Joseph Hampton
My birth date is September 4, 1968, and I was born in Thomasville, Georgia.
Thomasville, Georgia is in the southeast part of Georgia. I mean very south. When you
leave out Thomasville, Georgia going south, you drive, when you’re going by county,
you’re in Tallahassee, Florida, and we’re right on the Georgia Florida border. I mean you
literally, when you leave my hometown, you drive right into Leon County, which is, so I
grew up one-fourth Florida State, and it’s near I-95. Thomasville is west of I-95. So it’s,
I mean, it’s a small southern town. It was and still is a farm town community. There’s
still plantations and they still grow crops of tobacco, watermelons, peas, beans, I mean.
They used to grow cotton. Cotton is kind of, it’s very difficult and it took too many
nutrients out of the soil and peanuts is still growing. They have Quail Rise. They have
the plantations that was the, you know, built in slavery have been converted to these, how
would I call it, kind of resort type places. So Quail Rise, which is the largest quail
plantation in the world, you come there to hunt. All the rich people come and fly in. So
people come in and hunt, that kind of thing. So that’s where I grew up and it was a nice,
real, I mean you’ve got to__________________. I stayed there; I left Thomasville when
I was twenty.
My earliest childhood memory in attending school, okay, this is going to be
interesting, was at this Presbyterian pre-school that I went to when I was three. I have an
adopted sister that was two years older than me, so when they put her in school, they told
me I had to go with her. So the first thing that I remember about school is that they told
my adopted sister she had to take dance lessons, which, you know, I didn’t, you know, I
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just remember waltzing, which she was my partner. So it seemed like a very weird thing
to do. It was a Presbyterian church and it was East Presbyterian. I know exactly where it
is, but I can’t remember the name. I don’t know if it was First Presbyterian. There’s two
there. In Thomasville there’s always, there’s two of everything, one white and one black.
It was actually the white Presbyterian Church where the pre-school was. It was
integrated, yes. It was, and we were, they were more, at least the church was more liberal
because the school really, my hometown didn’t fully integrate until the first year I was in
public school, which would have been ’74, when I was five or six, so it was ’75 or ’76.
So that’s the first thing I remember about school, but I always liked school. I liked the
pre-school, but I didn’t stay there long. I don’t know, I can’t remember. We were there
for a year and then we left there and went to Mrs. Stoop’s School, which was right down
the street from the Presbyterian school, and it’s like, I think it should be a national
monument because she, it was, you’ve seen Little House on the Prairie, that was my, that
was Mrs. Stoop’s School, literally. It was one room and you had kids from ages about 35, we all were in the same classroom and the young kids sat in front and as you got older,
you went toward the back and I went there for two years and you went and you learned,
you know, and we played outside. There was a little playground. So when I was 3-4, I
went to the Presbyterian school and then 4-6 I went to Mrs. Stoop’s.
Both of my parents were working. My mother, I grew up in a single family home.
My Mom, you know that place called Hopkins Street, right around the corner my father
was from us. My Mom, she worked, at that time, she was working at Southernland
Foods, which is they process chickens and cure hogs and a slaughterhouse, and that’s
what she did, and my grandmother was living with us and she had had a stroke and she
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was bedridden, my mother’s mother. So we all lived in what we call a, we used to call it
family houses. So it was, you know, me, at that time, me and my sister, Mom, and one of
my younger brothers. I have two younger brothers and, my parents, my father worked at
Water Brothers, which is, they make apparel like bras and underwear here in the, I guess
you’d call it a stocking, order room, where they’d order material to make sure, he was
like a bookkeeper. Thomasville was, you had the farming, but you had Flyer’s Bakery. I
don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Flyer’s Bakery. It’s one of the last independent
bakeries, their headquarters, it started, it’s headquartered is in Thomasville. So you had
your, the economy was very rural, still farming, but you had Flyer’s Bakery, Water
Brothers, Southernland, Gossett Clark, which makes this big furniture, and Georgia
Crate, which makes the crates they ship food around the country, and Bafford Leather
Company. Those were the major employers outside of farming, inside the city. Mother
long worked at Southernland for a while and then she left there and went to, she’s a
butcher for the most part, so she went to work at a grocery store as a butcher while I was
growing up. Both of my parents are still living and they’re both still in Thomasville,
couldn’t get them out. They were both born and raised there and not leaving.
By the Fall of ’74, I was going into public school, first grade, I was five turning
six and it was a weird thing because they didn’t want me to go to first grade, the school
system. They had a thing called pre-first grade. It was kind of like TK, but they called it
pre-first grade. TK is like kindergarten, but transitional kindergarten. Well see, what
happened with my Mom was like, “Are you all insane? He’s been going to school for
three years.” So my Mom told them, she said, it was like well, school started in August,
the end of August and I wasn’t six yet. You had to be six to start school and she was like,
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“No, test him.” They tested me and they said, “Well, we could bring him in second
grade, but we’re not going to do that because he’s too little.” So I started the first grade
and that was the first integrated, fully integrated class in ’74, in my hometown. We
finally, after the National Guard came by and all that, seriously, in my hometown, the
National Guard had to come. When they started integrating by high school, years later,
one of my cousins were one of the first blacks to go to Thomasville High School, which
was, she started going in, we entered high school in ninth grade, but she was actually in
tenth grade I think she would have been in ’72, when I was still young because I would
go over, they stayed right next to us. A lot of our family lived within a block of our
house and we’d always. Thomasville, there is black sections, you know, you have more
than one. You have Fletcherville; they name them by the streets. There’s Fletcherville,
it’s like, I kind of grew up in that area, in Fletcherville. Then you have Fruit City and
they call it that because it’s Orange Street, Peach Street, so that’s Fruit City, and then you
had Douglass, over by the middle, the black high school was called Douglass High
School after Frederick Douglass, and around, that’s where, that’s the Douglass area,
around that area, and then you had your two large, well, what I would call large housing
projects. One was called Illinois and the other one was, oh man, I’m blanking on the
name of it, Woodcock, and so they were like the black areas of town and within about.
Thomasville is, don’t let them fool you, right now it’s 18,000 who live in Thomasville,
but and when I was there, the town has gotten smaller. There’s people move out, it’s
more of a retirement place, or a lot of industries are shutting down. Southernland is no
longer there, Water Brothers is no longer there, after a lot of other companies closed,
some of the younger people are moving out. Farming is still there. I think farmers will
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always be in Thomasville and they’ve started talking towards a retirement type place
where people live south of town. Actually, they, I think they kind of look at it as, you
know, you’re close enough to Florida, but you’re not in Florida, you know, it’s warm, it’s
a southern kind of place. So Thomasville, it’s not, I mean when I was there, when I was
living in Thomasville, the junior high and high school, there was about 28,000 people, so
they’ve lost about 10,000. It’s shrunk.
My elementary school was first to fourth grade and it was Jerger Elementary
School. I don’t know who Jerger was, but it was, Jerger was very interesting because if,
this day and time, when everybody wants to go to the best school, if you had that kind of
mentality back then in ’72, you wouldn’t want to go to Jerger because when I was at
Jerger, we lived right on the edge of Fletcherville, right on the edge. I mean you kind of
hop in the street and you had Magnolia Street when you turned the corner. It’s what you
would call, and these areas ain’t big, we just called them, but it seemed, it was huge and
so what happened was that Jerger was actually ran by the hospital and doctors, and that’s
where a lot of doctors lived around there and that’s where their kids went to school, so it
was the best elementary school in the city, and so that’s where doctor’s and lawyer’s kids
would go. So I was hanging with the elite of Thomasville and not knowing it, but that’s
just kind of the way it, you figured it out when you got in the fifth grade, you realized
whether or not you went to a good elementary school because Jerger was one through
four, and then you went to, we had like, let’s see, Jerger, Harper, Scott, and Batt, we had
four elementary schools in Thomasville and what I know is that one through four was
elementary and then you went to Mackin Park, McIntyre Park Middle School. So middle
school was fifth and sixth grade, just fifth and sixth, and I think, you know, then you
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went to another school, seventh and eighth, that was Douglass Middle School. I believe
they turned the old black high school into the city middle school, and then high school.
When I left south Georgia, I realized that’s kind of the way the system worked
everywhere, one through six was elementary, seventh through ninth was middle school,
and then high school. What it did was that when you went to McIntyre Park, it was a
two-story school, fifth grade, and what they would do is that you would start the value
about buildings. So what happens when you go to McIntyre Park, and you would say
okay, where are these students at, so the plus was the smarter kids were the smarter kids
and that way you could, learning was on your level and then, I mean, you know, you had
two floors of, you know, smarter kids on the bottom floor and the lesser, so it was very,
and so the fifth grade, the school was divided by a walkway. When you think about it,
it’s a very vivid picture of that walkway that connected two sides of the school and the
middle of the school was kind of like, when you walk into the middle of the school, there
were steps. It was a beautiful school. It was called the Pines. It was divided by pine
trees, that was what the yearbook was called, The Pines, for the, that was the white high
school at the time. See, Douglass was the black high school. McIntyre Park was the
white high school. They both became middle schools and they built a new high school
for when they integrated, and so the right side of the school was the fifth grade area,
upstairs and downstairs. You had to walk the crossway to get to the sixth grade side,
upstairs and downstairs, in McIntyre Park, and there was a gym, cafeteria, that type of
stuff, but you, they would send and let you out and you would, depending on how you
would do in fifth grade depended on what class you were in. We were in a cluster in
sixth grade. So that’s how it was in McIntyre Park.
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In Jerger, I didn’t realize I was mixed in with well-off kids. They were just other
children to me. It was a fully integrated school. The first through the fourth grade for me
was I would say difficult. They were, it was a very strange time for me because they
couldn’t really figure out where I fitted. I was a very small child, physically small, very
thin, I guess for my age. I was short. My Dad is like 5’6” and, you know, I was, you
can’t tell now, but even at that I was like 5’6” too, but so I was a very small, very tiniest
frame kind of kid, but because I had been in school so long and my grandmother, I
believe my grandmother, she, when we would come home from school, she would make
us count money. We’d sit on her bed and we’d count money all the time. We’d sit up
there because she was bedridden from a stroke, and so we would sit on her bed and she
had this pickle jar with coins in it. So we’d count money, we’d talk about money, and the
whole thing. Everybody sitting there counting money, and so when I got in school,
school was easy for me and so I had a tendency to get done with my work very quickly
and I wouldn’t sit still. So it was like I was restless and I was going and help people with
their schoolwork and they were like, what is he doing, teacher’s going crazy, I wouldn’t
sit down, my Mom was just. My full name is Joseph Lenard Hampton, just me, and so
my Mom with this whole thing was just, and I’m going and talking and walking around
and so she was like, “Is he doing his work?,” “Oh, his work is great,” “Then why are you
calling me? Even though he work, I know he’s smart,” “Oh, who knows?” So the whole
thing was just kind of, and so you know, so it was like we’d, they couldn’t figure out kind
of what to do, so it was just kind of weird and the thing that made it weird was that
because they made my sister go to junior, the year my sister entered public school was
the first year they introduced junior first grade or what we call that TK, so every body
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had to go. There was no test, so I ended up in the same grade with my sister who was
two years older than me. Well, almost two years older. She was born in December so
that put her back a year. Then they put her, so you know, I just turned six and she’s
seven going on eight and we’re in the same grade. So that was kind of like, you know,
they were like, “Should we move him up? He could go to second grade.” You know, I
could read, I could, at six, I was pretty well hidden because I, you know, was just at home
with schoolwork. So it was like where would I go. They didn’t want to move me ahead.
They kept me, I remember they just, I remember them talking about it. They were like,
“No, you can’t move him up.” It was just like this weird thing, you know. Mom didn’t
want me to do it because she thought I was too small physically and she was like, you
know, I think she in her mind it was that with my sister, the whole system was just kind
of strange. I remember my sister, I mean, my heart was still in it so they were trying to
figure out what to do with me and it was kind of. I would say what Jerger did for me
though was that I met kids black and white that I wanted to, I wouldn’t say it was
competition, but see back then you know, by the time you got in third grade, you knew
kind of the separation between who was smart, because still they put you in the classroom
together. That was very, I guess it may go back to segregation or whatever, but me and
the other kids worked good. We had a, I think I had an excellent public education to be
together. So we did that so I liked to just, you know, work and compete and I was
wanting to be, because I always was finished first, I always had that drive to kind of
make sure I get done first and I wanted to be that kind of thing. So when I left Jerger,
they used to kind of just let you go on to real school and kind of compete with each other,
but you know, pre-school was kind of, but I, when I got to pre-school I already liked
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counting money when I was three so it wasn’t like I was there to learn, you know, mainly
it was about writing, which I have a, I always had a horrible in writing because I wanted
to get done fast, which that’s not really good for penmanship. So I remember that’s, you
know, a lot of when I was in elementary school was like _________________________
the great ____________________ books with your eyes on. I mean, “Write better
Joseph.” I’d say, “Is it right Mom,?,” things like that, “Is it right, is it right?,” but you
can’t hardly read it, so it was kind of a _________________ life for me. I was with the
smart kids, quote unquote the smart kids, and on the ground floor, different classrooms,
but you know, and McIntyre Park was different because two things.
When I was in third grade, we moved from our family neighborhood from
Fletcherville to Villa North. It was an apartment complex, huge, I mean it had like, I
don’t know, I say huge for me, it was like maybe twenty buildings and it was like eight
apartments per building. So it was like all of these kids and people and we would, they
would _______________ and let everything ______________. It was just kind of
concrete and asphalt kind of place. Not real pretty, you know, it was a
___________________________, but still a real part of the town and so I got to, I left
Jerger. That’s the part I forgot to tell you. I left Jerger. I went to Jerger my third and my
fourth grade year I went to Balfour to move to go to a school close to, well, you know,
Balfour was just some white guy I saw on the wall. I remember the picture. All the
schools had photographs. So I went to Jerger for first, second, and third, and fourth grade
I moved to Villa North and went to Balfour, and when I got to Balfour, I learned that
when I met people for the first time that were, I guess didn’t take education as seriously
as I was accustomed to, you know, just to, school was, that’s what your job was, my
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grandmother would say, going to school was your job and so I was there it was like I was
in this smart class I guess you would call it and, but then I just, you couldn’t, the attitude
was different, but also the expectations were different. The whole school, everything was
integrated there. So in the fourth grade, I was mixed in with white kids and I found a
different culture because most of the kids that went to Balfour were living in public
housing, but we, that’s the first time I, I didn’t know, I didn’t realize, I just thought
everybody, so everybody, because I didn’t, I thought, you know, everybody worked and I
don‘t know, went to work, I mean, it’s just a welfare and people that apparently didn’t
work and so it was just kind of, it was different. It was strange, and crime. Anyway, they
_________________ in the roughest part of town. We moved there, my grandmother
died and there was this whole mix-up with the house and so we, the landlord said,
“You’ve got to find somewhere to live,” you know, so it was just like we moved, and
we’ve got four kids. It’s not easy to find. So we moved to Villa North, it’s like, “That’s
fine.” I have my oldest sister, Angela, and two younger brothers, Edmond, who we call
Fatman, and Steven, who we call Chump. So there’s four of us, three boys and one girl.
So it was that whole clash between the social economics when people looked at the
world, and also I never, the biggest thing that shocked me about it was I was never
around real aggressive people. So we had to move in the middle of, in April of my third
grade year and during a couple of months of school, and it was like these kids were, you
know, they were fighting, they were rough, and we just kind of, were shocked. It was
like, “What’s wrong with you all, calm down.” “I can’t believe you kids would fight,”
and they had enough for, I never had a fight in my life and there were fights. I really, it
was very interesting in kind of a way. People just, you know, ____________ with each
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other so that’s what kind of shocked me, and that, that, you couple that with, you know,
the school system because school was kind of like woven right here and they were more
into playing sports, you know, and I was more __________________ to get your
homework, and so it was kind of a different little thing to kind of, it was interesting
before I got to McIntyre Park.
When I got to McIntyre Park, I kind of understood that and McIntyre Park was an
issue because it was the old high school, and so the Thomasville High, where I went to
high school, and McIntyre Park is where I went to fifth grade, it’s right across the street
from the high school. You have all, the sports company is actually on McIntyre and they
built the high school across the street so they could still use the same
_________________, so you could, so it’s just, it was okay, I mean you know, it was
huge; a football field, a big old gymnasium, and sunken cafeteria, and just grounds and
stuff, and but you could see the football players come over and play, you know. We’d be
up in class at 2:00 and the football players came over and we were starting to get, you
know, we’d look out the window and you’d see all these like this is, you think, I don’t
know, for me, it was just like the world opened up. It was like, I was used to being in my
small, family kind of neighborhood and then like I said, a year and a half of kind of shock
of getting used to living in the Villas, we called it, and then, we got in fifth grade, you
could, there was no doubt in mind, your mind that people that were good in school were
treated one way and people that weren’t good in school were treated another way. It was,
it was segregated to that point. So that was kind of a ____________. To me it was like,
math was, the thing was about McIntyre Park, they had a math lab and what would
happen is they were forced to go to after school to go down there and, you know, work
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and then they called it another language, _______________, or whatever. I don’t know, I
wanted the math and it was, you know, that’s when I met some smart kids. I remember
John Phillips, people I would come to know later. I didn’t know them at that, you know,
that time, but it was like, “Hey, these kids are, you know, big bucks stuff,” and it was
like, you know, just kind of a opening up of stuff. I still didn’t really get it. I mean you
miss the social economics of it, but I still didn’t quite understand social economics at that
time because no one explained it to me. I just kind of, and American’s won’t discuss it,
especially in, you know, the rural south. You have the have’s and the have not’s and the
schools were not named after people who lived in public housing. So Jerger was, you
know, fifth and sixth, and no, McIntyre was fifth and sixth.
The next one is Frederick Douglass and that’s the old black high school. We
moved there to do the seventh and eighth and it’s called a middle school. They don’t call
it a junior high. They still call it a middle school, and oh man, it was like, it was nothing
like McIntyre Park. It was a step back, literally, you could tell. The gym was awful. The
gym at McIntyre Park was just nice. There were ______________able basketball court,
the goal, the goal no kid could move, you had the main equipment, it goes and comes
down over the bleachers and the bleachers folded up against the wall, and so we went to
Douglass, it was like this old building. You had one new building that was down toward
the bottom of the school, but the main building was very old and the gym was very old
and it was one just big. McIntyre Park is now the middle school. Douglass, they closed
Douglass School. They closed it, but they didn’t tear it down. It ain’t that simple in my
hometown because there was a fight when they closed. The people, when Douglass,
when they merged Douglass High School with Thomasville High, they had to take the
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other school, Thomasville High, “What are you moving Thomasville High for?” The
black kids were from Douglass and the white kids were from McIntyre Park. They made,
everybody, the big fight was over whether teachers could ________________ school
colors because Douglass High School was black with blue and gold. Thomasville High
was red and black. So everybody was like, Thomasville High was at a time, the black
school was a better football power, so they’re like, you know, “Our head Coach should be
their head Coach,” and da, da, da, da, and all this and, “Our colors, our legacy,” and so
what they did was they took, they mixed the colors. The new high school was red and
gold. It was, you know, just crazy, a compromise. So what I just did, just to let you
know something, right now Douglass, when they shut Douglass down, I mean, they
didn’t know what they were going to do with it and they don’t know. Like let’s say they
were closing and moving to a community center, blah, blah, blah. The black, the
African-Americans in my hometown didn’t think that was right, so they bought the
school from the school, from the city, so now they use it for events and just, like a
community center where they have parties there, but it’s privately owned. It’s all about a
living, I think it’s _________________ for a, you know, just to get rid of, they didn’t
want to fight, they didn’t need the school. This was, I started at twelve, so it’s ’80, ’81,
somewhere in there, and so I get there and didn’t even tell the differences, but this is
when school becomes school for me, in seventh and eighth, because what happens is that,
say you put on a track inside of a bird, they identify, these are the kids that can go to
college. Well, these are kids we know can go to college by ability. These are the kids
that could go to college, but we don’t know, a trading school. These are the kids we
don’t know what’s going to happen with. We’ll be lucky if they get through high school,
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and so you would see it, I mean, you know, some kids took elementary math. Some kids
took pre-Algebra and Algebra, you know, so it was like you had to pick your class,
literally, you saw that you took your, the list of classes home with your parents and you
would pick what classes you would take, you know. Now the thing about it is, you don’t
take Biology if you don’t want to take Biology because you had to take a science course,
but the more weaker of classes, you know, you meet with your advisor and they tell you
to take Biology and you take Earth Science. I’m like, fine, you take pre-Algebra this year
and Algebra next year, that kind of thing, so that’s when I really, school became okay,
they’re kind of splitting us up and that was, that was very interesting to me because I
knew a lot of smart kids that went to Jerger. We had a lot of kids that on the lower tier
because I went to Balfour for that one year, so I knew everybody, I kind of knew, I was
comfortable, I did, I kind of lived on both sides of town and so it was very interesting for
me. I mean it was, the thing about Jerger’s, I took, I started playing chess with a Chess
Club so I took Chess. So I mean you, I started seeing different things you could do in
school to kind of. Oh man, I took the hardest curriculum I could. My Mom, it was
interesting, my Mom always allowed me, she was, I grew up in a situation where by the
time I got to this age, it was that everybody recognized that I had some type of intellect I
guess, and she would just be like, I didn’t see myself as ambitious. I was just kind of lead
by kid, but she knew I was always going to pick, do what was best, so she would say, I’d
come home and I’d go, “I’m going to take Biology and I’m going to take Earth Science
and I’m taking, you know, Algorithm, I’m going to take Chess and _____________
History,” and she was like, “Okay, just write something up,” and she would sign the
paper, you know, so it was that kind of thing. My advisor was telling me the same. He
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would, they, they knew because I mean what happens is they’d take those standardized
test scores you take in the seventh and eighth grade so they knew what you, they knew
what you were capable of. They knew what you, and they interviewed, they knew from
your notes from your teachers the year before what was going on, so school became more
serious, but also I thought about playing, I’d always played basketball. I mean just kind
of playing basketball outside and stuff, and I considered playing basketball my seventh
grade year. That’s when I thought gangs used to really organize sports. I played, first
organized sports I played was soccer. This was like during the ______________ or early
‘70’s when everybody’s trying to play soccer, but that was really like,
________________ I think I’m going to play basketball this year. I grew some. I had
gotten like, sixth, seventh grade I was still small and I was, you know, I figured I could
play the point guard and yet would be able to do that, and the football coach, Mr.
Cromartie, and my mother went to high school together so they knew each other and I
said, “I want to play basketball this year.”
I’ll never forget when Spring came around, it was time to tryout for basketball. I
had mentioned this to my Mom. She always let me do what I wanted to become and I
said, “I want to play basketball,” and she said, “Well, why do you want to play
basketball? That’s an after school thing. Why don’t you want to pick pecans after
school?” I’m like, “Are you insane? I never picked pecans in my life.” I had never done
anything work related, so she was like, “Well, you’re going to pick pecans after school
during the Fall and in the Spring.” It was like the worst job ever. They had various
machines that would shake the trees and you put blankets around the bottom and they
would fall on them. You’d collect them and then they would sort them out by size and
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variety. So I did that my Junior year, in my seventh grade year, I was like, you know, I
was, you know, doing it wasn’t’ like I, sports was like, sports was no big deal, but what
happened in the Spring of that year, my seventh grade year, I’ll never forget, I was, I had
an older sister, so guys are like, you know, people were starting to get a little girlfriend,
blah, blah, blah. We were still in the same grade, same school, sort of hanging out, and
when I was in the same class as her, she’d be like, man, oh school. A guy named
Michael Clark came over and was trying to talk to my sister and I’m outside playing
basketball and I guess he realized I wanted to play some ball, so he told me, “Why don’t
you tryout for football?” I’m thinking, I had never, football never really crossed my
mind. I didn’t have to wait for my height for football because I was extremely quick. I
was fast and so he was looking at my speed, more or less, and so he was like
_________________ football. So I was thinking what the hell, I guess, he’s very well,
I’m going to go out for football just so my Mom won’t put me into something else than
what I was. So I started playing football and I actually liked it. I tried out at middle
school, so my junior high, I was thinking it was one year before, but my seventh grade
year, that Spring, we had Spring, in the South we had Spring football, so we actually
practiced, we played football in the Spring for a month. So I did that and I actually
turned out to like it. This was at Douglass Middle School. So I tried out and I got on the
team and played Strong Safety, Free Safety, and that was a change for me because I was
very, I knew that sports could be _______________. It was like Chess to me and, you
know, I liked to, where you have to be in the plays and figure it out and, you know, it was
all this stuff. I was like this is, you know, it’s more than just running around them folks,
so it, that became, that kind of changed the way I thought _______________ from a
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standpoint of, it was more than just going to school. So I said I’m going to play football
and all this kind of stuff. So my eighth grade year, I actually started as Strong Safety, on
the first string, so the eighth grade year was interesting. I had my first girlfriend, we were
all, not quite yet the big man on campus. I was starting to realize that there was a
substantial advantage to playing football. Oh my God, it was insane, wearing your
jerseys on the, all this football, for crying out loud. We had pep rallies and
____________ to start off with and we had cheerleaders too, all that, you know. Football
is bigger in the South. It is huge, you know, football is, when we play baseball and
basketball, but playing football, and we took trips and we played, we played three games
out of town and that was a big deal, plus we drove to Bainbridge, you know, by our
standards, you know, to play a football game, which was, you know, insane at the time,
but the one thing it also did was it gave me a more enrichment in life because you got up,
you know, you went to school, you had practice, you run home, you had to do your
homework, I had to make sure my brothers didn’t need any help, my younger siblings
had done their homework, my mother was working. She had a job, she was working, in
fact, my father was working at Water Brothers and she worked for _____________
Leather, so when I got home from school, she was at work. School was for kind of
latchkey kids and so it was mainly, you know, it was like me and my sister were like
parents, but we had two younger brothers and we had to make sure they did everything
they needed to do, but it was, you know, it was a lot of freedom, but a lot of
responsibility, which was fine. I didn’t see that much different and so that was, I left
middle school after the eighth grade in ‘82, getting ready to go into high school. So I left
there _____________ to play football and now we move to Thomasville High School, the
17
real world. I graduated from Thomasville High School in ’86, May of ‘86, and so I
entered in the Fall of ’82.
So I left there going to high school and you knew the lines had really been drawn
about school and kind of the hierarchy, among the students and among the faculty kind of
what to expect from the students, and Thomasville High was I think a very great high
school to go to. I think that, I think that I got a great education being in a small town in
the South, you know, you had a lot of programs and all that kind of stuff, but being in
eighth grade was, it was fun. I played football, made ____________, oh, one thing I
forgot to tell you about going to eighth grade was that I grew like, I had a growth spurt
between seventh, I left seventh grade and I think I was 5’3” or something like that. When
I got to eighth grade, I was like 5’7”, so it was kind of a big different, it was really, you
know, I was taller than my father then and he was freaking out, “What did you put in
your shoes ___________?” My feet got bigger, I got taller, none of my clothes fit, you
know, it was just kind of, it was weird. Good thing I was playing sports because it kept
me coordinated because that’s a lot of growing to do in a short period of time. So I went
into high school and, you know, I, we had three football teams in my high school. You
had the ninth grade squad, you had the Junior Varsity, and then the Varsity. Everybody’s
got to play. You’ve got to keep it, keep it, you’ve got to keep the machine stocked. So I,
you know, I went in, and high school was just crazy to me because you’ve got ninth
grade, you’ve got twelfth graders, and how’s, so you’ve got all these kids in the same
school just, so you get to see just the difference in people and so, and also, you know,
there’s in my hometown there’s three high schools. There’s the Thomasville High, which
is a city school, down the street, a ways down the street is Central High School, that’s the
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county school. If you don’t live in the city limits, you go to the county school, and then
there was Brookwood Academy, which was the private school. I don’t know any black
kids that went to Brookwood Academy. I don’t know if it was created when integration
went into effect in ’72. That I don’t know and that was when integration came to the
public schools and I would think that would make sense because going to Brookwood
Academy was like $1,000 a semester school, which, you know, $1,000 isn’t
commonplace. So it was very, high school was very interesting to me. I liked it because,
because you, I took Algebra when I was in eighth grade so I got an A when I was taking
Geometry. Well, they didn’t really, they kind of like put the fire under me, I mean that’s
the way I looked at it because in my Geometry class there were ninth graders and tenth
graders and eleventh graders and twelfth graders and like, you know, because some
people didn’t take, you know, so it was kind of, you know, you just kind of crossed all
these lines with other people that was much older than you. I mean I was, well, entering
high school I was thirteen going on fourteen and I’m in class with people that were
nineteen, you know, eighteen going on nineteen and so I was like this is just, it was very
different for me, but it was, I mean we, I did well. I enjoyed it. I played football and we
had moved, we moved from the Villa to a white neighborhood, kind of a white
neighborhood in Thomasville, right down the street from the high school and we’d walk
home, right down from Thomasville High School. It was called the Cabernet. It was an
old neighborhood, you know, a well-established neighborhood. I moved, let’s see, I’ve
got to think about this. I moved Summer of my going into my eighth grade year, when I
was still at Douglass I moved and so we walked and so there was, we could walk from
my house to the Middle School, but it was right, very short, a couple of blocks from
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Thomasville High, which was good because I was in middle school, I mean I was in high
school and my younger brothers were in middle school, so we all could just go up the
street together and my sister was, she wasn’t hanging out with me then. So it was the
first time I had lived in a white community. The neighbor across the street was white and
the neighborhood just, you know, it was like maybe, it was a house. Mother finally, we
got out of the situation where we did a lease to own your own home, three bedrooms.
Mother still lives in the house. She refuses to move, refuses to move. God, I’ve been
trying for a long time to move her out.
So, you know, you get to high school you’ve got, everything’s really segregated.
You’ve got the football players, you’ve got the ___________ school club, you’ve got, we
had high school fraternities and sororities, you had the sub-Debs, you had, the fraternities
and sororities were not integrated. You had all black, you had all white fraternities, no
black fraternities. You had black fraternities that were kind of sponsored, that were kind
of pseudo-connected to the black fraternities. Well, what happened is that you had
FAMU that was forty minutes from my house. A lot of people leave Thomasville High
and go to _____________. They were already hooked in and to pledge a certain way, so
you had Kappa’s, we had Alpha’s and we had two kind of, the Q’s had two quasi-centers
associated frats at the high school because when the guys started, I guess they kind of got
into splitting it and started on their own, so there was two kind of Q, two of those and
same thing for the sororities, Delta’s, AK’s, and all those. We didn’t have Zeta’s. We
had only the AK’s and Delta’s, just those two. So they had Theta sororities. It was kind
of crazy. People, I’d tell people and they’d be like that was kind of an interesting school,
but I mean it was a lot, it seems for me, I was, you know, thinking of going to, Math was
20
pretty cool and Geometry, you know, school was easy. I liked school. I liked working
_____________. Football was a whole other thing. It was a very serious thing. Scouts
were coming by looking for college. I mean that’s football. I’m thinking, you know, it’s
a game _________________, you know, playing having a good time, but oh no, no, no.
I, I, what I know, we played, the Douglass year, ninth grade, the football team had a six
game schedule and we went one and five, which was just, we were all about, we got into
size. We were all like give us backs or wide receivers. We were fast, but we couldn’t
block anybody. If we went up against a heavy wall, it was over and you couldn’t get to
the quarterback to stop him, but it was a very ugly season, but it made us very close. I
think the reason being, it made us very close. It made us, because, you know, we won
our last game of the season. We were 0 and 5, so it made us, you know, kids crying on
the bus and we were down, but don’t cry on the bus. I’m saying, we lost our fifth game
and kids were crying and I’m thinking, dude, it’s football, and we won our sixth game,
our last game. It was a home game and we beat Lound’s County. I’ll never forget it. It
was a big deal. They were pretty good. I mean they were, they didn’t beat Valdosta.
Valdosta was the winningest. Lound’s was the county school and Valdosta was the city
school. If you just Google Valdosta High School, It’s the winningest sport’s program in
the history of America in football. Oh my God, insane high school football. So but ninth
grade, our season was so bad it made us all tighter because we were, we had played
together and eighth grade was, you know, eighth grade blah, blah. When I was there, you
played in seventh grade, but I didn’t play in seventh grade so I didn’t have a relationship
with the kids that played that were on the Junior High and the Varsity because I didn’t
play my seventh grade year. So all these kids would come back and it was crap, so it was
21
like we were on a team that wasn’t winning at Thomasville. So the Junior Varsity and
the Varsity was saying we were pulling their record down. We lost to Central, the county
school, you know, to the county school, ________________, we lost to Bainbridge, you
know, you’d think you all got coming up next time we’re screwed, you know, and I’m
thinking, I still ___________________ football in particular. I’ll never forget the biggest
project I had in ninth grade, I had to do an insect collection and I was kinked. I don’t
know why, but I was just like, so I was going and catching bugs and trying not to mess
them up with the names, put a pin in them and get them situated on the cardboard. So it
was interesting in two ways. One, it kind of, my mother, she wasn’t interested in
Science, but I guess she was like, this boy is, you know, he’s catching bugs and I’m
allergic to insect bites. I swell up really, really bad and so my Mom was like, “He’s lost
his mind,” and so I’m out there catching the bugs and stuff, but I remember that very
distinctly because, ninth grade, because I was thinking ____________, it was like a real
Science class to me, my first real Science class. We had to get the name and pins and put
a label there and so, you know, everybody was like, it was my grade, and so you know,
Mom was like, you know, “Oh, what you are doing bothered by that,” and I was thinking
this is what I’ve got to do, this is ______________, but I left ninth grade going to tenth
grade and I learned two things in ninth grade. One, that football wasn’t a game and two,
that there was, high school wasn’t the end yet. It was really the start of the end. You just
get up and go to school and so my, and it was a lot of work and football was a lot of
work.
School was, going into tenth grade, I got in tenth grade I’m thinking okay. We
were also the Varsity in tenth grade. I went from the ninth grade football team to Varsity.
22
I was cool, I was, I mean, I got up to 5’9”, 5’10”, and I gained a little weight, but I was
quick and I was fast, and I was, I could break down a tape, I was, I understood, I learned
football, I never learned football before I was in game. I ___________________,
scientific _______________, you know, I would look at it, okay, this is what they do.
This is what we would do. I would always analyze it and I was going to play. I wasn’t
worrying about analyzing it, I always, you know, I was like kind of a big blitz package
and I don’t know, I just, I didn’t look at it as, you know, it’s like the _________________
kind of type thing for me. I took it seriously just because I took kind of, a lot of times I
took everything kind of seriously. If I was going to do it, I was going to do it. I wasn’t
going to just kind of hang out. So I got in tenth grade, I was on the Varsity and, you
know, it was just good because you just would change coaches. Our Coach left and he
had been there for like forever, won a national, a high school championship, a national
championship, and schools integrated and he went to a rival school and the school
system, though it was red, when our coaches would coach power, ________________
became our Head Coach and our main Coach, just to let you know this was in high school
and you can’t give a Coach a job, you’ve got to go on a search, go on a search for a
Coach. So he became the Interim Head Coach my sophomore year, which was very
interesting because I got in, I got more into football, you know, get up at 6:00, lift
weights before school and, you know, you went and ate breakfast and did your school,
and you left school an hour early. Football players get out of school an hour early of
your regular classes because your gym class was playing football, so you went back over
it and you studied film, and you got dressed about 3:30, you know, you was on the field
and practiced two hours. It was very regimen and it was going fine, but I remember that,
23
I remember scouts coming to watch older guys, the Pittman’s and I’m thinking, you
know, it was, I still was like this is football. I never kind of, it’s still a game, but I
remember, and so I remember finally out of my tenth grade year when we went to an
awards banquet and they were giving out, you know, the end of my tenth grade, it was
like in the Spring. It was more like in, maybe in March. It was before basketball starts
and baseball starts, you know, you do, and so I remember Walter Pittman got a
scholarship, you know, people getting scholarships and I’m thinking, and I always
thought about going, to the Seniors and when they were giving out, you know, for
college. I went into high school Fall of ’82, so this is March of ’83, and I see that the
Seniors are getting scholarships to go to college and I’m thinking, but also I was, I always
thought I’m going to go to college because I have brains, which I have, you know, I
wasn’t worried, you know. By that time I had figured out, you know, I’m smarter than
90 some percent of a lot of people in this school, only in how they grade me or not, you
know. So it was like, well, I thought, better have ________________ the avenue, you
know, some fool getting a scholarship and going to play football, you know, well damn,
just kind of do it and I got better at it. I got, you know, and then my Junior year, we
recruited a, they hired a Coach from a private school up in Rome, Georgia. He’s won
three straight. In Georgia, you have different levels though, 1A, 2A, 3A, and he’s a 3A
champion. They brought him in. He ran the wish ball. His thing was that, my high
school football team was good. We had a quick, I mean we had a really good football
team, but when we were in the Regionals, we lost. So we would go eight and two and,
you know, nine and one, go to the playoffs, win the first round, the Regional
championships we had to play Valdosta, you know, we just followed them. We always,
24
we could play Valdosta to 14-9 or 10-7, but they were like, they had, I mean they would
dress 150 players and, but see Valdosta is a base, a military base, so you have these kids
coming in from the, you know, they were, they were just huge people too. You know,
when I went to high school, I don’t think Valdosta lost a game when I was in high school.
Well, they won like four or five straight championships. I mean, they’ve been national
champions, national high school champions like two of the last four years or so I’d say,
something like that. So, but I, we, we could go, our defense could play with anybody and
we could play, we were known in the state to play defense. Our offense couldn’t play
with, our offense was horrible. We ran the veer option, which was this weird kind of
offense, kind of like what the hell is this, you know, throw the ball, you quasi-run it,
whatever. In my, my Junior year, we got a Coach that came and he ran the wishbone, and
we were perfectly suited for the wishbone because it was four ______________, you
know how ____________ that can be. You’ve got to be able to just hold the line of
scrimmage for a little while and get to the outside. You’d be, use your skill, your speed
to kind of, our defense was already good. So it’d be typical, you know, we, so I already
gave him the football and I knew how to run the option and the defense was
_______________ already close too. I was playing cornerback. I moved from safety to
cornerback and, I mean, I liked defense because I thought that, I think its harder playing
defense than offense because offense, nobody on defense is trying to figure out how to
get there. So I played and, you know, really, we went, in my _________, we went I think
seven, _______________ seven and three, and we tied. We started off slow because we
couldn’t, my Coach couldn’t come until, he didn’t get there until the Summer because he
was under contract at another school. When he got there, I was playing defensive back
25
and they didn’t really change, they changed some people, but the veer was kind of like an
option, but we were kind of, I mean, the coaches we had were pretty good. They knew
where to place people. What he did was kind of diversify. He made everybody pick two
positions where he could know, one on offense, one on defense, and then as a defensive
back, I had to play, I had to know every position on the team. I mean, I had
_________________ linebacker, ____________ on the line I was fine because I was still
lightweight, but you know, it became more and more a thing that you know what, I would
look at the guys in my class and I’m thinking I don’t look at myself as being a good
football player. I would look at guys and I’m thinking you could play D1 ball, you know,
Mike Clark and Kenny Wilson and Darrell ______________, they can definitely play. I
was still on the academic track, you know. In my mind, you know, that was kind of so
and that’s what, you know, we went into my Senior year, my Junior year, two things.
One, I said, you know, we kind of realized that hey, we went, we won like our last five
games and we’re like, you know, we can run this system. We tied for, we ended up tying
with two other teams for to go to the playoffs, but because we had, we had the same, like,
record in the division, we had one more loss in our division, so as a tiebreaker
_____________, so we didn’t go to the playoffs. So we thought we made the playoffs,
after beginning bad and all that and we didn’t, and I think that was another good thing,
you know. We, we went into off-season thinking hey, we’re going to whoop this, we’re
going to, we have ways we ran or blocked, we really, we got strong and we’d built a
better weight room for our school and Coach Hines was really, he poured this kind of
cosmentality in the school, so that was going on in my high school in my Junior year.
26
Another thing that happened in my Junior year was that during football season on
the weekends, on Saturday mornings, I took Physics at Florida State. Florida State is
about 40 miles away from Thomasville south in Tallahassee. It’s right across the street
from FAMU; FAMU’s on one side. It’s in the panhandle, and so we would, you know,
play football on Friday nights, be a lot sore, get up at, you know, 8:00 the next morning
and drive to Tallahassee to class. So, you know, this was, now we’re going, I’m going to
Florida State on this big old campus and I’m like you’re going, the first time I went into
this college lecture hall, it was built like a stadium, you know, you’re going down like
that and at the bottom is the professor, and I’m thinking, damn, this place is huge, but
that’s my introduction to college and so I was like, and you know, it was like kids, they’ll
sleep and, you know, not paying attention, and I’m thinking this is crazy man, teacher’s
aren’t saying nothing, going fast, stuff all over the board. I’m thinking this is what
college is going to be like and I was really interested by it. I’m thinking okay, you know,
you have breaks and you’ve got a syllabus and nobody really cares and it’s like, it
seemed so unstructured and I was just like, you know, this is crazy. This is kind of, so
you know, my Junior year, those were the things going on, kind of getting, really getting
into football and kind of really realizing that there was something I could do with it and
also my introduction to college. So I spent my, since we didn’t make the playoffs, we
had a really rigorous off-season my Junior year and we went into Spring football just
hell-bent on being just good. I mean and we were, we played Lounds County, was going
to be _______________, I’ll say was going to be like, I don’t know, something like 15 to
21 starters. So Lounds was considered the best team in our region. We played them for
our Spring game, yeah, one football game in the Spring. This was in my Junior year and
27
we played them at home and we beat them, and everybody was like wow, they’re going
to beat Lounds. This is going to be, it was like, I mean we beat them, but we didn’t play
good. We think we can do better than this, so you know, we had this Summer regimen.
We had to go, we worked out all summer long lifting weights my Senior year. We were
getting together players and we could run extra laps and do all this stuff and I’m working.
I got a job at, it was a state hospital in Thomasville, Southwestern City Hospital,
for the mentally ill and then they had a unit that was called Rosehaven that had, this is my
introduction, this is my introduction to disabilities. Rosehaven had congenital mental
retarded quadriplegic type people there. There were, you know, they were more or less
like babies throughout their lives, you know. I worked in the kitchen, so we had a, you
know, we pureed their food and delivered, and the interesting thing about that Summer, I
worked out, Summer of 1985, I know that for sure. I graduated in ‘86, so Summer of ’85,
and I’m working at Rosehaven, I’m working in the kitchen and my kind of pseudoGodmother, she ran Rosehaven. She’s actually a, she went to Florida State. She’s a
psychologist, but she ran Rosehaven and so I’m going over to Rosehaven. Her name was
Andre Mari, and she’s still living, still lives in Thomasville. Nobody leaves Thomasville
except me. My wife is from Chicago. We met at U of I. I’m the only one that got out,
and so I’m going to go by Rosehaven and see the kids there and the people there, and the
interesting thing was that we had what I call the Franklin Delano Roosevelt wheelchair.
One of those, the high back cane chair, we had one and there was one sitting in the
cafeteria, and that Summer of my Junior year, I was going on break, I was scared I was
going to go to sleep. Everybody was like, you know, older people at work that was like,
“Boy, you shouldn’t be sitting in that wheelchair, I’m afraid for you. That’s not a good
28
thing,” you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I’m like what, this wheelchair, what’s the
deal, you know, I don’t play with things, and there was, that Summer, it’s like it’s funny
because football was coming and, you know, everything was kind of just planned.
Football was coming together. I was looking at trying to, I was doing great academically.
I just, at some, my Junior year, I took pre-Calc and lots of Trigonometry my Junior year
and Chemistry, Chemistry II, and I took Advanced English and Advanced History. I was
like, I was like, I love, well, I took Algebra when I was in the eighth, ninth grade, so I had
to do something to get two Math’s, so life was very interesting.
So I’m looking at college, where I’m thinking I might go, what kind of programs
and I’ve always been interested, my tenth grade year, I, we had to take a sickle cell
anemia test who did testing by their school for sickle cell anemia and that sparked my
interest because I’m thinking why are they doing this kind of public health thing at
school? I guess I’m thinking well, you have a captive audience and so I finally looked
into sickle cell anemia and so I got the history of it, you know, about, you know, how,
you know, people from Africa have it and they’ll fight malaria. It’s seen as a way to
survive malaria, you know. It’s great to have this sickle cell trait, as long as you don’t
have sickle cell. So I got it and I, you know, but the question is do they have any use for
this in America because of the malaria virus. So almost my Science was, you know, kind
of hindsight, so I went from, that’s why I took Physics _____________, but I kind of
moved from Physics to __________ Biological Sciences. I thought oh, I’m going to do
genetics or biochem or microbiologist, other than just, study something like sickle cell. I
really hadn’t tied it down yet so I had, going into my Senior year I had a lot of stuff on
my mind and plate and, you know, I was really serious about football, but I was also
29
serious about academics and I kind of, my grandmother was like our spiritual leader to
have in my family and my great-grandmother, I’m sorry. My grandmother had died years
back and my great-grandmother Susie, you know, the, she was the, my mother’s
grandmother, she was still living when I was growing up. She died in ’90, she outlived,
she outlived just about all her kids. She outlived all but two of her kids. She was 90, not
quite sure, but right about 94 or 95. I would go, the hospital wasn’t too far from her,
where she lived, and I would stop and see her a long time, so I kind of wanted to, my
spiritual journey happened that Summer too, and that was the year I kind of gave my life
to God, that Summer, so you know, I was, I was getting ready for high school. My greatgrandmother was very religious and that was, she was Southern Baptist and so when I
would visit her, she would talk to me about God, yeah, that’s all we, I mean that was, I
remember when they had, she had a very certain philosophy about life, you know, doing
to others what you would have them do unto you, but the one I took away from when she
said, “There’s no qualm too small to share,” and that was the philosophy she led her life,
and so we would, I would go to have a talk to her and I was always, I had, I was always
fascinated by her because she was born on a plantation in _______________, she was
born free and she grew up on a plantation after slavery and left, right outside in the
County right outside the town. The plantation still exists and it’s called, Oh God, I’m
blanking on the name, it’s Pebble Hill, Pebble Hill Plantation, but I don’t think it’s still
owned by the family who owned it with the slaves. I think it’s changed hands since then,
but the plantation itself is still going, running, doing stuff and my great-grandmother did
share cropping. They’d share crop and then she left when she was fourteen or fifteen.
Well, my, her grandmother was Seminole Indian and she said her grandmother always
30
instilled in her that living there was a place, it had negative vibes, you know, more or
less, you know, she says, it’s not a place to live, there’s not, it had bad, her mother was
born in slavery and she said this place has negative history so we shouldn’t be here, so
she encouraged her to get away, and so that’s why I was always fascinated because, you
know, she was, she had been, I was thinking when she was born, you know, we were, you
know, she was born like in 1902 or something like that. When I was 20, there were no
stoplights and no, all that kind of stuff so we were going to let, I, you know, I gave my
life to God that year, that Summer, now really into, I just, I guess you would use, I would
say born-again Christian because I, I’m not bringing labels, but I _____________ been to
church, not always, growing up in church, but the thing is, I kind of adopted my own
spirituality, in my system, what was my relationship with God, not just, this is the
Summer of my Junior year. I think it did carry me through, you know, that Summer, my
Junior year was a very good kind of, it’s almost like I, everything was kind of funneling
me toward my Senior year in my mind because I got, I’m getting ready for my Senior
year and, the Summer of ‘85, so I’ve got a spiritual experience, working at Rosehaven
and I’m seeing people with permanent disabilities, and our football team, we had to
redeem ourselves, same guys I played with in the eighth grade. We had a core of 18 that
I played with, always, and it was the ninth grade that brought tears.
So that Summer, you know, you know, I’m working, I worked in the kitchen,
going over to Rosehaven, I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to do, and you have this
kind of spiritual enlightening, I guess would be the best way to call it, which was
probably the best thing that ever happened. I’m getting it from my grandmother and
other people. I attended St. Thomas AME Church in Thomasville, two St. Thomas’s in
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Thomasville, well, two, one was, yeah, two St. Thomas’s. One’s African Methodist
Episcopal, that’s where I went, AME, and so it was there at church, but I think, the thing
that, my grandmother had always been, you know, saying the same things and preaching
the same things, but what changed for me, and I can remember very
__________________ was that I was sitting out, the kitchen, we’d get all kind of jobs,
you know, you’d put food on plates, you’d also __________________ them, but the thing
that had to be done was the dishwashing, afterward you’d wash dishes, and you know,
being a sixteen year old kid, whereas I’ve got a bigot, “Well, go ahead and clean them
dishes.” This guy over there, and to this day, I cannot remember that man’s name and I
think about it a lot. You’d be, we had two shifts so I, we kind of crossed paths, but we
were, see, we were all on different schedules. Sometimes we worked early and
sometimes I’d work late at night, well not late, I worked the second shift, but I’ll never
forget, I was, by this time, I was kind of a cocky, arrogant kind of kid. I wasn’t, I
wouldn’t say I was cocky, I would say this, I knew my potential. I knew what everybody
else kind of saw me, but I never really quite, it took me a long time to kind of figure out
what the hell I’m talking about because I don’t know, I’m just a kid just kind of doing
what I do, but I knew _______________ each other, if you put it all together, you know,
you know, I kind of said, I remember when I went to see Sam Nunn speak in, was it
Columbus, I can’t remember, but I went to see Sam Nunn speak in January. He was the
Senator from my district in Georgia and you know all of a sudden I’m thinking, I could
be a Senator. In my mind I’m thinking, if I do what I’m supposed to do, I’m thinking
that’s kind of like, you know, I thought I’d be President at that time, and I was thinking I
could be a Senator, and to me that was kind of an upper echelon of politics and so, I’m
32
talking about a U.S. Senator, otherwise, they, I was shooting to be another, shooting for
Washington, but there’s a gentleman in, I see now what he was explaining what I was
going to say, oh say I’m living at the University of Georgia, I’m living at Georgia Tech,
and, University of Georgia’s in Athens and Georgia Tech is in Atlanta. I said well, I
might go to Emory if I get a full scholarship, blah, blah, blah. This was the elderly man
in the kitchen. Mother died and my Aunt Flora was sitting there talking and he was
asking me what was I going to do and I was telling him my hat is just, I have this fiveyear plan. I’m going to do this stuff and I’m just keeping it all together and we were, me
and him was standing rather close to each other, so I was scraping the plates and getting
the dirty stuff off them, and he was running them under water, putting them in the
machine and the older children were kind of off of the end of the thing, but making sure
everything was being cleared out, and he just kind of, this elderly gentleman, he just kind
of said it like he was lobbing a softball at somebody, he said, “Joseph, can I ask you
something?” He said, “Where does God fit in at?,” I didn’t have an answer and I hadn’t
really ever thought, you know, for the first, one of the few times in my life, I didn’t really
have a comeback, which was, you know, growing up, I, playing sports in the South and it
does some help to have a quick wit, but I didn’t ever have it because, you know, as a
person who says I’m a Christian and I go to church, I must have had an answer for that. I
didn’t say anything and he didn’t say anything. I think he said, “He’d get back to me
with that.” He might have meant giving him an answer, get back with that, so I spent,
that happened like in, I was thinking June, June of ’85, and I remember after that
happened I stopped, I started walking to work and riding my bicycle to work, just to take
time to think about it, just to kind of, do some meditation. I would go by, I lived across
33
town from the hospital, from Southwestern’s the name of the hospital, Southwestern State
Hospital. Rosehaven is the name of the division within that had the congenital disabled,
a particular section. Southwestern had a lot of that, yeah, a big old place, and see I would
go visit my, my adopted Godmother, ___________ Rose Haven, but I worked in the
kitchen for the whole place and Rosehaven was for those with severe multiple
disabilities. So, and so, yeah, I was, that, you know, it kind of made me kind of stop for a
minute and say okay, football or education, I mean where does, what’s most important
here. I had to kind of prioritize my, what was going on, that’s what I’d tell my
grandmother. I spent a lot of time just by myself. For a while, I slowed it down and I
was kind of, I guess when you’re 16 years old, you don’t slow down. It, so, I was, it was
crazy and, you know, this is going to sound, when I tell the story people say you’re crazy
because I’m very specific.
I remember I went and took my, Friday I worked. When I walked from where I
lived to the state hospital, it took about 40, about 45 minutes, and my bike took maybe 20
minutes. You know, yeah, we were in a family affairs apartment. We didn’t have a car,
and so I went, I worked my last day at the hospital on August, it was a Friday, so it had to
be like August the 12th. Monday would have been, so it was like the 10th, so my last day
was something like the July 30-something, I can’t remember the date, but, because
football like was starting on the 4th, on the, on the, football was starting on the 5th, so
yeah, it was hot. It was, actually it was August 1st or something like that when I had my
last day at work, and then on August 2nd, I went and took my Senior photo for school.
We had to put on tuxedo jackets, we were, light tux, the teacher’s picture’s downstairs in
my daughter’s bedroom, and I, you know, when we started practice that following
34
Monday, on the 5th, and I started, you know, I worked that Friday and there was a lot of
stuff going on. People were just getting ready for get up back to school, so, you know, I
was going to the skating rink and having fun the last couple of days, and I was kind of
like staying home, kind of chilling out from a girlfriend at the time, Tonya was her name.
“Where you been? Where you going?,” and blah, blah, blah, and I said, “I don’t know,
I’m just chilling,” you know, she was sixteen and so we went to the same Thomasville
high school, and so we, I was, I was kind of, we were very different. She was, I was a
jock, but I was ____________. I was kind of, I didn’t fit the mold, I didn’t fit, yeah, I
didn’t really fit, and so you know, I’m saying to myself, you know, I really, that, that
question and I kept thinking about it and I’m reading about where did God fit into all
these plans and I had kind of just took, it took, it took over my, it stopped me, it stopped
me and made me think, and so after, I remember when I took the picture home, of course,
in high school I took my picture and then the next Sunday I went to church, AME, and I
was starting practice. The name of the church is St. Thomas African Methodist Episcopal
Church, St. Thomas. It wasn’t the church I grew up in, that was a, there were two
churches I went to in Thomasville. One was Mount _______________, which was my
grandmother’s church and that was a Baptist church and she preached there. I remember
St. Thomas after we moved over to, we moved to a white neighborhood in eighth grade.
I remember I started going in ninth grade. What happened was that I thought that we, we,
we would go to church all the time, all the time, and then we kind of stopped. My mother
stopped going to church as much and so my siblings stopped going to church as much,
and we lived all the way across town and we didn’t have a car, so going and getting to
church was like a, it became a task almost I guess, you know. Thomasville didn’t have
35
good public transportation, so it was either by foot, by bike, or by car. So I started going
to church with some of my friends, a friend of mine, Steve Curry, and he went to St.
Thomas and it was close to my house. He’s still around, but actually, he went to, he lives
in Miami, but I started going to church with him. It was just, there was nothing in me and
it was within walking distance, so same God, just different church. So I remember I
went, that, that, that Saturday I went and took my picture and that Sunday I kind of
wanted to go to church and I thought I might as well, I’m not going anywhere, you know,
go by the skating rink, what’s going on, blah, blah, blah, and I’m just like ah, I’m just
kind of, you know, whatever, because football practice was starting on Monday, which
was kind of, which was the start of my Senior year, teen years, you know. I told myself,
and it’s something I admitted to myself, it’s something that, I had never really done
anything, I would, I hate to say this without as being a very interesting thing about
myself, which I always try to be about when I was a kid, but that Summer I realized in
kind of going through this process that I’d always skated by. In the sense that I never had
to fully apply myself, you know, football was football and school was school, and it was
just kind of, it was like okay, I’m going to be all right, just kind of do it and, you know, if
you cram at the last minute, well, you know, work it, I had that very kind of work it out,
kind of, I never had to just, there was no putting, as my grandma would say, “Put your
hands to the block.” I never kind of, you know, I was driving a tractor, and I said to
myself, you know what, for once, just put every, what would your life be like, what
would you accomplish if you just tried, if you were focused and driven and, you know, I
don’t really, ambition was never, just a kind of thing, so I think getting experience and all
that kind of helped me get to that place where I was thinking about it, and so that week I
36
went into practice, you know. That first week we only practiced in helmets and that was
it. We were just kind of getting loosened back up and getting ready to go, it’s 95 degrees
when you start practice. It’s 95 degrees, 100% humidity, I mean I guess you get used to
it, but it’s hot, when you put that helmet on, it’s hot, and we went into practice and we,
you know, we didn’t get out of practice until like 7:00 in the evening. We got there at
like 12:00, midday, the hottest part of the day. You had to be on the field by 1:00, you
ate lunch there and blah, blah, blah, that kind of thing, so I mean we, you know, it was
cool, and I was still, you know, pondering what was going on in my life and I remember
that Friday we got done with practice and everybody was saying okay, Sunday, we’re
going to meet up at the skating rink, you know, and going to do all this stuff, blah, blah,
blah, which I said, “That’d be cool. I’ll show up and __________________,” and that
Saturday, I walked, I did a lot of walking. I always liked to walk.
It was Saturday, September the 11th, and I said to myself, you know, oh no, we
started, oh I’m sorry, August 11th, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, August 11th, and we were just,
you know, a week, we started the full, Monday the 12th was a big day, full pads, you
could hit somebody, and so, you know, I looked at the 12th and said okay, I’ve got to, you
know, that was really the start of, really school because then we got another two more
weeks and then school started. That Saturday, you know, I realized that I had been to
church and everything, but I had never felt that I had gave my life to God. I never felt
like I had, it’s kind of, I don’t know, there was like this, you know, I was, I feel like I was
a Christian by default, that’s what my grandmother did, that’s what my parents did,
that’s, that’s kind of what I did. So I don’t know, I don’t know how, I don’t know why,
but my, luckily through my life situated. My pseudo-godfather, Walter Maria, who was
37
Andre’s husband, who ran Rosehaven, was a _______________ preacher. His name was
Walter. Andre was the woman who ran Rosehaven. His last name is Maria, he, he ran it.
He’s a preacher and we stayed right here, go two, three houses, and cross the street, that’s
where they stayed. This is where my mother still lives today, 1011 N. Spair Street, and
so I, for some reason, that Sunday I got up and I didn’t go to church. It’s kind of, this
was August 11th, and I just kind of hung around and didn’t do much, and then we went to
Walter’s house and I told him, “I’ve got to borrow your car today. I’m going to the, me
and Angela Anderson are going to the skating rink,” and he’s like, “Fine, you can take
the car,” and so I said, “I need to talk to you later on,” and he said, and I don’t know why,
he said, “Yeah, I had a feeling we needed to talk.” I don’t know if he ever noticed
___________, a change, a difference, or whatever, but I went then. I kind of, we kind of,
you know, need the prayer of given the life that you’ve had almost all of your life and I
felt so sinner and it was so funny because I was thinking, you know, I’ve got to get back
over to the hospital so I can tell, you know, I don’t remember the man’s name, but the
man in the kitchen and I hadn’t answered his question yet. I hadn’t answered his
question yet and I was determined to and I was just that kind of, you know, I had grown
up respecting elderly people, oh yes, very, and I still have a, I took it and I don’t know if I
was too reading more into it than I, but I don’t know. For some, nothing had ever
stopped me like that. Nothing had kind of shaken me up. You know, I think for me,
what it did was, when he asked me that question, and I was planning my life, if you say
God is going to be an important part of your life, you can’t answer that question “What
does God mean to you,” and I think I saw what I’ve just been waiting on. I told my
grandmother he asked me that and she was like, “Did you have an answer?,” and I said,
38
“No.” I mean I told her about it the day it happened and she said, “Well, it’s something
you should figure out,” my great-grandmother, we just call her my grandmother, yeah.
So I’m like, you know, we really, we prayed and, you know, I just felt good, you know.
It was like everything kind of came full circle. I don’t know, that’s just kind of the way I
felt about it, you know. I went home, changed clothes, we went to the skating rink,
everybody was just, the place was packed. The whole town was out and, you know, we,
we had a good time. I went home, I went, I dropped Angela off and I went home. I went
to sleep about 1:00. The ___________ closed at 12:00 and, well, I woke up the next
morning and my Mom was up cooking cakes because mother, mother was a really good
cook and, you know, I would cook stuff for her, but she loves cooking, and so she had
cooked a cake and it, you know, she said it didn’t come out right. It was kind of, it was
crooked and I remember she was icing the cake and my brothers, my two brothers, were
sitting at the kitchen table. In fact, maybe Chump, my mother was sitting there icing the
cake and she was kind of disappointed in the cake. She was like, “Oh, I should do this
cake over,” and I’m like, you know, in my mind I’m thinking, “There ain’t nothing
wrong with the cake, just” and we were just like, “Yeah, we get a chocolate cake,” you
know, we’re thinking, you know, in fact, me and my brother are fighting over the table
and we’re thinking, yeah, this is, because she would never cook us a cake. I went out the
backdoor and I told them, I said, “I’ll see you all later,” and everybody said bye and I
walked on the street and I met Michael, Mike Jones, on the way to school, on the way, his
father was one of our coaches and he was in like, Michael was in eighth grade I think.
He played in the, he was, that kid was as big as me and he played in the band and
everybody kind of gave him grief because he would have been a football player and I’m
39
walking and talking to Mike. I said, “Mike, you’ve got to do what, you’ve go to follow
what you feel.” I said, “You can’t really,” I said, “Because your Dad’s the, you know, is
a football coach and your brother’s a, his brother was the back-up quarterback and, and
he was in ninth grade. His brother was a really good football player, Sean, and he went
to Georgia Tech, and we’re just walking and talking about, it was crazy. You have a
sixteen year old and like a fourteen year old, walking up the street to football practice,
just kind of talking about life, and it just, everything just seemed fine and I went to
practice and, you know, we got, I, we only got a brand new ____________in
_______________, and our facemask was figured weird. We’ve got to, we just got
everything all redone, like, and I remember the facemask didn’t have a bar across the
front, wanted to be able to see, you know, I wanted to have good vision. I remember my
coach saying that. “If I ever give you this facemask, are you still going to hit people?”
I’m like, “Yeah, I’m going to hit people. What are you saying?” Anyway, we went and
we had our first hour of practice and practice and practice and it was hot. It was one of
those days, it, it, I remember the first time I sat, when the practice break came, we went,
we had the cafeteria, which was where we walked to the back of where we had Gatorade
and stuff on break and whoever had ran the water had gotten the Gatorade mixed up and
there was a pool of water. I mean, I sat in the water, and it was, I mean, not overly, but I
mean, you had a good half of, everybody was kind of getting, you know, we were really
hitting that day because it was the first day we could hit and everybody was kind of fired
up, and I remember I got up and went back and we went and sat in sections, which means
that for the first half of the day, you’d be in the primary position and in the second half,
you’ve got to go secondary position. So, you know, I’d go workout with the wide
40
receivers and then I came back and would do some bikes, and Leonard Wilson, who was
the other cornerback, left cornerback, was, he just came back, we just both came back
down to work with ________________, and he and Tommy Wheeler was about to, we
were doing tacking drills. We had just brought up some freshmen and sophomores, I
mean, sophomores and juniors from the junior varsity and the freshmen squad, so it was
going to be tackling drills, what the coach assigned. So we had a pile of cones set up out
and something was wrong with Tommy’s helmet, and so I had, I told him, I said, “Well,
I’ll tackle them better.” I really loved to tackle, you know, and me and Leonard, I guess
we worked out, we were, you know, he’s one cornerback and I’m the other cornerback,
we worked out, so the coach made us do everything together. We used to race in teams,
so we’d have to race in pairs, so I was, that was very, very, ___________________, and I
had, you know, because I’d grown up ________________, so I was talking and he was
like, “Stop talking. I want to leave.” We’d been doing this for an hour and a half and
we’d be there another hour, you know, relax, calm down, you know, this kind of shit, and
so we started tackling. I tackled him first and we would hit each other. I mean we would
really hit each other. He was probably like, I mean, I don’t know why, he was a very
intense player, quiet, but very intense and I guess he kind of helped me get into, as he
was hitting me I’m thinking, “Dude, this is _______________ and I’m like, “They’re
going to hit you back.” So everybody was always funning me, _______________ each
other, but on that day, you know, we were about, it was maybe about 2:30 and we were
doing our sideline tackling drill, and same type of drill I’ve done for the last four years,
cut back, hit, hit and run, didn’t get up.
41
Leonard hit me, my partner, and it was just, it was funny because like I’ll tell you
what. I remember, he hit me like, say this is the cone right here, I’m running toward the
cone. The cone represents the sideline and what you do is you try to teach people how
not to cut, a lot of kids know how to use the sideline as a, like a defender because people
who are going to cut back, they get to the side, they’re going to try to cut, so what you do
is you teach them to tackle on an angle, use the sideline to, the person’s got to come back
to you, but run to where they’re at, run to where they’ve got to cut back to, and you’re
focused on running ahead, the angle, because they have to cut back, back in very front of
you, so I was showing him how to do that and I don’t remember. I remember cutting, I
don’t really remember the hit. I don’t even remember hitting the ground. I remember
being on the ground. It was funny because I’m laying on my back and I’m looking up
and I guess I had been there a little while, you know, normally you just pop back up, and
they’re like, “Dude, get your ass up off the ground. What are you doing?,” and I’m
thinking, why are my legs up in the air and I said I wanted to get up and I didn’t move,
and the coach was like, “Joe?,” and I said, “I can’t get up,” and he said, “You’re
messing,” “I can’t get up,” and he’s like, “Well, um, you,” you know, everything kind of
stopped, everybody just kind of paused, everybody was kind of standing around, and so I
went to get up again and nothing happened. I said, “I can’t get up,” and so practice just
kind of stopped, and it was funny because we were just sitting there talking. I’m laying
there and we’re just talking, you know, and it was funny, _____________, Steve Kerr,
who’s little brother Eric Kerr, got, we used to call him the _________________ one year,
but he was really tall. He was like 6’, he was in, Eric was in ninth grade or tenth grade
and he was like 6’4”, and I remember saying, I said, “Jude, come stand and block the
42
sun,” you know, “Keep the sun out of my eyes,” and everybody kind of laughed and I
remember just waiting there for the ambulance to come and they came, and I remember
Coach Jones, who was, he was my, his son was the one I walked to school with that day,
and he had to call my Mom and she was, he taught her when she was at Douglass Middle
School. He was a substitute teacher at that time, went to Fairview, _______________,
Thomasville, kind of the whole, so it’s kind of this weird kind of, you know, you get to
trace everything kind of back to different stuff and he was my head football coach when I
was, when I started playing football at Douglass, he was the head football coach at our
middle school. He came over when I, he was the head football coach at Douglass and
when they changed coaching staffs, he came over to coach in Thomasville, well, he was
one of the new assistant coaches. He wasn’t the head coach so, you know, it was kind of
weird, you know, he was, and when you’re in a hometown that small, you know,
everybody knows your mother. He knew us more than just, you know, like my head
coach did, like, Coach Jones is a black coach, so you know, it was kind of, it was weird.
We had to be, I was relatively calm about the whole situation and I think that was
because I was kind of, I couldn’t feel anything and luckily my Dad’s family, a lot of the
time, it _____________ just to see what happens, you have the average so high
________________ and you can’t breathe, especially as hot as it was. It would have
been, the humidity was 100% humidity, that kind of thing, you know. I mean my
neurosurgeon said, “I can’t believe you didn’t die on the field, like they do,” but it really
summed, Dr. __________________ was with me. He had a bedside manner, but he was
a good neurosurgeon, but I just remember we went to the hospital and my mother got
there. She was pretty, I think she thought maybe I had broken my, you know, she wasn’t,
43
they didn’t tell her what had happened. They just told her that I got hurt and everything
would be done at the hospital and, you know, ironically, my mother ________ to work at
3:00, so the person that was coming to pick her up and taking me is the people who take
her to work, saying they went to, “Oh, you just like your time was just up.” Her ride was
coming to pick her up instead of going to the hospital, I mean to the work, she went to the
hospital, and I was laying there and it was kind of, and I remember her singing. I guess
she went to talk to Dr. Peterson, the neurologist on staff at the time, and he said, she
asked him what was wrong and he said, “I can’t tell you. You’ve got to talk to somebody
else. You’ve got to talk to Bobby Kagas.” I think she told me, she said, “That’s when I
kind of knew _________________.” It was weird because we were all, I remember just
laying there and I couldn’t feel nothing but my head. In fact, I felt like a head, that was
it.
Then we just kind of, we were getting ready to go into ICU, my Mom, my Dad,
and my sister were all standing there, and my Mom and my sister had had a falling out
and they hadn’t talked that whole summer, and they were all standing there and I said,
“Oh,” so I was like, I said, “Well, at least something,” you know, it was really, I said, “At
least something good came out of this. You’re all talking to each other now,” and it was
kind of, I don’t know, I never for some reason, and maybe still to this day, I think I’m
starting to kind of quite, I’m trying to get there, but the gravety of the situation or at least
the, everybody else’s perception of it, never really, I get it, but I don’t. In some ways, I
don’t really quite, everybody was just devastated, everybody was just like and I’m
thinking, you know. Dr. Kagas said I, he told her I had, I think the words I think she said
he used was that, I think he just, I don’t know what he told her exactly, but she said, she
44
told me, she said, “They think you broke your neck,” and which I’d kind of figured that
out. He told her that I broke my neck and I had kind of already figured that. Otherwise I
had a really, really bad _______________, you know, where you kind of pinch a nerve
and you can’t feel nothing, but, or I had broken my neck. I mean I had taken enough
Biology to kind of figure that out, and you know, that was Monday the 12th and Tuesday,
when I was in ICU, I was tired. I remember when they finally got the other guys here
who had a, and I was on this wooden board to keep me up and they kept it straight, and I
just wanted them to carry me and I was just so tired that night, everybody walked,
because I didn’t get in bed until it was dark, getting close to dark, and I remember waking
up the next morning and I was just like, “I broke my neck,” you know, and I was
thinking, “This is before my senior year,” you know, I had all these plans. I mean I had
just, I’m going to do this, I’m going to get everything together, blah, blah, yada, yada,
yada, and I think that was the first, that, you know, I allowed myself to feel sad and I
don’t know why I said that, but that’s how I felt, and you know, I cried and I cried a lot,
and I remember my mother and my coach came to my room that afternoon and he was
standing there. This was the next day and it was Coach Hodges, the ___________ coach.
This is Tuesday and he’s standing there and he had never met my Mom, and they’re
standing there by my bed and my Mom was just like, and I said, and I think she, I know
something about, he said, “Joe, how you doin?,” and I said, “I’m doing all right.” I said,
“I just feel like I got robbed and I was at home when it happened,” because it was like, it
just happened and I was, I was there, you know. It ain’t like I passed out and then I woke
up to a ___________ in the hospital and everybody was like, you know, I never lost
consciousness. I was always there and that may, obviously, that was the hardest day, the
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13th, and the next day, well, I take it back. Tuesday night, Tuesday evening, my
grandmother came to see me, my great-grandmother Susie, who recently had passed
away, and she came to see me and that was I mean, I woke up Wednesday, you know,
going to be sixteen and a broken neck, in a relatively decent mood, you know, I wasn’t
upset any more and my Mom, I remember my Mom and she asked me, no, she didn’t ask
me anything. She didn’t say anything. I don’t think she was even talking to me. She
was just, you know, just kind of, you know, just talking. She said, “You’re a good kid
and good in school,” and you know, she was just going through all this stuff, as to why
this had happened, and she was like, she says, you know, “Why you,” and I said, “Why
not me?,” and she told me that stopped her. I said why, my thing was that, “Who do you
want it to happen to?,” and I thank God so much that I had that, that walk that summer,
all those hours of kind of getting everything in order and understanding kind of it wasn’t
about school as it was about football. It was, life is about, you know, your relationship
with Him and what you bring to the world, and so I, I think that gave me the ability to
answer her when she said why me. I could say, “Why not me?,” Would you rather it
happen, and in my mind, I was thinking who should this have happened to, Leonard, you
know? I, I, you know, so and she said that and I remember her telling me that much later.
She told me that, and I don’t know why, and even after it happened. Leonard came and
saw me at the hospital, Leonard Wilson. Leonard still lives in Thomasville. He’s a truck
driver, so he’s in and out. He’s not, no, no, no, no, he’s, those eighteen guys, we’re still
those eighteen guys. I’m still in touch with just about all seventeen. We’re all just, we, I
don’t, it was a very, after I broke my neck and I, you know, it was weird because I stayed
in Thomasville until the 28th of September because I, I was going to go to, first I was
46
going to go to _______________ Spinal Cord Center in Atlanta because it was close, you
know, _______________, but we decided to go to Jackson Memorial Spinal Cord Center
in Miami. It was better, really good, they see ___________________ a long time, and
also the, it’s funny because you say nobody leaves Thomasville, but my mother, two of
my mother’s sisters, left Thomasville and they went to Miami where, they live there, so
we have family there. They left there and they had kids with them and everything so we
went there, but, you know, it was funny because when I thought I’d, you know, Kagas
was very gloomy about my prognosis and so he told my Mom, he goes, “You need to
plan the funeral,” and blah, blah, blah, he didn’t think I was going to make it. He told her
he would give up, to quote his words, “I wouldn’t give you a wooden nickel for him.”
He was a New York neurosurgeon and they had brought him down to run the Southwest
Georgia Neurological Institute and man, he was that, no bedside manner. He said, “You
know what,” I guess, I got to know him, I mean he was a good guy, but I think he said, I
don’t think, he said, “I don’t want her to have any false hopes.” He said, “You broke
your neck. You did a good job at it,” and so what he did was, they opened up ICU, you
know, ICU normally just for immediate family, but they opened up ICU so all my friends
could come in to see me, you know, that last, you know, that one last time, you know,
that kind of thing. No, they, no, they didn’t think I was going to make it. They opened
up the, they thought that was, you know, when I, so it was, it was interesting to see this
kind of parade of people. It’s funny because you sit back and you’re thinking, it just, it
was just people and people and I’m thinking, “Oh hell, do I know all these,” you know,
you’re just kind of, it’s weird. Leonard was pretty cool and didn’t blame himself because
when I was, I remember the day after I got hurt, of course, Michael Clark, the guy who
47
talked me into playing football, he was our quarterback, he was the first person to come
see me in ICU and he was kind of coming to see Joe go, you know. Half of the football
team, they quit because their parents wouldn’t let them play, but he came to see how I
was doing and ________________ and I told him, I said, “Tell Leonard, you know, to
come see me.” Leonard, we were never worried about it. I think that, we always said,
you know, I always felt this because I was, I, everybody kind of said it was the way I
was, you know. I wasn’t freaking out so nobody really, other than my Mom, you know,
everybody else was kind of, my friends kind of, just kind of went with it, along with the
way I did it. I mean I’m going to talk and I said, you know, I remember him coming and
we complained about how we lost the first game of the season and I told him, I said,
“Well, you’ve got to play for both of us,” you know, so he came and we were cool. I
mean we’re still friends, we still see each other every time I go home. It’s funny, I talked
to his brother, Spencer, he called me the day of the Inauguration actually, January 20th,
yep, he called me the day of the Inauguration and he said, it was just funny because he
said he was just sitting there and he was thinking, this is Leonard’s brother, Spencer, his
younger brother, Spencer Wilson. He said for some reason it reminded him, I had, I went
to, after I left going to Jackson, I continued to go to school at Jackson. I was in Rehab
and I went to high school there. They had a high school and they had teachers come in
and teach us at the, we would leave the physical grounds of the hospital and they had
teachers come in and teach us courses. So I, I wanted, I was hell-bent on finishing school
on time with my class, so I, I went to Jackson and, you know, went through the whole,
learn how to sit up and feed yourself, and the whole, you know, it was, you know, Rehab
was interesting to say the least. Today, I feel I’m quadriplegic, quadriplegic, C4-5-1, you
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know, being in, that’s sort of the first time I’d ever really been in a city for a long time, in
Miami. Yeah, Miami was a whole new, coming from Thomasville, Miami’s like,
different cultures, different people, and more anonymity and in Thomasville, everybody
knew everybody, but the great thing about Miami was that, I’m at Jackson and it’s my
first experience, any interaction with people who are foreign. In Thomasville, I met one
Cuban for he lived like in the Villa for like a month, just ___________________ lived,
that’s it. I had never met anybody from outside of the U.S., nobody, and so, you know, I
went there and I met Prince Duvall’s nephew, from Haiti. He got shot and he was there.
Duvall, um, whatchacallit was a, he got shot in the back. He was technically a
paraplegic, but he got most of his function back. He was there. The, one of the Princes
of, was it Dubai, it was one of the, you know, those Emirates, United Arab Emirates
countries, he was there; a guy that was running for presidency of Nigeria was there, he
had got shot; a guy from Poland; there was one from England got hurt playing rugby.
They flew in from all over the world to come here because this Center has such a
reputation. It was on the same floor. We all were on the, it was the newest, latest
hospital so they had the, we had a lunchroom, you had PT, and then you had like
hallways with bedrooms and you had hallways off on this way. On this side was people
that had strokes and on this side was people who had spinal cord injuries and then we
shared PT. We were never in there at the same time though, but we used the same PT,
PT and OT facilities. So we were, it’s funny, we could have been the United Nations.
We would sit out on the balcony and just talk about world stuff, which to me was like,
always a little History, but they had people who were Americans who had a totally
different, you know, first time I’d ever met a Muslim, first time I, first time I’d ever met a
49
Jewish person also, you know, it was a whole different kind of vibe, you know, and be
17, kind of sitting there kind of saying little and hearing much. I was at Jackson from
September 28th, 1985, and I went home for good in July of 1986, and I got married in ’96.
So I was there from September 28th, 1985 to July 1st, 1986, and I went back home for one
week during that period. I went home to graduate. I went home to march with my
classmates on June 1st and then I went back to Jackson.
After I came home for good on July 1st, I was thinking what the hell is college
going to be like? This was 1986, July 1st, what was I thinking on the way back home? I
rode back home with my, as I called him my super godfather, Walter Maria, whose wife
was the head of Rosehaven and he’s a minister, and it was Walter, Andre, Andre’s his
wife, and my mother. I flew in from Miami to Tallahassee and then we drove from
Tallahassee back to Thomasville. It’s about a 40-minute drive, and that’s pretty good,
you know. Thomasville is way west of the coast and it’s north of Tallahassee. If you’re
on the panhandle, it’d be, no, but Tallahassee is like, okay, you know, you have, I’m
talking about the Gulf of Mexico, you’ve got the Gulf and then you’ve got the Atlantic,
so it’s far west of the coast. I’m thinking about east of the panhandle, I mean around by
Pensacola and that kind of thing. Tallahassee is inland and that’s the state capital, right,
in Tallahassee. You know, it’s funny because I can actually, you know, I think that my
life traveling, I came to what I call a couple major, I mean just drives. It was kind of like
nobody’s really saying anything and this was one of them. I mean, you weren’t, I went,
when I flew down, when I went to Miami, we had, my insurance company had got a
medical jet, so we flew out of this small airport on a private jet out of my hometown. It’s
a real small, Thomasville, for the bigwigs, they only have an airport for them. It was
50
insurance my mother carried on me from work. Well, actually, it was the insurance the
football team carried. It was funny. I signed it that Monday, I signed it a week before I
got hurt because you re-up it every year, $25.00, and so that’s when I signed the form
was at the first practice on August 5th, best $25.00 I ever spent, and so I had flew down,
but on the way back, you know, we drove from Tallahassee up, and I remember just
sitting in the car because the thing about Miami, Miami is set up, Miami’s a big city and
they had, they have a lot of disabled people. Jackson’s there, it was pretty easy to get
around. Of course, the hospital had vans and, you know, you know, I was in a manual
chair at the time. I hadn’t been using, I had been going back and forth between the two
because there were times, when I was in Rehab, I went through this phase where I was,
my, at first, my left, left arm came back before my right one started, so I couldn’t push. I
was driving and then I got, that came back and I started using my manual chair, but I was
so spastic______________, the spasticity in my body was jumping around and so it was
like people were afraid it would turn the chair over, so they put me in a manual chair until
that kind of died down, but I remember riding back from Tallahassee and it was like a
lull, in the car and the manual chair was folded up in the trunk. I still, I, it’s funny, I
don’t know, one manual chair, but I remember sitting there on the ride up and I was
thinking, I thought, two thoughts came to my mind. Mainly, one, I thought about school,
you know, I’ve always, I guess that’s just one of the things running my life, is I thought
about school. I graduated, I went and, you know, we did the whole last week of school
thing. It was great. I mean, we didn’t talk about it much, but _____________ pushed
me. He was the President of my class, a good friend of mine, was just here about two
months ago visiting me. I said we keep up, I mean, it’s not the case, and I was thinking,
51
what I’ll do in my school because I hadn’t been in school really yet, and I’m thinking
college is all different. I know how Florida State was and it’s kind of how am I going to,
you know, my whole life when I was at school, when I was, before I got injured, I was
always ask for the pencil, doing the work all quick, and my whole motive ____________
had changed. Everything was more audio and visual. I had to kind of, I mean you’re
taking Calculus and you kind of, you ain’t writing it, you’ve got to kind of memorize it
and kind of get it in your head. It’s how you manipulate, you know how you, writing tuff
helps you to learn stuff and I didn’t have the, you know the added value of doing that.
Writing helps you retain stuff, taking notes, it sticks with you. Well, that year I had to
learn how to just pick it up by, just the whole switch, and I was thinking about college,
you know, the adjustment of going back to school, how was that going to be
______________. It’s not like I’m adjusting back to Thomasville High, I’ve got to go a
________________ college culture. Well, what I had decided was that I was going to go
to, there’s a junior college in my hometown called Thomas College and it’s run by the
state. It’s Thomas University now. It’s a private, it’s a very, it’s a very interesting place.
Thomasville is not what you’d expect. It’s the, I was going to go to Thomas College and
stayed a year. At that point, it was a junior college, two-year. If you were a Georgia
resident, it was open enrollment. This had the, where you take an entrance test and they
know where to place you, that kind of thing. I wasn’t quite worried about that kind of
stuff. So I thought about that. A, I thought about housing and what it’d be like living in
my hometown again. Just, you know, I, you know, when I left there wasn’t curb cuts, but
when I got back there was. The City did everything in a year. They told me, they told
me when I got back everything would be right. There were other disabled people in
52
town, they did, I mean, but it gets funny because see, the state hospital was there and you
had people who were there in the state hospital that would come out ________________,
but after I got injured, they redid all the schools and they did, it changed, _____________
Thomasville changed. I think it was what happened to me changed, I mean they actually,
that put the issue on the radar because I think, I can remember, you know,
_____________, but that was on my mind. I was saying what is it going to be like
getting around Thomasville. I thought, you know, when I went back in June for
graduation, I went downtown and I went around and I went to, the high school was
modern so it was already easy to get around, but then I went back over to Douglas and
they had put ramps in. Douglas was an old school and stuff, and then I went over to,
what kind of shocked me was I went to the old County, well, what used to be the old
Black County High School, Magnolia, and it was a middle-school, I’m sorry, it was the
County black middle-school and I could get around. It was for the City, I’m sorry, my
mother went there, it was the black, it was the black middle school in my mother’s
generation. In my generation, we had turned it into a middle school for the County. So I
went from Jerger to Balfour to Macintyre Park, Douglas, and then Thomasville. It took a
while to get through all my school system. So I was thinking about that.
How am I going to, you know, just the, it wasn’t getting around as much as, you
know, I could walk across town, I rode my bike, I had, you know, I used to have my,
drive my, Walter’s 1984 Fiesta 4-speed ________________, red door, you know, four on
the floor, and so it was just like I was thinking about why is it even different, you know,
kind of just the way everything was going to be and I went home and we, so I was kind of
thinking about that and I got home and people were there and everybody was kind of cool
53
and we had had a, David, the guy who was my physical therapist when I was in Miami,
my insurance company flew him up to Thomasville to take a look at my house, so they
could look at it and see what they would need to do to make it accessible and this is the
house on Spair Street. It’s still there and my mother’s still there, and so we came up with
plans and got a contractor involved, and I had been living there for like, we had to stay in
there for like, the guy was like, “Oh, we’ll get it done in like three months.” We had to
___________ bedroom, put on a ramp, add a bathroom, because it was a ranch house. It
wasn’t, you know, put in a power door, and once they expanded the doorframes, it was
fine. So, you know, it was just, but initially, until they got a ramp on it all, you know, it
was __________________ get me inside the house and my, and my manual chair was not
an issue, but so we did, so it was kind of weird kind of once I got home and I had two
younger brothers were there, who were like, Chump and Fatman, Edmund and Steven,
their names that are never spoken, it was a very interesting transition because I, I, what I
realized probably within that first year I was home, it didn’t take long, was that in my
mind I always said that I broke my neck and my family got paralyzed, in reaction too
much to my injury. Everything kind of stopped for them. My mother wouldn’t let my
brothers play sports any more, you know, that was, and my brother was, Fatman was just,
Fatman and Chump was, Fatman was a much better, I mean Fatman, he was big as, both
of them bigger than ____________ already and they were, oh Fatman would have, my
brother Chump probably had the most, just kind of natural kind of freakish athletic
ability, but he wasn’t, it took him a while to get, he didn’t start playing football about
until a year before I got hurt. Steven’s just kind of late, baby boy, lazy, just want to, you
know, you’ve got to prod him to do everything, but he was big. I mean Chump’s 6’3”,
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maybe his highest weight was probably 285, but he could move, he could run, he could,
he was a, you know, he was funny because he kicked, he was a kicker and he played
_______________ offensive line, so he was a very, you know, kind of, you don’t see
_______________ness and size and he could dance and he could sing, but he was just
kind of laid back, but once he started playing football, he was, he liked it because, I think
because he could just, Chump was always kind of quiet and just kind of hung out with me
and Fatman, kind of stuff, but, and Fatman’s very, moving to the Villa made Fatman
aggressive, because he was young, he was, when we moved to the Villa, I was seven and
he was five, so his thing was that, you know, I’ve got to match the aggression around me
and he was a little boy, Fatman was that way. Chump was more, Chump was three when
we moved there so he just kind of, yeah, I would say _______________ . So, so she
wouldn’t let them play football, but I think, I mean, Fatman, Fatman would have been
outstanding as a back and wide receiver. I think that it hurt, I mean because to me, if I
was kind of like this, you know, for lack of a better word, I was kind of more of a, like
his older brother/father figure because I was, you know, I was always, it was my job, if
they didn’t do their homework, they didn’t get in trouble, I got in trouble, it was my, that
kind of responsibility, you know, my thing was that, you know, I told Fatman, if you
don’t do your work, you can’t play sports, you know. My mother didn’t, she was like,
you’re here with him, you get your homework done, when you’re doing your homework
while he’s doing his. So I was just like, you know, I had to, you know, kind of say, you
know, “Fatman, if you don’t do your work, then I’ve got to ______________ with you.
___________________. You won’t be able to play football next year. You won’t be
able to play no football, basketball or baseball, and so, you know, that kind of whipped
55
him into shape, in a ___________________ kind of way of doing things, but, so he’s,
you know, it’s, I think, like I handled it very weird, seeing me just kind of, first I
disappeared. I broke my neck, then I was gone for a year, he’s, they’re there in school,
Mom wanted to keep them in school and not, them fight and I’m in a wheelchair and I’m
spastic and I can’t really manipulate things, and it was just, I think it was just kind of
weird for them to see me. I think it was seeing both scared and painful. I think I would
say both. It was, it was, for a while, I know it was very uncomfortable for him because
he didn’t know what I could do, he didn’t know how to, he didn’t know how to react with
me or interact with me and, you know, thinking that, you know, I’m eighteen and he’s
sixteen. I’m going on eighteen and he’s sixteen and, you know, one thing about having a
disability is that when you acquire a disability within a household, you know, before
disability, everybody has roles, you know, defined in what you do and what you don’t do.
Well, then, you know, my role changed so everybody else’s role had to change.
So it’s like my disability just kind of was like this throwing a pebble in a pond,
the ripples kind of, and so it was like, you know, I, my Mom was just, she, she still to this
day, my mother has I would say it’s, well, I wouldn’t say to this day, she’s, actually, for
about fifteen years, fifteen, between fifteen and eighteen years that she got back in, she
finally got back in the church and kind of, she was like, she had, I don’t think she lost her
faith with my accident. I think she didn’t know how, she was, my mother was really
angry about it, but she didn’t have, there was nothing to direct her anger, you can’t. I
don’t think she ever got angry with God. I think, my mother, my mother’s aunt was a
very strong, very in your face kind of person anyway, you know, with three boys, you
have to, but I think she was, and I think that, you know, for the first time in her life, there
56
was something that was out of her control. What can I do? It was just this, there’s a hurt,
it’s a hurt, that pain, that, that loss, you know, and like she’s always saying, “I remember
the last time you walked out that back door.” I mean, it would go over and over, she was
always saying, “the last time you walked out the back door.” She was making that cake,
the morning she was making a chocolate cake and I said, “I’ll see you all later,” and so,
you know, the dynamics of the household. Chump, Chump was just Chump. Chump is,
he’s, he’s such a loving, kind of kind, kind of, he’s like a bear, a teddy bear kind of
person and he just kind of, was just like there. It’s like he would come and just like, I
remember it’s like he went from admiring me to making sure that I was always all right
and everything was kind of where I, and then he became into this kind of pseudocaretaker kind of person, you know. You know, you, people learn, you know, he would
watch what I did. With Fatman, he watched, but you could it tell from a distance, he was
kind of more, he watched and understands for what I was going through, whereas
Chump, watched with a sense of trying to understand I think. It was something, well,
Chump was so young. Chump was, what was Chump, Chump was thirteen. He was
thirteen when I broke my neck so he was fourteen when I got home, and so he, it kind of,
you know, he was kind of a young thirteen. He was kind of, he was still a child’s child
when I got hurt because I, he, you know, my Mom told me how he cried and that was,
Chump cried a lot, right after the accident, he cried, and so, I wasn’t there so I didn’t, I
didn’t see it. He didn’t come see me, they didn’t come see me in the hospital, when I was
in ICU, they didn’t come see me that much and they didn’t fall apart in front of me and I
can remember Chump, I remember Chump crying when he was in the room, but there
was, the way my mother described it I mean he was, a kind of hysterical kind of, body
57
wracking and sobbing, whereas Fatman, she told me he cried. Fatman was, and still is a
very, he’s like a thin tree, you know, he’s just strong. It’s like he’s, he’s rooted, but he
has this kind of distance about him. My sister, Angela, Angela was, I would say out of
all my family members, Angela, she probably took it the most in stride because I think
Angela probably out of all my family members knew and knows me better than anybody.
We’ve always been together, you know, you know, from, we started school together, we
went through school together, we, it was just this, I guess she always knew that, you
know, she never worried about me. She was like, “You’re going to be all right.” I mean
that’s just kind of her attitude about everything and she was just kind of, you know, she
just, I mean she was Angie and I think that was kind of comforting in a sense that and I
always, I always kind of sensed that, I mean I expect her, I expect her to know me
enough to know that my circumstances had changed, but not, not, I hadn’t really changed
and luckily, you know, that way, you know, don’t, and my father freaked out. I mean he
went back to smoking and he had, yeah, he had stopped smoking. I told my dad to stop
smoking when I was fourteen, so he had been stopped smoking for three years and he
smoked Camel non-filter cigarettes, yeah, so he was like, you know, and I was like, you
know, as long as my Dad’ smoking ____________________, from the pain and nerves
and not knowing what the future held, and my Dad wasn’t there. I mean he was still in
town, but he didn’t, I mean he wasn’t, it was like, I think he even had less control because
he wasn’t actually in my life. He didn’t know kind of what to do or kind of, you know, I
let my, me and my father got to know me, know each other well because I decided on
Sunday’s afternoon, I would go by my father’s, I’d always go to my grandmother’s
house, my great-grandmother’s, always.
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My great-grandmother’s full name is Susie Mae Hampton and she died in the
mid-1990’s, and my grandmother’s full name is Wessie Mae Jenkins, and my mother’s
full name is Josephine Hampton. She doesn’t have a middle name. They gave, we had,
the boys, my grandmother didn’t have any, all her sons died when they were infants. My
great-grandmother, all her grandsons died when they were infants. She had four sons
who died when they were infants and so when, to keep the Hampton, ______________
were all girls, you know, they got married. So what it was that some of them, they gave,
some of the girls, the point was that, then my aunts all, my great-aunts, they all started
having girls so they thought the family name was going to die, so they started giving
some of the girls last name Hampton and then when they got kids, the whole point was
that your last name was going to stay Hampton, and there’s still only like me, Fatman,
Chump, I think it’s like about four males that are left out of, you know, my grandmother
had, my great-grandmother, my great-grandmother had five girls and then my
grandmother had a son and four girls. So it was just, and then my uncle only had a boy
and four girls. So keeping the Hampton, keeping the Hampton going is tough.
So I mean, it was that weird kind of bite to that, just adjusting to the family
dynamic and, you know, keeping stuff and, you know, dealing with your, I would say that
me, my injury caused not only the relationship of my brother between him and my Mom
to be very awkward, Fatman, because Fatman didn’t understand, you know, up to this
day, he doesn’t quite understand why my mother didn’t want him to play football. I think
he, I think he saw it as a sign of defeat on my mother’s part and a sign of, you know, you
know, you can’t let this stop life. You can’t, you don’t know what’s going to happen,
you know, this thing was at, I could break my neck crossing the street, and so that was
59
very much his, and so they’ve, they’ve, I can literally say, you know, it’s been two
decades and there’s still some kind of weird, with Fatman and my Mom, because they’re
too much alike. Fatman and my mother are too much alike. They don’t bend, they don’t,
they, you know, sometimes when they’re wrong, they think they’re right. So, you know,
that was very interesting and just trying to play that, you know, in between the two and
you’re trying to figure out, okay, how do I, we’ll make this right. How do I kind of, you
know, smooth this over, and, you know, it’s four of you in a three bedroom little house, it
ain’t much room. It ain’t nowhere to go when you mad at somebody or you upset or, you
know, feelings got bruised or whatever, but I think, you know, all in all, our relationships
between, you know, me and them were fine, but Chump didn’t really mind not playing
sports. Chump was like, you know, he hadn’t got any, it didn’t hurt Chump, it hurt
Fatman because Fatman’s, that was Fatman’s, I guess his out, you know, from
Thomasville. That’s how, that’s kind of, I think, you know, he never verbalized it that
way, but I really would say that was his, and he’s still in Thomasville. I would definitely
say so that there is resentment on his part toward my Mom. You know, we had a
conversation one time. I was in Champaign and he had came over to watch football, you
know, it was football and this was when David ____________ won the Heisman. He
came, the University of Houston came to, played the University of Illinois and he, he
flew up, and I remember this was like in ’92 I think, ’91, ’92, I can’t remember, one of
those years in the Fall, and, you know, we had never just sat and talked about it or talked
about the feelings of it. I’ll never forget we were sitting out on the balcony outside my
apartment, right on John Street, right around the corner from Beckwith. I stayed in an
apartment over there, I remember. I stayed in Beckwith for a year and then I moved over
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there and he, we were sitting out and he had his Budweiser, which he drinks and I had my
Mountain Dew, which I drink, and I said, “Fatman, you know,” and he just stopped me.
He said, kind of like, I said, “Fatman, you know, we never really, I never told you about
how I feel about what was going on,” and I said, I remember just kind of, I said, “Me,
breaking my neck, you know, changed your life,” you know, something along those lines
and he said, I had to, I stated it, and he says, you know, he says, he kind of looks at me in
a way that, and he wasn’t Fatman, he said, “There’s nothing really to say,” and that was
his way of saying that I’m all right. It did, but I’m okay with it, and, you know, it wasn’t,
he made it, it was almost like it didn’t bother, I mean, it wasn’t about you, which was
kind of the interesting thing about and, you know, you didn’t change the situation, the
situation changed and you were in it. You either look that way or just, and so yeah, it
was a very interesting thing, I mean, because Fatman was, he was in eighth grade the year
I left. He was in high school the year I got back, so that was like, you know, we thought
my Mom would thaw out, you know, after she realized I wasn’t bugging out or I wasn’t,
it wasn’t the end of the world. I thought that my mother was the one person that didn’t
take her cues from me in the sense of, she held onto that feeling of, you know, this ain’t
right and _________________ you all say that, you know, I’ve got a right to feel the way
I want to feel, and you know, we, we’d, we’d never talk about it, and you know, I’d see
her and I would tell her. I’d say, “You know, we’ve got a problem. You think you’ve
got a right to feel the way you want to feel and all this, but it’s his life,” but she was like,
“Wait, it’s his life, but if something happens,” and I’m like, you know, her thing, her
thing is that, “Haven’t you learned that one person’s life affects everybody else’s,” and I
said, “Well, that’s more about you than it is about him.” So I mean it was that kind of,
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you know, weird, you know, strange vying of attention of just kind of like, are you all
ever going to learn just to chill out and relax kind of situation, but, you know, that’s part
of kind of when you work through that and then, you know, it was a strange Summer, the
Summer of ‘86 was a very interesting Summer, that Summer of ’86, just kind of finding,
you know, me figuring out where I’m at and what I’m doing and where I’m, you know,
kind of what were we going to do, kind of how the family was going on, going back to
school, there was just so much stuff going on.
On the drive back from Tallahassee in silence, it was my godfather, my mother,
and my godmother, you know, they talked, but it was never about anything that was
about anything, nothing about my disability or me coming back home. We didn’t really
talk about what my future entailed. I think everybody had their own, and I found out
later, everybody had their own plans for me. Everybody had their plans for me, you
know, my mother kind of had her way of looking at it and then Andrea and Walter, you
know, Walter being a minister and Andrea being a psychologist who worked around
people with disabilities, you know, those kind of areas and specialty kind of things. She
worked around severe mentally disabled people who were born with disabilities, but that
still don’t keep you from kind of having, you know, your own understanding and really
your kind of your own well, out of all the people here, I’ve probably got the most
experience so maybe I can, you know, kind of figure out which way to go with this and
what to do. So it was that kind of, you know, everybody’s trying to figure out, you know,
and I think everybody was still waiting for me to fall apart. I think because it was such
an interruption of my own trajectory into what I would be doing, and I think that, you
know, you go through, oh, all the doctor’s and all the psychologist’s that told them, “Oh,
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he’s going to go through denial and anger,” you know, “He’s got to go through the five
stages,” and, you know, “Sooner or later,” you know, “He’s doing well and he’s been
doing well, but sooner or later, something’s going to happen and blah, blah, he’s going to
fall apart and he’s going to be,” curled up in a ball someplace I guess and I’m just like,
“Man, get on, let it go.” So that was kind of, it was dealing with all of these different
personalities and people. My Mom would just, you know, my Mom would just tell me,
but I think that in some ways, my mother, I think in the back of her mind, I think she said
if it happened, it happened, but I don’t think she expected it to happen as much as
everybody else did because I think that my Mom, she was with me the whole while, so by
the time I got back to, I think my Mom was waiting for it to happen while we were at the
hospital in terms of me falling apart, at the hospital in Jackson before we got back. I
think by the time we got home, she was like, she was secure that I was prepared for me. I
think she was fine. I think she was still dealing with stuff for her and then
___________herself in a situation of _______________ together for ______________
and that kind of stuff, but I think that when she and I was like, okay, you know, I can
quote unquote deal with life on life’s terms, and so my great-grandmother was like the
greatest person about the whole thing.
My great-grandmother, Grandma Susie, Susie Mae, let me tell you, this is the stint
of me and her talking about my disability. I’m in the hospital, it’s Wednesday, in
Thomasville, it’s August the, I broke my neck on the 12th, it’s August the 14th. I had my
surgery on August the 13th, the next day, which nobody expects me to come out of,
particularly Dr. Kagas. No, Dr. Kagas, well now, he’s, so my grandmother comes to the
hospital, she walked in the room, we pray together, and she makes, everybody leaves, but
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my grandmother and we pray together and my grandmother, she stands really tall. She’s
about 6’2”, 6’3”, she was tall, but she had osteo so she was a bent over tall lady, but she
still would bend over. She said to me, I mean she looks at me. I don’t know if she was
looking at me, through me, or in me, and she asked me, she says, “Joseph, are you all
right?,” and I say, “Yes, ma’am,” and she left and she would never speak of it again, and
I think my grandmother was about, my mother was about, my grandmother was never
about the ____________, she was about the spirit. She wasn’t asking me was my body
okay, was I, was I okay. My great-grandfather, her husband, is from Hampton, Virginia,
so it probably comes from the whatever, whatever the circumstances were in Hampton,
that’s where the name comes from. She was born in 1902, and died in the mid-‘90’s, so
that was her married name, and I’m trying, I don’t even know my grandmother’s maiden
name. Nobody in our family ever did a genealogical search. It never interested me as
much as, you know, it does, I guess, it’s weird. The thing about my family, it’s like my
family started, in my eyes, when my grandmother left the plantation, my greatgrandmother, Grandma Susie, left the plantation after her great-grandmother told her to
get off the plantation. That’s kind of where everything, her great-grandmother was
Indian. She wasn’t a slave; she’s a Seminole. She’s the one that was like, “This ain’t,
there’s too many bad experiences in here.” So her great-grandmother was pure Seminole
and my great-grandmother was mixed. I don’t know, you know, how, how much, but she
was mixed. She just had those features. She was tall, she was kind of, her cheekbones
that have, high cheekbones, the long, the hair, so I mean, no, my grandmother, but
Grandma Susie was just like, and I think that’s why to her, during that summer when I
kind of worked myself, went through my spirituality and gathering stuff that turned out to
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be so important, I think that’s why she was comfortable just asking me was I okay. My
grandmother Wessie had already passed before I got hurt. She died when I was seven
and when we moved to Villa North and I was seven when she passed away. You’ve got a
lot of stories in your head.
So I’m back in Thomasville, the junior college is accessible and it’s a pretty, well,
it has three, one, two, four buildings, and the only thing, the only building that is old, I
think that the old original building they had turned into an administration building, and
then they built, you know, new kind of buildings next to it, and everything was ramped
up so I was cool. I started in September ’86. I didn’t have time for any self-pity. I
realized something when I was sitting there. The junior college was ramped up before I
left. I mean, I not a one because the main building where you took most of the classes
was one of these buildings that’s, you know, was kind of more industrial way of style.
You walk in the main building, that’s the library and then on the exterior around the
library is classes, you know, it was, so that’s, you know, you’ve got to just walk around
this big, old building and you pass by class, by class, but the center of it is the library, and
then you’ve got a cafeteria like place, but it had a ramp that kind of went through it, so I
mean, it had been there for a while. It wasn’t like it’s, it didn’t look new when I got
there. I think it was one of those, I don’t know what brilliant person told them, but they
got it figured out when they did it, but also the way with a school, there isn’t a natural
way to put a ramp to connect two buildings, you know, the buildings were separate, but
across the grass kind of elevator. One was elevator high and the other one was just a
ramp. So I just said, you know, hey, I’ll go to school here and for a year, kind of figure
out what I want to do, and so, you know, first semester I took Biology, I took Art History,
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and, Biology, Art History, and did I take Calculus or, did I take Math my first semester,
no, I took Biology, Art History, and English Lit, you know, kind of, yeah, that’s what it
was, and it was interesting because what happened was that right before I started school, I
got phlebitis and they just thought it was just due, not kind of change of work, I don’t
know, I was doing PT twice a week and all this kind of stuff, so I had, I had phlebitis and
so I spent ten days in the hospital. Phlebitis is like a blood clot and it gets lodged in your
blood vessels and it’ll dislodge and move to your lungs or your heart and I had it in my
right thigh, and they put me on blood thinners and, you know, I missed like the first
couple of days of school, but it was funny, but when I got done, the thing about it, they
were working on the house that whole summer and when we got done, they, when I left,
it was finishing up when I got sick. I got phlebitis and when I got back, they were done.
Everything was, the bed was in the room and all this kind of stuff, for the house, so I
started school and it was very, I remember the first day I went to school, a friend of mine,
just got there, he was Hispanic and he, he was a para. He lived in my hometown, had no
clue, he was a paraplegic, paraplegic, had a van, and his name was Charles Rodriguez. He
was born in the States, but I don’t know where he was born at, but I had, you know, after
I got hurt, he came to the hospital and then I didn’t see him until after I got back and was,
he came to the hospital to introduce himself to me and just to kind of, you know,
encourage me, and then, yeah, he came in his manual wheelchair, and then after I got
back in town, I remember when I came back for graduation, you know, it was front page
kind of story thing, and he stopped by our house that Thursday or Friday before we left
and he was like, “Well, I know you’re having a hard time getting around. I’ve got a van
with a ramp on it,” and all this kind of stuff so, before I went back to Jackson, after
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graduation. When I was first injured, the town newspaper carried a story about me and it
was front page, so the whole town was aware of it, it was, and when I came back for
graduation, the local paper covered it again and so he saw it and he comes by, and he was
just, he offered to kind of be my ______________ chauffeur and he asked me what I
planned on doing. I said, “I’m going on to college. I’m going to Thomas College,” and
he said, “Well, just let me know if you need a ride because I have a van that has a lift on
it that I can,” you know. It was a Ford F-150 cargo van, and so I remember he dropped
me off and I rode it up to class, the first day I’m going to school at Thomas College,
missed the first couple of days, so I’m, I go up to the thing. I’m like okay, I know where
the classroom is, it’s around, it’s around the edge, I’ve got to go, and for some reason,
they weren’t, they had, they weren’t in the class, they were in the lab. So I went to the
class, this is Biology class, I went to Biology class, and I was going to Biology class and
they weren’t in the classroom. So I’m thinking, well, maybe they’re in the lab and I went
and turned the corner to get, you know, to go around and I’m driving my power chair,
which is a brand new power chair, brand new power chair and it was an E & J, Ernest &
Jennings, they were like the Mazda’s of, they were the original wheelchair makers, E & J,
and so they, and I turned the corner and something on my front wheel went off the side of
the curb and I just fell out of my chair. First time I ever fell out of my chair and I’m
thinking, I’m laying here in the grass, and I’m thinking I’m going to be here for a while.
It was a very weird kind of situation. Luckily, Charles hadn’t left. He saw me fall so he
comes back around and he goes in the lab and the people had to put me in the seat. Some
of the people I went to high school were there, which was kind of interesting. So it, you
know, it was kind of like, it was like a weird introduction to everybody because the whole
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class comes out and they’re trying to figure out, you know, what should they do. “Do we
need to call the ambulance,” and I go, “Just roll me over, pick me up and sit me in my
chair, straighten me out.” There was a guy I met, he actually went to, he’s back in town,
he went to Troy State for a while in Alabama and he was a football, he had played at
Central High School in my hometown, but I didn’t know him. He was older than me.
Central was the County school, and so he, he became like this kind of, you know, he was
big and he was like a, he was always a lineman, so he kind of became like my, you know,
guardian angel, you know, “Oh well, what are you all doing? We’re on the way,” and
he’d pick me up and put me in my chair, he’d straighten me out, and he was kind of, he
was very smart and we just kind of hung out together. So he was always like, he was,
nothing about me being disabled, it’s like he knew I was disabled, but then he didn’t. It
was just like, you know, when I have my coat on, when I need my coat on, he’d be like,
you could tell everybody was like, “Oh, ___________________ I’ve got to get his coat
on,” everybody would kind of freeze like, what should we do, and he was black and he
was like, “Y’all just, what’s wrong with y’all.” He was just like, “Come and just, don’t
push me over and snatch the coat off.” He had a football, he treated me like football
players treat football players, you know, he don’t worry about me breaking and so school
was, it was, it was easy. It was, it was actually a comfort because I got back into, I
delved back in my _____________, taking Biology and just learning, and you know, it
was just, you know, when you’re sitting there in a classroom with 34 other people, you’re
just somebody just, you know, you just learn like everybody else. You’re not worried
about, you know, dynamics of family and getting home and, you know, I just, it just, you
know, school was just school. I recorded my lectures and I got notes, no computer, I
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wasn’t, I got notes from, I’d always just get notes from everybody else, you know,
whoever I thought took good notes, but no, within the first, the year I had in high school
at Jackson, then the year, within that first, after the first school, I was nervous for the first
time ever going to school, I was nervous and I was like, “Oh Lord, am I going to be able
to do this?,” you know, I hadn’t, it’s college and you’re, college seems like just a big step
because when I was going to junior college, it was like, after about mid-terms, I was like,
you know, okay, this is going to be good, but you know, this is kind of easy. It wasn’t, I
wasn’t any longer intimidated or nervous. I was like whatever, you know. I can do this,
you know. I know I can do it here anyway. It isn’t like this is, you know, some Yale, and
so, you know, you know, I, I, the semester was cool. Things around the house kind of
settled into a pattern. I can’t say it settled, but it settled into a pattern. Mom’s still
working, my brothers were at school and everything was just kind of moving on, and then
I got phlebitis again. I got phlebitis in November, pretty quick, and I was like, they
____________ a dose of Cumadin because I took, I got it late November and then I
remember I had to, I missed my, part of my Art History test because one part was written
and one part was identifying sculptures, _________________ and stuff, so I had to take, I
remember going back to school to take that over, to take that, that test and, you know, the
semester was pretty cool and, you know, it was weird because I, you know, I hadn’t, I got
phlebitis and then I got phlebitis again, and so I’m thinking oh God, it’s, you know, you
know, everybody thought it was, thought the feeling was my _______________, you
know, disability is a _______________ quad, it’s a chronic illness, and you’re going to
be, you know, this kind of stuff is going to happen, just get, you know, you’re going to
get UTI’s and you’re going to get bedsores, and just thought all the, it was funny because
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I, I got that phlebitis in late November of 1986, and I wasn’t sick, I didn’t, I didn’t get
sick again in any way, I didn’t get a UTI, I didn’t get a bedsore, so I didn’t get nothing
for seven years. I mean I was, it was stupid, I was stupidly healthy for a while. I mean
just shockingly for my doctors, which I think was good because I didn’t have to, they
made the adjustment, kind of, you know, and I’m thinking what’s the big deal, I mean
just, you know, take care of yourself kind of thing. I eat right, I worked out with a PT
three times a week, that kind of stuff, but so school, Thomas College was like, you know,
okay, I can do this and I, I said, okay, I’m going to go, you know, no matter where I’m
going to go to school at, so I decided to go to Howard. I decided I would go to Howard
after my first semester at Thomas College. After my second quarter, we were on the
quarter systems, so my second quarter ended in January or February, somewhere around
in there, and I’m like looking at going to a four-year college and looking at Howard and
so I did. This is going into 1987.
I’m looking in ’87 at Howard University, so I do, I file all my paperwork, I sent in
my transcript, blah, blah, blah, they all happy, blah, blah, blah, so I called up to the
school. They didn’t have a _______________ Coordinator when I called. I’m passed
around from secretary to this, think about it, this is, I got into Howard. I got in right
when Mayor Marion Berry got caught smoking crack. I got there, no, I got there before,
wait a minute, that was in ’90, then maybe he was out, because when I got there in ’87
something was going on because I remember him trying to be put in and the Fall of ’87,
what was going on then? Wasn’t he still mayor? Maybe he was trying to run back again
or something, I don’t know, but anyway, I got there, okay, when I got back there. When I
got there, my _________________________. I had told them I had my application and
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they’re like okay. They said, “Well,” you know, “We’ll go over it,” and the lady said,
they sent me to Admissions, and she said, “Oh, yeah, we’ll let you in,” blah, blah, blah,
not telling them I have a disability, yeah, well, I just told her again who I was. She pulls
my file and they’re saying, “Well, _____________________probably ____________ in
the next ______________________ junior college _______________ two years,” but my
undergrad, my, my high school was so good that they were like, and I had, you know,
they had had six of my friends, _______________________, six of my friends had went
there from high school, in my class. So, you know, there was people there and it was
cool, and it was a black school and all this kind of stuff. So I’m explaining to the lady,
I’m in a wheelchair, I’m in a power wheelchair, you know, I know Howard is a historical
black college and university. It was built in 1870’s or 80’s, whatever, so I’m thinking,
you know, “I know it’s going to be old,” and she’s going, “Oh,” and she’s like, “We’ve
had blind students here,” that kind of thing, and I said, “Well, that’s not, I have different
issues,” you know, “I’m going to have to get notes from teachers and from the students,
and, you know, and getting around the school. I’ve got to make sure because I can’t take
steps, and how is the school set up,” and she’s like, “Oh, no, we just put in all these,
buildings that don’t have ramps, we have,” and she put me on hold. For buildings that do
not have ramps, they put in cage lifts, outside, keyed, locked all the time, always a lot of
confusion, who has the key, and so she was like, “You can get in all the buildings and
everything’s fine,” da, da, da, da, yada, yada, yada, and I’m like, and you know,
_____________ was just being naïve about it and I wouldn’t have minded, it was fine, so
I’m like fine. They say it’s fine, they’re going to let me in and I talked to my friends,
everybody was like, come to D.C., everything’s great. So I go to D.C., I go to, in Fall of
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’87, getting ready to go to D.C. So me and my Mom and one of my cousins, older
cousins, uncle, sorry, he, they’re going to, I have a van, a F-150 that’s converted, I mean,
cargo, it’s converted and it’s got a lift on it. Well, this is a loaner. Mine was being built
at a place there, but they loaned me one until they finished mine. Mine was done actually
in Tallahassee, Florida, so we drive up in D.C. and I get to D.C., and like, you know, and
I’m going to keep the loaner there while I’m there.
I moved into Sloan Hall and there was, they had converted it, you know, they had
redone it, ________________ was right across from residential houses, which was kind
of weird for me, __________________. You could tell by the brownstones and the way
it looked. So Sloan Hall had been redone, re-gutted, just redone, and so there was like
two wheelchair accessible, well, they didn’t call them rooms, they called them suites and
the thing about it, it had a _____________ and a bath_____________. Most dorms, you
know, they didn’t have showers in them. It had it’s own bathroom with a roll-in shower,
it had a small kitchen, and it had two bedrooms. So I’m thinking, I get in Sloan Hall and
I’m like, oh, this is cake. I’ve got two bedrooms, no problem, so I started, I’d
_________, I’d get up and I’d go on campus maybe a couple days of the week, you
know, I’d drive, we’d drive in the van. It’s apparent we get on campus and there’s no
parking for us and, you know, Howard has all these hills and nobody said that. So I’m
thinking, do you know, nobody, they didn’t mention it, you know, and I know, I drove, so
it took me, we finally parked around by the quad. It’s like a, near the top of a hill, there’s
like a little cutout where you can drive onto the quad, the yard, you know, you can get
right, you know, you come out, and so I’m like, okay, I’m going, I drive up on the yard
and it’s like, I look around the yard and it’s like this, I don’t know, I’m in the quad and I
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look around and it’s like, oh, one of the great experiences of my life. I look out and the
school is all, I’m looking at, I’m looking at the yard and I’m like, this is all black people,
but it’s, but that’s not what, you know, after I think it was ’87, and coming from the
South, going on the campus was, you know, more than 10,000 black people who are in
college, that’s not the norm, so even going down to FAMU when I used to go there, I
didn’t think about it, I was just there, but when I was, I’m in college and these are my
peers, and it was like this should be the norm and not the, you know, something out of the
ordinary, but it gave me a different, it gave me a different feeling about being black, just
that moment, and so, you know, it was interesting, being part of a historical black
university as a student, with a, and seeing that, you know, there were people from
everywhere. I mean just, you know, Canada, out of the country, African people, all this
kind of stuff, and I had a buddy, they gave me this guy from Kansas, campus buddy to
help me get acquainted, and he was from Kansas with overalls, colored overalls, and I’m
thinking, dude, that’s not a very straight fashion statement, you know, he was very
comfortable with who he was and, you know, he is like, and it was like, I know when I
met him, his name’s Warren, he says, “It’s going to be,” you know, he just kind of looked
at me and was talking and shake his head, “I’m going to tell you straight up. I don’t
know anything about people in this building. I don’t have a problem with them, but I
don’t know anything about them.” He was very, he grew up in a small town in Kansas,
and so we kind of relate to kind of, we kind of got out of the smaller town and we’re at
Howard and it was much different than what we know, but it was pretty cool, but it was
just like, he was just a, he was just amazed to be on campus and he was just like, “This is
going to be crazy. How are you going to do this?,” you know, and so I took, one of the
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first classes I took, I was scheduled, I had Biology and I was in Chemistry at Howard,
you know, down in what they call Death Valley. So I’m going to Death Valley, which
has got a ____________________, all those steps lead into there, so you’ve got to find a
way to get into Death Valley, so I finally find a way to get into Death Valley, so you
know, and I’m taking Chemistry, I’m taking Spanish, I’m taking another English course,
and History course, and I’m like, okay, I get to the Chemistry building, it was called the
Chemistry Building, but it was a chemistry lab. It has a cage to get in there and no keys,
it’s locked, so I called administration, “There’s no keys,” and a guy comes out with the
keys. They had to go find him and so this was going to be a problem now. So, you
know, then I go from there I go to get in the building, there’s another cage to go up the
flight of steps to get to the next hall and I’m like, this is going to be all these keys, every
day, and they’re like, “We’ll, get you a set of keys,” “Dude, I can’t use a set of keys,”
“We can’t leave these unlocked,” so I’ll have to get somebody to, you know, open these
and there’s nobody around. So, you know, the cages, there was a big old lecture hall and,
you know, kind of thing, that was fine, you know, I’m thinking this is back at Florida
State, you know, cool, so school was fine, but it was like getting from the bed all the way
to Death Valley, getting all the way back over campus where they had this like, over near
the, for my English course, it was like, like every day, and it’s like, come on, this is like
spread out like crazy, and I’m running from here to there and I’m just like this is, and so
that’s the one, and which I mean I’m thinking I can do this, you know, your brain’s like I
can do this, I can do this, I can do this, and so I was, there was a rehab hospital there and
I was paid, they were just starting to work on voice recognition stuff, voice recognition at
the National Rehabilitation Hospital. It’s a federal hospital and so I used, okay, go there
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for voice recognition and they have a school, so I’ve got to type and I was writing, you
know, this, I was going to buy a computer, but we didn’t know what. At this time it was
voice recognition rather than continuous voice and it was kind of like it was new. I mean
it was really new, drive and dictate. It was a floor drive and dictate. This was a floor
drive and dictate. IBM was working on it and they were just trying to figure out, I get
like on the ground floor of stuff. I tell you what, looking at stuff, so I’m thinking okay,
I’ll get a computer and all this stuff and I hadn’t been, I hadn’t gone to school for about a
month and then I had to have attendants come in. My Mom hadn’t left yet. She was like,
she stayed the whole month, and she was like, she had a hotel not too far, but she was
always at my dorm room. The insurance company paid for it.
We had very interesting calls. We had a lawyer named David Gold, still a friend
now, in Miami, and what he did was that we, we had a fight with the school and he
rewrote the contract, over terms of the contract ____________________, which was fine,
but he put this language in there that said that the insurance company will be responsible
for anything, any expense that is related to, directly or indirectly, to Joseph’s, you know,
physical limitations, like injury. Well, that’s a _________________ and it could be
argued, and he probably did that intentionally. So they would be like, they’ll say, “Oh
you’ve got to buy the,” you know, when I move out, like I had big old king-size waterbed
at home and like I said, “I can’t take another waterbed,” and I said, “I’m packing,” I said,
“I’m going to move, I’m going to pack up all my stuff,” and he’s like, “You don’t have to
pack up anything, just buy you another one, just buy you another one.” He said, “You’ve
got to come back home so why pack it all up and just bring it back home with you when
you come home for break.” So it was just like, so these guys were just pulling, they were
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just asking for just about anything he said because he knew if they didn’t, there would be
a fight. So, so we had attendants there, and dah, dah, dah, and I was like, you know, the
attendants were spotty. It was, you know, sometimes they would show up and sometimes
they wouldn’t and then they’d be late or whatever and I was like, you know, between,
you know, they were from agencies. We had agencies that would come in, so you know,
you get to have all the, and so we, you know, it got to the point we’re running around
campus and being late and trying to get everything done and I’m just thinking, this place
is not set for, it was just getting, the school work wasn’t a problem, the school was the
problem, the school, the city was a, just getting around the city and dealing with
_________, so you know, I just said, “I’m going to leave and go back home and,” so I
decided to leave and go back home. So I mean, you know, I mean one thing, it’s one
thing, I’ve always been, I’ve always been very honest with myself in my situation. I
mean I’m, I’m an introspect person because of my southern kind of outward
____________________, and so I’ve go to, I’ve got to __________________, but I’m
very true to myself and I’ll say, you know, at some point, you know, I ain’t going to be
able to do this, and I’m thinking, you know, I said it, and you know, what kind of the
kicker was I, well, my aide just didn’t show up and if I’m ____________________, but
look at where my friends live in Sloan Hall, from Thomasville, he was a year ahead of
me, and Patrick and, you know, it was always I had that kind of in the way I feel, I had
this weird kind of network that was there so I was never, ever, just alone and so, you
know, I said you know what, and I know my Mom, she was freaking out because she was
like, you know, it was time for her to go and she was just like, you know, this is not
stable, it wasn’t stable and she didn’t feel, and I knew why. It wasn’t like, you know, she
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was just bugging out because she was my Mom, it was a very erratic up and down kind of
situation and, you know, two years out from the injury, that’s a kind of weird thing to
kind of leave and I was running, I’ll see you, but right now, this is not the time to do this.
It’s not, you know, I decided, I said okay. That was the, I can’t say it was, it was, it was
the first time I knew that my disability could stop me from doing something I wanted to
do. It was, it was, it was, it was like, I was there from late August and we left like
somewhere up around in September and, you know, I went to the administration and I
told them, I said, “Hey, I don’t mean no harm, but ya’ll ain’t ready for people with
disabilities,” and they agreed and they gave me my check back. They, they, the Dean,
he’s like, you know, I don’t remember his name. I swear I can’t remember his name. I
didn’t have a Dean and he says, you know, “You’re right and we’re just going to refund
you your, your tuition and whatever you paid and,” you know, “Sorry for the
inconvenience,” and, you know, that was it. I had given it a good month and I could tell
you, you know, I know Dean or whatever his name is and he was like, “Don’t worry
about it,” blah, blah, blah, and all this kind of, I mean I’m thinking, are they going to
have the stuff shoveled, you know, around, ice, so, you know, I could see, it was bad
enough when it rained, so I said, okay, I’m going to leave and called the movers and they
came down and got my stuff. During that month, I was still going to school. I was, I had
a driver that dropped me off and they’d come back and pick me up, and so I, you know, it
was another one of those trips, quiet, riding back from, with my Mom and my uncle who
drove, drove a van, my great-uncle, I’m sorry. This is my Aunt Elizabeth’s husband, who
is my great-uncle. It’s my grandmother’s, Grandma Wessie Mae’s daughter, no, sister,
Grandma Wessie Mae’s sister, her sister Elizabeth, her husband. His name is Murray.
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What is Murray’s last name? It is very proper, Murray, I can’t, Carpenter, Murray
Carpenter, a very formal Carpenter, and he’s still living in Thomasville. They’re still
kicking it, them two, they’ve lasted a whole breed as we call it, and so I remember riding.
It had to be like sixteen hours, something like that, and then we stopped, you know, you
know, not overnight, we just drove. We stopped to eat and it was hot. It was still hot
coming back down south and I remember just riding and I’m just thinking, I’m going,
I’m leaving Howard. I felt, I figured, I felt it was something that I could deal with and I
could handle, you know, I could, it wasn’t like the world had ended, but it made me
reevaluate how I had to make decisions from now on. I couldn’t tell somebody I was
disabled and expect them to understand what that meant. So I think, that was kind of my
awakening too, that people don’t know, it’s not part of their culture to think, and you
know, he was honest with me, he didn’t think, come on down.
So, you know, so Miami had been accessible as long as they had, you know, the
city had went crazy and laid Thomasville out for me and all this so, you know, my, you
know, my world had been pretty smooth around about disability and
__________________, but I drove back and I was just thinking it was, and see I had, the
hard part was I still had, school had already started so I couldn’t enroll for that semester
at school at Thomas College, so I got a, it’s called Thomas College. The founder of
Thomasville, obviously his last name was Thomas. He was a Confederate War Colonel,
not Confederate, Revolutionary War Colonel. So I got, I had like two months just to sit
and think about what am I going to do in Thomasville. I can’t, I missed the beginning of
the semester, I’ve got to just wait until the next quarter to start. There wasn’t any pain in
figuring things out, it was just I had to re, you know, I’m saying to myself, okay, Joseph,
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this ain’t as, this ain’t going to be as easy as you first thought it was going to be, just
because you’re home. It wasn’t, it was like, you know, the first bump, the first speed
bump, but it was, it was a, it was two months of more or less doing, nothing really to do
and my hometown, it was very, there’s nothing really to do anyway. So it was like the
first time I had kind of just sat since I had got injured and I can’t really say, there wasn’t
anything enjoyable about it because it’s like, I, I, I’ve always been busy if I wanted to be
and to be doing nothing if I wanted to. Now it was just doing nothing because there was
nothing really to do. You know, people had their own lives and running around and I
went to see my friends every now and then. A lot of them had went off to school and I
had a lot of, a lot of my, a lot of the kids I went to school with my senior year, black kids
obviously, you know, we had a lot of kids go to college. So when I’d seen how many
people there are in Thomasville, that’s not true for my class. A lot of us got out of town
and went on to college and no one came back. So we, I mean it was, it was a slow kind
of, being back to dealing with that kind of weird, you know, the adjustment of the family
and making sure everything was cool and it was spent, you know, that time was spent
more then on my mother and my brother about, okay, football, this is in two years, me
and Fatman and my Mom, and we thought, you know, okay, I’ve been out, like this
happened two years ago. It’s time to let it go. He’s still got two years to play ball, and
blah, blah, blah, and my Mom, oh man, she was like biting a hunk of granite and you
knew it would break your teeth. So, you know, we finally realized, hey, for to let this go,
so it was that kind of, there was more loss in that. It was kind of the pain and the hurt of,
I knew that what Fatman, you know, he, you know, people have dreams and they have
aspirations and they can kind of, you see your world and kind of envision, like I had my,
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I had, you know, the play I was telling the guy about, I guess he had
__________________ and it was just shattered. He came to me at the hospital after the
injury, okay, I’m sorry. When, during the parade, that’s what I call it, the parade of
people coming into ICU, and he came, and this, I didn’t tell you this about ICU. The
crazy thing about ICU, I only saw maybe two people, everybody came after I had my
surgery, you know, they figured if I’d make it out of surgery, you know, no, no, if I make
it out of surgery, you know, he’s going to be on a respirator and, you know, maybe he’ll
die sometime, whenever. Then after, they put a respirator in after I had surgery, but I’m
breathing on my own. They were shocked that I could after I got hurt, but they said okay.
So friends at my school, friends all came in and I remember them coming and I was, it
was the worst thing they could have done to those poor people. God knows it was bad.
So I’m on a respirator, I’m on a feeding tube, I’ve got tubes in every vein, my feeding,
they feed me intravenous then they’ve got a tube in my nose, pump out, and then they’ve
got a respirator in my nose, so I’m taped all up, you can’t see my face, I lost, I’m down to
120 pounds, I’m like a bag of bones, and I’m on a striker frame, which is a bed that
rotates. So you come to see me and I’m sitting in there and then you start talking and
then I lean, I turn away from something because people are going nuts. Everybody’s
crying and hysterical and, you know, just like this is, just why, why you all doing this,
and I’ll never forget, a friend of mine, Darrell ___________ Baer, came in and he was
just like, he was mad. He was like, “Joe, they say you’re going to die,” and I couldn’t
talk. It was weird because I couldn’t talk because of all those tubes and stuff and I was
like, “I’m not going to die,” and he was like, “I know you’re not going to die,” but the
guy, the gentleman came and I’ll never forget he was, he said, “I just came to see how
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you was doing,” and the striker, I’ll never forget, the striker frame would turn and they
would tip it this way and then it came back and it would stop in the middle for a while,
and he got real close to me and I told him, I said, you know, “I’ve got an answer to your
question,” and I think he had forgot about it. He just came to see me, you know, he
didn’t, you know, he wasn’t, I think, you know, he came to see me, you know, and so,
you know, I told him, I said, you know, I remember I told him, I said, “You asked me
about where did God fit in my plan,” and I told him, I said, “He is my plan,” and he just
kind of looked at me and then he said, “I had forgot I asked you that,” and he said, “That
was a couple of months ago.” I said, “Yep,” and I told him, I said, “It made me think
about it for about a month and, you know, it kind of put me on the right path,” and, you
know, we prayed and it was, it was, it was, it wasn’t, it was a good circle because I think
he left in a better, you know, because coming to see me was no nice, but I think he left,
and I told him, I thanked him because that actually got me to a place where I think that I
dealt with what was happening way better than I would have, but that was at, and I’ve
never seen him again since then. I haven’t seen, he died of liver cancer a couple of years
after my accident, but so it was that kind of loss that Fatman was dealing with, the
realization that this ain’t gonna happen, and you know, we were scheming like, well,
Fatman, you can be, you can get independent and you can do this, you know, we used to,
you know, we’ll move out and we’ll get you somewhere to stay and my Mom was like,
she went to the school, “You better never let Fatman play football,” and she had to sign
for him to play and the school told him, he better not, you know, because she said, so it
was that kind of thing.
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So and that’s when I started looking for U of I, I mean looking for a school. This
is now ’87, and after being home for a couple of months, I’ve got to find somewhere to
go to school. You know what, I used Miami Dade Junior College in Miami as the kind of
blueprint. Miami Dade Junior College is a two-year school in Miami and it has, you
know, wheelchair basketball and all that. I knew that there were schools that provided
assistance, you know, dorms, and the University of Miami had some stuff, but I met
Mark Bonneconi, Nick Bonneconi’s son, broke his neck a couple of months after I did.
Nick is the father and he played for the Miami Dolphins and was on the ’72 Dolphins
undefeated team and his son, Mark, was injured playing football at Citadel in South
Carolina, and he came in right after me in ’86, and, you know, his whole thing, his father,
I mean he would sit around and talk about where he was going to school and his father
was like, “Well,” you know, “you can go to Miami Dade to start.” Well, that caused a
kind of big thing in Miami. They started a Nick Bonneconi fund and research project in
Miami for spinal cord cures, and I had a friend named Patrick who was, worked at the
hospital and he knew about it. He would volunteer on the quad, that’s what we called it,
so he knew kids who got hurt and came into Miami and then go off to school, and I met a
girl who went to school, I knew it was possible and I wanted a bigger school. I knew my,
at the time, I knew that if push came to shove, I could go to the University of Miami.
Florida State had a program, they had a dorm that was off-campus that was, but I didn’t
want to go to Florida State. I just, I had already had been there and done that, in the Fall,
and I took Physics there, but I’m like, and I had thought of going to southeast Georgia for
the whole, the whole thing was, you know. I don’t know where I was going, but I wasn’t
going nowhere like a _____________, my mother could show with her _____________
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onto something. So we, we looked and, me, well, my Mom was ______________
fighting it and my Mom said, “You figure out everything else,” you know, but I had a
lady that worked for me. She worked for an insurance company. She was a
_______________ counselor. They assign the rehab counselor and so, you know, she
pulled all the schools, so she went and did her own research, but she’d bring stuff back to
me and I would say okay, based on what they’re saying, I would throw people out, put
people in, throw people out. It came down to, I would say, I’d look at the school and say
based on what they’re saying, of what they can do and I would call them, like they don’t
know what they’re doing. I would find out by a phone call and then, I would know if
they had a real program. You know, after talking, I talked to people in Miami a lot and
they were saying, at Miami Dade, and they would say, “Ask this,” “Ask that,” you know,
you know, “Ask them about test taking,” “Ask them about note taking, “Talk about
double-time.” “How do professors give the tests?” “Do you take a test in class?” “Do
they have someone else take the test?” “Do the TA’s do it,” you know, people would be
like uh, uh, uh, I mean, you know, transportation. “Do they have,” you know, “a network
of aides already set up,” you know, so it was just all kinds of stuff. I’m like, “Well, okay,
you tell us about how I’m going to do it.”
So we came to U of I, so we, I, after we came back, U of I just, it just, when I
called Rehab, and it was like, okay, this is rehab because at first I thought I was calling a
rehab place that wasn’t on campus. I called DRES and I talked to __________________
Services _____________ and I’m thinking, I ain’t talking to Admissions or whatever and
they were like, “Oh, we have an Admissions Coordinator just people for disabilities.”
We talked and it was like, “Well, we suggest you come and visit before you come,” you
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know, “We’ll put you up, just, just come,” I mean you know, “Just, we want you to be
comfortable. Just come.” They said, “Come look,” and I went April of ’88. I started my
quest in the Fall of ’87. I thought about going to visit Berkeley, Cal-Berkeley, because
they have a program that was established in the mid-‘60s, and I thought about, well, I
always have Miami to fall back on, the University of Miami, but it wasn’t that extensive
and I knew that. It was an extension of Dade, but it was a good program and I wanted to
go to a four, I didn’t want to be transferred and, I wanted to go to a four-year school and
get it done. So April of ’88, I flew into Champaign-Urbana, in a little crop duster, we
called it. My thing was that I was going to go there, to visit Berkeley because I had said
okay if, I was going to my first choice first and see how it was because I, the University
of Illinois, because in just by talking to them and I just thought that, well, one, the
academic program, and California was so far away and I was never, I wasn’t a California
kind of person. I didn’t know how ______________ Berkeley was, but, you know, I was
just like, I know how good that Berkeley was, it’s just that California just ain’t, say kind
of, I had a picture of California and it’s got flower children and a little bird, the hippie
generation, like I’m going to live in one, and so, you know, I was like, okay, and
California just seemed like a whole other world, and I hadn’t broadened my horizons that
far yet. I knew Thomasville was too small, but you know, but I liked Champaign, we’ll
go see and so we flew in. We flew from, no, no, we flew from Tallahassee to Chicago,
no, we flew from Tallahassee to Atlanta, from Atlanta to Champaign on Delta, and so,
it’s like you say, limited, but _____________________, you like. I flew from
Tallahassee to Atlanta, from Atlanta to Chicago, for the _____________ to Champaign,
and so we were there for four days, on campus. It was me and my mother and my brother
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Chump came, Chump came, and we, where did we stay, we stayed at, I’m 20 now, so
Chump, yeah, I would turn 20 that September and so Chump was, wait, something’s
wrong about these dates. Okay, no, I take that back, I started looking in ’88, ’87, I, I, I,
no, I take that back. I did not go to U of I in April of ’88. I went to U of I in April of ’89.
The problem, I looked for a year, I’m sorry, we went through a whole, it was a whole
process that was for a year. Now I didn’t know that I could get into junior college, at
Thomas College, and then I applied, just knocking out Chemistry, blah, blah, blah, and
it’s a quarter system so you can get a lot of stuff in. So it was, I’m sorry, it was April of
’89, and I turned 21 that Fall, and so, you know, we go in April of ’89, and Chump is
three years younger so he’s sixteen, he’s in high school and, you know, he’s just, he’s the
only kid at home now besides me and Fatman is like, “I’ve got to bail, man,” and so we,
we go, it was April and it’s cold as it ever gets, it’s about as cold as it gets in Thomasville
ever, and it was like we went around and they drove us around on the buses and they’d
get buses just for me and they came and picked us up at the airport. They knew the
flight, they knew everything, and I had a manual chair, I was in my manual chair because
then you they picked me up, they took us to the Illini Union where we stayed, and they
took us around. They had tickets for us to go see Whitney Houston. She was at
Assembly Hall singing “All My Love for You,” and it was way before she married Bobby
Brown when she was still Whitney Houston. My Mom was like, “I don’t want to go see
no Whitney.” She told the guy, “Thank you, but I don’t want to go see Whitney
Houston.” We’re like, so we went around. No, we didn’t go. I didn’t want to go. I’m
not, hey, I’m like whatever, I ain’t going to argue with you and __________________
myself,” so Chump didn’t have no vote. Chump was having a _________________, so
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he was like, “Hey, whatever, you know, it’s free food, I don’t care,” and so we ran
around and we went around the town, and they took us to the Mall and, you know, we
took, you know, we met, they dropped, they would take us to this place where students
were and just leave us and say okay, call and talk to people and talk to Beckwith, and we
went to Beckwith. We went around the school and we, then one day, they had me with
this, they took me like on a student schedule and just showed me, okay, if you’ve got a
class at this time, you’ve got to be somewhere at this time, the bus is going to be here, the
van will pick you up, the van will drop you off, then, you know, something, you need
your wheelchair repaired, we’ll take you to the basement of DRES, you take a test,
you’ve got a test Friday, you need, and I’m like, I’m thinking, I don’t need all that. I just,
it was there. Whatever support service I needed was there and they said if there ain’t
something you do need and we don’t have it, let us know. So it was like I’m glad I came
here first. I don’t have to fly to California and so it was a no-brainer. I didn’t even go, I
didn’t even go look and so I’m, I went there in April of ’89, to look around and then I
entered that Fall of ’89.
So I came to U of I, August 17, 1989. I remember the date. We drove my new,
my van this time, F-150, decked. I went, I had a Braun lift, I had a Braun lift, I had, we
got a little crazy with the insurance company money, but, you know, maybe, I had a
queen-sized, I had a couch back there. It would lay down into a queen-size bed,
automatically, with a motor on it. I had a button you pushed and the doors open and the
ramp went down and TV’s and DVD’s, I mean not DVD’s, we had, you know, the fiveman disc changer and surround sound, and it was burgundy and gray. It was just nice,
parquet wood floors. So we drove up, me, me and my mother and Chump, and we got
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there on, straight through, just stopping to eat, and went right into Beckwith Hall, and
met Roshonn the first day I was there. She was working at Beckwith as a student
personal assistant and she had just gotten there because she was out in California doing
some, you know, pre-Med stuff, cutting up cadavers and stuff, and she was, she was the
same as me, both were Juniors, oh no, she was, she had been in California that summer,
but she had just got to Beckwith to start working, but she was a Junior at the U of I,
coming in as a Junior, so we were on an equal plane, well, she knew more about the
school so it was just kind of. I got there, everything was cool, and everybody just kind
of, you know, it was kind of interesting because it was just like, you know, you’re sitting
there with your peers and you’re at ease, but everybody, you know, just seemed, you
know, just easy. It was comfortable and I was Microbiology major. Well, you know, I
told you before I had thought about doing Sickle Cell Anemia research and so I had, so I
took all of my Chemistry and Biology and stuff, so and she was a Biology, most of the
kids at Beckwith were pre-Med, most of the kids that worked there are pre-Med. They
use it as a resume booster to get into medical school, working as a personal assistant.
They stayed there. Back then, back then, we, back then all of the PA’s stayed there. So it
was like the DAV’s and the AV’s, disabled bodies, and it had been opened for seven
years before I got there. So I got there, everything’s cool, it was just, it was seamless for
me. We just kind of, everybody just kind of, you got into school, you started doing your
work, you know, going to Noyes Lab and the different classes that Fall. The weather was
brutal. It was like cold. I was like why does somebody stay here, you know, and live
here forever, it’s insane. So you know, me and Roshonn, it was, it was fun. It was back
to, it was kind of what you thought college would be and your brain kind of, you know,
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folks getting drunk and missing class. See we, you know, I, the class of ’89 at Beckwith,
changed Beckwith. After we left, they changed all the rules. It was bad. Not too many
rules, it was just, well, we had a, we had a live-in nurse that was over Beckwith, AfricanAmerican lady, Oh God, I’m blanking on her name. She was from Jamaican decent. She
had two, she had a son, Adam, that was like 14, and the kids there were typical 19, 20,
21-year-old kids. Well, I’m saying, there were able bodied and there were disabled
bodied kids and they more or less run a building, kind of know what it takes to balance,
you know, she’s there, but she can’t be, she lives upstairs. She has a 14-year-old son she
has to keep up with and deal with, and she’s, when medical problems pop up, she had to
deal with that and so it was like for a year, we more or less ran, and we were, the kids that
came and me, Peter Solby, Catherine Dyack, Todd Schmeedle, and Cat was the Director.
I used to go hang out up there. I’d go to Beckwith just to keep up with kind of what’s
going on, just kind of research and stuff, but you know, they, you know, we kept that
house like, there’s certain things we would ask for stuff, that people, I guess, I guess
before we got there, people were like they were so happy just to be able to go to school, it
was like, you know, the food is bad, the food is bad, you know, and, you know, we were
just like, you know, the schedule’s rigid and make stuff flexible, you know, and why do
we have to eat like at the other dorms, why don’t we have this like other dorms, why
don’t we have a big screen TV, and we were just asking for stuff and asking for stuff and
what about this, and stop making it so geriatric like ________________, and they would
just trash the place sometime and it was a dorm and I met some really good people. It’s
funny because Eric, Eric Horn, who’s a neuro, you know, he’d say, “Meet me later,” and
he’s a neurosurgeon in Indianapolis now in DPHD, so he does spinal cord research and
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he was an able bodied PA, and so we’re still good friends. Tom Keane, who’s a
radiologist, he’s at Johns-Hopkins right now in Baltimore at University hospital, and he
was just here, we had, he came here for New Year’s Eve. We met, I made, in Charlotte.
His brother moved here two, he’d come anyway, but his brother moved here two years
ago, so I was, Charlotte is a growing city and it’s moving south toward the South
Carolina border. Well, this is still Charlotte proper and Pineville is outside the city limits.
So I made friends that we’re still friends now, you know, they were in my
wedding, I mean just, but it was, it was a good time, but the one thing that we would sit
around and talk about, it was funny because we would sit down as people, people with
disabilities and people without disabilities, you know, young kids, 21 years old, we
would sit and talk about people with disabilities and what the school could do different
and what was different about what Beckwith should do because we always felt, by the
time that Spring got there, we said the thing at Beckwith, Beckwith made it too
comfortable for people to be at Beckwith. It’s too easy and it doesn’t teach enough. If I
come there and my aides are there, I never learn how to interview aides, I never learn
how to evaluate aides, I never learn how to deal with problems, I never learn how to, you
know, if you’ve got 13 aides living there and one drunk somewhere, somebody else is
going to fill in so nothing is disrupted, nothing, so you never, you go from mama to a
new mama, you know, people cook for you. You never learn to leave. You never learn
how to pay a light bill or a cable bill, or budget. So that’s what we would, and they had
the facilities upstairs. When I was there, they had like these apartments. They had a
kitchen and all this and you were supposed to transition. Beckwith was never intended
for people to live there four years and we had people there that were graduated and had
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been in there the whole four years, and I think we kind of, I, you know, the kind of
people that sat back and philosophized about this stuff, me and Roshonn and Todd and
Eric and Peter Solby, and it was like, you know, they need to start doing what the
material says. Make somebody come in, give them a helping hand to figure out how to
do it, to get acclimated to school, maybe be here two years, but make them transition out.
I think you get that where other residents get on your nerves because you get people that
are over-protected all their lives and why and what about me, so you know, we just had
that, you know, I knew that when Spring came, I knew I was out, the Spring of ’90. I
only stayed one year. That was it and I was gone. I decided that the first semester. I just
knew that, you know, I knew how to deal with people. I had to pay my mother’s bills
since I was nine. I didn’t have to, you know, I was a latchkey kid. I understood about
running a house and so I didn’t need, you know, I needed the University to be accessible.
I needed people that knew how to work with a person with a disability and if not, I could
train them or I could have my brother to come, I mean, you know what I’m saying, I just
needed a body that was willing to work with me when I need it and I will pay you, and
unlike most people, I wasn’t on _________________ and so I could pay more than, you
know, I wasn’t, you know, I didn’t have to worry about paying somebody six dollars an
hour and, you know, so okay, what about giving them seven bucks an hour and you’re
like, “Oh, but I’ll need you but three hours a day and who can you deal with that so I can
afford to set something up,” you know, “You come work for me, I’ll pay you $75 a day.
I don’t care if you work one hour or ½ hour, just, just show up and so what, $75 bucks
cash, you know, without, “I ain’t going to report it. This is just between you and I.
Uncle Sam can write you a check,” and you know, my insurance company was just like,
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they were just like, “Keep me out of the loop. We’ll pay you, you pay them, just sign
some papers and have the hours,” or whatever. So we knew, me and Roshonn started
dating. The insurance company was Cigna of North America. What happened was, they
got tired, they got tired of dealing with me and bought me out of being my support
services. They were like, “Look, dude, ya’ll, at the rate you’re going, you’re 20,” well,
you know, I’ll tell you what happened.
Well, what happened, I’m going to tell you how it happened. Spring of ’90, I’m
saying okay, I’m going to move out. So I go right down the street from Beckwith. There
was an apartment complex that was right on the corner of John and Oak, right there on
that corner, there’s an apartment complex, it may be Oak Street or maybe another street.
A lot of people were, DRES is on Oak Street. It was one street up from DRES. It’s a
little side street right in there. So I went and rented a three bedroom apartment, you
know, and it was big, you know, you could rent bigger places for space and all this kind
of stuff and, you know, I hired Roshonn and, who was my first aide, Tom Keane as my
PA’s, just ______________ stuff, and me and Roshonn was dating at the time so we
lived together and Tom would come over and work, and so when I moved out, the
insurance company got crazy. It was like, “We can’t, no, why are you moving?,”
“Because I want to move. ____________________ out of my check,” and they’re like, at
that time, it cost, to pay for attendants to stay, for attendants to be at Beckwith was like
$2,000 for a semester, and so when I moved out, they’re thinking, “Well, if you move
out, we’ve got to pay these people $75 a day,” you know, “We’re paying more,” you
know, “in a couple of weeks than we pay for the whole semester,” and they’re like, “It’s
cheap and we know it’s accessible and you’re moving out.” So they told me if I moved,
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they wouldn’t pay it. They said, “We’ll only pay you to pay for aide care for the same
amount it costs us if you were staying at Beckwith because you’re choosing to leave
Beckwith.” Well, they tell me this in the Spring, they tell me when I’m telling them I’m
going to move. So I’m like, “Whatever, I’m moving.” So I moved, I rented an
apartment, I move in, and so the crazy thing is that the lady that used to run Beckwith had
quit. We had, we had just turned the place upside down. The nurse, she had quit and she
had just like enough, and ________________ came in to run Beckwith. We knew that,
we heard ____________ people say, “We have to reevaluate what the hell is going on,”
because nobody really knew what was going on at Beckwith down on the end. Some
handicappers, you know, “As long as you all don’t, nobody’s going to sue us, we’re
happy.” ____________________________, and so she went to work for Cigna as a
Rehab nurse and she, and she became my case, I was on her case list, and so I told her, I
said, “They said they’re not going to pay.” So that Summer, they paid because it was
Summer because Beckwith closed in the Summer and I moved into an apartment for the
Summer. I moved in the Summer, but I wasn’t moving back to Beckwith, but I told them
and they said, “We’ll pay you over the Summer because school is out, but when the Fall
starts, we’re not going to pay.” I was taking some Summer courses and so there wasn’t
nothing back in Thomasville and so I just stayed there, and we did go to Chicago, which
was cool, his girlfriend was there, so it was kind of weird after _________________
college ___________ anyway, __________________ playing football or whatever.
So them and Dave had gotten together and Dave was like, “They said what?,” my
lawyer, Dave Gold, was like, he’s like, “What?” What kind of idiot would say? They
can’t tell you where to stay?” He said, “If it’s more convenient, it’s more convenient if
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you’d just die,” you know, “That’s even cheaper.” So they got into a big fight and they
didn’t pay actually for like the first, I was, luckily I’m a saver so I saved up my money.
So I’m just like, you know, I’ll pay for the stuff and they’ll figure it out and
_______________, and so he’s like, “Look, you know you,” and they’re like, “You know
what? You turned out to be a little more than we thought.” This is in the Fall of ’90 and
I’m going to school and, you know, paying my aide and rent and all this stuff, and my
lawyer in Miami has got a court date set and they’re just like, “Look, what I’ll do, you
seem like you’re doing pretty good so we’ll let you out of your own case. We’ll just buy
you out and you just deal with it from now on.” I said, “Fine,” you know, “I’ll be all
right,” you know, so it was a negotiated buyout and Gold probably got me the best
buyout he could and so, you know, that just kind of put everything in my hands and it’s
been fine, I mean, I don’t get sick. I haven’t been that sick. You know, I was, I was a
very cheap case for them to have in their caseload, except for things I asked for and they
said, “___________________________, “_________________________but you didn’t
spend anything on me medically.” I mean in the hospital, you know, and I’m thinking, in
’89, we haven’ bought nothing, we haven’t done nothing, no wheelchairs, no nothing.
So I moved out of the dorm and me and Roshonn lived together and it was just,
and I, you know, it was interesting because in that first year I was there taking Science
courses, Biochem, Physics again, and Organic Chemistry, with the intention of being a
microbiologist, Microbiology or Genetics or something like that, you know, and I, I, I got
to the point where, just, Beckwith changed the whole trajectory in my life because I got
to interact with people with disabilities in the real world. At Jackson, it was in this very
still hospital, but you know, even though Beckwith wasn’t a real, real world, but you got
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to see how people had to, how they saw the world, how young people dealt with moving
far from Mom and their attitudes and how they didn’t want to deal with, we didn’t deal
with their disability, they were welcome to deal with care and everybody just wanted to
kind of just take care of me and I can whine, and there was people with disabilities who
are some of the biggest manipulators in the planet, oh my God, they learned, they push
buttons and they scare people and they, so I’m like, ya’ll just, you know, they wouldn’t
do their schoolwork and the professors would not want to be bothered and then, you
know, they just end up giving them a grade, and just, I’m like, so since then, I became, I
was already a very curious person, very, you know, science, science kind of oriented, but
I was like, this is, it was the most fascinating thing I’ve ever been around and, you know,
I said okay, I should look at this. So I just kind of started taking some Psych courses and
I took a course called Modern Viewpoints of Psychology, taught by Dr. John Delaney, in
the Psych Department, kind of a reverse psychologist, one of the most brilliant people I’d
ever been around, and he changed the whole way I looked at Psychology because I
always thought a Psychologist was just this kind of foo foo kind of whatever, you’re just
sitting around _________________, and so he was like. The doors are unlocked here
because I’m from the South. I don’t leave the doors open at night, you know, it’s crazy
because I’ll go, you know, up to the shops here, we leave the doors unlocked and we
don’t even think about it, besides somebody that breaks in knows you. So he was just
like, he showed me that, you know, Psychology is a Science if you treat it like a Science.
You can do the research and you can learn about things that, you know, you know,
studying Chemistry is, you know, part of this image. You can study people in the same
way, but you’ve got to be very rigorous about it because they just tell you, they say 95%
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of all research is done in main social sciences, and that’s crap because they don’t
understand statistics, they don’t understand the models, they don’t understand design,
they don’t, they never really put it together. The people we evaluated are on review
boards and they don’t know what they’re looking at either. Maybe you’re a bad
statistician and, you know, you’ve got another bad statistician looking at it, then you just
compound it, and you’re just like, so he’d always say to me, he’d say, “Whenever you
read an article, the first thing you do,” he’d say, “Read, read the ________________,
read the design,” and he said, “Before you read the results, go through there and see how
you would design it different.” He’d say, “Look at the, don’t look at the results. Look at
the experiment. What is wrong with the experiment?” He’d say, “You look at most of
them,” he’d say, “You’ll find a flaw, a big flaw that makes the results irrelevant,” and I’m
like, now, that’s not bad, that’s something to do that’s, that’s something I could, I got
interested in. It was very, so I, I, I said okay, I’m going to do Psychology and I changed,
you know, and my parents, my mother freaked out because I was always, I was always
the Science guy. I was always in Math and Science my whole life and she dealt with me,
you know, dissecting pigs at the house and, you know, you think, you think the insect
thing was bad, wait until I brought a little pig home and take it apart and well, we had to,
we had to dissect it and, you know, tell the organs and it was a regular old test and I’m
like, and she’s like, “What the hell are you doing?” “I brought home a,” and I had to, oh,
the worse thing I did was in my tenth grade Biology class, we had to, they gave us a dead
frog and we had to boil it to get the skin off of it and label all the bones, and she’s like,
“What in the hell?,” and I’m like, “This is Science.” So, you know, I guess, you know,
like you said, I was a typical high school kid then, come to their parent’s house and say,
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“I’ve got to, I’ve got to borrow one of your old pots and cook this frog,” and she was just
like, “Oh my God. Well, just make sure I ain’t home and clean up my kitchen.”
So, so I got into it and so I’m taking Psychology courses, but I, but I remember
when Psychology courses just more or less pissed me off because they weren’t, I took
Stats and I took Modern Viewpoints. The rest of it was nothing. It was just, you know,
there was just people talking, you know, you ain’t really doing. I took Modern
Viewpoints. It was good, ____________________. At the graduate level of Psychology,
it’s different because you’ve got to pick out what you could do and during all this time,
I’m skipping years, but you know, so I finished up with a major in Psychology in
January, the Fall semester of ’91. January, I don’t know how they label it, but January of
’92, Fall of ’91, in December. My last final exam was sometime in December and then I
had my Bachelors of Science in Psychology.
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