“WAIT!!”
But it was too late. The New York City cabbie peeled off in the driving rainstorm, taking with him the purse I’d left on the seat. The purse with all my identification, maxed-out credit cards, and the cash I’d only just borrowed to pay my rent.
The signs were clear: time to give up, pack up, and head back to Georgia.
My big break had finally come—I’d been assigned a story for LOOK magazine on Chinatown’s hidden gang wars—but I’d just found out it wasn’t going to be published because the magazine was bankrupt. And so was I. The dream of a big-city journalism career that inspired me to jump at the opportunity to leave my secure job as a college teacher and move to New York City was fading fast.
I was twenty-seven years old, a single mother with a five-year-old son, and no prospects for a new job. Well, except one. I had a tentative connection to television through a political reporter from WNBC-TV named Gabe Pressman. Gabe is the one who had delivered the news to me that LOOK was going out of business.
“Magazines are dying,” he’d observed on the early morning call to tell me I was unemployed. “Maybe you ought to try television. We need writers, and I hear the station is looking for women, too.”
Within days after the farewell Bloody Marys were passed around at LOOK’s offices and television crews had come to cover the closing party—for me, more like a wake—Gabe came through for me, setting up a meeting with WNBC’s news director.
“Any television experience?” the news director asked without smiling. I’d been sitting outside his office all day, and out of pity or his promise to Gabe, he finally motioned me in.
“No, but I know how to tell a story,” I said, hastily handing him a photocopy of the Chinatown story.
He glanced at the provocative title, read a few paragraphs, and asked, “Can you do this story for television?”
“YES” was my answer, although I had no idea what that meant.
I was back in Chinatown the next day, with a full television news crew who had to show me how to hold the microphone when doing an interview, how to do a stand-up on camera, even how to pretend to be listening during the cutaways, another new term I filed away for future use, as I was hopeful I would be doing this again.
The story got almost three minutes, an eternity in television news, and I was hooked! Immediate gratification. No waiting for publishing dates. The story was seen by a much larger number of people than would have read it in a magazine, and I had produced and reported it for NBC News—with a lot of help, of course. My total time on camera was less than thirty seconds, but former colleagues at LOOK called to congratulate me on landing a new job—and career—so quickly.
I waited for the next assignment.
What I got instead was this advice from the news director: 1) become a blonde, 2) lose some weight, and 3) find a small town somewhere and learn the business. “You don’t start in New York,” I was told with a distinct note of finality.
So I made the rounds to every TV station that took my call or request for an interview.
“Already got a brunette; would you become a blonde?”
“Just not ethnic enough… we need twofers… woman and minority.”
“You’re too young to be credible.”
“Too old” (at twenty-seven!). “Too inexperienced.” “Too educated”—painful to hear as I was still paying off my student loans for my graduate degrees.
It was three months after my TV debut, after a long string of “not quite right” rejections and waitressing for cash, that I was watching the red taillights of that NYC taxi flicker in the downpour as it disappeared down the street with my rent money in the back seat.
Dejected and drenched and fighting tears, I told my five-year-old son, Mark, “Time to pack up and head back to Georgia.” Then the phone rang.
“Hello, this is Rabbi Goldberg. I got in the taxi after you, and I have your bag. Your number was inside. Would you like me to return it now?”
Within a half hour, there he stood, handing over my small, black bag with the borrowed money and with it, the chance to keep moving forward—at least for another month. When I tried to explain how meaningful his act of kindness was, he took my hands and said, “Well, Patricia, at some point in everyone’s life, they need a rabbi, and tonight, you got yours.”
I got something else that night, too. I had experienced the singular goodness of another human being whose gift of showing up at my door, giving me back my bag, and restoring hope and possibilities inspired me to make a silent promise to be someone else’s rabbi, mentor, sponsor, and advocate.
Each time I have had that opportunity in the many decades since that stormy, life-defining encounter, I remember my promise and think of Rabbi Goldberg with deep gratitude.
IT’S BECOME ALMOST a cliché that life journeys begin with grandmother stories, and as I referenced in the preface, so does mine. My mother and I spent my earliest years about eighty miles west of Savannah, Georgia, with my grandparents on that small farm without electricity or indoor plumbing. My father was overseas in the army during World War II.
I have warm and wonderful memories of those first three years with a doting grandfather who would feed me homemade biscuits and sing me back to sleep and a grandmother whose long, raven-black hair I loved to brush as she told me stories next to the pot-bellied stove that provided heat in the kitchen, where we spent most of our time. She had only finished sixth grade and had never lived anywhere but small tenant farms, but her stories seemed to come from deep in her memory and contained special meanings for me. One story stands out in my memory, a story that I later found exists in many forms in many cultures.
Her version went something like this:
Once upon a time, there was a little girl who was always running and falling. She would run in the fields through the cotton and tobacco, falling among the rows. But one day, the running girl found herself outside the fields: no cotton or tobacco, only high mountains.
A beautiful horse galloped by with a friendly boy on his back, a boy with a feather in his hair. He offered her a ride.
They rode and rode through green fields and flowers and women sitting in circles around small fires.
When they came to the end of their journey, the boy turned to her.
“I will grant you one wish,” the boy said. “What will it be?”
The running girl said, “I want to be able to run far and wide and never fall.”
“That wish,” the young brave said, “I cannot give you, because there will be times when falling is your only way forward. You must run on rough ground, through barriers sometimes, and you will take wrong turns and become lost, and you will fall. You must fall. And from time to time, you will.
It’s in the falls that you will learn to breathe, to recover, to get up, and to continue moving forward.
No matter how often I stumbled or fell, which was often, as I seemed always to be in a hurry as a child, and even now, I would hear Grandmother comforting me with that familiar line adapted from the story: “Falling on your face is at least a forward movement.” I never thought of slowing down or stopping—that was never her advice. She just gave me unconditional love through the falls and the failures—something it would take me nearly a half century to find again.
My grandmother had to hide her American Indian heritage—which her papers, discovered when she passed, indicated was Creek-Cherokee. There was little information about her family, but it’s likely that her mother, like many other Creek and Cherokee women in the Southeast who were landowners in those matrilineal cultures, had married a white farmer to avoid extradition by the US government’s 1838 Supreme Court decision—a decision that forced relocation of the American Indian communities in the South to newly formed reservations in the West. Because so many died on what was truly a death march, history refers to this movement as the Trail of Tears.
I knew none of this until my grandmother’s death, and however distant this connection to her heritage, the discovery of my grandmother’s background led to a personal interest in the history of the American Indian nations, an interest that would play a big role later during my years of working with Ted Turner and Robert Redford. I also believe that my grandmother’s legacy of storytelling as well as her personal strength and resilience gave me an early portrait of what a woman could do and be, even with very limited resources. Imagine how pleased I was to discover that my grandmother’s native language, which I never heard her speak, has no gender pronouns, no hes or shes to distinguish what is male or female.
One day, a tall, dark-haired he appeared in the yard, a stranger dressed in a green army uniform. My grandmother hugged him, clearly overjoyed. Granddaddy said, “Patsy, honey, this is your father! Go welcome him home!”
My father approached and tried to hug me, but I turned away, and even today, I can remember feeling sad while everyone else, especially my mother, seemed so happy about this stranger’s presence. Each time he would reach for me and say, “Come, hug Daddy,” I would run to the more familiar arms of my grandfather or grandmother.
It was not an easy homecoming. A few days later, in spite of my tears and begging to stay, we left the farm in his borrowed ’45 Ford and headed for Fort Stewart outside of Savannah, Georgia, where this man who said he was my father would continue his military service.
FOR THE NEXT several years, we moved to a succession of army bases, averaging one or more moves a year. Mother soon tired of the moving, but I thrived on being the new girl at school and in the neighborhood, making new friends fast because no sooner were they made than we would move again. Finally, Mother convinced my father to leave active military service, and they decided to settle in Swainsboro, Georgia, a small town just thirty miles from my grandparents’ farm.
Swainsboro (population then and now around five thousand) was once called “The Crossroads of the South” because the north-south and east-west national highways actually crossed there. When Interstate 15 was built to connect Atlanta and Savannah, bypassing Swainsboro altogether, there were even fewer reasons to visit a town that had once been named Paris. The Swains family, who had a lot of influence in the town’s early days, had thought that Paris sounded “too foreign” and changed the name. What didn’t change for me from the beginning was the feeling that I didn’t belong there.
Except once a year, when the excitement of the annual Pine Tree Festival parade suspended my complaints about small-town boredom. I would arrive early for the best spot along the parade route, and as the high-school band approached, trying to play in tune and march in step, and accomplishing neither, my heart raced, anticipating the colorful floats to follow. I fell in love with parades and their disruption of routine, their movement forward—although in the case of this parade, the forward movement was transiting the ten blocks from the county courthouse to the city limits sign. From that first parade encounter, I had a strong urge to be in parades, not just standing on the sidelines, watching them—and life—pass by. I couldn’t have articulated why at that age, but I must have realized that being an observer, even to something as transitory as a parade, just wasn’t enough. Not for me. Then or now.
To get into the Pine Tree Festival parade, I entered the beauty pageant for Pine Tree Festival queen as soon as I was old enough—fifteen—and I won! I was delighted at the time, but looking back, winning a beauty pageant at such a young age wasn’t such a good move. It seemed to set me apart from the other girls my age, and I spent a lot of the rest of my high-school years battling the beauty-queen stereotype and all that it meant in the South of the fifties, where being pretty was valued much more than being smart.
I felt pretty in the royal-blue, off-the-shoulder, full-skirted evening gown based on a photo of a former Miss America’s gown that my mother had stayed up night after night sewing for me to wear on the big day of my ride in the parade as Miss Pine Tree Festival. The skirt was so large that it took five heavily starched crinolines (please google crinolines if born after 1960) to hold it up in a huge circle.
Suddenly, the tractor driving the float jerked to a stop, and the abrupt jolt threw me off my pine-box throne. I fell forward on my face, my royal-blue evening gown skirt falling forward too, like a deflated balloon.
Laughter floated up from the crowd in the streets, and I was mortified. The first face I saw when once again upright was, of course, my grandmother, who was visiting for the big day. At the end of the parade, as she helped me dismount from my throne, she whispered, “Well, honey, at least falling on your face is a forward movement.”
I wanted to laugh, or at least smile conspiratorially, but I was too sad. The magic of the day had faded, and the Pine Tree Festival queen’s parade ride felt shorter that day, and the town felt smaller, a phenomenon that I’ve observed other times when the reality didn’t quite live up to the expectations.
I WAS DETERMINED to get past the expectations of what was possible for a young girl who was told she was pretty enough to get by without money or connections—past the emotional scars of a mother who displayed my pageant trophies as if they could have been hers. And they could have been, had she not abandoned her own dreams to marry my father. While I struggled with the tension between what I valued in myself and what my mother wanted me to become, I lived in fear of my father, whose silent anger hung like a heavy cloud over our house. My brother, who was born when I was seven, was too young to be my confidant, and his relationship with our parents always seemed easier than mine.
School was always my happy place. I loved learning and my report card reflected my determination to be as close to number one in every subject as I could. Straight As meant I might qualify for a college scholarship, and I intended to go to college, even though my parents had not gone beyond high school and only three in their large farm families had gone to college.
I had big plans but no idea how I was going to implement them… until Miss Shirley Roundtree swept into my eighth-grade English class at Swainsboro High School wearing a full-skirted dress that swayed as rhythmically as Loretta Young’s did during her dramatic descent down the staircase every Sunday night on The Loretta Young Show. Miss Roundtree was beautiful by anybody’s standard, with shining dark hair that was perfectly coiffed, bright red lipstick that I soon learned was her signature, and gorgeously coordinated outfits.
Beyond Miss Roundtree’s stylishness, however, I loved the way she commanded respect, clearly the boss from the moment she set foot in the classroom. I didn’t just want to look like her; I wanted to be her.
I didn’t have any other role models, so I pursued Miss Roundtree after class, day after day, with endless questions: “How can I get into college? What do I need to do to make that possible? Can you help me get a scholarship?”
“If you could do anything you wanted, what career would you choose?” she asked one day, realizing that I was not going to stop asking her questions.
“I want to be an actress—like Vivien Leigh!” I said, thanks to annual showings of Gone with the Wind at the one movie theatre in town.
“Okay,” she responded. “Let’s start a theatre company at school.” She cast me in every play she directed and produced—usually as the lead. We didn’t do the usual high-school dramas; Miss Roundtree believed in challenging us and the audiences. I won best actress in the state, playing an unmarried mother in a rarely performed theatre piece by poet Carl Sandburg.
Then, in my junior year, my attention suddenly turned to politics. I was inspired by a story during the Saturday newsreels about Margaret Chase Smith, the first woman ever to serve in both the House and Senate as well as the first female candidate nominated for president from a major party. I didn’t know that she was a Republican, and in fact, I had never met a Republican since everyone I knew was a Democrat in those days, including my parents and grandparents; Southern Democrats then were closer in ideology to the Tea Party now. I only knew that I was ready to put acting aside and focus on my new dream—becoming a senator.
My interest in politics was ridiculed by everyone—except Miss Roundtree, who encouraged me and even started a debate team at school. We thrived, winning debate competitions around the state. This training turned out to be the best preparation for the teaching jobs to come. I also had begun to give youth sermons at the Baptist church where we went twice every Sunday, Wednesday night for prayer meetings, and every other Saturday for “hate Catholics” sessions—Bible studies intended to convince us only Baptists would get to heaven. I enjoyed giving sermons and was told that I was a natural at the pulpit, and at one of the yearly tent revivals, I even promised to dedicate my life to full-time Christian service. But since everything I was beginning to enjoy doing, such as dating and dancing, was a sin according to the Baptist view of the Bible, I began to have doubts.
Clearly, I wasn’t all that sure exactly what I wanted to do or be—shifting from big-screen star to Baptist missionary in one year—but one thing I was absolutely clear about was that I wanted to move forward from where I was and what was expected that I could become.
“I THINK YOU should apply for a drama scholarship to the University of Georgia,” Miss Roundtree—now Mrs. Reid—suggested as she had noted my flair for the dramatic, my love of public speaking, and my ease with an audience, probably all good qualifiers for a stage career.
She wrote a recommendation and I got the notice to come to UGA and audition.
“Absolutely not!” my father said, denying my request to go to the audition. When he’d retired from the military and gone to work for an appliance store that sold televisions, he had refused to get one for our family, explaining that he worried about the influence of TV on my life. (Little did he know!) Just the mention of an audition for a life in the theatre was out of the question for him.
“Don’t you worry,” Mrs. Reid told me conspiratorially when I ran to her with the bad news. “We’ll figure out a way.” Then she drove me to Athens herself, and sat in the back during my audition.
A couple of agonizing months later, the thick envelope arrived: I’d been accepted with a fully paid scholarship to study drama at UGA.
Still, my father was adamant. “You can go use that money to go to the state teachers’ college down the road, like my sister,” the only person in his family to go to college. Once again, Mrs. Reid interceded, assuring my parents I’d be safe in Athens, Georgia.
“I promise I’ll visit often to make sure she’s doing okay,” she assuaged. “It’s a great opportunity for Patsy,” as I was called then—and in spite of efforts to get people to call me “Patricia,” no one did, then or now! At last, Mrs. Reid prevailed, and off I went to UGA.
My father came to see me at university only once, unexpectedly, just in time to see my performance in the role of a prostitute dying of syphilis in Hello from Bertha, a one-act play by Tennessee Williams. He watched in horror as, clad in a revealing black slip, I cursed and threw gin bottles onstage.
“That’s it,” he told me afterward. “You’re coming home with me.”
“I’m not,” I told him levelly. I loved my life at the university, and I had started my journey away from a home where I didn’t feel safe, understood, or loved, and beyond the small-town limitations. I would do what I had to do to stay, so I threatened him with words I had never spoken before. “And if you try to make me leave school,” I told him, “I’ll tell Mother about what you did to me.”
He froze. He knew what I meant. He had threatened me into keeping “our secret”; now I was threatening him with revealing it.
My voice was calm, but inside I was shaking. Still, I spoke my truth, even for a fleeting moment, and the abject fear in his eyes told me that I had gone far enough. As he turned to leave, I knew I was staying—and to keep moving forward, I buried our secret for the next twenty-eight years.
DANGEROUS TIMES CALL FOR DANGEROUS WOMEN
In Conversation with Stacey Abrams
Stacey Abrams has made history more than once in her life. She is the first African American woman to become the Democratic nominee for governor in any state—and she almost became the governor of my home state, Georgia. Amid allegations of voter suppression through political maneuvering by her opponent, who was Georgia’s secretary of state at the time, Abrams demanded that every vote be recounted in the days after the election. Ten days later, she announced the end of her gubernatorial campaign. There’s no question for those of us who witnessed both her effectiveness as the Democratic leader in a conservative, Republican-dominated state assembly and the way that her campaign ignited support and interest across the United States and around the world that she will continue to move forward as a leader.
Stacey’s life story is one defying expectations and limitations at every step in her journey from rural Mississippi. A daughter of Methodist ministers who taught her the values of giving as well as leading, she inspires all those who hear her and meet her with how smart and strategic she is, how committed and courageous, and yes, dangerous, too. She’s clearly not afraid to take risks, to put herself on the line, to disrupt, and to be as daring as she needs to be to make the changes she sees as possible.
Stacey had only had a few days to rest and reflect on her historic campaign when I sat down with her and asked her what it means to her to be a dangerous woman.
What resonates for you in the statement that “dangerous times call for dangerous women”?
Stacey: Central constructs motivate people to action—the core notion of autonomy, the resilience of democracy, the opportunity for success—yet recent years have eroded our confidence in their truth. We wake, we work, we dream, believing that our efforts will bring them to fruition. In these times, when our basic beliefs are at stake, we must have women who are willing to defy convention, to take calculated risks, and to build infrastructure that will serve a broader community and withstand assaults on our freedoms.
Do you think of yourself as a dangerous woman and, if so, how has this been manifested in your life and work?
Stacey: A dangerous woman is one who understands the traditions and conventions, may even operate within them, but she is also willing to defy them when necessary. I ran for governor as the first black woman to receive the nomination from a major party, and after questionable actions that eroded access to the ballot for thousands, I refused to offer a concession speech, instead challenging the structure of our elections. More importantly, I launched an organization to pursue legal reforms to our electoral process, even though the results would not change the outcome of my election. This moment is an example of how I have consistently tried to confront challenges: identify the problem, understand why it’s a problem, and then work to solve it. I would say there are few things as dangerous as a woman with a plan and the perseverance to execute.
Is there an age component to feeling dangerous? Was there a particular incident or moment or time in your life when becoming dangerous felt essential, and why?
Stacey: I do not believe age is a necessary factor. As we can see from the young women at the heart of Black Lives Matter or the Parkland survivors, to the tenacity of an Edith Windsor or Maxine Waters or Mazie Hirono, the issue is not age; the question is the necessity of the moment. At the age of twelve, I was selected for a prestigious honor that included a trip to Arizona from my hometown in Mississippi—and I was the only African American selected from my state. Unfortunately, when my parents brought me to the airport to travel with the other participants, we discovered they’d intentionally given us the wrong information and left without me. My parents tried to take me home, but they’d raised me to not allow others to dictate my future. So I convinced them to let me go alone, on my very first flight, to the event. I was nervous, terrified of flying, and not exactly certain of my reception when I arrived, but I did it anyway. Being dangerous is an act of imagination—deciding your goals and pushing through pain and angst.
Who are the women in your life who inspire you to be more dangerous?
Stacey: My mother, my three sisters, Johnnetta Cole [the first female president of Spelman College], Lauren Groh-Wargo [Stacey’s campaign manager and the CEO of Fair Fight Action], and those countless women who stepped up to help me pursue my bid for governor.
What are the biggest remaining danger zones for women worldwide?
Stacey: Poverty, reproductive health care access, academic education, property ownership, and access to technology.