The Other Side of the Woods

By Robert L. Lesueur

Bob, at any early age, had a dream of becoming an Air Force pilot. He devoted his life to achieving that dream. Along the way, he met not only skepticism from the society in which he lived, but also from his peers. Bob talks about the people he met growing up that had a profound impact on his life. This is the autobiography of a black youth who was born in the Jim Crow south and discovered at a young age that he would not accept the status quo of being a second- class citizen. It deals with the struggles that he had to overcome in order to realize a lifelong dream. It is a story of growing up in the 1950s,1960s and 1970s in Madison, North Carolina. The story is at times humorous and at times deadly. It is a story that dreams can come true.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781647014766

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The Other Side of the

Woods

Robert L. Lesueur

Copyright © 2020 Robert L. Lesueur

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2020

ISBN 978-1-64701-475-9 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-64701-476-6 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Dedicated to

Mr. William Stick Lesueur

and

Mr. Espy Joyce

Madison is located in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. It is about twelve miles south of the Virginia state line by car. The demographics of Madison when I grew up there in the 1950s and 1960s were white and black. There were no Hispanics, no Asians, nor Native Americans that I knew of or ever saw. Madison is a place of rolling low mountains, hills, and valleys, which are heavily wooded. Madison sits adjacent to the town of Mayodan. The area is known as Madison-Mayodan. People in Madison-Mayodan are probably like most people in every small town—everyone knew one another. Since everyone knew one another, this led to what I would later call small-town paranoia. Everyone gossiped, and everyone else was gossiping about them. This small-town paranoia would affect all the people that lived there, including me.

The local cash crop in the Madison-Mayodan area was tobacco, and the local industries were textile mills. Most of the people’s livelihood depended upon these two sources; however, neither of these sources of employment was a good source of income, but people got by. Most blacks in the area were laborers or domestic workers, with some growing tobacco on a sharecropper’s basis. There were also a few black farmers who owned their land but not many. The textile mills employed blacks; however, they were paid less than their white counterparts. None of the blacks had a chance for promotions or advancement in the 1950s and early 1960s. During the first two decades of my life in Madison, the only professional jobs for blacks were to become teachers, preachers, or undertakers.

Just as beautiful as the Madison-Mayodan area was, there was also an ugliness to it: racial intolerance. Jim Crow was the law of the land. Whites pretty much kept to themselves, and blacks, the same. Blacks could not walk into a white-owned hotel or motel to rent a room nor go into restaurants to sit down and eat. Blacks were allowed to go to the back door of a restaurant where the black cook would take their order and hand them their food. There were the obligatory white-only water fountains and restrooms for blacks to use. There was no racial violence in Madison during my time there, and I had never heard about any that happened before I got there. There was the occasional racist name-calling on both sides. We had a few choice names for whites also. The police in Madison did not shoot or beat blacks for no reason. I never heard of the police shooting anyone. I do know that a few people had their heads cracked open with blackjacks by the police, but head cracking was open to both blacks and whites on an equal basis.

There was one movie theater in Madison, the Patovi Theater. We could see a movie but were only allowed to sit up in the balcony, which was accessed by a side door. That was okay as we routinely poured water and soda on the white kids’ heads below. Our restroom for the theater was in an alley behind it, which smelled of urine. Of course, the schools in the area were also segregated. However, we were assured by the white school board that they were separate but equal.

I believe that my parents were married just before World War II. When the Army drafted my dad, my mother decided to enlist in the Women’s Army Corps (WACs). During their tours of duty in World War II, my parents were sent to racially segregated camps. Mother trained as a surgical nurse assistant, and Daddy, as a fireman.

My father had one older brother, William. Uncle William got drafted into the Army before my father. I would never get to know Uncle William as he drowned during training maneuvers while in the Army. One of my mother’s brothers also served in World War II. He later died from complications of shell shock and dementia when I was very young. All my other aunts and one uncle on my mother’s side of the family would be in my life for many years. Some still are.

When my parents returned home from the military, they used the GI Bill to go to college at the Agricultural & Technical College (A&T), which was a historically black college in Greensboro, North Carolina. Mother worked part-time as a nurse while attending college, earning a bachelor of science degree. However, when she graduated from NC A&T, she became a teacher instead of a nurse. My father received a master’s degree.

My mother had a lot of pride. She was very opinionated and headstrong. Mother could be very vindictive toward people she didn’t like. Mother loved to talk and was a good source of local gossip. Mother believed in disciplining her children, especially me. Not that I didn’t deserve it most of the time. My mother’s favorite tool for my punishment was a switch. As mother was drawing back, and before she struck the first lick, I would begin screaming, hoping that would make my beating shorter. Well, Mother knew that trick. The one thing I didn’t want to hear my mother say was that she wasn’t going to beat me. She was going to wait until Daddy got home so that he could do it. Those were the only times I would ask her to please do it.

At the time of my birth, my parents were living in Greensboro, North Carolina. I was born on January 18, 1951, on my father’s birthday. I was his birthday present. Later in my life, I would wonder if Daddy liked his gift. I was the second and youngest child. My older sister, Patricia (Pat), had been born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 1946. My father’s name was Robert Bob Lincoln LeSueur. I was named Robert Bobby Lincoln LeSueur Jr. My mother’s name was Savannah Johnson LeSueur. My father grew up within the town limits of Madison, and my mother was raised on a sharecropper farm in the country. Both of my parents attended the Madison Colored School. My mother came from a large family. She had seven sisters and two brothers. Mother was a strikingly beautiful woman who had grown up in the country in an impoverished household. My mother would tell me stories of how poor they were and about being hungry and cold as children.

Soon after my birth, my parents decided to move to Madison to live with my father’s parents. My mother was to be a teacher at the new black school named Charles Drew. My father commuted daily the twenty-five miles to Greensboro to work in a Serta mattress plant as a laborer. The plan was to save their money to build their own house in Madison using the GI Bill.

My father’s parents were William Stick LeSueur and Clara Mae LeSueur. They were special people to me. I have carried them in my heart above all others all my life. My grandmother Clara would only be in my life for approximately five years. My grandfather, for a lot longer. I have few memories of my grandmother Clara. I remember her as a loving and kind person. I remember suckling on her breast as a kind of pacifier, and I remember her taking care of my sister and myself when our parents were away at work.

My maternal grandmother, Grandmama Dodd, lived about a quarter of a mile from my father’s parents. Grandmama Dodd lived in an old wooden frame house with her current husband, Mr. Dodd. He was not my mother’s father but her stepfather. My mother and her siblings’ father had died long before my sister or I were born. Grandmama Dodd had married Grandfather Dodd sometime later. Grandmama was a good, poor, simple woman who loved God. She always dressed in big loose-fitting old dresses. Grandmama Dodd did domestic work and laundry for whites. I was never as close to my mother’s family as I was to my father’s family.

My grandfather was called Poppa by my parents, my sister, and me. He was a humble, hardworking, and honest man. Everyone in the community, black and white, respected Poppa. Everyone outside the family called Poppa Mr. Stick. Poppa explained to me that they called him Mr. Stick because when he took on a job, he would stick with it until he finished it. Poppa told me later in life that his grandfather had been a free man and not a slave. In his early life, Poppa had worked as a laborer for T. D. Meadows wholesale grocer. Now, Poppa owned a small candy, soda, and general merchandise store that was next to his house. He also owned and rented out a duplex apartment behind his house.

Poppa had four brothers; their names were Jess, Abe, John, and Waist. The brothers, however, had different ways of spelling their last names. Some of the brothers spelled their surname as Leasure or Lesuer, but Poppa and our family spelled our last name LeSueur. To this day, I cannot account for all the variations in the spelling of our family name. All but one of my great-uncles, Uncle Abe, lived in Madison. Uncle Abe resided in Washington, DC, and drove a taxi. How he ended up in DC is a story in itself and one that I will share with you later on.

Poppa and Grandmother Clara lived in a two-story frame house, which he built in the 1930s. The home was located in the Freetown section of Madison, on the main highway through town, business Highway 220. Poppa’s house and duplex sat on about three acres of land. The house had one back door that entered into the kitchen. The front door opened into a hallway where you would see the staircase leading to the upstairs bedrooms. In the upstairs area, there were two bedrooms. Our parents occupied one, and my sister and I used the other. Poppa and Grandmother’s bedroom was on the first floor. There was a family room and living room also located on the ground floor. The family room was where the family spent most of our time because it had a fireplace. In the family room fireplace, most often, we burned coal as fuel. During the winter months, usually, only two rooms were heated during the day: the kitchen and the family room. The kitchen was heated by a woodburning cooking stove that was lit from before breakfast to after dinner. The cooking stove also provided us with our hot water. All the other rooms were heated by kerosene stoves when occupied.

Poppa’s house at the time had no running water or bathrooms. However, looking back on it, I would have to say that we were better off than most blacks and whites in the area. Bedpans were used if you had to relieve yourself in the middle of the night. Water came from a well near the back door. The toilet was an outhouse behind the house. On cold winter days, it was unpleasant when you had to go to the outhouse. That is where I think the metaphor freezing your ass off originated. Whenever you had to sit on that outhouse seat in frigid weather, you felt as if you were freezing your ass off. Our baths were given once a week on Saturday nights in a big galvanized tub. The rule was that the oldest child bathes first, then the younger child; this meant that I had to wash in my sister’s dirty bathwater.

My paternal grandparents grew vegetables during the spring and summer. They had a chicken coop where my sister and I would collect the eggs each morning. I didn’t care for that job because all the eggs would have chicken shit on them. I remember my grandparents would cut off the head of a chicken and how the headless chicken would run around the yard squirting blood until it fell over and died. Then, my grandmother would burn and pluck the feathers off the chicken, gut the chicken, and prepare it for a meal. To this day, I think this is why I am not a big fan of chicken. To me, the best part of my grandparents’ property was the abundance of fruit. They had apple trees, pear trees, plum trees, peach trees, walnut trees, a large grapevine, along with a strawberry patch, and watermelon patch. It was wonderful for a child like me to have so many choices; even better was that Poppa also had his store, where I could always go