Chapter 8: Teaching Positions
After graduation, we drove Becky’s VW all the way to Chicago, where there was an annual gathering of businesses and schools looking to hire recent graduates. Unfortunately, there was nothing for us. We decided that if nothing could be found by the end of summer, we would go to California and stay with Becky’s brother until we found jobs. At least we would not have to face a cold winter jobless.
The city of Greensboro decided to add a special touch to its annual awards banquet by hiring a professional videographer to produce a short film. The film was meant to capture the recipients unaware that they were being filmed by someone hired by the city’s board. And to add more interest, the man hired for this job also had a storyline about his stress from job hunting and his expectant wife. The videographer contacted the head of the theater department for a recommendation of someone with the talent for this role. I was offered the role, and although there was no pay involved, I was told it would look good on my resume. I accepted it and found it nothing like a stage performance. Most of this time was spent waiting for the lighting and sound to be adjusted for a two-minute scene, followed by further adjustments. It seemed like the actors were secondary to the equipment. While waiting for another adjustment, I began talking to a crew member who had just graduated from Bennett College, one of the first black women’s colleges. She
mentioned that the theatre department professor was leaving for two years to finish his doctorate. This was a prime example of networking! I applied for the position and was accepted
Becky was still working at the phone company. So now I would be paid for the next nine months and then have the summer off.
Part of the reason I was attracted to teaching was from my art teacher in undergraduate school. Each summer, he would go to a different country, taking photos of architecture & art in museums. Then he would share the experience with his students.
I thought what a great way to live, having your summers free.
During my first year of teaching at Bennett College, I applied for a grant to support teachers traveling abroad to broaden their knowledge. I also successfully staged a production of “Dark of the Moon”. It’s a modern American drama set in the Smoky Mountains, based on the folk ballad “Barbara Allen.” The plot follows a witch-boy named John who falls in love with a human girl named Barbara Allen. He wants to become human so he can be with her, but their relationship is doomed by superstition, betrayal, and tragedy. Themes: Love versus prejudice, folk traditions, the clash of the supernatural with the human world, and intolerance. The production was considered one of the best ever produced at Bennett.
The school arranged for Ossie Davis to speak at our theatre while I was there. Ossie was an actor and
playwright. His most notable play was Purlie Victorious (1961), later adapted into the musical Purlie, a satire on segregation and race relations in the South.
So, Becky and I decided we would save our money and tour Europe in the summer. Each time we wanted to go out for a McDonald's hamburger, we would remind ourselves that we would have to give up a glass of wine at a romantic Paris bistro.
We made more money by selling Becky’s VW and a TF Roadster I had restored. We were able to put down a deposit on a Fiat Spider sports car and take delivery in Milan, Italy. Once we got there, we were so excited about the new red convertible that we had the top put down before driving out of the garage. Within a block, a hard rain came down as we scrambled to put the top back up. We visited Rome to see the Colosseum, where we spotted dozens of cats roaming inside, and wondered whether they might be distant relatives of the original lions.
This was in 1972, so a paper map was our only means of navigating through Europe. More than once, we would end up in a small village where people would stare at us for being the first English-speaking foreigners they had ever seen.
I recall a small town where all the good hotels were booked, so we had to spend the night in a cheap hotel with no air conditioning and no screens on the windows. It was hot and humid, so the windows were
left open, allowing an army of large mosquitoes to attack me from every direction. Becky hid under the sheets while I stayed up most of the night doing battle with these blood-sucking female mosquitoes who seemed to have a fatal attraction to me.
When we finally woke the next morning, we stared in disbelief at the walls as they were spattered with spots of blood, my blood! We quietly checked out and slipped out of town as if we were fleeing from a crime scene.
When we arrived in Paris, we realized why it was known as a city of romance. Everywhere you looked, there was a nude statue.
In Paris at the Louvre Museum, Becky was viewing the Mona Lisa when she fainted. A few days later, we arrived in England, where we checked in with a doctor and found out that Becky was expecting.
She called my parents about the news. I got a photo of Becky coming out of the phone booth.
*(Photo)
In Plymouth, England, we walked out onto a wooden pier, where, at the end, we found a metal plate with an inscription.
“From this point, the Mayflower set sail in 1620.” So now we knew the origin of the name Plymouth Rock.
While in England, we called the company in Italy that we had paid to ship our new Fiat back to New York.
For some unknown reason, international calls back in 1972 were limited to about five minutes. It took most of that time to find someone who spoke a little English. I was informed that a problem had arisen and that we needed to return to the company in Italy to resolve it. When I asked for more details about the issue, the conversation ended due to time constraints, and we had to return to Italy. We discovered that the shipping line had gone on strike, and it would be some time before we received a refund. We returned to France, where we arranged for another shipping line to deliver the car to New York.
In New York, when we checked with the shipping company about our Fiat, they advised us to come back tomorrow, as only a few cars had been removed from the ship. I asked if they could check whether our Fiat was among the few removed from the ship. They assured me that with hundreds of cars on the ship, the odds of mine being one of the few were remote. Since we wanted to get back home and didn't want to stay in a hotel in New York, I persisted. To their amazement, our Fiat was among the few that were unloaded. We had been on high alert, with folks warning us that if driving & parking in Europe didn’t damage our vehicle, the cargo ship would. I checked it out, and there was not a dent or even a scritch on it. When we finally got near home, we stopped for lunch. In the restaurant parking lot, we sat in the car as we watched a woman back up across the lot straight into the front fender of our new red Fiat sports car! The repair shop could never match the car’s exact red paint color.
We had this huge, framed map of the United States, something like 8’ by 4’. We had pinned a cutout of our Fiat on Greensboro, NC, and each month when we made a payment, we would move the car westward, saying, “When it gets to California, it will be paid for.” Our friends thought this was a cute idea and would check our progress each time they visited. It blew their minds a few months after we started this ritual to find the car in California! Fortunately, to my amazement, the grant I had applied for came through, allowing us to pay off the balance on the Fiat.
On January 26, 1973, Ben was born. He inherited his beautiful blue eyes from his grandmother and great-grandmother. He was healthy and happy except at night, when he would constantly wake up screaming. This took its toll on us since we both had jobs and needed our sleep. My mother would take him back home to Asheville for weeks at a time, thinking it was just colic, but she was mystified as much as we were as to why this continued for the first year of his life. We later learned that Ben was on the spectrum. The doctor said that when Ben fell asleep, it was probably like an electrical storm going off in his head. He gradually grew out of it, but later in life, he struggled with other areas, such as schoolwork and social skills. We took him to the doctors for medicine and hired tutors to help with his learning. He grew up with a few really close friends and truly loved his little brother, Brian, who arrived six years later.
During my second year at Bennett, some of my students noted that most of the plays seemed to be written by white playwrights.
I told my students that if they could find a contemporary black playwright, we would try to stage his play. They found one in New York. His play told the story of violence and death between a black man and a white man. It was written more like a movie script than a stage production. To make a stage production work, I filmed parts of the story and projected it onto a scrim, spotlighting the actors behind it. I got the school to pay for his flight down for the production. His only problem with the production was my showing the white man bleeding after being fatally struck in the head. His concern was that the blood would elicit sympathy for the character. He obviously felt that the man was such a racist that we should not feel any human compassion for him, even as he lay bleeding to death.
One scene in the play took place in a graveyard beside a freshly dug grave, surrounded by flowers. I had my actors dress in black and meet at a cemetery where a funeral service had been held earlier that day. I explained that this was highly unusual and that we would need to be quick and get the scene in one take. As I finished the last take, I saw a caretaker walking in our direction. I told the students that we had been spotted and needed to leave in an orderly fashion. Their response was to literally run out of the graveyard and race to their cars. I can only imagine the gossip
surrounding the caretaker’s staff who witnessed such a scene.
I enjoyed teaching at Bennet College with its lovely little theatre and one-person department. Had it not been for the professor returning after earning his doctorate, I would have stayed in my position there.
The head of the theatre department at UGCG must have kept up with recent graduates or at least with his former assistants. He informed me that a teaching position was available at Shaw University in Raleigh. I scheduled an interview and secured the job.
The head of the department was a woman with a bachelor’s degree, married to the head of the Humanities Department. I was appointed as the technical director. The first production consisted of around eight different scenes. To accommodate this unusual requirement, I constructed a large, circular platform on wheels and secured it to the stage floor. The stage is set with two walls of stage flats intersecting. From above, it appeared to be a large X inside a circle. This enabled multiple scene changes without disrupting the action.
The theatre was in such poor condition that, when the department head complained about its condition and sought repairs, the school decided to condemn it instead. We had to relocate our offices from the building to old trailers on campus. All theatre productions had to be performed off campus, in high school auditoriums. This made my job so much more difficult. Moving scenery, lights, and sound equipment to a new location each time was a real pain.
I wrote two one-act plays during my postgraduate classes at Chapel Hill over the summer. I staged and directed them as “Comedies of Love”. My cast and crew were so proud of the production that they presented me with a plaque, which I still have today.
During my third year at Shaw University, I began to realize that most students were there on scholarships or some form of tuition aid. Additionally, despite repeatedly submitting grant applications for theater lighting and sound equipment, none had been granted to my knowledge. When I raised my concern with another teacher, I was told this was how we received our salaries. In retrospect, I understand that this was an avenue for young Black students to receive an education that would otherwise have been unavailable to them. But at the time, it looked like making it my responsibility to submit grants was somehow a buffer since I was a white man. When I delayed submitting another grant, I faced intense pressure until I wrote a letter of resignation. I was told I would no longer receive my final paycheck because I had resigned. However, they would reinstate me if I provided the finished grant.
At that point, I wrote a long letter to the dean stating that I would no longer be an unwitting accomplice to what I considered a fraudulent use of federal funds. Additionally, if I were not paid my final paycheck, I would bring the situation to the attention of both the public and the authorities. The dean immediately accepted my terms, recognizing how serious I was, as I had brought a lawyer. Shaw was the end of my time as a professor at a university.