Mom’s last child, my brother Carl, was born that summer. I was sixteen and embarrassed that Mom was pregnant again. When Carl was born, I loved him dearly, but I wouldn’t take him outside of the house because I didn’t want anyone to think that I’d had a baby. Inside our home, though, I held and cuddled him all the time. I may have been compensating for my resentment of Mom’s pregnancy, or I may have had a premonition that our time with Carl would be short.
Both Duke and I did above-average work our freshman year. We had no money and few new clothes—but we had each other. We were happily planning our future together when I learned that he had left Indianapolis because a girl had been pregnant with his son. He had not wanted to marry her, but after his son was born, he supported him. Duke didn’t tell me about the baby. I found out by reading a letter he had written to his mother. I cried for three days and refused to tell my parents what was wrong. When I finally did tell them, Pop, who had always been wary of Duke, said, “I knew there was something about him I didn’t like.”
At the end of the school year, Duke went back to work in Indianapolis. Heartbroken over what I had found out about him, I looked for a summer job in Louisville. I went to work for the Tuckers, a well-off family who lived on Cherokee Road, an upper-class neighborhood. Every morning, Mr. Tucker would get the Courier-Journal to “see what the stock market is doing.” This was my first contact with people who had unearned income; everyone else I knew labored for a living. While Mr. Tucker was studying the stock market, I was working every day of the week, from seven in the morning until it was nearly dark, keeping his house clean. I made seven dollars a week.
I’m sure that the Tuckers weren’t any worse than other people who hired domestic help and that they were probably paying the going rate. It was my early experience at this job and others like it that gave me a deep conviction that poor, working people don’t “get their share of the pie” in our country. My experience with this type of unfairness made me determined to do something about it.
Before school began again, my brother Jay, who had a good job, gave me a special present. I didn’t have many clothes, mostly what I could make myself. One day Jay said, “Georgia, I want you to have a new coat when you go back to school. I have an account at Levy Brothers. Go and get what you want and charge it to me.”
In fact, he let me buy two coats—a fitted, black dress coat with jeweled buttons down the front and a medium blue, plaid wraparound coat. I felt like a million dollars in those coats.
That fall, when I returned to Municipal for my second year, I made a discouraging discovery. I found out for the first time about the discrimination within the Black race based on shades of skin color. If you were light, you were invited into the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority; if you were brown, then Delta Sigma Theta accepted you; and if you were dark, you pledged Zeta Phi Beta. I was in the Ivy League Club, a precursor to belonging to Alpha Kappa Alpha. My family was composed of people with a wide range of skin tones, but I despised these distinctions. Disgusted, I dropped out of the Ivy League Club and refused to pledge a sorority.
For his second year of college, Duke went to A and T College in North Carolina. When school ended in the spring, he came to see me on his way home to Indianapolis. We went out to dinner at Betty’s Grill on Tenth Street. Duke knew he had hurt me, but he didn’t know how badly.
“Georgia, I’m sorry I hurt you. I love you. I want us to get married.” He pulled a package out of his pocket and handed me an engagement ring.
I knew what I had to say. “I love you too, Duke, but I can’t marry you.”
“Why, Georgia?”
“I don’t think I could ever accept that you had a family and kept it a secret from me. You betrayed my trust by doing that. If you couldn’t tell me something that important, I can’t marry you, no matter how much I love you.”
It was hard for me to say, and when he cried, I cried too. We parted, two very sad young people. We did not meet again until twenty-five years later, when he came to Louisville as part of his work as regional director of the National Equal Employment Opportunity Office.
At the age of eighteen, I knew precisely what I did not want to do with my life—clean other peoples’ houses—and I also knew what I did want to do. I wanted to become a medical doctor, a surgeon. I had cherished that dream for a long time. I was not afraid of blood and never had been squeamish about dealing with family medical crises such as broken bones or fainting. Word got around among the girls in town that I could pierce ears, and many asked me to do so. As the reputation of my medical services grew, a girl showed me a wart on her finger. It was big and ugly and she wanted it off.
“I’ll remove it for you,” I offered. Taking a sharp razor blade, I cut into the wart. It bled profusely, but I just kept on cutting until it was all gone. Then I poured on alcohol and bandaged the finger. Now, I shudder to think what a disaster it could have been. In those days, just as later when I turned my attention to other difficult pursuits, I had supreme confidence in my abilities. I simply assumed that if it could be done, I could do it.
Despite my talents, my mother’s friend and our neighbor, Edna Leavelle, who had a college degree, once said to me, “Georgia, you’re gonna be just like your mother—get married and have a houseful of children.”
Biting my lip, I didn’t say anything. But at that moment, I hated her. As I walked away, I mumbled to myself, “How do you know what I’m going to do when I don’t even know yet myself ? I do know I’m not gonna be just a housewife with a house full of kids, though!”
By then, I knew I had to do something better, but I had admitted to myself that I had no chance of becoming a doctor. Looking back, I think I could have done it if I had had some guidance and financial help. However, I had neither. To my parents, finishing high school was an accomplishment, since neither of them had. As for my college scholarship, it had been an unbelievable stroke of luck in the first place. Despite my grand ambition, a Black woman went to Municipal College to become a teacher or to find a husband. There was no counseling program to help ambitious students like me, and after my scholarship ran out, I didn’t even have the money to stay in school.
I felt angry, and once again, impatient. At the time, I was going out with a nice, but to me, boring young man. Robert Jones, with curly black hair and a ready smile, had had a job in a woodworking plant since high school and my parents liked him.
Robert asked me to marry him. I refused, at first, because I didn’t love him. He pressured me to say yes and so did my parents; I guess they thought it was time I settled down with a man who had a steady job.
However, all that mattered to me was that the fall term at Municipal was approaching and I had no money to enroll. All I could think about was getting back into school. At that point, I did something foolish. I told Robert I would marry him if he paid my tuition. He agreed. When I realized a short time later that my education would cost too high a price, I told Robert I had changed my mind. He went to my father and Pop told me that I must go through with the wedding. “A promise is a promise,” he said.
My father’s decisions had always been the law; so I thought I had to do it. I was angry and felt betrayed. “You can make me marry him, but you can’t make me stay with him!” I shouted at my father.
Juliette Williams, a girl who was almost