knowing his fate was one of the most difficult things I’d ever done. Carl had grown since I left, he was six feet tall now. He had lost weight. He didn’t know he had a terminal illness and he was proud of the weight loss. He wanted to stay in shape and play sports. My parents made up excuses why they wouldn’t let him. He talked of going to Central High School and practiced his saxophone, so he could be in the school band. The rest of us watched him with tears in our eyes. My heart ached for him. It was so hard to keep up a good front, but I did my best.
Though I told myself not to, I called Jim Powers while I was home. “When can I see you?” he asked. We spent the next day together and saw each other a lot after that.
Because of my guilty conscience, I called Nicky often. He always assured me that he and Billy were doing just fine and said that I should stay as long as I needed to. I called work and asked to have my leave extended for another two weeks.
Carl entered high school in early September and joined the band. He still hadn’t been told the truth about his illness. One night we were watching television together. The program was about a person with leukemia. The narrator said the woman’s body was creating an overabundance of white corpuscles. At one point, Carl quietly said, “That’s what I have.” We all sat there motionless. Every heart in the room was breaking.
It was almost impossible to leave Carl when my four weeks were up. I knew I would not see him alive again. Back in California, I went to work every day, but my mind was still in Louisville. I called home as often as I could. The news was always bad. He received more and more transfusions, felt progressively weaker, and was in and out of the hospital. Finally, Carl’s condition became critical and he entered the hospital for the last time. The family stayed with him around the clock and prayed for his soul to be saved. Weeks before he died, Carl accepted Christ as his Lord and Savior.
“I’m not worried about Carl now,” Mom said. “He’ll go home to live with Jesus.”
I didn’t intend to make the trip back home when Carl died. I had said all I could to reassure him of my love while he was alive. In addition, I now knew I couldn’t stay away from Jim Powers if we were in the same town.
When I told Nicky the news about Carl’s death, I said, “I don’t think I’ll go to the funeral since I was just there.”
“Georgia, your family needs you. You’ll never forgive yourself if you don’t go,” Nicky responded.
I have to try to be truthful with this man, I thought to myself. “Nicky, if I go, I won’t be back,” I said. If Nicky had said he wanted to stay in California, our marriage would have ended then. He didn’t and he didn’t question me.
“If that’s what you want, we’ll all go back,” he answered.
We were just getting settled in our new home. Both of us were working; we each had our own car and we had just paid off the debt for our four rooms of furniture. We were much better off financially than we had ever been. None of that mattered to me. I told myself I was going home to be with my family and say a final good-bye to Carl, but in my heart I knew it was Jim who was drawing me back to Louisville. Even though the relationship caused me so much misery, I couldn’t give it up.
Grieving for Carl was hard on all of us, but Pop’s grief overwhelmed him. My mother seemed to be able to block it out somewhat by keeping busy, but Pop couldn’t. He had prayed so hard for Carl to live. My father actually believed that he could pray Carl back to health and so he felt betrayed by God when Carl finally died. For six months, Pop went to work, ate, and when he was home, laid on the living room couch staring at the ceiling, not speaking to any of us.
We faced death again as a family in 1962 when my brother Rudolph was killed in an automobile accident in California. He had just finished Bellarmine College, where he had been a basketball star, and was serving in the Air Force in Ft. Ord, California. Driving on a rainy night, he lost control of his car in a curve and was impaled on a railing. He was killed instantly. Even though our grief over losing Rudolph was great, it was not as terrible as watching Carl slowly die.
Carl was buried on December 6, 1956. I called Nicky and asked him to send Billy by train so I could be with him for Christmas. Nicky stayed in California to sell the house, the furniture, and my car. In March, he joined us in Louisville. We rented a small four-room house near my parents. Nicky got a job as a laborer at DuPont and I went to work in the data processing department of the Louisville Medical Depot, a federal installation. After living in the “doll house,” as we called it, for nine months, Nicky and I had saved enough money to buy something bigger.
Looking for a house to buy, I learned that the one thing that had not changed in Louisville was housing discrimination. Blacks were still relegated to living in certain areas in the city: the periphery of the downtown business district; a section in the west end called Parkland, where we lived; a small area in the east end of downtown called Smoketown; and the semi-rural area in the city called Little Africa. Blacks in Little Africa still raised chickens and hogs within the city limits, just as they had when I was a child. The financial institutions limited property loans to Blacks at 80 percent of market value of the property, if you could get approved. Blacks had to have exemplary credit and paid higher interest rates. The insurance companies redlined targeted properties in the Black areas, blocking out and refusing Blacks from acquiring insurance.
We bought a duplex with my brother Jimmie and his wife. It was an ugly, brown, two-story wooden frame house with a porch across the front. There were just no duplexes in good condition for us to chose from. Marie and Jimmie had three large rooms and a bath on the first floor and we had the second floor with two bedrooms, a large living room and kitchen combined, and a bath. Nicky built a food bar to separate the two rooms and put a fireplace in the living room.
Marie and I spent many days and nights sitting on the porch, talking about world news and what was going on in the country. Marie was born and raised in West Medford, Massachusetts. She had not experienced the blatant discrimination that Blacks faced in the South. Jimmie had met her while he was in the Air Force in Texas. Nicky and I were trying to make a home, but I was haunted by my feelings for Jim Powers. Eventually I gave in and saw him again. Before long, our relationship picked up where it left off.
Nicky and I didn’t argue, but we didn’t communicate either. Fie was unhappy with Kentucky, but I didn’t want to live in the Northeast again. The pace was too fast. While living in New Jersey and working in New York, I found myself talking and walking faster, trying to keep up with the Easterners. I was not accustomed to not knowing who lived next door to me or to not offering a guest a drink or some food, as is the custom in the South. I vowed that if I ever made it back home, I would never move from Kentucky again. As time passed, my consciousness of the inequalities faced by Blacks and by the poor grew as my life took dramatic turns and I faced new experiences.
In 1958, I learned firsthand how poor people were treated in public institutions. I was having severe pains in my abdomen; my monthly periods were erratic and I bled profusely during them. I had never had any real health problems before and I didn’t know what was happening to my body. Nicky and I were only able to meet our financial obligations monthly and I did not have the money to get a private physician. My alternative, therefore, was to go to the general hospital where indigent people were treated.
I walked into the huge lobby of the yellow brick building on Chestnut Street. The place looked dirty inside. Sick people, Black and White, were slouched on benches, waiting. Empty food wrappers and cigarettes littered the floor. I signed in at the registration desk. An arrogant, elderly, White woman looked over her glasses at me and said, in a loud, demeaning voice, “What are you doing here? You don’t look like you belong; you’re too well-dressed.” Before I could answer, she said, “Have a seat until your name is called.”
I
