When I was twelve years old, we lived in the tiny hamlet of Dallas. Life was sweet. We didn't have indoor plumbing because we lived a half a block from where the town sewer line stopped. But we were happy.
Then suddenly we were moving to Washington, D.C. My father was always in a quest for Big Money and he heard that he could make Big Money as an electrician in Washington. We didn't sell our house or move our furniture because this was going to be a test run to see how we liked it. The Big City awaited.
All the avenues in Washington are named after states...so being from North Carolina, we moved to North Carolina Avenue and it had a lot of people from North Carolina living there so we weren't the only dumb ones.
Our first apartment (and I use the word loosely) had one room and a closet that had been converted to a little kitchen. It was a basement apartment. We weren't all the way underground. When we sat in our room we could see people's legs as they walked by. And every five minutes or so, a big streetcar would go clanking by rattling our windows as it flashed by. We didn't have streetcars in Dallas; we didn't have buses either.
There was no bathroom in our apartment. We had to go upstairs and use a bathroom that was also shared by people on the first floor of the building. At least it was indoors.
We had no furniture so we went to a used furniture store near the apartment. My father bought a double bed, one rocking chair and a small table to hold our radio. We used to gather around the radio to listen to our favorite programs...my mother and I sat on the bed; my father in the rocking chair. We would sit and stare at the radio as if it were a tv. I liked radio. You had to create your own mental pictures of what was happening and I was good at that. We ate our dinners sitting on the bed since we didn't have a table.
Actually we had one other room and that's where I slept. It was the furnace room and I slept on a roller way bed. There was just enough room to open the bed beside the furnace. I had never seen a furnace before in my life and especially not one that big. There was a pilot light but when the furnace came on, it was with a blast of fire that lighted the whole room and made me sure we were all going to be blasted back to North Carolina. Scary. Scary indeed.
The apartment had roaches which we all hated. These weren't little roaches...they were big and they could fly. We tried spraying them but they would grab the spray can and squirt us with it. We put out Roach Motels, but they ate them. They came out mainly at night and when I was sleeping in the furnace room and the furnace would blaze on, I could see them scurrying all over the place. I slept with a broom and in the morning, I would use the broom to turn on the lights and give the roaches a chance to go wherever they go in the daytime.
My mother cried and wanted to go home to North Carolina. But my father was studying to get a journeyman's license and it was time for me to go to school.
The school was gigantic and it looked like a big brick castle. It had high chain link fences all around the building and the playground. On the first day of school, I went to three different front doors and they were all locked. I could see kids on the playground but I couldn't figure out how to get into the school. I went home and told my mother and father that there was no way to get in. My father didn't like that answer and just said, "Well tomorrow you will find a way in." And I did. You went onto the playground and they let everyone in at once. I was really so frightened. I was a nervous kid anyway. But eventually I found the office and they welcomed me. I had to take tests for most of the day. They had what they called a "track system". They had a college-bound track; a business track and a I-Hope-You-Can-Find-Work-of-Some-Kind track. And each track had two sections: smart and smarter. I got put in the college bound, smarter track. This was the greatest blessing that probably ever happened to me because it gave me some direction in my life. I was college bound!
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