, academics, or others). Their stories might be about a first date remembered 25 years later, the Sunday school teacher who inspired a generation, a widowed father who raised healthy children amid profound loss, a hospital orderly who prays for patients, and families whose loved ones have Alzheimer’s disease.

To listen to the radio program, click here.

* * *

In my recent Skype conversation with Sherry (still in Atlanta; while I, this season, am living in Tel Aviv), our typically unstructured exchange — moving from personal stories to more public ones, took a sudden and dramatic shift back to the personal when Sherry blurted out, “Did I tell you about Corey’s conversation with my mother?”

And out poured another scary true tale of the legacy of Jim Crow, underscoring the perfect pitch of Senator Barack Obama’s 37-minute speech that was heard around the world. "But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now," he intoned, calling all the people of the United States to face it head on.

“Tell your truth, Sherry,” I coaxed, "write about Corey’s conversation with your mother, and let's publish it on my blog. Let this space be your StoryCorps booth for all the world to read, and perhaps even to understand.” And she did just that.


Baby Pictures: by Sherry

I was born and grew up in suburban Atlanta, Georgia, nearly 57 years ago. I am all too familiar with racism and the humiliation of segregation. However, I was amazed by a call I got from my sister Marsha [shown in the photo on the right of Sherry and behind Hattie Pearl, their mother] who told me about a conversation between her son Corey and our mother. It was about the baby pictures (long a sensitive subject for my siblings and one that our mother kept silent about for years). Last month my twenty-something nephew asked her why there were no baby pictures of his mother.

Though we have baby pictures of me, the eldest, we have none of my four siblings. And until Corey's direct questioning, they remained puzzled and often grumbled that they felt slighted and hurt.

My mother’s answer was simple yet amazing. She calmly explained that when I was born, in 1952, photography studios where we lived would not photograph black people. So, my parents drove to Auburn Avenue in downtown Atlanta and had my pictures taken in this black business and residential area. When the family grew rapidly, my parents were simply too busy to make the trek for my siblings’ pictures. “Why didn’t you ever tell us?” I asked her. “It was just too painful,” the reply.

No eating here; no sitting there
My mother hated taking us for ice cream, she later told us, because while black people could buy at an ice cream shop, they were forbidden from eating there. We kids would pepper her with questions all the way home about why we couldn’t eat at the shop. She only recently admitted that she could not bring herself to tell her babies that America considered us second-class citizens.

While my mother continued to try to protect us, the horrible truth was encroaching steadily. One day it hit me with a force that still shocks me today.

Many Saturdays, she would drop us off at the Strand Movie Theatre, where we entered through the back door. When I asked why we went this way, she said it was cheaper, and I accepted her explanation.

I don’t remember my mother telling us to sit upstairs in the balcony; probably, we intuitively joined the other black people. One day, all the balcony seats were filled. So I, age seven or eight, blithely went down the stairs, found an empty seat, and sat down. Suddenly, a white man, shining a flashlight in my face, screamed “Nigger, get back in that balcony!” Terrified and sobbing, I ran upstairs, sat on the steps, and continued to cry. The black kids laughed hysterically, incredulous that I didn’t know my place. While I still hear the violent screams and the laughter, I remember nothing about the movie.

Vacation Bible School fiasco
For some reason, a few white women came to teach Bible School at our church. All week, we had done arts and crafts, which I loved, and Friday, we would take our projects home. One night that week, the Klan burned a cross at our church. The teachers couldn’t return, and I never got my project. I felt devastated, confused, and afraid.

Traumas of integration
These sample ordeals should have prepared me for the coming trauma. But they didn’t. In 1965, I was among the first small group of black children to integrate the high school. My dad was so afraid for us that he almost forbade it, and he sat up all night long with a shotgun the night before our first day.

Everyone — students, teachers, administrators, and even bus drivers threatened, harassed, and humiliated us nonstop. After a year of this treatment, I finally got it. At the tender age of 13, I had an epiphany: They really do hate us and want to kill us! Until that moment, I had been clinging to the belief that this couldn’t possibly be true.

When I became the first black person to be admitted to the Beta honors club, I was ready. I stood in the line of inductees and heard my fellow club members scream at the adults, “You must have made a mistake, there’s no such thing as a smart nigger!” This time, I didn’t cry.

During the horrible integration days, my normally shy mother’s behavior was astonishing. She protected us vigorously and even threatened the principal that she would take him to the U.S. Supreme Court if he forced black children to sit together on the bus (this way, accommodating white kids’ demands to sit apart from us). So, I suggested to my black classmates that we spread out and take a seat in all parts of the bus. In response, the driver told us to sit together (to create a separate block of seats for the white kids). When my mother confronted the principal with our reports, we were instructed to sit anywhere. Yet the white kids defied the order and stood rather than sit next to us.

I should have known my mother had such strength. During the early days of integration, we commuted many miles to the black elementary school as we rode past the white school, packed like pigs in a raggedy school bus. Until the day my mother went to the black school and counted us as we got off the bus. She enlisted the principal to join her in forcing the local board of education to give us another bus. When the board claimed it had no extra driver, an excuse for not getting the other bus, my mother found a driver.

Understanding and gratitude
For a long time, I was so angry with my mother for not telling me the truth before the theatre incident and about the other horrors sooner. Eventually, thank God, I came to understand her dilemmas and I imagined how she must have struggled during those years (and, of course, throughout her whole life).

I mean, really, how do you explain something like racism to a child? Now, I am grateful for those few sheltered years under the protection and sometimes cover-ups of my beleaguered parents.