Reaching for the Moon: Chapter 1

Mama adored us, but she was very orderly and from time to time she could be a bit strict.

The number of times the train engineers blew the whistle as they traveled through the trees, echoing off the granite bedrock that rose above us and formed the valley within which our town, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, was nestled.

A passenger train also rolled through town, carrying not only travelers of modest means but also the well-appointed private coaches that the wealthy magnates of that era owned and used to travel around the country.

Many White people convinced themselves that Colored people were an inferior race and so justified using guns, whippings, beatings, rape,

These attitudes and behaviors were prevalent for many decades after slavery ended, including in education.

In its 1857 Dred Scott decision, our nation’s highest court, the Supreme Court, ruled that Colored people were an “inferior and subordinate class of beings” as compared to Whites.

Despite these considerable obstacles, Colored people fought for our rights and took pride in our achievements.

This brings me to Mary McLeod Bethune, a Colored woman born shortly after the end of slavery whose parents had been not only enslaved but also denied a formal education.

Then we’d listen to the chicken running around like crazy under the tub until it died and the noise stopped—something we no longer do today because it’s inhumane, but back then it was just how we fed ourselves.

Only one time, when we got a little older, did Daddy let us sit in the back of the church with the rest of the children our age. But during service, one of the other kids acted out and there was a small commotion.

“You are no better than anyone else, but nobody else is better than you,” Daddy would emphasize to us over and over, even as he guided us to understand the restrictions of segregation.

“You are no better than anyone else, but nobody else is better than you,” Daddy would emphasize to us over and over, even as he guided us to understand the restrictions of segregation.

Some people say that he was the descendant of Colored people who had never been enslaved and as a result had been able to accumulate more than the average Colored person.

As the story goes, the colonel subsequently provided for her and their mixed-race children.

What Daddy lacked in formal education, he made up for with his profound knowledge of and appreciation for the natural world.

Farmers are dependent upon factors such as whether the sun shines enough or too much, when the rain comes and how much falls, and whether pests like the apple moth will undermine their crops and leave them with little to harvest, or whether frost or an early snowfall will leave them with scarcely anything to show for their months of work.

That’s when the roads became treacherous and often impassable with snow and ice.

It often took all day to create every meal from scratch, laboring in a hot kitchen to cook enough sustenance to support dawn- to-dusk physical labor.

Though racial segregation was imposed in town, during planting season and the harvest, Colored people and Whites became just a community of farmers coming together to help one another live.

Perhaps that’s also how I learned from an early age to not always adhere to the customs of the color line.

His show horses, who were named Bill and Frank, transported our family in a horse-drawn buggy.

He would get out of bed and go help the heifer deliver her baby.

Before the European settlers arrived and killed off most of the indigenous people, Greenbrier County was part of the Can-tuc-kee territory, where the Shawnee and Cherokee peoples lived.

His honorable reputation preceded him, and his word was his bond— you could always trust what he said.

Even though Greenbrier’s jobs were good for that era, Daddy didn’t want his children to have to work there when they grew up, experiencing either its snubs or the perilous accusations that White people could capriciously make against Colored people—you never knew when.