The Promise: How One Woman Made Good on Her Extraordinary Pact to Send a Classroom of 1st Graders to College - Hardcover

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The Education of Oral Lee Brown
Even though I acted as a surrogate parent to twenty-three kids, I didn't always understand what they were going through growing up. I couldn't compare my childhood to theirs at all. Even though I'm just in my early sixties, and was only in my forties when I made my promise, the world of my childhood has disappeared. Well, in most ways, I hope!

I was born in Mississippi in the early 1940s, in a small town just outside Batesville. At the time Batesville, which is on the Tallahatchie River about fifty miles southwest of Memphis, Tennessee, had a population of about 15,000 people. The most interesting thing about Batesville when I was growing up was the fact that it was on the main train line that wound through the country, so we got to see all kinds of people coming and going when we were children. We also got to dream of leaving on that train, and believe you me, did I dream of leaving Mississippi! Even as a child I knew that there had to be a better life for me somewhere else, somewhere with racial integration and economic opportunity.

I am the ninth of twelve children born to Walter and Nezzie Bivins. My parents are old-fashioned farming folk: we grew cotton and corn, and we were very proud of the fact that we were one of the only black families in Batesville who owned our own land. Almost every other black family worked as sharecroppers, which meant that they did all the hard work on another man's land and then had to give most of the profit right back to the owner. That's why black people in the South stayed poor.

My father worked as a sharecropper for years and years before he saved up enough money to buy that land, and then we cleared and tilled it ourselves. When I say "we," I mean all of us--even at the age of eight years old I was picking fifty pounds of cotton a day, and then going back in the house to cook for twelve people. This was the time in my life when I learned a lot of the discipline--not to mention the penny-pinching--that it took to put an entire class of children through college.

You see, when you're picking cotton, you're doing it with the understanding that there's not a lot of money to be made in it. In fact, you're breaking your back for almost nothing. I'll give you an example: my family was so disciplined about working our own sixty acres that some years, we finished our crop in time to work on another farm that hadn't finished all the picking. We were paid every day for the amount of cotton that we picked, and so I can tell you exactly how much the fifty pounds of cotton that I picked every day at the age of eight years old was worth: two dollars. I remembered that later on when I was struggling to save enough money to put my babies through college: Oral Lee, I said to myself, you used to work for two dollars a day. You can get through this. And I always did.

It was a hard life in Mississippi. It was hard not just economically but socially, too. Thanks to segregation, black people had to live in a part of town called the Vance Bottom, down by the river, while white people lived up the hill in Batesville proper. Every few years the river flooded and destroyed many homes, and do you think any of those white people ventured down the hill to help out? That's right--they didn't. But they still expected black people to move off of the sidewalk when a white person passed by, and to keep their mouths shut after a black person was lynched by a white mob. That happened fairly often, too. Mississippi was a violent place to be a child.

In many ways, I'm one of the lucky ones. I left home when I was twelve years old. What happened was that one of my older sisters, Willie Bea, married a young man named Paul and followed him to Newburgh, New York. They had heard there were good jobs up North, and they wanted to escape segregation. They also started having children nearly every year of their marriage, including two sets of twins! They eventually had eight children in all. That would have been far too many babies for Willie Bea to manage by herself, so I lobbied my mother to be the one who got to leave Mississippi and help out.

After Mississippi, New York was amazing. When I arrived there at the age of twelve, everything about it felt completely foreign and new. It was the first time I had ever seen snow. It was the first time I'd ever seen a city! It was also the first time I had attended desegregated schools, and the first time I'd seen black people on an equal footing with white people. Of course there was still subtle segregation, but for the most part, everyone was just trying to make money in New York. I felt my heart bursting with pride when I saw black people who had "made it"--black people who had nice homes and nice cars just like the rich white people.

Now, when I say that I was one of the lucky ones, I mean I was lucky because I got out of Mississippi. In a different way, though, I wasn't lucky at all: I had to leave my mother, who I loved more than life itself. There's no way to describe how much I missed her during those years in New York, and how much I continued to miss her when I was an adult. In fact, after I was an adult, I used to tell my mother in the same breath that while I was so happy she had let me go to New York--where I didn't have to live under segregation--I also felt that she shouldn't have sent me away. I believe both of those things with all of my heart, even though they contradict each other. And my mother used to laugh at my logic whenever I said that, but she understood.

"Oral Lee," she told me, "there's no way I could've pleased you. What would you have liked me to do?"

"I'd have liked you to have packed up and gotten on that train with me," I told her. "All of us should have moved to New York."

She just laughed and laughed. The truth is that my mother probably wouldn't have liked New York. She's a Southerner in every way. Much later on, when all of her children were living in California, she moved to California too. Even though we all loved it, she never really got used to living there. As hard as her life was there, Mississippi was her home. I appreciate that--but I still wish that I could've put her in my suitcase when I moved to New York.

Even though I only lived in Mississippi for twelve years, I had two crucial experiences there that shaped my life. The first thing that happened was that I met a young woman who taught me the importance of education.

I've noticed that a lot of people who have gone on to do work in education had a special teacher during their childhood. If you read the autobiographies of educators like Helen Keller or Booker T. Washington, you'll notice that, even though they started their lives with huge disadvantages, there was someone in their childhood who mentored them and encouraged them; someone who believed in them. For me, that person was Miss Grace.

Miss Grace was not from Batesville. I believe she was from a big town in the South, maybe Memphis. She lived in the town of Batesville, in a house that was set up especially for young female teachers from out of town. There were a few teachers who came from hotshot cities to teach us ragged kids in Batesville; I'm sure there were white women who did this for the white schools too. A number of young teachers lived in Miss Grace's house, staying in their own apartments and boarding together. Young women didn't stay on their own then like they do now. And Miss Grace was young--she must have been about twenty-two years old, fresh out of college.

She was also beautiful. I'm not just saying that because she was the kindest lady you'd ever meet in your life! She was truly a pretty woman, and all the men in town used to stare at her. But she was one of those people who didn't even notice that kind of attention, because even though she was pretty she wasn't a snob. She was just everything that you could ever want to be: kind, beautiful, charming, gracious, sweet, intelligent, concerned. My brother Homer also had her as a teacher and even after we were grown we used to talk about how much we loved her. She was the sort of person who everyone loved.

Now, I always said she liked me because I was the ugliest kid in the class. The other kids used to say, "Why does Miss Grace like that ugly girl?" But it didn't bother me. First of all, I was just happy to be in school in the first place. See, unlike the way things are for kids today, when I was growing up kids were either in school or they were working in the fields. So we were all thrilled to be in that schoolhouse. There was never any question of "cutting class" like kids do today. If a kid was absent from school, it was because his parents needed him to be at work in the fields. That happened to all of us around harvesting time, and we were always sorry to leave our lessons.

I was doubly sorry to leave Miss Grace. For the first time, in addition to having someone at home who loved me--that's my mother, I was always special to my mother--I now had someone out in the world who loved me too. I often thought about how I came to play Miss Grace's role in the lives of my students. And when I got frustrated or upset with my students, I thought of Miss Grace, and that gave me peace.

For Miss Grace and I had a special relationship. She even asked me if I would like to spend the night with her every now and then. I must have been around ten years old then. Of course I said yes, and whenever she wanted to have me over, she would write a note for me to take home to my mother. And the next day when I went to school, I took a little brown paper bag with an extra set of clothes in it, so that I could stay over with Miss Grace.

Those were some of the best evenings of my life. After school was out, Miss Grace and I would walk back to her little rooms in the boardinghouse. It was only a few blocks from the school, not the six miles I had to walk from my house, and we would just talk and laugh all the way. She w...