Speaking Truth to Power - Anita Hill [19]
My school life and activities were typical of girls in rural Oklahoma in the 1960s and 1970s. When I began my formal education, there were five children at home. Carlene, John, Ray, JoAnn, and I each day began with the near-half-mile walk to the bus stop. Ray, JoAnn, and I traveled north to the two-room elementary school at Eram. Carlene and John, though they earlier had attended Eram Grade School, were bused south to the segregated high school in Grayson. At Eram grades one through four studied together in one room with a single teacher and grades five through eight with another. In each classroom four rows of aqua-blue seats with attached desktops faced a single blackboard. Each row was designated for a single grade, which averaged about eight students. Next to the blackboard was a huge gas heater that heated the entire room. Due to my nearsightedness, I often sat near the front and close to the heater. Accordingly, I was often scalding hot while my classmates in the rear shivered.
My first-grade teacher was Mrs. Johnson, whose husband taught in the other classroom, where my brother was. Later Mrs. Broadhead, then Mrs. Morton and Miss Pope—all women, all white—taught each of the four classes in her charge each of the required subjects. Mrs. Harris and her husband, Lee Wade Harris, rounded out the school staff as cook and bus driver/janitor, respectively. Under Mrs. Broadhead and her successors, I excelled, often doing the next grade’s work in order to be challenged. But the highlight of my promotion from grade to grade was that it brought me away from the inner wall and the cloakroom and closer to the outer wall of the schoolroom and the area I loved most. I knew from grade one that, once in the fourth grade, I would be allowed to sit next to the wall. I could hardly wait—for underneath the large windows was the room’s library. There, lining the shelves were the encyclopedias, geography books, and the Nancy Drew mystery series just waiting for me to finish my work.
In grades one through three, when I finished an assignment early, I would ask permission to cross the room to the library. But by the fourth grade I could simply reach out and pull whatever I wanted from the shelf without leaving my seat or drawing attention to my idleness. I liked my schoolwork and did well in it, but I loved reading the library books even more. Perhaps they were a greater incentive to complete my assignments quickly and correctly. By the end of fourth grade, having read all of the books in the first library, I was anxious for the promotion to the next set of books.
The peacefulness of my family life continued through most of my childhood. Yet at about the time when the outer world seemed to be in chaos with war, antiwar demonstrations, civil rights protests and rioting, personal crisis disrupted our idyllic existence. One evening during the fall of 1967, my parents left my sister JoAnn and me alone at home. Usually when my parents had to be away in the evening, we went with them, or one of my older brothers, John or Ray, stayed with us. However, on this night my parents were going to the hospital to visit my Aunt Sadie, who was critically ill from a stroke she had just suffered. My brother John had left home for the air force, and Ray, the only other sibling still at home, was playing in his senior year of high school football. JoAnn was fourteen and I was eleven; by today’s standards of latchkey and otherwise independent children, we were certainly old enough to be left alone for a few hours. Yet this was the first time that I remember we were left alone. Since our closest neighbors were miles away, we felt fairly isolated and we imagined that every dog bark foretold some terrible misfortune about to befall us. We teased each other, laughed, and did our normal sibling squabbling about whose turn it was to wash and whose to dry. Upon finishing our homework and chores we waited for our parents to come home with some news of our aunt.
As the night wore on, the time when we were sure our parents