Here I sit on the floor of a hotel bath room , laptop
propped on the trashcan just typing away.
My BFF lies in the adjacent room sleeping soundly after successfully
overseeing a huge event she’s been working on for over two years and been
dreaming about for eight. According to
my trusty laptop, it is 2:20 AM at home in Oregon but I’m in Tulsa, Oklahoma,
my birth place. In fact, the hospital
where I took my first breath as a 4 pound premature baby, who wasn’t supposed
to make it, is a stone’s throw away.
Now 60, a long survivor, and way over 4 pounds, I have returned to my
Oklahoma roots.
I spent my toddler and early childhood years here in
Oklahoma wrapped in the care of my grandmother and daddy. On summer days I napped under wet sheets hung
from a clothesline to ease the hot, humid Oklahoma thickness and on summer
nights I chased fireflies among the cacophony of frogs, crickets, and
cicadas. On Wednesdays, I baked apricot
fried pies with the church ladies and tinkered on the clunky upright piano,
ending the day with an evening service of hymns and halleluiahs. And, on Saturday nights we polished my Mary
Jane shoes, laid out my gloves and hat, and tied my offering in a pretty hanky
for Sunday School the next morning. I
shucked peas and beans with Grandma and Mrs. Patella on the shady cool porch
and ran from the old mean rooster in our yard.
My brother and boy cousins would tease and torture me with horned toads
but watch over me each Saturday morning as we skipped to the corner store to
spend our weekly nickel on candy for the Saturday matinee. It was my life in downtown Tulsa in the early
50s.
By seven my dad re-married.
We left grandma and Tulsa behind
and moved to Littleton, Colorado where my father started a new business. Our family grew as we added my two little
brothers and adopted my sister, who is actually my step-mother’s sister, orphaned much too young. I claim her now
and always as my full-fledged sister and I wouldn’t trade her or any one of
those wonderful family years in Colorado for anything. I became a woman in the shadows of the
Rockies; but most every summer we would pack all seven of us into our Buick
station wagon with four- window air conditioning and travel back to
Oklahoma where our grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins would feed us Sunday
fried chicken and slabs of barbeque bologna after we spent an afternoon taking
turns churning the ice cream freezer.
In the 60s the army took my brother to Viet Nam and college
took my sister to Durango. My parents
moved back to Oklahoma and I learned a concept called “in-state” tuition. My parents agreed to let me spend my senior
year back in Colorado with my friends as I was very active in high school and
couldn’t bear to give up my life there to finish High School in Oklahoma. (Are you feeling the teen drama here?) The deal was, I would attend college in
Oklahoma where they would pay “in-state” tuition. So, in
short, I had a blast my senior year of high school living with various friends
on the Tom-Tom (drill team) squad and
cried all the way back to Oklahoma the night of graduation.
Stillwater would be home the next four years while attending
Oklahoma State University with summers back in Tulsa waitress-ing my way to tips
for the following school year. Instead
of chasing fireflies, my sis and I “dragged” Peoria chasing boys. The nights felt even muggier after growing up
in Colorado and the natural sounds of frogs were replaced with the Beach Boys
and Beatles blasting from car radios through open windows. It was my life in the early 70s in downtown
Tulsa.
My first teaching job took me to the Eastern Shore of Virginia. Here, I left my white bread world and became
the first public kindergarten teacher in a county of black and migrant field
workers. Dr. Martin Luther King, the
Reverend Jesse Jackson, and other civil rights workers I’d seen on TV took on
meaning now as I became immersed in a culture far different than what I’d
known. At 23, I had only met two black
people previous to this teaching assignment:
1) An attractive and very polite
young man at a leadership conference in Denver who pulled out my chair for me
and 2)
A model from Dallas who I roomed
with me second semester at OSU. Yes,
at 23 I had no awareness of black people living in downtown Tulsa. Unbelievable isn’t it?
Those first few years of my teaching career on the Eastern
Shore were as eye opening as an Oklahoma tornado coming straight at you. Every teacher holds that first class closely
to her heart; but, those dear little forgotten children captured my very soul
and I began to notice…to look…to understand what I was seeing on America’s
nightly news.
After twenty more years of teaching, two marriages, three
children, and military moves coast to coast, I moved back to Oklahoma in the
early 90s. I took a job teaching in,
you guessed it, downtown Tulsa. Not far
from where the rooster chased me in grandma’s yard, I taught in a school made
up of 98.6% black students with a teaching staff of 80% white teachers. This school was comprised of families who
were descendents of the Tulsa Race Riots and was located across the street from
one of the long-standing churches to survive the racial holocaust.
Like most white
Oklahomans I had never heard of the Tulsa Race Riot which took place in 1921
when a black man was accused of accosting a white woman…leading to bombing of
Black Wall street located in the Northern part of downtown Tulsa. The oil barons were in our Oklahoma History
books. The dust bowl and the Five Tribes…however accurate…but nothing of Black
Wall Street, “separate but equal”, or race rioting. It was eye-opening to have Eddie Faye Gates,
grandmother of cute little Chutney, visit our classroom and tell the story of
such an event.
That same year, I would be invited to attend the Oklahoma
State University Writing Project, one of 190+ sites of the National Writing
Project helping teachers become teacher leaders and better teachers of writing in
all subject areas and grade levels.
Attending this professional development and my work in downtown Tulsa
transformed me as a person and a professional.
Founded in 1974, the NWP is committed to preparing teachers of all students
equally, giving them a voice and strength and resiliency. One of the ways to increase teacher awareness
was to develop a network of sites in urban areas sharing common
challenges. Thus, a yearly Urban Sites
Conference evolved offering a space for teachers to talk the hard talk and
address the sticky issues of reaching students attending urban schools. As co-director of the OSUWP, my friend (you
know the one who is sleeping in the next room) and I decided it would be a
great mission to host the USN conference in Tulsa one day.
After directing our local Writing Project site, I took a
position on the national staff at NWP. It
was like a dream working with teachers all over the country, attending the
conferences, coaching the sessions, and mentoring new sites. I served in this capacity for eight
years. Unfortunately, last year, NWP
lost a large federal grant and I was laid off with most of the rest of our
staff. I continue to keep in touch with
the many friends and colleagues, especially Britton, the director of
OSUWP. This year, our dream of having
USN came true; OSUWP hosted the national Urban Sites Network conference in
downtown Tulsa.
It’s tradition for the host site to hold a town hall at the
end of the Urban Sites Conference. Yesterday as we were rapping up for 2012,
teachers shared what they learned from their tour of the Greenwood District,
tour of downtown, and a visit to the sites that inspired the book, ”The
Outsiders.”
Just as the executive
director was sharing her writing from a tour of Greenwood, the Reverend Jesse
Jackson walked into the room. There was
a frozen hush right before a spontaneous applause. There was history standing right in front of
us.
“Recruit, retain, and cultivate”, he told us “just like the
successful coaches do. He told us that
teachers are in a wonderful position to touch the lives of those young ones at
risk and he praised us for holding the conference to tackle the tough
issues. He encouraged all to continue
the work for the sake of the children.
It was a full circle moment for me. There I was in my birthplace sharing our
story with teachers across the nation. I
flashed back through time. I could see
Martin Luther King with Reverend Jackson on television leading the march for
equality …men willing to risk their lives for the betterment of others. I thought about the oppression, the
liberation, the transformation, the continuing…the struggle… still.
This week, I return—to my birthplace, to my family, to my
friends, to my calling, to dreams fulfilled, and to my faith in education as
transformation. It is a coming home like
no other, truly a full circle revelation.
