The contest results are in and we are proud to publish the first-place winning essay in our winter, 2012 contest. Guest judge Shanti Bannwart sent these words about Kate Allen’s “I Grew Up in That Place”: 

The essay is a touching example of the mythological Hero’s Journey – or better the Heroine’s Journey: the challenge of encountering the dragons and ghosts of our “tribe,” the seduction of money and safety and the final discovery of her own voice and calling. This personal journey is placed in the outer turmoil of political and social upheaval that mark and crystallize the protagonist’s destiny and imprison her inside her cultural beliefs until she – finally – achieves personal power and choice. How simply and humbly this big topic is handled using an unpretentious style. The author is deeply honest, authentic and original in her descriptions. She is truly showing instead of telling; her details are down-to-earth. She fulfills our natural desire for arc of story and a meaningful ending. I follow her tale with engagement, and I care that she succeeds in life. She is one of those trees that slowly grows through a crack in the asphalt. Wow! I think this essay could morph into a coming-of-age memoir, one that provides an insider view of American life during a time of great change.

I Grew Up in That Place
by Kate Allen

There was only one high school in my hometown. Well, that can’t be right—there was only one high school for white kids, and there was only one for black kids. We white kids never thought about the other school, that is, until we heard about busing.

In one ear, as a 14-year-old ninth grader, I was unconsciously collecting facts, stories, and fears of the coming end of life as we knew it. It was 1964, and the passage of the Civil Rights Voting Bill had left my small Texas town part of a stunned and segregated South. Still in my other ear, I collected all the usual adolescent girl stuff: who the cheerleaders were going with, what our rivals in the next little town were up to, who may have been pregnant. I so well remember trying to learn how to fit in with the “bankers’ daughters,” the reigning symbol of dignity in our town, since living on the wrong side of the tracks had provided me a good deal of shame and upper-level poverty to learn from.

Even at a very early age, I remember wanting out of that life. I didn’t want to live as part of the working poor. I didn’t want to be a nobody. And I wanted to be more than somebody’s wife! Looking and acting like the bankers’ daughters seemed a good start. The drama in my family had a great deal to do with in which social class we would end up. My mother, a well-respected secretary at the local bank, struggled to push us into middle class. She damn well cared what the neighbors thought. She borrowed money to send my older sister to a state college—no degree was expected, just getting a husband with one before four years was up. Hard work and honesty came from her side of the family.

She expected us to do better than her life; but it was always assumed that marriage was the ticket out. Every fall, she put three dresses on lay-away for each of us; it took her months to pay them off, and we could always count on her, until we were old enough at 14 to get our own summer jobs and start buying all our own clothes.

But she’d married a  man who had no intentions of budging from his lower class ways. Dad, right out of the 1800s, had no use for education; he used to call it “the devil’s work.” He couldn’t tolerate authority, so he never had a job. At least, not a job with a boss and a paycheck. But he did fancy himself a car dealer. With her co-signature (mom’s job made her the credit worthy one, but women then weren’t allowed to borrow money in their names), he managed to buy a little parcel of land in the “colored” section of town and set up shop as a mechanic and used car dealer. In later years I would come to know what he really did during the day—he was the slumlord, of sorts, of the automobile business in our town. All of his customers were poor and the great majority were black and brown folks. All his customers bought down-payment-only cars, and my father carried the notes.

That’s where the action, so to speak, was in our lives. He specialized in buying cars at the wrecking yards, repairing them just enough so that they’d test run, and selling them to people in miserable straits. When they couldn’t keep up with their payments, he’d get despondent and go on dry drunks, venting his frustration in physically and verbally abusing us girls. Mom would have to co-sign more loans to make his lot payments.

But an altogether different story ensued when his customers were, indeed, making their payments, but the plunkers died, or they discovered worthless batteries or holey radiators or bald tires he’d switched right before delivering the car. Many times, usually on late weekend nights, we’d hear loud knocking and cursing at our door, confrontations usually bolstered by the bravado of alcohol. Dad would make one of us kids answer it, whereupon we’d hear direct threats to his life. We assured the late-night visitors that our father wasn’t at home. He covered over his shame at these incidents with a barrage of racist monologue—often justified from Biblical passages. (He had aspired to be a Baptist preacher!)

He saw no reason to treat his daughters any differently. We took our chances on bald tires, worn out batteries, leaky radiators, oil guzzlers, even failing brakes. And though we often had our electricity and water turned off just before end-of-the-month payday, my sister, brother, and I always had a car to drive, chosen from those that he couldn’t sell or weren’t ready to sell at the moment. Usually we wound up with a Dodge or Plymouth with enormous tailfins, inspiring me to name one of them “Moby.” My father at one time fancied himself becoming rich with his ongoing collection of Ford Edsels. But nobody else in that small town would be caught dead with one, so we girls drove the monsters to and from school—and, of course, cruising during lunch period.

But he had another side for our younger brother. In my father’s eyes, when Jimmy became a teenager, there was finally a reason for living. He found a 1957 Thunderbird at auction, fixed it up and painted it maroon with a white top, and set my brother up for glory.

Of course, I was the one to question the difference in treatment. It was then I heard him say it out loud: “Girls,” he said without even a hint of self-consciousness, “can’t help the fact that they’re just girls. They can’t be any better!”  Of course, Jimmy had no curfews, no chores to do at home, and no grades to maintain.

Although my sister and brother continued to wear the mantle of working poor kids, I managed early on to imitate the ways of people who seemed to have more dignity, more possibilities in life. I was a good student with almost no effort. I learned how to fix my hair and makeup like the rich girls, even though I often got the evil eye and a Southern Baptist lecture at home. I became well known as the sidekick to the popular girls, the shadow counselor to the homecoming queen. And, I landed a boyfriend on the football team, William Edward Knowles III, known mostly for his wealthy family.

His home provided me with an entire script to study. There certainly were no junk cars parked on his front yard.I was introduced to the concept of maids and gardeners. I listened closely to which colleges they talked about. On his 16th birthday, his father had a new Chevrolet Impala convertible delivered to him at school by the dealer himself!

I was, by now, working after school and buying fabric to make my own clothes so that I would have as many dresses as the bankers’ daughters.William, my first boyfriend, was a kind and sweet 16-year-old; at 230 lbs. he made All-American tackle, but he hadn’t had much luck in getting a girlfriend.We both made use of the status of “going steady.”

His parents were very kind to me. Looking back on it, I must have been their Eliza Doolittle—a worthy project for their son. They included me in many of the family’s activities, much like an adopted daughter. When we went out to dinner, they always ordered filet mignon or T-bone steaks, medium rare. But from my family’s humility, I could only bring myself to order a grilled cheese sandwich, an irrevocable sign of my social class and always an embarrassment to them.

At William’s house, I never heard the “n” word, and I saw only graciousness bestowed on the “help.” Instead of using the book of Genesis to justify why whites were God’s chosen people, William’s father waxed eloquently and convincingly about backward African cultures and the clear double-tracking of evolution. European art and technology lessons were liberally thrown in for comfort. Yet, my reading of Black Like Me and The Autobiography of Malcolm X my freshman year in college, began an irrevocable and somewhat radical “redirection” of my small town concerns.

My mind just kept refusing to get in line with “the family.” William was really uncomfortable whenever I would jump into these conversations with his parents, and he, himself, seemed never to have an opinion. I was becoming outspoken.

Politically, time marched on as the assassinations came and went.

One day William asked me if I wanted to go “collecting” with his grandfather. It was something he and his grandfather had often shared when he was a child, and he wanted me to see how wealthy his grandparents were.  They owned many houses in the poorer section of town. It was the first of the month and time to make the rounds to collect the rent.

When we arrived at his grandfather’s house—on the “old money” side of town, we piled into a 1957 Chevy with extensive damage—no beloved antique this car.

His grandfather smiled his greeting, made routine preparations and began the introduction as we got on the road. “These colored people—some are good folks and will pay every time. But a bunch of them are just no good trash, and I have to do whatever I have to do to get my rent.” Although I felt wary, I just couldn’t put my finger on it.

The first couple of stops, William’s grandfather made quiet contact with residents who barely peeked out the front door of the house while delivering the rent in dollar bills. I was stunned by the poverty and conditions of the home and the children and animals outside. Most all of the windows were broken out. No signs of paint on the outside for decades. Most of the houses were up on beams with all manner of artifacts strewn under. A couple of them leaned so badly, I couldn’t believe they were still standing, much less could contain people. When we parked in the front yards especially close, I could see that newspapers served as wallpaper to abate the wind.

Then came the unbelievable. As his grandfather went from house to house, his grumbling got more intense; cursing and racial epithets started pouring out of the old man. As he returned to the car, no one having answered the door to that particular shack, he backed the car out of the front yard, then quickly put it back into gear and rammed that ’57 Chevy right into the front porch of the house! I was stunned, frightened, trapped. But he backed up and ran the car into the porch again! This time the porch collapsed and part of the front wall of the house came off on the fender of the car.

The family who had been hiding inside came pouring out of the house, children crying, mother screaming, father cursing. The car was backed up and out onto the dirt street and William’s grandfather yelled, “You’d better be out of that house by tonight or there’s more where that came from.”

Shaken, I couldn’t bring myself to speak. The old man mumbled something about how that was the best way to make a point and get your money. I found a way to say I needed to get home very soon, and he turned the car around and drove us back. On the way, I barely spoke. William must have wanted me to know of this family secret. He finally said, “He’s been doing that all my life. He just wrecks the car again and again until he gets a new junker and starts all over again. He’s got to get his rent somehow!”

All I could think of was to ask what eventually happened to the houses. He assured me that when they started to fall down, he sent the help over there to buck up the foundation. But no repairs were ever made. “He doesn’t have to; he always gets them rented out,” William seemed to want to assure me that the family was financially successful.

Well, I am ashamed to say, years later I married William in order to traverse those tracks. We had a big wedding, paid for largely by his parents. Two days before the wedding, his mother forced herself to tell me there was a “small problem.” The two black friends we had invited from our college dorms would be able to come to the wedding in the church, but her prestigious garden club’s rules prohibited them from attending the reception in the club building—unless they were serving the guests.

For a strong moment I considered walking out on the whole affair. By now it was the Nixon years. I’ll never forget calling our friends to warn them about the reception hall. That was humiliating and painful in the most lasting of ways.

And, turns out William’s father had his own brand of 19^th century womanhood to sell to me. When I began commuting to attend graduate school in Austin, he sat me down one day and let me know that he feared deeply for my sanity! “If you keep going to school, you’ll wind up a schizo . . . schizo . . . . .” 

“Schizophrenic?” I helped him out. “Yes!” he declared, without a hint of self-consciousness.

William came to tolerate my educational aspirations, but stayed in relative denial of the chasm between the woman his family demanded and the one I was becoming.

It would be four years of a Stepford-wife-like battle for my soul before that familiar “wanting out” feeling returned.  It was a life of strict adherence to his father’s values—money and status— devoid of deeper meaning. I can recall it as if it happened just last evening. That nightly, televised slaughter of our innocence—both on the homefront with a parading, real constitutional crisis called Watergate and far away in the killing fields of a mysterious Southeast Asian land.

It was to this loss of innocence which I finally gave myself away, finally finding the courage to be the political woman I was. By 1975 I had fled the comforts of my arranged marriage-of-my-own-making and that small Texas life. I gave William that old phrase: “I just can’t do this anymore. I don’t fit into this life.” He was shattered, but I felt mostly freedom, finally. Living my dreams, I maneuvered my way into a doctoral program in Washington, D.C. with only enough money to live in a flat in the upper northeast side—a welfare community just years before shorn of its livability by the powerful race riots of the 60s. And, it so happened, my then boyfriend and I were its only white residents.