The Lamb of Wall Street by Karen Bruton

Author:Karen Bruton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Forefront Books
Published: 2021-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

CHOOSE TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE

When I think about one person who made a difference in the world, I think of Rosa Parks. My childhood coincided with the Civil Rights movement. I was only six when, down in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat for a white man and move to the back of the bus. Segregation was just the way things were for Americans back then. The folks in Shantytown had their own barbershops and grocery stores. I never met any of the kids my age who lived there—they went to an all-black school. It wasn’t until I was a junior that our high school integrated, but even then, only one black student was added to our ranks.

When my parents first bought the little white house Larry and I grew up in Kannapolis, North Carolina, it was on a dirt road called Pennsylvania Drive. Around the time I was born in March 1949, the road was paved, more houses had bloomed throughout the neighborhood, and our address was changed to Pennsylvania Avenue. Dad bought the lot next to ours so we’d have a little elbow room. We flew kites and played baseball there, and Dad planted a garden large enough that he needed a mule, a plow, and a set of hired hands to prep it for planting every year. Produce straight from Dad’s garden—beans, corn, tomatoes, radishes—fed us during the warmer months, and what wasn’t eaten fresh Mom canned and preserved for later. I ate everything Dad grew save for the tomatoes. Those I wouldn’t touch.

One of our town’s movie theaters, the Palace Theatre, was known as the “black theater,” and though my black neighbors could patronize other cinemas, they had to sit in a separate section. My family went to the Gem Theatre on Saturdays and stayed all day watching cartoons such as Tarzan or Disney movies such as Sleeping Beauty. We sat downstairs, and the black patrons were relegated to the upstairs balcony. The Gem even had two water fountains, one for “whites” and one for “coloreds.” Larry told me that he once snuck a drink from a “colored” water fountain because he thought maybe they had different water than we had—but he was shocked to discover that it was just regular water. The separate fountains made no sense to him after that.

Looking back, it’s terrible to consider all this, but when I was a kid, it was just life. I had no concept that black people were any different from us, besides their skin color. My parents never spoke a disparaging word or said anything that would have taught me otherwise. Everyone in our community was so challenged just to live life day to day that no one talked about being black or being white. I wasn’t aware of the struggles that were erupting all over the country in that era until we finally got our first television, and then I started seeing it for myself—like news footage of Alabama governor George

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