After Grace and Jim separated and I left for college, she continued to teach her Advanced English classes at the local high school and to work on her masters during the summer. But new paths were opening quickly. In the next few years, Grace would change jobs, buy a house and avidly pursue her interest in Black literature. If this new life had its challenges, it was filled with the personal satisfactions she had hoped for.
In December 1966 Grace writes of a visit to her mother in Dallas and then attendance at a convention of the National Council of Teachers of English in Houston. The Astrodome wowed her: “There never was such a place! It looks like the world would look if you could see it all at once.” In a February 1967 letter to a friend she says that she hopes to get a fellowship to complete her masters the next summer. In closing, she dwells on her delight in being a grandmother: “Isn’t it fun to have a grandson? Stephan is a doll. Wish you could see how long and how bright he is!”
In May, Graces writes of a professional conundrum. She has told her principal that she can’t live on her current salary but found the response less than encouraging. Meanwhile, a new community college is being established in Wilkesboro and they have interviewed her for a position there “in the area of humanities, which I want to move into, providing it is literature-based.” The salary is nearly twice what she is making. While she is considering this, St. Andrews, the local college where Jim had taught, offers her “a dual position, assistant dean of student life, and a chance to help plan and teach in a new humanities course.” Then, at last, the high school principal weighs in with a raise.
“Now — what do I do? I have tried to just live each day and yet all of these things have suddenly come my way. I am still strongly Presbyterian-oriented enough to ask: Why, and what does this mean in my life?”
Grace took the St. Andrews job. She hated to leave the classroom teaching she’d so loved, but the salary remained inadequate. To mark her departure, Grace’s students pooled their resources and bought her a Steuben Glass whale. Her junior class had chosen to read the unabridged version of Moby Dick. Some were waylaid by Melville at first, “but soon everyone was as excited about the book as I am. And now I have a beautiful, perfect crystal whale to remind me of our exhilarating learning experience and of my generous, affectionate 78 Special English students.”
In September 1967, she writes that “the new work is so different that I am not able to tell you whether I like or am just doing it. Perhaps the best sign will come tomorrow when I get my first salary check and see that I am finally making enough to live on.” She is spending the great bulk of her time not on teaching but on “deaning,” which she enjoys far less. On the other hand, she has gotten to see her grandson twice in two months. “He is strong and active and altogether delightful to be around. I can feel him and want to hug him right now.”
In the fall of 1967, she buys a house. She writes a friend: “At first I was horrified at the prospect, but finally after talking with two wise and able business men and friends, I realized that buying a certain type of house was an investment as well as actually cheaper than paying the exorbitant rent I was paying.’ (Jim and Grace, having spent most of their married lives in church-provided homes, had never owned a house.)
She has a rich and compelling network of friends and colleagues in Chapel Hill — including Reynolds Price and longtime journalism professor Walter Spearman — and she writes to a friend that she has been invited to “two cocktail parties with the journalism, radio, theater, motion-picture, television crowd.” In August of 1968, Grace is awarded her master of arts in teaching degree from the University of North Carolina. She feels proud of her very high grades, and welcomes my calling her, in a letter from my summer job at Glacier National Park, “my scholar-mother.”
Over the next several years, the letters grow sparse. Surely she is talking with all of us by phone more now than before. Also, she is devotedly pursuing her longtime interest in African-American studies. She creates and teaches a new course at St. Andrews: English 203, Black American Literature. The 25-item booklist is a treasure, and I have folders full of her lecture notes on Langston Hughes, LeRoi Jones, James Baldwin, Jean Toomer, Alex Haley, Eldridge Cleaver, W.E.B. DuBois, June Jordan, Ralph Ellison and more. But it was the work of Richard Wright that particularly compelled her. It was a thrilling moment when Grace was invited to a University of Iowa Afro-American Institute summer seminar in July 1971: “Richard Wright: His work, his world and his influence.” Ralph Ellison gave the introductory lecture.
Earlier in 1971, while I was in graduate school at Northwestern, Grace had come up to research Wright’s years in Chicago. Subsequently, she went with my sister-in-law to gather information on the years Wright spent in Memphis. This research culminated in a journal article that is cited online as still “the best piece of first-hand research” on Wright’s years in Memphis. “Richard Wright’s Memphis” was published in the 1972 Wright issue of “New Letters.”
Reading the article’s ending, it is easy to see why Grace felt so drawn to Wright: “However limiting and hostile {his roots in Delta soil} had been, because he felt deeply enough and was conscious of his own possibilities, he was ‘full of a hazy notion that life could be lived with dignity, that the personalities of others could not be violated, that men should be able to confront other men without fear or shame, and that if men were lucky in their living on earth they might win some redeeming meaning for their having struggled and suffered here beneath the stars.’”