started venturing out into the neighborhood, poking his head into the juke joints and the pool hall where the hip cats drank late into the night. It was where the men slapped Woo on the back as they poured him another shot of whiskey. But whenever Pershing poked his head inside, he got the same wave of the hand from the proprietor and the men lining the wall.
“ Boy, get outta here. You ain’t got no business in here. ’Fessor Foster wouldn’t want you in here. ”
Woo wouldn’t have minded and never told him not to come in, but the word had spread somehow that Professor Foster and his wife had a different life in mind for Pershing.
There were pressures coming at him from every direction—his high-minded parents trying to make up in a single generation all that they had been denied through generations of slavery; bullying kids who taunted him and resented his station, tentative though it was; neighborhood people watching his every move. Then there were the reminders that no matter what he did or how smart he might be, he would always be seen as inferior to the lowliest person in the ruling caste, which only meant he had to work even harder to prove the system wrong because it had been drilled into him that he had to be better than the system construed him to be.
He lived under the accumulated weight of all these expectations.
“People in the town demanded more of us,” he said years later, “and we had to give it. I respected what they told me. And anything I didn’t want them to see, I kept it out of their sight.”
Every few years, a teacher from Monroe Colored High loaded a band of students onto the flat bed of a pickup truck and rattled across the Missouri Pacific Railway tracks. They passed the rich people’s porticos and pulled up to the back entrance of the white high school in town. The boys jumped out and began stacking the truck bed with the books the white school was throwing away. That is how Monroe Colored High School got its books. The boys loaded the truck with old geography and English texts, some without covers and with pages torn out and love notes scrawled in the margins, and headed back to their side of town.
By the time he was old enough to understand where the books came from, Pershing was fast putting together the pieces of the world he lived in. He knew there was a dividing line, but it was hitting him in the face now. He was showing a talent for science and was getting to the point that he needed reference books to do his lesson. But it was against the law for colored people to go to the public library. “And the library at the Colored High School did not live up to its name,” he said years later.
He was in the eighth grade when word filtered to his side of the tracks that Monroe was getting a new high school. It wouldn’t replace the old building that Monroe Colored High was in. It was for the white students, who already had a big school. It would be called Neville High. The colored people could see it going up when they ventured to the other side of the tracks. It rose up like a castle, four stories of brick and concrete with separate wings and a central tower, looking as if it belonged at Princeton or Yale. It opened in 1931 on twenty-two acres of land. The city fathers made a fuss over the state-of-the-art laboratories for physics and chemistry, the 2,200-seat balconied auditorium, the expanded library, and the fact it was costing $664,000 to build.
As the new high school took shape across town, Pershing watched his father rise in the black of morning to milk the cows and walk the mile and a half to open his building the size of a grade school. His father, his mother, and the other teachers at Monroe Colored High School were working long hours with hand-me-down supplies for a fraction of the pay their white counterparts were getting. In Louisiana in the 1930s, white teachers and principals were making an average salary of $1,165 a year. 70 Colored teachers and principals
“ Boy, get outta here. You ain’t got no business in here. ’Fessor Foster wouldn’t want you in here. ”
Woo wouldn’t have minded and never told him not to come in, but the word had spread somehow that Professor Foster and his wife had a different life in mind for Pershing.
There were pressures coming at him from every direction—his high-minded parents trying to make up in a single generation all that they had been denied through generations of slavery; bullying kids who taunted him and resented his station, tentative though it was; neighborhood people watching his every move. Then there were the reminders that no matter what he did or how smart he might be, he would always be seen as inferior to the lowliest person in the ruling caste, which only meant he had to work even harder to prove the system wrong because it had been drilled into him that he had to be better than the system construed him to be.
He lived under the accumulated weight of all these expectations.
“People in the town demanded more of us,” he said years later, “and we had to give it. I respected what they told me. And anything I didn’t want them to see, I kept it out of their sight.”
Every few years, a teacher from Monroe Colored High loaded a band of students onto the flat bed of a pickup truck and rattled across the Missouri Pacific Railway tracks. They passed the rich people’s porticos and pulled up to the back entrance of the white high school in town. The boys jumped out and began stacking the truck bed with the books the white school was throwing away. That is how Monroe Colored High School got its books. The boys loaded the truck with old geography and English texts, some without covers and with pages torn out and love notes scrawled in the margins, and headed back to their side of town.
By the time he was old enough to understand where the books came from, Pershing was fast putting together the pieces of the world he lived in. He knew there was a dividing line, but it was hitting him in the face now. He was showing a talent for science and was getting to the point that he needed reference books to do his lesson. But it was against the law for colored people to go to the public library. “And the library at the Colored High School did not live up to its name,” he said years later.
He was in the eighth grade when word filtered to his side of the tracks that Monroe was getting a new high school. It wouldn’t replace the old building that Monroe Colored High was in. It was for the white students, who already had a big school. It would be called Neville High. The colored people could see it going up when they ventured to the other side of the tracks. It rose up like a castle, four stories of brick and concrete with separate wings and a central tower, looking as if it belonged at Princeton or Yale. It opened in 1931 on twenty-two acres of land. The city fathers made a fuss over the state-of-the-art laboratories for physics and chemistry, the 2,200-seat balconied auditorium, the expanded library, and the fact it was costing $664,000 to build.
As the new high school took shape across town, Pershing watched his father rise in the black of morning to milk the cows and walk the mile and a half to open his building the size of a grade school. His father, his mother, and the other teachers at Monroe Colored High School were working long hours with hand-me-down supplies for a fraction of the pay their white counterparts were getting. In Louisiana in the 1930s, white teachers and principals were making an average salary of $1,165 a year. 70 Colored teachers and principals
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