H
Hildegarda
Guest
This is an inspiring life story. It's two main lessons, I think, is that righteous anger over one's life circumstances should be directed at the root cause of it and not on other people enmeshed in the same film of lies; and that Working on oneself CAN become one's second nature.
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In early 80-s some religious non-profit that helped immigrants and foreign language speakers gave out a recognition award to a volunteer interpreter who has been helping them for many years. A blurb about it appeared in a local paper; it featured a picture of an old black man by name of Wilk Peters and his story: born in 1900 in a family of a poor farmer, went to college, learned 6 languages, traveled the world.
Jon Franklin, an eminent journalist, found this blurb while scanning the paper and zeroed down on it: with his professional instinct he knew that this is something very unusual, that there is a STORY here. He flew to interview Peters, and little by little unraveled what turned out to be an extraordinary life journey.
Franklin’s story is written in a form of saga and represents dramatic non-fiction genre. It was originally published as a five-part series in The Evening Sun beginning January 31, 1983. It was reprinted in condensed form in The Readers Digest in January 1985 and afterward translated into many languages. Franklin has received a Pulitzer Prize for it.
Years have passed and a once popular story was forgotten; the magazine where it was published closed up. Wilk Peters passed away in 1996, and nobody remembers him now.
Currently the story can be found in Franklin’s book, «Writing for Story”, and online at his dedicated site ( \\\http://www.bylinefranklin.com/bylinefranklin/drama-ballad.html):
****
In early 80-s some religious non-profit that helped immigrants and foreign language speakers gave out a recognition award to a volunteer interpreter who has been helping them for many years. A blurb about it appeared in a local paper; it featured a picture of an old black man by name of Wilk Peters and his story: born in 1900 in a family of a poor farmer, went to college, learned 6 languages, traveled the world.
Jon Franklin, an eminent journalist, found this blurb while scanning the paper and zeroed down on it: with his professional instinct he knew that this is something very unusual, that there is a STORY here. He flew to interview Peters, and little by little unraveled what turned out to be an extraordinary life journey.
Franklin’s story is written in a form of saga and represents dramatic non-fiction genre. It was originally published as a five-part series in The Evening Sun beginning January 31, 1983. It was reprinted in condensed form in The Readers Digest in January 1985 and afterward translated into many languages. Franklin has received a Pulitzer Prize for it.
Years have passed and a once popular story was forgotten; the magazine where it was published closed up. Wilk Peters passed away in 1996, and nobody remembers him now.
Currently the story can be found in Franklin’s book, «Writing for Story”, and online at his dedicated site ( \\\http://www.bylinefranklin.com/bylinefranklin/drama-ballad.html):
The Ballad of Old Man Peters
Copyright 1984, The Baltimore Sun. Used with permission
Verse One
Time is precious as it runs out, and Old Man Peters spends long hours at his desk, writing and studying, fighting for a little more knowledge. Death is near, but he brushes away the cold comprehension. There has never been time for fear, and there is none now.
Prudence, though . . . prudence is another matter.
Outside, beyond the double-locked doors, poor teenagers traverse the alley on the way to nowhere, casting occasional glances at the old man's rowhouse.
For a lifetime Wilk Peters traveled the world in search of its people and its wisdom, and he brought his knowledge back to black universities to share with the students there -- but the children who pass in the alley know nothing of that.
Their minds are filled with the hormones of youth, and to them the old man is . . . an old man, that's all, an incomprehensibly ancient old man, 82 years old. Spent. Finished.
To some of them, he is prey. For those Mr. Peters has locks on the doors, locks on the garage, steel screens on the windows . . . but he doesn't consider moving. Moving would take precious time.
He sits at his desk, a book of Italian grammar open in front of him. He stares at it. The mind behind the eyes is old, years beyond the average life expectancy of, as the actuaries so succinctly put it, a black male.
Outside, a truck thunders down The Alameda.
He reads a line, loses it, reads it again.
The scientists say that there are two kinds of memory, short-term and long-term. It is as though life writes its current experiences upon some blackboard in the mind and, as the days pass, the brain copies the information into a permanent library.
But at 82 the blackboard often goes blank prematurely. Then what Mr. Peters learned today, a moment ago, is lost. When that happens, he stubbornly begins again. In recent years he has learned to make notes to himself, lest he forget an appointment, or an important fact.
But he needs no notes to remember his childhood, and the romantic, impossible dream that saw him safely through decades of racism, poverty, and ignorance . . . the dream that guides him still.
The dream began in Trinity county, Texas, in the southern forest east of the great prairie, the part of Texas that had enough rainfall for cotton to grow; Klan country, where the nights were ruled by racial paranoia.
Wilk's father John had once owned his own farm, but that was a violation of the racial code. After a series of night attacks by anonymous riflemen he abandoned the land and fled for his life.
Wilk was born a few years later, in 1900, in a sharecropper's cabin. His mother, Martha, carried him with her when she went to work in the fields, and soon he was joined by another baby, and then another.
With each season, the family changed farms, seeking a better life, finding hard labor instead. Wilk learned to supervise his younger brothers and sisters, then to hoe.
At the age of eight he was an American serf walking behind a plow mule.
But even then there was some special, indefinable thing about Wilk Peters. Somehow he sensed that the world stretched far beyond the Texas horizon.
Though he had never seen them, he knew from school that the earth included seas and mountains, and was home to people who were hues of brown, red and yellow. To the north was Oklahoma, somewhere to the southwest a place called Mexico.
Mexico . . . he liked the way the word slid along the tongue.
It was a foreign country -- exotic in the poor boy's mind, yet near enough that he occasionally heard Spanish spoken by travelers. It had a romantic sound, rich with rhythm and vowels, and to hear the incomprehensible words filled him with a restless, inarticulate lust to . . . to . . . to go.
His parents had attended grammar school, and though they had never learned to read without effort they understood enough to know that education was the path to emancipation. And they recognized that Wilk's . . . specialness . . . if it was to flourish, required tangible aspirations.
Considering his son's future, John groped far beyond his own experience.
He had never seen a library or a college campus. He knew nothing of engineers and scientists, of economists or accountants. There was only one educated man in his humble experience, an awesome figure in a tall black hat -- the doctor.
Wilk would be . . . a doctor.
A doctor.
The word was a gift from father to son, and it settled in the boy's mind and lodged there, a kernel of reality around which his inchoate yearnings could coalesce. The word gave definition to his life and focus to his mind, and it led him to an instinctive understanding of the enemy. The doctor represented knowledge. The antithesis, the enemy, was ignorance.
The dream gave school a special urgency, and while his classmates daydreamed Wilk diligently pursued the art of penmanship and the abstract rhythms of mathematics.
He learned that there was a country called France, beyond the Atlantic Ocean, and another called Russia. Switzerland was a place of mountains. In Spain, matadors challenged enraged bulls. Armies marched in Germany. Boatmen poled gondolas through the canals of Venice.
The boll weevil was by virtue of its six legs an insect, and separate from the eight-legged family of spiders.
Wilk was wary of spiders, snakes and white men, but he wasn't afraid of them. In his nightmares he recoiled from a far more horrible evil, ignorance, and with his entire being he concentrated on the desperate need to beat it back. Step by encouraging step, he saw himself succeeding.
Another sister was born, then a brother, then another sister, finally seven in all. Mother and father slept in the main room of the cabin, the children in the side room.
John Peters was a good and provident farmer, and though there was little cash there was no hunger. The family raised its own poultry, grew its own garden, smoked its own hams and kept range cattle.
The seasons changed and Wilk grew. With the approach of Christmas and Thanksgiving the cabin began to smell of baking cookies and cakes. The holiday table was laden with turkey, stuffing, bowls of home-grown vegetables and woman's most wonderful contribution to man, sweet potato pie. If there was no Christmas tree with gifts beneath it, no one felt the lack.
They were years of innocent hope, of family laughter and poverty lightly borne, when life stretched on toward infinity and dreams were indistinguishable from reality. Of course Wilk would be a doctor. Why not?
Then, in the spring of 1913, his father returned from an errand and collapsed heavily on the bed, disoriented. The next day he couldn't move his left side.
Somehow the family got through the summer. From his bed John gave orders, advice and encouragement to his wife and eldest son. Leaning on one another, Wilk and his mother hoed the corn, tended the livestock, and struggled to keep the farm and equipment in good repair. In late summer the whole family helped pick the cotton and Wilk drove it to market.
Then, in the autumn, as the days began to grow short, Wilk's father died. They buried him in a small cemetery not far from the farm he'd been forced to abandon. There was no money for a tombstone.
Wilk stood, numb, by the grave. Without his father's strength and knowledge, the poverty was suddenly crushing.
When school began a few days later, Wilk's brothers and sisters went but Wilk stayed home. He was needed to take his father's place on the farm.
As the boundaries of Trinity County closed in around him, the 13-year-old clung desperately, hopelessly, to the only thing he had left: his dream.
Verse Two
In the early years of the 20th century, the dream that a black sharecropper's son could become a doctor was an audacious one. But while Wilk had his father to encourage and instruct him, it had somehow seemed possible.
With the approach of the winter of 1913, however, his father lay in an unmarked grave and Wilk, as the eldest of seven children, inherited adult responsibilities. For him, there could be no more school.
His father had taught him the fundamentals of farming, and Wilk could plow, hoe, chop, pick, milk and do most of the other chores. But the boy's best efforts had gone into books, and he lacked the practical savvy that had allowed his father to support the large family.
The winter passed, followed by a summer of hard work, followed by a poor harvest, followed by a desperate winter. The next year was no better. Nor the next. Wilk yearned passionately for the sound of his father's voice, a voice that knew all things, a voice . . .
A voice that had said, "I want you to be a doctor."
A doctor.
The dream had no place behind a plow, no application to the process of butchering a hog, no meaning at all for a boy who had dropped out of school so early. And yet . . . somehow . . . without it he would perish.
The dream sustained him as he fought for the family's survival, and it comforted him when he failed.
He worked hard, but hard work didn't suffice when the rains didn't come, or when they came too early and beat down the tiny cotton seedlings. Hard work didn't stop the bowl weevil or the worms that burrowed into the ears of corn, and hard work couldn't help his little sister.
Wilk's youngest sister had always been sickly, but now she grew increasingly thin and weak. A doctor was called.
Wilk watched with awe as the man examined his sister, but the outcome wasn't any comfort. The girl was very sick, the doctor said. But he didn't know why, and he had no medicine that would help.
Harvest brought still another failure. The family needed money for food and Wilk and his mother looked around for something to sell.
There was nothing left but the mules. They brought very little.
It was then that the Reverend Eva Johnson entered their lives.
The Reverend Johnson was part black and part American Indian, a man with a bible, a bible and a job, a real job, in the turpentine forests . . . and a man with an eye for Wilk's mother.
Wilk instinctively disliked the preacher. He watched suspiciously as the courtship developed, but was helpless to prevent the marriage. Then, when the family moved to the turpentine camp, the boy's worst fears were confirmed.
Soon he and his brothers and sisters were at labor in the long-leaf pine forests, scarring the trees to bring the resin out, collecting the sap and pouring it into barrels, hauling it to the distillery for conversion into turpentine.
As for the preacher . . . sometimes he read a few words from the bible, but he wasn't a real preacher after all. Sometimes he worked in the turpentine forests, but he usually had something more important to do, like hunting and fishing.
The turpentine work was difficult, menial labor, from dawn to dusk, and the days blended into one another. With the passage of time Wilk's image of himself as a doctor deteriorated into fantasy, a fantasy that grew increasingly difficult to capture.
Wilk was in the forests, scarring trees, when word came that his youngest sister was dead.
Then he stood, at age 16, in another anonymous free cemetery, miles from where his father was buried, watching them lower his sister's wooden coffin into the ground. For two more years he worked, taking orders from his stepfather. But he balked when the man decreed that the family would move again, to work for a new turpentine company.
Wilk, for his part, suspected that one turpentine forest was much like another, and, anyway, he wasn't going anywhere . . . nowhere, at least, with the preacher.
He stayed and the family moved on. For the first time in his life, Wilk was alone. He was 18.
Confused and unsure of himself, he hung around the turpentine forest and grappled with the future. The dream was all but gone now, and it offered no inspiration.
Finally, hearing of work in the lumber mill town of Diboll, and having no reason to stay where he was, he took his few belongings and headed down the dirt road, one foot in front of another.
Diboll was a sawmill town of perhaps 2,500, a collection of green-wood shacks, dirt roads, and a company store . . . and it was always in need of another strong back. Within a few days of his arrival Wilk was pushing slabs of lumber toward a howling planer.
It was a tiny, humble place, lost in the hot south Texas forest, a transient town that would vanish as soon as the timber was gone.
But to the young farmboy it was a wonder. Model A Fords, used by the lumber company, frightened horses on the street. There was electricity, a boardwalk in front of the store, and a bewildering number of faces.
And some of those faces, he found as he settled into the first of a long line of cheap rooming houses, had intelligence behind them.
Almost all the residents of Diboll could read and write, and most had at one time or another journeyed down to Tyler, 125 miles away . . . Tyler, the place of dreams, home of the black place of learning, the Methodist-owned Texas College.
Wilk found that some of the other young men at the lumbermill had also dreamed of getting an education, and that some of them had actually gone to Tyler and enrolled. They had failed, however, and had returned to the mill in Diboll.
This intelligence had a dramatic impact on young Wilk. If they could go, so could he! The gossamer fantasy instantly solidified in his mind, from possibility to dream to goal to necessity.
Yet . . . the men he talked to had failed.
In Tyler they had somehow lost the dream, forgotten their priorities, mismanaged their money, failed to apply themselves to their studies, flunked out . . .
It was said in Diboll that an illiterate, once he became an adult, was done for. The mind was set, firm, impossible to teach.
The thought filled Wilk with cold terror. He couldn't believe it was too late; he refused to believe it. If he ever got the chance, he promised himself, he would not drop out.
If he got the chance?
Wilk looked around him, at the automobiles, at the sawmill, at the goods in the company store, at the simple machinery he operated at the sawmill. To make those things, somebody, somewhere, had to know something. To make the trains run, somebody had to know something.
Desperately, he wanted to be one of those people.
So it wasn't if he went to college. Not if.
When.
He would have to save money, and in the meantime he would have to study, to make up for lost time.
The resolution made, his ignorance became suddenly intolerable, and he couldn't wait. He borrowed some primers and, when he wasn't working, he reviewed arithmetic and grammar. Then he found a book on mathematics. It was incomprehensible, but he refused to put it down.
By day he worked at the sawmill, by night he studied, on Sundays he went to the local church, on payday . . .
On payday, every two weeks, he carefully divided his money into three small stacks. One stack was for home -- for shoes for his sisters, a dress for his mother, for whatever was needed. The second stack was for his own modest requirements.
The third stack was the smallest, by far, but by far the most precious. It was for the dream.
A dollar became, with the addition of another, two dollars. Five dollars grew into ten, ten became twelve, twelve became thirteen.
Wilk began to worry about security. There weren't any banks in Diboll, and he didn't dare leave the money in his room.
The solution was to fold it and knot it into a handkerchief. Before he went to work he put the handkerchief into his right pants pocket, then tied a string around the bottom of the pocket so that the handkerchief couldn't possibly fall out. At night, he slept with the handkerchief pinned into his pajama pocket.
A year passed in work and study, then two. The more he learned, the more voracious his appetite for knowledge became. Slowly the puzzle of mathematics yielded to his stubborn attack, and he was captivated by the sweet logic of it.
As he learned, the idea of learning itself broadened. When some of the townspeople talked of forming a band, for instance, he was mesmerized by the idea.
Back in the turpentine forests some people had played a guitar, but . . . a band! All those different instruments!
Music was still another thing for a young, hungry mind to learn, and Wilk spent precious money on a used clarinet. After that he worked, he studied, and he played.
The handkerchief got too full to carry with him. He walked to a nearby town, located a trusted aunt, and gave her $50 to hide for him.
And another year passed, and another. He sent off to Tyler for a college catalog. He pored over it, neglecting the clarinet.
Soon, now.
One Sunday a note appeared on the church bulletin board, announcing an educational meeting. Dr. W. R. Banks, the president of Texas College, would give a lecture and be available afterward to answer questions.
Wilk returned to his room and re-counted his savings. The total, including the money that had been left in the care of his aunt, amounted to almost $300.
That evening Wilk was at the church early, and when the program began he listened spellbound to the tall, unbelievably erudite gentleman who seemed to know every word in the dictionary and could make ideas dance in the air like notes on a page of music.
Afterwards, Wilk overcame his intimidation, went up to the man, and demanded his attention.
Wilk confessed that he was 23, and had only a sixth-grade education. But he'd saved some money. And he could work hard.
Was it possible?
The college president studied the intent young man. Experience told him Wilk was too old, but he hadn't the heart to say so.
Nothing, he equivocated, was impossible.
It was all Wilk needed to hear.
That autumn, almost precisely ten years after his father had died, Wilk packed his belongings, bought a ticket on the lumber train, and headed for Tyler.