When I left home to go to Montgomery, Ala for my first job as a typist at St. Margaret's Hospital, I was a naïve seventeen-year-old. Everything was new and frightening to me. I had never used a telephone. One of my responsibilities was to answer the phones in the admitting office. The switchboard operator quickly lost patience with me. But the nuns were kind to me. I distributed the mail to the patients on the floors. I delivered mail and laboratory slips to the "colored wing" where the patients were cared for. The odor on this ward was almost unbearable. The whole wing had one R.N. who tried to care for the patients. Many of the patients had been burned. Their skin was mottled from the lack of pigmentation. Their cries of pain were heard throughout the day and night. Morphine was scarce on this ward. The death rate in this ward was extremely high

No sooner had I gotten to the City, when I was set upon by my contemporaries asking where I planned to go to college. It was humiliating to admit that I could not go to college. I had burned my bridges by leaving home with no hope of a scholarship from the nuns. The nuns had told me I would not fit in the convent school. I was too irreverent to ever embrace the nunnery. And certainly there could be no help from Mama. She was struggling to keep the family home and farm intact. There must be a place for her wandering children to return in time of need. Before his death from tuberculosis, Papa had extracted a promise from Mama to "never mortgage the farm" Farms were being swooped up by the local banker for back taxes and unpaid loans.

I became accustomed to city life. The smell of magnolias permeated the air. The soft southern voices intrigued me. History came alive. It was as if the Civil War had been fought only yesterday. Old people laid claim to Civil War hero relatives as surely as if there had been no World War I nor World War II in the intervening years. Folks were categorized into Yankees or Southerners.

Soon I learned to ride the bus around the city and home from work. One day I was returning from Mass when two little black boys got on the bus. They were dressed in dark suits with short pants and white shirts and bow ties. Their hair was neatly combed. They were horsing around and being playful as only seven-year-olds can do. Unfortunately they did not move to the back of the bus quickly enough to suit an old man in the front of the bus. He took his cane to both of the little boys, shouting, "get to the back". What abominable treatment. Such was the South in the l950's. I worked in Montgomery for several years. Partying, dancing and living uproariously soon wore thin. A lot was missing from my life. No husband, no career, and no education

It was twelve years later when I finally scraped up enough money and courage to apply for college. I went to the most reasonable State College that I could find. It was Lincoln University, a branch of the University of Missouri. It had been an all black school and I was one of the first white students. I felt no animosity from the other students. They welcomed me. One of my best friends there was a young black student who sat next to me in class. When he asked me for a date, I was shocked and dismayed. After that, I ignored my friend. To this day, fifty-five years later, it is with a feeling of guilt and shame that I remember the hurt in his eyes. I was willing to accept their hospitality in school but unwilling to socialize with the blacks. I was following the accepted rules of behavior for a white woman.