Primary Lessons

by Sarah Bracey White, Kevin Pilkington (Introduction)

Ripped from middle-class life in Philadelphia, and transplanted to a single-parent household in the segregated south, Sarah, a precocious black child struggles to be the master of her fate. She refuses to accept the segregation that tries to confine her a system her mother accepts as the southern way of life. A brave memoir that testifies to the author's fiery spirit and sense of self that sustained her through family, social and cultural upheavals.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction

243 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Tayo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. Even though my life is hectic and I don't get to read as much as I would like (at least not for leisure) I carried it with me everywhere so that I might be able to steal a chapter or two wherever I could. I admit I found that I would often have to set it down. A true indication of how incredibly well-written this memoir is, I found myself getting emotional and choking back tears as the real-life heroine led me through her upheavals, confusion, triumphs, trials, and tragedies surrounding her early life growing up in the segregated South. Especially with all the talk of a "post-racial" America, this book offers a lot of insight about race relations and their impact. All in all...a wonderful book.

[Carol Baldwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

“As an African-American child growing up in the segregated pre-Civil Rights South, Sarah Bracey White pushed against the social conventions that warned her not to rock the boat, even before she was old enough to fully understand her urge to defy the status quo. In her candid and poignant memoir, Primary Lessons, White recalls a childhood marked by equal measures of poverty and pride—formative years spent sorting through the “lessons” learned from a complicated relationship with her beloved, careworn mother and from a father’s absence engendered by racial injustice and compromised manhood.” (Press release from CavanKerry Press)

I don’t normally quote a press release when introducing a book, but I couldn’t improve on this synopsis of Sarah Bracey White’s memoir. I first “met” Sarah in the pages of Childrenof the Dream: Our Own Stories of Growing Up Black in America. After reading about her experiences as a Sumter, South Carolina teen working in a camp for wealthy New England girls, I friended her on Facebook and told her about my work-in-progress. She promptly sent me a copy of her memoir which, has since helped fuel writing Half-Truths. I think Sarah's memoir is best revealed in her own words.
"The city buses are a sore spot for me. We don’t have a car, and I seldom have a dime to ride the one that travels from Liberty Street downtown to the shopping area. Even if I did, I wouldn’t want to ride the bus because I hate sitting at the back. Maybe we are poor, but even if we had extra money, it wouldn’t change the thing I hate most: the fear colored adults exhibit toward white people, even white children." (p. 127)

At one point their small house is vandalized. Sarah writes, "Even though we had nothing of value, it’s frightening to think that strangers have spent the day in our house—on my bed. Why had they picked our house? Would they come back?... Why had they smashed them [the figurines]? Were they angry because they found no money or valuables? Whoever they were, they had to be colored. White boys stood out too much in a colored neighborhood to consider mischief like this. "(p. 131)

She recalls the role of supportive teachers: "Maybe my teachers like me because they can see that I’m an outsider, trying to fit into a life I don’t want. Or maybe they like me because they like my mama and know the hardships she endures. Whatever the reasons, my teachers are a source of comfort. They give me approval and confidence. By the time I reach high school, they no longer tell me to stop talking so much. In fact, they encourage my outspokenness and open doors that make it possible for me to use my gifts in ways that benefit me." (p. 142)

In an unusually frank conversation her mother admitted, "The people in this town. They always said I wasn’t good enough for your daddy. He came from a fine respectable family, and I came from nothing. They used to say my real daddy was a white doctor who my mama worked for."

I’m shocked by Mama’s confession. "Is it true?" I ask.

"I don’t know. I was always scared to ask my mama about it. When I was about ten, I went over to the doctor’s house and hid behind a tree until he came home. I wanted to see if I looked like him."

"Did you?"

"Not one bit! I didn’t look like my daddy either." Mama pauses. Her eyes glaze, and she sighs deeply. “I loved my daddy. He used to call me his sunshine. Said I was the light of his life and that it was my job to banish the darkness. I never understood what he meant by that. I love the darkness. In the darkness, I’m the same color as everybody else.'" (p. 164-5)

When Sarah asked her mother why she didn’t move north like her siblings did, her mother replied, “When you move out of the south you leave your past behind. The only thing that counts up north is how much you got in your pocket. Everybody up north is running away from their past. The past is all I’ve got."

Sarah wrote, "Today I feel like she has exposed the rusty chain that holds her prisoner in Sumter." (p. 165-6)

When Sarah is getting ready to make her debut she considers, "Until those cotillion classes, I’d only been given instructions on what not to do. A long list of restrictions seemed to say that I was the problem, that my only for survival was to be invisible. But I don’t want to be invisible. I want to stand above the crowd and shine. That’s not the life plan for young colored girls like me. Yet being selected as a debutante has nurtured a rustling hope inside me. Maybe, just maybe, I can escape my fate." (p. 176)

At the cotillion she thinks, "Tonight the fact that we're colored doesn't matter. Tonight I feel like a princess, smiled upon and feted by people I respect and who respect me. Tonight I'm more than just another poor little colored girl living in the shadows. I'm filled with the infinite possibilities of who I can become." (p.179)

Sadly, two weeks after that special evening, Sarah's mother suddenly dies. At the funeral Sarah looks at her mother and thinks, "She looks more peaceful now than she ever looked alive." (p.197)

Sarah has no choice but to continue carrying out her plans. In 1963, she works as kitchen help in Vermont before entering college and receives an education: "When I ask Mrs. Lee [the woman who supervises the help] why we can't ride the horses or swim in the lake she smiles sadly and says, 'We're the help, and the help doesn't mingle with the campers.' Up north, it seems segregation is a matter of class and skin color."

Despite my anger at these restrictions, I am shamelessly curious about the campers. Never before have I been in such close proximity to so many white people. Daily it gets easier to eavesdrop on their conversations as they grow used to our brown presence and we become about as significant as the pine trees. No one worries about a pine tree hearing secrets. Soon I learn that white skin brings no solace from problems, that money doesn't ensure smooth boy-girl relationships or prevent sadness and heart ache. I also learn that white girls are cruel to other white girls. I had always assumed that whites were only cruel to colored people. I'm especially shocked to learn that white girls openly envy one another's looks. Almost every girl wants to be blond (I always thought long hair of any color was beautiful) and that every white girl would die for a perfect tan. I don't understand why they want to have skin like ours if they don't like colored people. (p.224)

In another conversation with Mrs. Lee Sarah questions why the white counselors make more money than she does, even though they are all "college girls."

Mrs. Lee shrugs, just the way Mama used to. "That's how life is," she says.

I can't understand why adults accept everything. Just because that's the way it's always been doesn't mean that that's the way it should always be. When I get to be an adult, I'm gonna change things. (p.225)
************
Sarah is now the executive director of arts and culture in the town of Greensburgh, NY and teaches at the Hudson Valley Writers Center. For more information about how Sarah is busy "changing things," please visit her website.

[Ann Cefola · Rating 5 out of 5]

This flawless memoir is engaging, entertaining and ultimately heart wrenching. Masterfully crafted, it has mesmerizing cinematic quality and the voice of the narrator is compelling throughout.

Primary Lessons is the story of a little girl who refuses to accept the constraints of the Jim Crow south and her mother's efforts to protect her within that system.

She takes us on a journey, which James Baldwin describes as "you're taught to pledge allegiance to a country and then about five or seven, you realize it's a country that has not pledged any allegiance to you."

Like all great journeys, the hero has to find her way home--a complicated and hostile place both in the world and her own heart.

[Carolyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Told from a young child's point of view, the story is as present and innocent as anyone that age is. As a result, the reader truly gets what it is like growing up Black in Philadelphia in the 1950's. And, more than any historian could convey, we get to see the contrast of what it is like growing up Black in the South as young Sarah is forced to move to Sumter. The difference is biting. The impacts of segregation are not just those of isolation and deprivation, but much further reaching into the very fabric of love and family and life and death.

[Susan Schefflein · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most beautiful memoirs I have read. A little girl learns to cope with life and has helpful mentors along the way. I loved it and I love the person who wrote it, who is a beautiful mentor to others.

[Martine Brennan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written. Sarah Bracey White takes us inside life in the South from a child's perspective. We feel for the child and her mother and respect them all at the same time.

[Victoria Hudson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sarah loves to learn and as a joyous, clever toddler she is growing up in her Philadelphia Aunt's home where the future is bright. She can be anything, do anything, her Aunt Susie tells her. When her friend starts kindergarten, she wants to follow, and talks her way into the neighborhood Catholic school - even though she's only four. She's advanced to the next grade at the end of the year. Except her mother returns and takes her back to South Carolina. She leaves the only home she's known. A place where she was encouraged to ask questions, seek out answers, and aspire to become whatever she could dream. Dreams are dust in a place defined not by ability, but the color of your skin.

Primary Lessons is the true story of Sarah Bracey White's childhood and coming of age. This is a personal story reflecting the struggle and trauma of systemic cultural racism and its cousin classism in mid 20th century America. While the setting of Philadelphia is a small part of the book, this provides a comparative backdrop for all that follows. In those crucial early years of 0 - five, Sarah lives in a nice middle class home in a big city, enjoys the ease of indoor plumbing and is encouraged in her creativity and questioning about the world. In Sumter, South Carolina, she is brought back to a family she's never known. Despite her single mother's quite respectable position as school teacher, the family lives in poverty, crowded in a small shack compared to Aunt Susie's home, without plumbing and an outhouse for a toilet. The once distant mother is now ruling her every movement, older sisters perceive her in the way or a nuisance and she has no friends to play with except her paper dolls. Instead of encouragement, she now hears she isn't old enough. Instead of school she plays alone. Instead of possibility, her life is defined by what she cannot do because of the color of her skin, aggravated by the perception her mother has about what is proper and respectable all driven by her mother's own demons fueled by the inequities of Jim Crow south. Where a question once brought learning and discovery, now it can as easily bring a slap for endangering the family or future.

Singular events define Sarah's life. The story presents well how young children learn to interact with their world based upon those decisions they make when small about how their world works and how to protect themselves from hurt. There is a great deal of hurt in Primary Lessons. The harsh impact racism had and continues to have in this country is ever-present.

There is also a great deal of perseverance. Sarah rebels and chafes against the restrictions of southern society and segregation personified in her mother. She grows up longing to belong, for a real family that would envelop her in the love she remembered from her time with Aunt Susie. She will not give in to fate. She will prevail. In the process, she will learn how close love and hate are in a family, hope often wears the mask of despair for its own survival and that every dream requires sacrifice.

[Robert Gironda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sarah Bracey White’s Memoir, PRIMARY LESSONS, is a wonderful book, on many levels. It is the achingly candid story of a young girl who must give up a relatively luxurious life in Philadelphia, with a loving aunt and uncle, to return to her mother in Sumter, SC and a life of near poverty. In the early 50’s, life for blacks in Philadelphia was almost tolerable, where life in SC was stifling and intolerable. But Sarah’s indefatigable spirit shines through, as she bides her time.

The book is a case study in Jim Crow living, which is mostly unknown to Northern whites. Ordinary pleasures, such as visiting the Public Library, are forbidden to Sarah, because she’s Black. Subjugation to whites is expected of Blacks in the South. Personal property means nothing. But Sarah is smart, and has an iron will. She waits for the time when she will be free.

Primary Lessons is also a study in hope and determination. Becoming an orphan at age 17, Sarah finds her way in the world. Her early life is filled with disappointment, yet she maintains a hopeful, positive outlook.

The book reads easily, as the author pulls the reader through the episodes of her life. It is compelling, and is read so quickly that the reader is left hungry for more.

It’s also a good choice for younger readers, who have little experience with Jim Crow-style discrimination and its effect on young people.

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a memoir that grabs you, shakes you, and won't let go. If you ever wondered what it was like to grow up black in the Jim Crow South, Primary Lessons will take you there vividly through the eyes of author Sarah Bracey White. White shares difficult life lessons-- uprooted at age five from a beloved Aunt's comfortable Philadelphia home (her mother could not afford to care for a fourth child) to be taken back "home" to racially segregated Sumter, South Carolina. I could not put this book down, and was sad when it ended with Sarah, now 17, leaving for college--changed, but in many ways still that same, spirited five-year old. I want to know more.

[Angchronicles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sarah Bracey White has captured her mother's strength, pride and love in the memoir, PRIMARY LESSONS. This book, Sarah's life, exhibits courage and confidence a young girl needs to survive the joys and sorrows weaved into life. In twenty four hours, I devoured the words, the songs, the love, the tears, the memories of a southern black girl that understood even fifty years ago that blacklivesmatter. PRIMARY LESSONS captures racial battle fatigue coined by William Smith, and embodies Rita Mae Brown's essay "Writing as a Moral Act" in which the writer provokes and disturbs her readers with truth. A truth she lived in 50s and 60s and continues today.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

I saw the author speak at my library and knew I had to read the book. She is both a wonderful speaker and author. She gives a vivid portrait of what it was like to grow up poor in the segregated south in the not so distant past.

[Debbie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't remember why I disliked it so - poorly written? Selfish character? I probably won't re-read it to figure it out!

[Nasus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Warmly written memoir of youth spent in the Jim Crow South; hardships overcome.

[Yvette McKnight-Johnson]

Sarah Bracey White is a phenomenal woman and an excellent writer. Sarah’s story was so familiar. Her words invoked memories conversations with my mother and grandmothers and their experiences. As I was reading her story, in spite of the limitations of Jim Crow and the restrictions of her mother, I knew Sarah’s spirit would soar. I anxiously await the sequel to Primary Lessons.