Essay: Fifth Ward, Houston, 1952 — One Girl’s Story, Part 4

In this excerpt from her new memoir, “Up Home,” Ruth J. Simmons recalls moving to Houston at age 6 from rural East Texas. She would go on to serve as president of Smith College, Brown University and Prairie View A&M.

BY RUTH J. SIMMONS

PART 4

Intuitive and smart, she did the only thing she could to make sure we had as much as possible: she went to work as a maid.

Yet in spite of all that she was doing for us, the more I saw of city life, the more I began to feel that my mother’s old-fashioned standards and lack of style stymied our enjoyment of Houston. For me, her plainness was a growing source of irritation and embarrassment. Perhaps I transferred onto her the embarrassment I felt about being a misfit because of my clothes, speech, and manners, but she was definitely a contrast to the mothers of my schoolmates, who dressed stylishly and wore makeup and modern hairdos. Mama did not seem to understand or care that the city required a new approach. My sister-in-law Erma Mae, however, was different.

Erma Mae was the epitome of what the modern woman could be: attractive, fun-loving, forceful, direct, independent of mind, and ambitious. Erma said that women could do their own thinking. Education was the key, and her girls were going to be educated so that they could be successful in their own right. As devoted as Erma was to my brother Elbert, she did not believe marriage required blind subservience. She was rearing Elma, Lawanna, and Beverly to be self-assured girls who set high expectations for themselves. I wanted to emulate Erma.

I don’t know if Mama was aware that I was discrediting all that she stood for. Perhaps I showed it in the flip answers I learned to give, in the airs I adopted in imitation of others, or in the way that I idolized Elma and Erma Mae. I began to develop a manner of speaking that was affected and stilted, reminiscent of actresses we saw in the movies. I later modeled my speech after that of Tallulah Bankhead, a prominent actress at the time. I was openly dismissive of practices that evoked country living. It certainly did not occur to me until years later that Mama would have had more appealing cloth- ing and a more polished appearance if she had not put our needs ahead of hers.

I continued to do well at Atherton Elementary School, making perfect grades and following rules for student behavior and good work habits. As a result of the continuous positive feedback I was receiving, my confidence grew. At first I feigned confidence, but eventually my comfort with who I was became real. I met friends, broadened my experiences, and began to realize the potential to achieve beyond what my parents imagined for me. Watching Elbert and Erma every day, hearing how they conceived of the future, made me think that their vision might be within reach. Too young and inexperienced to understand how to piece it all together, I nevertheless absorbed Erma’s insistence that the future of girls would be different if we would only take charge of it.

Acouple of years after we had become accustomed to our first Houston neighborhood, Daddy decided to move us to another implausibly crowded lot, on Sam Wilson Street, just east of Lockwood. There, the landlord, an aspiring real estate magnate named Mr. Woodrow, had constructed or moved to the site a number of shabby houses for which he exacted unreasonable rents. My new neighborhood was like the Lee Street area without the railroad yard or the Dew Drop Inn—rows and rows of poorly kept wooden houses that families rented from landlords unable to maintain them properly. Aunt Aggie, the youngest of Mama’s sisters, moved into a house in the rear of ours. Though just a few blocks from Lee Street, this home was much farther from Atherton School, where I remained enrolled through the fifth grade. On Sam Wilson Street, we created a new compound with a different extended family. Mama’s warnings about outsiders remained in force, and Aunt Aggie’s children substituted for Elma and her sisters.