Boys, however, had begun to notice me. Joe Ray Jr., who had always been a close friend to my brothers and me, now wanted to spend time alone with me. Often, he would come and sit with me on the porch of wherever I was baby-sitting.
Eventually, though, my traumatized feelings calmed down and I began to look at boys in a new light. I fantasized about Carroll Mason, a good-looking boy I met at a party in Bloomfield, where I had been visiting my cousin Josephine Bishop. I wondered if I would ever fall in love and get married.
Then I met Duke, the first boy for whom I felt a real passion. I was a senior at Central High, the Black high school, when he transferred from Crispus Attucks, the Black high school in Indianapolis. I met him at Coach Willie Kean’s house on Grand Avenue, but I had already noticed him in my trigonometry class. George Duke Beasley. He wore suits custom-tailored by his brother in Indianapolis and was the star of Central’s basketball team. We became lovers.
Duke kept a room with an older couple, but his meals were not furnished; he was always hungry. My love for him was such that I gave him my lunch money. I thought this an important indication of the depth of my affection. Because the Keans were one of the families I cleaned for, I had a key to their house. We would meet there when we knew they were going out. One night, though, they caught us.
“What’s that?” whispered Duke. “It sounds like the back door opened.”
“Quick!” I said. “Get under the bed!”
Straightening my clothes, I went out to meet the Keans and nervously explained that I had come over to do some cleaning. I went home and laid down on the couch, worrying about Duke under the bed at the Kean’s. About two hours later, I saw him coming up our sidewalk and I rushed outside. “What happened?”
“After you left, they came into the bedroom and Coach called, ‘All right, Duke, you can come out now.’ He lectured me for an hour about how I could have gotten you pregnant.” After Duke left, I tossed and turned all night. When morning came, I told Mom I was too sick to go to school. Around noon I told her I was feeling better and was going over to the Kean’s to clean. Because it was the middle of the day, I was alone in the house. By the time Coach and his wife Helen came home, the place was spotless. I had cleaned like I’d never cleaned before.
I apologized to Mrs. Kean. She said, “Georgia, you know what you did was wrong, and you know I’m going to have to tell your parents.”
I was frantic. I couldn’t let her tell my parents. I ran down to the basement where Coach Kean was working.
“Mrs. Kean says she’s going to tell my parents what happened last night. I know it was wrong and I apologize, but you can’t let her tell. If you do, I’ll have to tell her how you pat me on the behind when she’s not looking.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” he promised.
My stomach was in knots for the next few days. As time passed and nothing happened, however, I decided I was out of the woods and relaxed. I had intuitively negotiated from a position of strength and won. It was a lesson not lost on me.
I had always hoped to go to college, but I really didn’t know how I would do it. I had no money for tuition and books and there was no way Pop or Mom could help me. My teachers knew I wanted to go, so Helen Kean and her sister Naomi Lattimore persuaded Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority to give me a two-year scholarship to Louisville Municipal College. Duke received a basketball scholarship to the same school.
Duke and I graduated high school together in the spring of 1940. We celebrated by going to one of the few restaurants in the area where Blacks could eat inside. It was a roadhouse on River Road owned by Mrs. Gertrude Ake, a friendly Black widow. Her specialties were tasty country fried chicken and liver and onions with sweet potatoes.
After graduation, Duke went to Indianapolis for the summer and I went to work in Louisville at Grant’s Five and Ten Cent Store on Fourth Street. We hated to part, but we knew it was only for summer vacation.
At Grant’s I worked as a counter girl, serving hot dogs and root beer. “Georgia,” my supervisor admonished on my first day, “you can serve colored people, but don’t let them eat at the counter.”
I said nothing, but I knew I could never tell anyone that they couldn’t stand at the counter and eat. In my third week on the job, my physics teacher, Victor Perry, came in. He saw me and walked up to the counter, where I stood. “Mr. Perry, would you like a hot dog and a root beer?” I asked.
“I believe I would,” he answered.
I’m sure he assumed it was all right for me to serve him or I wouldn’t have offered. He stood at the counter eating and as we talked, I could see my supervisor watching. I knew what was coming. When Mr. Perry left, she strode over to me. “Georgia, go to the office at the end of the day,” she said sternly. I didn’t wait until the end of the day, though. I knew she meant to fire me and I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction. I quit then and there.
Mom’s last child, my brother Carl, was born that summer. I was sixteen and embarrassed that Mom was pregnant again. When Carl was born, I loved him dearly, but I wouldn’t take him outside of the house because I didn’t want anyone to think that I’d had a baby. Inside our home, though, I held and cuddled him all the time. I may have been compensating for my resentment of Mom’s pregnancy, or I may have had a premonition that our time with Carl would be short.
Both Duke and I did above-average work our freshman year. We had no money and few new clothes—but we had each other. We were happily planning our future together when I learned that he had left Indianapolis because a girl had been pregnant with his son. He had not wanted to marry her, but after his son was born, he supported him. Duke didn’t tell me about the baby. I found out by reading a letter he had written to his mother. I cried for three days and refused to tell my parents what was wrong. When I finally did tell them, Pop, who had always been wary of Duke, said, “I knew there was something about him I didn’t like.”
At the end of the school year, Duke went back to work in Indianapolis. Heartbroken over what I had found out about him, I looked for a summer job in Louisville. I went to work for the Tuckers, a well-off family who lived on Cherokee Road, an upper-class neighborhood. Every morning, Mr. Tucker would get the Courier-Journal to “see what the stock market is doing.” This was my first contact with people who had unearned income; everyone else I knew labored for a living. While Mr. Tucker was studying the stock market, I was working every day of the week, from seven in the morning until it was nearly dark, keeping his house clean. I made seven dollars a week.
I’m sure that the Tuckers weren’t any worse than other people who hired domestic help and that they were probably paying the going rate. It was my early experience at this job and others like it that gave me a deep conviction that poor, working people don’t “get their share of the pie” in our country. My experience with this type of unfairness made me determined to do something about it.
Before school began again, my brother Jay, who had a good job, gave me a special present. I didn’t have many clothes, mostly what I could make myself. One day Jay said, “Georgia, I want you to have a new coat when you go back to school. I have an account at Levy Brothers. Go and get what you want and charge it to me.”
In fact, he let me buy two coats—a fitted, black dress coat with jeweled buttons down the front and a medium blue, plaid wraparound coat. I felt like a million dollars in those coats.
That fall, when I returned to Municipal for my second year, I made a discouraging discovery. I found out for the first time about the discrimination within the Black race based on shades of
