THE GIRL ON THE CORNER—Growing up in the Sixties

Based on actual events

The Girl on the Corner

I grew up on First Street, right on the corner at the railroad tracks. I was raised by my grandparents, though I wouldn’t be told that until I was around eleven or so.The house is still there, occasionally occupied, sitting next to the seafood place. Back then, there was a row of storage barns along the east side of the tracks from First to past Peachtree. Over where the grain silos sit was once a neighborhood. It was a black neighborhood. I don’t know when it was established, but in the early 1900s. A black Methodist Church once stood on the West side of First Street.

I was friends with a black girl that was my age who lived across the tracks and on the corner. We had known each other since we were about four because her mom would come over and help my grandmother. We spent many afternoons playing in the den while her mother helped with Monday’s laundry. Even as a child, I was taken by her pretty smile and eyes. Our play dates ended when my grandmother recovered from her surgery. Though we could see one another’s homes from our yards, neither were allowed into the other’s neighborhood because…segregation.

We resorted to waving at each other across the imaginary wall between our worlds. On occasion, my group of white friends and I would meet the black kids at the railroad tracks. Just kids comparing notes about school, whose daddy was whose and what did he do, etc. That was the only time the girl on the corner and I could actually see and talk together. But, it was rare. It was too much of a chance being caught talking to “those kids”. And honestly it was from both sides. I risked being scolded and “switched” for disobeying. I know it was likely the same on the other side of the wall because we’d hear the call: y’all better leave those white boys alone!”

Looking back, it’s funny that I was five years old and running around the neighborhood, a downtown neighborhood, without any supervision. That’s how life was at the time. We lived in a small town, but a town divided by law. Probably the first word I learned to read was the word: colored. I remember being able to read the “colored only” signs downtown. You had to know where you were allowed to go and where you were forbidden to go. This was even before I began school. My Aunt Susie was always trying to teach me how to navigate the world even when I was four and five. Aunt Susie was my guide about society’s rights and wrongs.

One year, probably when I was about six or seven, my Sunday school class had a guest teacher, a young girl on Christmas break from college—a Stroud girl if I remember right. She had an idea of bringing the early sixties activism to Ayden by having the class bring a toy for the poor. An unopened, new $1 toy. This requirement would lead to my first clash with my mother.

I had heard of the poor. I had not seen a poor person, in person, but I’d seen them on TV. They were either in the mountains or in the city in neighborhoods of rundown buildings with abandoned cars in the streets. The Sunday-school teacher really poured it on and pulled at our heartstrings and by the time she was done speaking, I was hyped to be able to make a difference in someone’s life as that young college student said.

First, I had to get past my Mother (actually my grandmother, but I didn’t know this at the time). My grandmother wasn’t frugal. Grandma was cheap. I mean, cheap. How cheap was she? Well, she had this full size four-post bed. Beautiful piece of furniture. Probably from the forties if not earlier. But, she wanted a new more modern bed, like she had seen on TV. So, one day she had me go out to the shed and get one of granddaddy’s saws and she cut the posts off of her antique four poster bed. I don’t remember how old I was, but I do remember how wrong it felt.

So, when I came home from Sunday school and announced I needed a dollar to buy a toy for a poor kid, her answer was: “Go get one of your old ones and give’em that”. I was shocked, as any six-year-old would be. You’re supposed to follow the rules. That wasn’t the rule. The rule was new and one dollar. For the next week or more, I’d ask again, and she would again say “no”. It was always something similar to, “if they’re poor, they’ll appreciate it”. I appealed to my Aunt Susie, but even she failed, until at last, she went to the source of all income in the Hudson household, Ed Hudson. He promptly gave me the dollar and Susie and I headed to Westbrooks.

A few days later I was standing at the end of the driveway at my house waiting for the Sunday school teacher to pick me up and we’d all travel to give the poor their toys. Even though it was a cold, raw blustery day, I was standing out there twenty minutes early to be sure that they wouldn’t forget me. There I stood, bundled up and ready to go when the station wagon arrived. The car was filled with my Sunday school classmates. I squeezed into the back seat and we were off. I was wondering how long the drive was going to be, I’d made sure I peed before leaving the house—-twice.

The car lurched forward and made a right hand turn across the railroad tracks, then across East Ave, then pulled into the little girl on the corner’s yard. If I'd known the words to express myself at six, I’d have used them. But, What The Hell!, wasn’t part of my vocabulary then. I have no way of knowing what the little girl that lived on the corner was thinking, but she stopped running when she saw me and that made me guess she was having similar thoughts as I.

It would be an ideal story if I could write that there was a life altering epiphany from the experience. A moment in time when your destiny is revealed and your life changes. No such moment here. Instead, I believe that on that blustery and cold afternoon, two children finally realized they were not the same—it just had to be pointed out to them. Once pointed out, there was no unseeing it. Afterward, we occasionally waved at each other, but mostly we kept to our own friends.

Ayden was very small back then. The fire whistle, as we called it, would sound continuously to alert the volunteers to stop whatever they were doing and head to the station. I stood in line at Mumford’s market several times when the whistle would start up and Mr. Mumford would take off his apron and run out of the store. For me it was exciting because I lived a half block from the station and witnessed all the comings and goings of police, ambulance, and fire trucks.

One day I was playing in the yard when the fire whistle started up. As any kid would be, I stopped playing to watch the firemen arrive and see the trucks leave. My favorite was the 1953 LaFrance convertible. It was huge. But the smaller Chevy left first and turned towards me. It was about then I realized there was smoke drifting across East Ave. I took off to see where the fire was and slid to a stop when I realized it was the girl on the corner’s house. I watched as men cared for people who I couldn’t quite see, but I could tell that it was children. Flames poured from the front door of the house and then steam as the firefighters got the blaze under control. I was told later that the mom had gone to work and the children started playing with matches. They were badly burned, but alive.

A few months later was one of the last times I saw the girl on the corner. She had scars from the fire. She was missing several fingers and part of an ear. But she still had the prettiest eyes and smile still. Not long after coming back to the neighborhood, her family moved. As public housing became available more and more families left that neighborhood. Now only a couple of houses remain from that era.

As I said, there was no earth-moving revelation that day. Except maybe for the fact that for the first time I really understood what “colored only” meant. It meant two friends couldn’t be friends because society told us we were different.