And she smacked me. She thought I was being smart. But that was just what kids were doing. And I was so proud of my autographs.
Of course, I have never let anything stop me. I just keep on going. When I finished Christiansburg Institute, I marched with my graduating class, but two days before graduation, I was called into the principal’s office. Botetourt County was supposed to have paid my fee, and they didn’t. And they didn’t give me a diploma. I had to march with a blank diploma. And I had to fight back the tears, because I had worked, waiting tables, and washing dishes, and doing everything I was supposed to do, but they messed up.
[Mrs. Ferguson moved to Roanoke at that point.]
I had so many people who were good to me here. Mrs. Pullen and her daughter Ethel. We had a drama club in Christiansburg and Edison had one too, and we used to exchange plays, so I knew Ethel, when I was going to school, and when I would come here I would go down and see her, and everything. And I would ask Mrs. Pullen, her mother, “Can Ethel go with me this place or that place?”
She’d say, “No. Ethel can’t go and you’re not going either!”
I had a lot of people like that, Mrs. Pullen [another Mrs. Pullen; this one was black], Mrs. Martin, and all those people would just tell me what I could and couldn’t do. That, I used to appreciate. I really did.
I remember hearing about Henry Street; there was a club called the Morocco that you could go in, and it had bands and those kind of things, and that’s where I met my husband, you know? And he had just come back from World War II, and that is where I saw him. And Henry Street is where if you wanted to dance or anything, this is where you went. If you wanted to go to the movies or the theater, that’s where you went. You could go downtown to the theater but you had to go up to the mezzanine, or the balcony. You had to go up all those steps. So we felt like the Virginia Theater was ours, we could just go there. And then there were restaurants and things like that. And most of the people we knew, like, I’m trying to think of the name of the restaurant, but his daughter and I, we were buddies. We used to go over there and get these big old steaks and all that kind of things at his restaurant at Henry Street.
And we didn’t hang on Henry Street. Because I’ve always been this kind of person: if I’m going somewhere, I’m going. But I don’t go out on the street when I don’t know where I am going. I wasn’t that way.
So, we had four social clubs that had formal dances, and there used to be the Roanoke Auditorium. We used to go dancing there, and hear Ella Fitzgerald, Erskine Hawkins, and Cab Calloway, all those fellows. They used to come to Roanoke and we used to go to those dances and have a ball. The Hotel Dumas had a private band, that is where the music center is now. And they had a private band and you could go and dine more elegantly. And we used to go there. And of course there was the Royalton, where they used to have the Red and White Ball. We would go there.
[I settled at] 402 Chestnut Avenue, Northwest. It was just a close-knit neighborhood. The neighbors were, okay, I’ll give you an example. My daughter, and she is really my stepdaughter, my husband had her before we got married. I have a son and he has a daughter. But when she went to college she said that somebody took her bag with all of the clothing that she could wear at that time, because it was September, and it was hot. And she called back home crying. My neighbors across the way started buying clothes for this girl, and gave them to me so I could take them down there to her. That is the kind of neighborhood I lived in. It was just, “What can we do?” You know? And she wanted to come home, you know. She didn’t want to stay at college, but I was determined that she was going to stay there.
Now people weren’t always in each other’s homes, I don’t mean that. But it was just a lot of love and caring. But I’m going to tell you something, it’s the same thing in this community. I have been lucky and thankful that people have a sense of belonging. And in Northwest, there was a lot of pride of ownership, pride of belonging. Our families and our schools and our churches, all were sources of pride. I shall never forget when Four Sounds sang down at Roanoke Auditorium. And everybody applauded them. They were just magnificent. You have never seen anything like it. We were so proud we didn’t know what to do.
One day I was on Chestnut Avenue, looking out the window of my beauty shop, and I said, “I am going to get my degree.” I called Lawyer Muse and told him my situation, and he said, “Mrs. Ferguson, you stay on the line, and I will put my secretary on, and I am going to dictate a letter to Mr. Wilkerson,” I think his name was, the superintendent of the state. And, he did that. He said he would get my diploma papers for me, and he did it. And when I got them, I decided, I will never argue with anybody about a high school diploma. I went to Virginia Western Community College, and I enrolled and I graduated from there. And then for my last two years I went to Hollins. And I graduated from there in May 1972.
Nothing could stop me. I just made up my mind I was going. I said I would do whatever I can, and I did that. I just made up my mind; when things are going bad, I just get going.
Cities are always growing or shrinking, hence remaking themselves. Sometimes this reordering is haphazard, and sometimes it is planned, carried out according to the agendas of those paying for the improvements. The messy, medieval city of Paris came in for such planned improvement, and it was the first capital city to be rebuilt without a massive fire first clearing the land. The coup d’état that made Louis Napoleon Bonaparte emperor of France in 1852 gave him the absolute power needed to undertake the massive renovation of Paris. He had three major goals: to bring water into the city and to improve the circulation of air among the buildings; to unify its parts; and to make it more beautiful. A powerful administrator was needed, given that this massive project was to be carried out while the busy life of the capital went on around it. In 1853, the emperor selected Georges-Eugène Haussmann, whom he made a baron, to be that man.1
Though Haussmann’s name is the one attached to the changes in Paris and many other French cities, he was not the person who created the ideas. Rather, the plans drew on wisdom acquired during several hundred years of city making. Years earlier, kings of France, eager to make their capital as beautiful as Rome, had begun deciphering the strategies needed to achieve that end. The leaders that followed them added to those aesthetic concerns the need to control frequent epidemics, such as those caused by raw sewage running in the narrow alleyways of the city. As the years passed and modes of transportation changed, the people of Paris found that they couldn’t move through the narrow medieval streets squeezed between the tightly packed buildings; street widening became a pressing goal of city beautification.
Over the years, a concept evolved. At its heart was the creation of wide avenues called percées (“pierced”), because they were to cut diagonally through the old city’s massive blocks of housing. By the mid-nineteenth century, a few of these avenues had been created with great success. Their width permitted light and air to enter the city and their style added to its beauty.
Haussmann’s job was to apply these proven techniques on a scale large enough to transform the city. At the same time, while the streets were being carved out of the old city, sewers could be installed. A new street face was installed, incorporating buildings, street lamps, pissoirs, and other “street furniture” carefully designed to create unity in the “look” of Paris as one traveled from arrondissement to arrondissement, ward to ward.
In the series of figures shown here, we see the section of Paris that was “pierced” to create Avenue de l’Opéra, one of the greatest of the Haussmann boulevards. In the first map, we see the outlines of the tight and somewhat random streets of the old Paris. In the second map, we see the proposal for a boulevard to cut diagonally through the urban tissue. In the final map, we see the Paris of today, with Avenue de l’Opéra successfully