By Jack White
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— Excerpt —
Warren [Dorsey] was born in 1920 and started school in 1926. He remembers the rough, unpainted walls, the old desks from a nearby white school, the old books with words scribbled inside and missing pages torn out by white kids who’d owned them first. He remembers all the neighborhood kids from six to twelve crammed into a room with poor, underpaid, tired, and barely trained Gertrude Johnson.
There were no bathrooms. For water they passed around a dipper and shared water they’d collected from a nearby stream. (Warren says that whenever they needed running water, they’d tell someone to run down to the stream and run back with a bucket of water.) There was no electricity. They got their heat from a coal stove in the middle of the room that darkened the windows with a light coating of soot.
When the weather was warm, they opened the windows. The windows provided all their light, and often there was very little.
But Warren remembers it as a place of light and hope. And it is a bright place now, a nicely renovated museum and part-time schoolhouse with clean windows and electric lights, an actual bathroom with real running water that comes from a faucet instead of a stream.
His grandmother was a slave. Her father was a white man and a slave dealer, who took advantage of his slaves. He owned her. He owned her mother. They all lived together in Marriottsville in a place the locals called “Little Africa.”
— End of Excerpt —
