Changing Places

By Myra Yarborough DeBruhl

In 1950, Myra Yarborough, age six, finds herself transported from rural North Carolina to the NC State School for the Blind in the state’s capitol of Raleigh. The family she loves seem far away as there are no phones in her home and a six week long stretch between visits. As America is changing, the school for the blind has an archaic feel and the housemothers seem to have stepped right out of one of Grimm’s fairy tales. Follow the challenges of growing up in an environment that seems resistant to change. Many people and friends contribute to Myra’s search for balance between a blind and sighted existence, between smiles and tears, and between opinions and reality. As you follow Myra’s growing years, you will get a glimpse of being blind through this perspective, and come away with a new understanding of blindness in the 1950s, as well as what it is like today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781312857957

Book preview

Changing Places

CHANGING PLACES

Myra Yarborough DeBruhl

Copyright © 2015 Myra Yarborough DeBruhl

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any matter whatsoever without the express written permission of both publisher and author except for the use of brief quotations in an article or book review.

ISBN 978-1-312-85795-7

Special Credit for the Cover Design:

Most grandmothers pull out pictures of their grandchildren to show them off. Instead, I am using a book cover graphically designed by my grandson (he used the image of our original school bell from a 1950s photograph):

Jonathan Christian DeBruhl

Sophomore at N.C. State University, School of Graphic Design

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Besides this story, other people deserve special recognition for their part in getting this book done. 

First of all, special thanks must go to my friend, Jennifer Raven. She has sat beside me many days as I worked, has perused every word written, has shared in the story as if it were her own, has taken care of any computer glitches, gone through countless books, annuals, magazines, and personal photographs for clarity and information, has attended an editing class with me, advised me on form, encouraged me with her own belief in the project, and ultimately displayed onto the digital format the final copy for you to enjoy. Thanks, Jennifer!

Thanks to Alice Osborne, editor and counselor on Writing from the Inside Out, http://www.aliceosborn.com.

Alice helped me search my soul in a deeper way, to pull out things as they were and not as I wish they had been, and to not be afraid of truth and its expression. As she edited out some things, she encouraged other things be added. Her insight was necessary in order to release the feelings which build the story. 

Thanks to my friend, Laverne Gallant, who has encouraged me in writing for years and who experienced so many of these chapters with me.

Larry Kendrick, Danny and Rose Hampton, Mom, and some of my school annuals deserve credit for pictures that appear on these pages, adding realism to the stories and places. Some of the pictures do not coincide with the particular stories where they appear, but all depict the realism of the time and things that were happening around myself, my family, and friends.  

DEDICATION

To every one of my friends who walked through these years with me,

To my parents who lived alongside me in their hearts,

To my children who have heard these stories a million times,

And to my grandchildren who have brought such joy to my life.

PREFACE

This is a book about countless very real, yet somewhat fictionalized situations, lived out in the years between 1950 and 1963 at the State School for the Blind in Raleigh, North Carolina. Even though the story takes my life and follows it all the way through those years, it is mostly the actual campus and the school that lends itself to the time and events which shaped many lives. Ways of living, teaching, learning, thinking, and relating have changed immensely from the time the story begins until it ends thirteen years later.

Students came from as far away as Manteo or Murphy, North Carolina and met in the state’s capital of Raleigh, where we were expected to embrace new things, sometimes making it very difficult for little children to understand where home really was. 

We lived in the times when rock n’ roll music was introduced, when stereos were not yet commonplace, where TVs, if anyone had one, were black and white, when schools were not air conditioned, where computers lived in science fiction movies, cell phones were not even thought of, and integration was just an idea. We perceived ourselves through the lens of blindness in this out-of-the-way shelter, as well as in the city churches and in our own hometowns. Methods of teaching blind students have changed through the years, but this book is only concerned with how we lived with blindness in our daily lives during this specific time period.

The changes over the course of these years will take you through the mountains and valleys in North Carolina which are told as reflective memories. These stories live in my diaries, in the minds of friends, as told by parents and teachers, and some simply from my own perceptions. This book is filled with my truth and my own sense of things growing up. This book is an opportunity and privilege for me to preserve a unique life experience, all while allowing you to come along and learn, live, and grow alongside the reality of my young self and my classmates. I am still learning how to understand life and blindness from many points of view. This book plays these viewpoints out in a storybook fashion.

Although I’ve played with the exact timing and fictionalized some dialogue, the events are real. Enjoy and travel to a time that’s both close and far away.

I should mention that today in 2014, the school I attended in 1950 is now named the Governor Morehead School. Even though the campus is at the same location, some of the circumstances that occurred during my years there would never occur there today. Children go home most every weekend, have house parents who are taught how to understand and help students adjust, and teachers must learn how to teach special needs children, as most of the students who now attend do have other needs besides blindness.

When I was a student in the 1950s, life on the campus was in a boarding school fashion, not seeing our parents for six weeks at a time, and some students only went home twice in one year. This type of existence is the strong focus of my story.

In later years, I talked extensively with my mother about how it was for her when I left home for school. As I now have children of my own, I wanted to understand what it was like for a mother to leave her child and drive over a hundred miles away. Geneva’s Story, the only portion of this book written in third person, comes from her answers during our long talks later in life. While my parents’ lives went on in Lexington, as mine did in Raleigh, I seemed to disconnect in a way that prevented me from understanding Geneva’s point of view through those remaining school years.

Me riding Chestnut while visiting my family in Lexington during my teenage years, 1960s

PROLOGUE

Geneva’s Story

Lexington, North Carolina, 1950

Many nights Geneva lay awake until almost midnight. This particular night she was still busy in her mind, even though she knew how important it was to get a good night’s sleep. It had been almost six weeks since she slept well. That is how long ago it was when she and Lee left their little girl, Susie, at the State School for the Blind in Raleigh, North Carolina. Susie was already talking to one of the little girls when they left her.

Mrs. Johnson, the housemother, had assured them that she would be just fine before they said goodbye. Lee had bounced Susie’s curls with his hand and Geneva had handed her the brand new doll she had bought the day before. 

The house seemed so quiet when they returned home; quiet for nights and days to come except for the sounds a family makes in their usual daily activities and that of Larry crying at night wondering where his sister was. It seemed to Geneva that Lee never talked about Susie except to brag about the steam heat and the indoor plumbing in the big brick dormitory where she was now living. Lee said it was a fine school and Susie would come out smarter than all of them. Geneva was expected not to cry about her child. She tried desperately to think of it as a blessing, an opportunity for Susie to have a better education and a better life. It hadn’t seemed like a blessing to Geneva, all those nights without her little girl to kiss goodnight. She never kissed Susie goodnight though. Maybe it was just knowing that she now couldn’t which made her want to; Geneva wanted to, tonight. 

Geneva had wondered a thousand times if Susie was afraid. Was she warm? Was the doll able to be the love she needed? She was such a little girl, but she could already count to a hundred and spell every word in her Brother Larry’s second-grade reader. Would anybody notice, Geneva wondered. Geneva wanted to be the one to pick out the dress for Susie’s first day of school, and to hear about it when it was over. Did she talk about home? Did she talk about Larry? She even wondered if her housemother remembered to call her Susie. Her real name was Myra, but in Lexington she had always been known as Susie. Geneva was sure they had remembered this, hadn’t they?

Susie could only see in contrast. In order to communicate his life with her, Larry had carefully drawn large white letters on a black chalkboard until Susie knew them all. He could entertain her for hours by drawing words, letters and numbers on the board. Susie would come away with a white chalk nose. Larry would call her Eskimo face. She would jump on him and give him an Eskimo kiss. Eventually the children would have to be separated before a real fight started.

Many nights now Geneva slipped quietly out of bed and went to the kitchen table. Here, memories turned over and over in her mind like pages in a book. How many nights had she sat there with her hands folded to keep them from shaking?

One night she had pulled the chain to the electric bulb. Lee’s mother lived across the street behind several trees, and the next day she had come up to see why a light was on in the middle of the night. Geneva guessed the light must look like a moon in the country darkness.

Now she took down the little kerosene lantern that hung by the kitchen door and lit it as the October coolness settled over her. The tablecloth came alive with its little plastic rosebuds that suddenly seemed to bloom. The salt and pepper shakers stood at attention at the end of the table. The white curtains at the window hung limp. Just a few weeks ago they had waved when she sat there, whispering a peaceful sigh to her mind.

Now Geneva got up to get the quilt from Susie’s bed. As she did she noticed how the lantern in her hand cast a shadowy silhouette of a little doll she saw dressed in one of Susie’s old snow suits. Every time it happened, for a second she was surprised at the illusion the doll’s blond braids created. Then she remembered:  tomorrow night Susie really would be sleeping here. Suddenly comforted, she turned down the lantern wick and lay down on the little bed, pulling Susie’s quilt snugly about her.

Family photographs of me and Larry, Mama, Larry and Daddy,

Late 1940s

PART 1

Chapter 1. My Story

It was a little rented country house where Mama, Daddy, my brother Larry, and I lived. It wasn’t a grand TV show of a house like the Little House on the Prairie, or a family like The Walton’s on TV, but it was home. I still remember the wooden family high chair my Pappaw made; it’s where I sat every evening to eat dinner until I was age seven and was finally big enough at thirty pounds to sit at our kitchen table. Sometimes now I see that little house in my head; the front porch full of family all listening to Lucille Ball on the radio, the neighbor boy coming over to shoot marbles in the dirt, or Larry and I rolling down the red clay hill beside the house. 

I also remember playing a game called roller bat. It was exactly like softball except someone rolled the ball and hit the bat and if they did, that batter went to the bases.

Mammaw and Pappaw lived just across the narrow little two-lane country road with their own swing on the front porch with family filling it up every Sunday afternoon. Larry and I played there as well, cowboys and Indians in the wooded area behind the cow pastures, or we sat on the limbs of the large umbrella tree out back. We would shell beans in the summer time and could hear rain coming through the woods long before it ever got to the gardens.   

Mama read to us every night. I remember a book called The Eskimo Twins and Larry and I rubbed our noses together like the Eskimos and giggled like the four and five-year-olds we were. 

Long summer days and long winter nights cross my mind like a ride on Daddy’s slow tractor through the fields or Mama’s Saturday mornings at the Five and Dime. 

My other grandparents, Mama’s parents, lived up in Lexington where they had water that ran without a well and a bathroom just outside the kitchen door. I feel Granny Kimbrell’s hands which were used to working in a mill, holding my own tiny hands and telling me to keep them so soft and smooth, like a baby’s hands. And Paw Kimbrell loved to dance. He could tap dance and entertain us grandchildren for a long time with the sounds of his shoes hitting the wooden floor, and he carried maple nut candy in his pockets for all of us. 

No matter where I went with my family I experienced love. We didn’t talk about it at all in the little wooden house, but it was a palpable thing to my heart, my emotions, and my life. I touched it from my daddy’s shoulders riding as high as the sky, holding Larry’s hand as we ran to the newest hide-out we had made together, smelling Mammaw’s bread baking in the oven, and tasting the homemade ice cream we made on hot Sunday afternoons. I heard it in my heart as Mama sang along with the radio, and I saw love like the sun peeking through the tree branches as the sun and the wind played together making shadows.

Little did I know of anything else; just my little safe house where I could be a little girl, a little blind girl, and didn’t seem to realize anything would ever change.

Larry and me, 1947

I REMEMBER

When linoleum was so new it was just a linoleum rug laid on the unfinished wooden floor and we loved it!

Earmuffs for when it was cold or your ears hurt … they never worked for either.

The smell of gum in Mama’s purse.

Riding on Daddy’s shoulders.

The way my Brother Larry’s neck felt after he got a new haircut.

The way my heart felt when he would play with me.

Baby bottles that were really glass and had homemade canned milk formula inside.

Easter egg nests made in the grass …that the grandma Easter bunny always found.

Really picking out the Christmas tree in the woods and dragging it home.

Exactly the way a chicken’s legs feel when it is alive.

The clothes being frozen on the line.

The way my tongue felt after sticking it into the electric fan.

Cars as slow as snails

…and puppy dog tails.

Thinking mud puddles were heaven.

Winter coats that weighed as much as I did.

Thinking since a nickel was heavier it was worth more than a dime.

The way only Mammaw’s cake batter tasted when getting to lick the bowl.

Playing snake in the gully with a real gully and sometimes a real snake.

Hearing the little children at church whispering:  She’s blind.

I remember going away to school.

In Lexington, 1950s

Chapter 2. Raleigh, North Carolina

Want a drink? someone said to me.

In the fall of 1950, I stood on a cement porch that seemed as long as a city block. My one eye that could see some light, searched everywhere for the sun. In Lexington the sun set just over the umbrella tree in Mammaw’s back yard, but now it seemed to have moved like I did. I clutched the doll Mama had handed me just before she and Daddy disappeared. I could see that her dress was pink, but that is all I could see. I rubbed my eye as if it would make the sun shine but nothing happened. My hand came away wet and I realized I was crying. Everybody was crying. Mama had told me stories about how I would go to school a long way from home in a big building, and that I would have lots of little girls to play with. I held the doll up to my shoulder, causing her to cry too. I took a few tentative steps hoping I would not fall off this high porch, but maybe if I got far enough away I would find my sun.       

Want a drink? The voice repeated before I could move too far. 

So, they have Cokes here, I thought. Maybe it won’t be so bad here after all. In Lexington they had a Coca-Cola plant and Larry would always look to see where my bottle came from. Maybe Lexington is not so far away, I thought.

The hand that held mine was cool and dry. My little slippery hand held on tight. We went through the heavy doors of the building. To me it felt very big inside, like a church but even bigger. The hallway was very dark and boards creaked under our little white, patent leather Sunday shoes. The hall was shaped sort of like a cross, with the straight part leading to the dining room past the clothes closet. Branches met in the middle, with left going to our own beds and right going to several rooms for older girls, but I didn’t know that just yet. I didn’t even know that all the little girls who were crying were blind too, like me, wondering what had just happened. All I knew just then was that my mind seemed to fill this empty hall up with questions.

Do you like it here? I asked.

I’m in the second grade and my name’s Hannah, the girl answered. I know everybody here. Last year we had a mean old housemother. We called her a witch.

The hall seemed to just keep on going. I couldn’t see light coming into it from anywhere. It made me feel like I was in a tunnel. Larry and I liked tunnels. We would scream and I would put both my hands over his eyes so he couldn’t see the light at the end. Now smells of pimento cheese, new luggage, and moth balls came from passages in front of us and met somewhere in the center of the dormitory. Hannah held my doll as she put my hand on something cool. It was a grooved knob.

Turn it, she said as she pushed my head down.

My chin landed on something hard. I reached in front of me with my other hand to examine the object. It was a big square bowl. I reached my arm around it as far as I could. Then I reached my hand down under my chin to examine the splatter. I stuck my tongue into the stream of wetness and found it was only—water. In Lexington to have a drink meant a Coke. This stuff didn’t even taste like water. What kind of a place could it be where drinks come from a bowl with a knob instead of a well or a dipper? 

I hate this place, I thought as Lexington seemed to gurgle down the drain of the fountain along with the water.

Hannah lead me back outside and showed me a big rocking chair.

Give me my doll, I said.

I want to play with her, she answered.

Give her to me! I cried, desperate to hold onto the one familiar thing in my life.

I heard my doll hit the cement porch and jumped out of the chair to feel for the sound she made as she landed. I held her close as