and if you were dark, you pledged Zeta Phi Beta. I was in the Ivy League Club, a precursor to belonging to Alpha Kappa Alpha. My family was composed of people with a wide range of skin tones, but I despised these distinctions. Disgusted, I dropped out of the Ivy League Club and refused to pledge a sorority.
For his second year of college, Duke went to A and T College in North Carolina. When school ended in the spring, he came to see me on his way home to Indianapolis. We went out to dinner at Betty’s Grill on Tenth Street. Duke knew he had hurt me, but he didn’t know how badly.
“Georgia, I’m sorry I hurt you. I love you. I want us to get married.” He pulled a package out of his pocket and handed me an engagement ring.
I knew what I had to say. “I love you too, Duke, but I can’t marry you.”
“Why, Georgia?”
“I don’t think I could ever accept that you had a family and kept it a secret from me. You betrayed my trust by doing that. If you couldn’t tell me something that important, I can’t marry you, no matter how much I love you.”
It was hard for me to say, and when he cried, I cried too. We parted, two very sad young people. We did not meet again until twenty-five years later, when he came to Louisville as part of his work as regional director of the National Equal Employment Opportunity Office.
At the age of eighteen, I knew precisely what I did not want to do with my life—clean other peoples’ houses—and I also knew what I did want to do. I wanted to become a medical doctor, a surgeon. I had cherished that dream for a long time. I was not afraid of blood and never had been squeamish about dealing with family medical crises such as broken bones or fainting. Word got around among the girls in town that I could pierce ears, and many asked me to do so. As the reputation of my medical services grew, a girl showed me a wart on her finger. It was big and ugly and she wanted it off.
“I’ll remove it for you,” I offered. Taking a sharp razor blade, I cut into the wart. It bled profusely, but I just kept on cutting until it was all gone. Then I poured on alcohol and bandaged the finger. Now, I shudder to think what a disaster it could have been. In those days, just as later when I turned my attention to other difficult pursuits, I had supreme confidence in my abilities. I simply assumed that if it could be done, I could do it.
Despite my talents, my mother’s friend and our neighbor, Edna Leavelle, who had a college degree, once said to me, “Georgia, you’re gonna be just like your mother—get married and have a houseful of children.”
Biting my lip, I didn’t say anything. But at that moment, I hated her. As I walked away, I mumbled to myself, “How do you know what I’m going to do when I don’t even know yet myself ? I do know I’m not gonna be just a housewife with a house full of kids, though!”
By then, I knew I had to do something better, but I had admitted to myself that I had no chance of becoming a doctor. Looking back, I think I could have done it if I had had some guidance and financial help. However, I had neither. To my parents, finishing high school was an accomplishment, since neither of them had. As for my college scholarship, it had been an unbelievable stroke of luck in the first place. Despite my grand ambition, a Black woman went to Municipal College to become a teacher or to find a husband. There was no counseling program to help ambitious students like me, and after my scholarship ran out, I didn’t even have the money to stay in school.
I felt angry, and once again, impatient. At the time, I was going out with a nice, but to me, boring young man. Robert Jones, with curly black hair and a ready smile, had had a job in a woodworking plant since high school and my parents liked him.
Robert asked me to marry him. I refused, at first, because I didn’t love him. He pressured me to say yes and so did my parents; I guess they thought it was time I settled down with a man who had a steady job.
However, all that mattered to me was that the fall term at Municipal was approaching and I had no money to enroll. All I could think about was getting back into school. At that point, I did something foolish. I told Robert I would marry him if he paid my tuition. He agreed. When I realized a short time later that my education would cost too high a price, I told Robert I had changed my mind. He went to my father and Pop told me that I must go through with the wedding. “A promise is a promise,” he said.
My father’s decisions had always been the law; so I thought I had to do it. I was angry and felt betrayed. “You can make me marry him, but you can’t make me stay with him!” I shouted at my father.
Juliette Williams, a girl who was almost twenty, had moved in with her brother and sister a few houses down from us. She was getting married that August. We had a double wedding at her pastor’s office. Afterwards, the four of us went out to dinner. Then Robert and I went to the room he had rented for us at the home of Mrs. Ida Tilford. She was a local seamstress who immediately took a liking to me, and she persuaded me to have a reception to celebrate the marriage. She had sewn a long, beige satin dress with high, puffed sleeves and a fitted waist for a customer who had failed to pick it up. Generously, she offered to alter the dress for me to wear.
The reception was lovely, but I soon found out that I had celebrated for nothing. When the time to enroll for college approached, I asked Robert for the tuition money.
“You’re a married woman now. You don’t need to go to school,” he said.
“You’re going back on your word!” I cried angrily. “That was our bargain. If you’re not going to live up to your end, I’m not living up to mine. I won’t stay with you!”
He wouldn’t relent, and although I didn’t leave him immediately, I became more and more bitter about his reneging on our deal. That, however, was not our only problem.
Robert’s idea of sex was to satisfy himself without giving any thought to me. There was no tenderness in our lovemaking—I felt as though I were constantly being raped. We fought a lot. One night I refused to have sex with him. Trying to end the discussion, I jumped up from the bed and went to the closet. I was reaching for my robe when Robert, furious, shoved me inside and locked the door.
Soon after that terrible night, Robert, who by this time was in the Signal Corps of the Armed Services, was sent to Lexington, and from there to Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. As soon as he left, I filed for divorce and moved back to my parents’ home. When Robert received the divorce papers, he called and said he was getting an emergency leave to come home. “I can’t believe you’re doing this,” he pleaded.
“Believe it,” I said. “And there’s no use coming home. I won’t be changing my mind.”
Robert got his leave and came home anyway. I did not want to see him, but because he had come such a long way, I finally agreed to meet him at his parents house to talk. However, as I had told him on the phone, my mind was made up. After our meeting, I went back home. What now? I wondered. I can’t go to school and I can’t be married, at least not to a man like Robert. My life is going nowhere.
In that dejected
