Sally Sanderson Fay sits near a window at Little Folks S;hool, lulled from her work into a drowsy reverie by the buzzing of the bees and the early summer sunshine and shade dappling the play-gound outside.
She once played outside that same window, making mud pies when she was a student here some 30 years ago. In fact, she and her older brother, Bill, both spent many happy years as children here after her mother, Eula Mae Sanderson, opened the lit :le school in 1953, and it is to those times that those little voices sometimes call her…back to the annual Little Folks School Parade and Circus, starring: The kids. Dressed as lions and tigers and hears, oh no, growling and snarling and acting vicious in mascaraed whiskers and jerry-rigged outfits.
The whole community turned out to support this school and these kids. The ait seemed tinged with a pink halo of innocence-or maybe it just seems that way in Sally’s aging, fading color photographs, the dyes slipping slowly out of register.
But the parade meant something, and that something has lasted. Even now, two Dallas adults will meet each other at a cocktail party and find out that both attended Little Folks: The instant question: What were you in the parade?
Back then, when that rare police car or ambulance went rushing by, all activities came to a halt so that all the kids could rush to the fence and gape.
Innocent times.
Innocence lost.
The children these days do not so much as look up when a cop goes flying by. It’s a common sight, part of the landscape. Though children still play outside that window at LFS-believed to be the oldest continuously operating day-care center in Dallas County-the world has changed. And so have the children.
Right now, two kids outside Sally’s window are talking about something, and she rouses from her dozy daydreaming to peer out at the little 5-year-olds. She listens to catch a snatch of their sing-song childhood babble. Using little piles of pebbles, they pretend to be involved in some kind of grown-up transaction, as many kids do in preparing for their futures in the world.
Curtice says: “Okay, this is da money. And that,” he says, indicating another pile of pebbles, “be the crack. You gives me the money, and 1 gives you the crack.”
These children are indeed preparing for a likely future in the nearby Georgetown projects and the surrounding hardscrabble apartments of what was once a kinder, gentler Pleasant Grove.
The Sanderson family- Sally, Eula Mae, and Bill-may be the only forces standing between children like these and a future of guns, drugs, murder, and misery. Of police cars and midnight rides, hands bound in handcuffs. Of prosecutors, public defenders, and lies that no longer work. Of the almost routine “execution-style slayings.”
Sally is saddened, but not at all surprised. She knows that the world that she and her contemporaries were raised in pas slipped away- She’s seen too many times the incoming 3-year-olds playing with Lego blocks. Nine times out of 10, the first thing they make is a pistol.
The staff works hard to get the children to stop making pistols. But it is hard to stop them, because that is what they know.
The mothers who bring their children to the door of Little Folks School these days don’t] have much time for parades or costumes. They’re harried, preoccupied with the logistics of poverty-the rent, the utilities, the groceries-as they rush in with their children and rush out again without them, racing against the clock to get to the|r low-income jobs or government training programs. But the mothers who drop their children off are in fact the lucky ones, At least they have cars, and Somewhere to go that day.
For those who don’t have cars or time, Little Folks School maintains two large vans for picking up pre-schoolers in the mornings and taking the older children to nearby San Jacinto, Hawthorne, and Rowe elementary schools. After school the vans bring them back to Little Folks, where they will be entertained, fed, and educated until 6:30 when it’s time to take them to their homes in the Georgetown projects or the rundown cut-and-shoot apartments along Piedmont and Buckner Boulevard.
Curtice and his brother, Lucius (all children’s names have been changed for this story), Have lived both in the projects and in the apartments. A short while back, the prbjects had a rampaging drug problem.
Yvette, a hard-working mother who tries to do what is right for her children despite her single, low-income status, was determined to get the boys out of those projects.
So she found an apartment not far away and moved her family there. And on the very first night, a raging gun battle broke out between the drug dealers who lived next door. Yvette and her children hid beneath the! bed while bullets came through the wall. Nobody was killed. And these days, that’s real lucky.
Once-it seems like a million years ago to the Sanderson family-while Eula Mae and her sister, Nell, were thinking about starting her lit le school, there was a death in the family. Eula Mae was vaguely listening to the conversation of her children, then toddlers, as they discussed the situation. The middle child, Bill, wanted to know whether the kids would he going to the funeral.
The oldest, Susan, said, “No, Bill, funerals are for big folks. School is for little folks.”
In spite of the sad circumstances, Eula Mae had to laugh, because she knew she had the perfect name for her school. Little Folks School it became.
But today, Eula Mae knows that childish wisdom just isn’t true any more. Today, all too often, funerals are for little folks.
CURTICE WAS A GOOD BOY WHEN HE first came to Little Folks School. He was well-behaved, but lately, like many of his peers, he has begun to act out, incessantly hitting and kicking the other children and stealing their things.
His brow is usually furrowed with suppressed rage, and, of course, Eula Mae Sanderson is concerned, as she has been concerned with all of the 6,000 or so children who have passed through LFS over the past 42 years. Eula Mae brings Curtice into her office and tries to get him to say what is bothering him. He doesn’t tell her, not because he doesn’t want to, but because many of these children from the ghetto simply don’t have the language skills to express their rage. In fact, even if they were more articulate, they still might be unable to put their mental fingers on the problem because, after all: What do they have to compare their lives to?
Life is just the way life is for these little folks.
Curtice, sullen, can’t say what has him disturbed more than usual lately, hut with friendly and motherly questioning, Eula Mae soon figures it out.
Curtice and Lucius have different fathers. And it turns out that recently, Lucius’ father returned to the apartment to live with Yvette for a while. Curtice is upset that Lucius has his father at home while Curtice does not have his (and he is too young to know that having both of them there might not he such a hot idea).
But one day Curtice comes to school in slightly better spirits, a little less depressed and angry. He has a recent photograph of his father, which he is proudly showing to anyone and everyone who will take time to look at it.
Eula Mae and Sally Fay praise Curtice and brag on the father, who cannot come to visit his son. In the picture he is wearing his prison overalls, standing in a cell.
Bill Sanderson, who drives one of the Little Folks vans, recalls another day, and another boy-Stephen, one of the school’s crack babies. “His mother was on cocaine when he was born-but he’s really smart, with more energy than the other children,” Bill says. “He and his sister live with different foster families. He wasn’t doing much right, so whenever he did anything halfway good, I complimented him. So I said, ’1 bet your mama and daddy are proud of you.’ “
Stephen, who is 3 1/2, said, “I ain’t got no daddy.” Then it started. A girl in the back seat said, “My daddy’s dead.” Another kid said, “My daddy’s in jail. ” All of them, Bill says, were fatherless. Eula Mae, Sally, Bill, and the staff of Little Folks fear that someday Curtice and maybe half of the kids in their care will follow in their absent fathers’ footsteps-footsteps leading to nowhere, or worse-dead, in jail, or just gone.
BACK IN THE ’50s AND ’60s, EULA Mae never gave a second thought to what happened to her charges after they went home. She knew that they were going home to stable families. No family is perfect, of course, but there were two parents to almost every household. Almost all of the kids were in LFS to learn, to catch up with the other first-graders who’d gotten a head start. None of them were there because harried mothers had nowhere else to take them. In fact, many of the mothers, themselves well-educated and caring deeply for the children, would volunteer at LFS. They could do that, because most of them didn’t work.
Eula Mae never dreamed that the day would come when she would routinely check LFS children for unusual bruises or other signs of abuse. She never dreamed that someday she’d be turning parents in to the authorities on child abuse charges. She never dreamed that she’d ever he asking 3-year-olds not what they ate, but when.
She never dreamed she’d have to turn down a child for care at Little Folks School because the toddler was so physically and mentally damaged by his mother’s crack abuse while in utero that all the child could do was thrash and bang its head on the floor.
Sometimes she looks hack on those halcyon simple times in a bygone Pleasant Grove and has to wonder: Was that the dream? Is this the reality? Increasingly, these projects, these crackhouses, these apartment complexes–these are the real world. The insane has become routine.
There was the drug-crazed prostitute who not too long ago just leaped right through the window into the office of Little Folks; thankfully, nobody was there at the time.
There’s another one in a nearby complex who works out of her apartment. Problem: Two kids. Solution? Lock them out of the house all day long, no food, no bathroom, while she turns her usual succession of $20 tricks. Finally, the children, hot and exhausted, begin defecating outside, underneath an air conditioning unit.
The Sandersons became aware of the neglect. The problem was that if they notified Child Protective Services, the woman’s pimp might attempt reprisals. They turned her in anyway, and for a long time, they have waited for the other shoe to drop.
Problem: Simone shows up at Little Folks with clear signs of physical abuse- bruises and a black eye.
State law requires child care providers to notify CPS of any evidence of child abuse. But is that the solution ? I t’s not likely that CPS will remove the child in any but the most severe cases -and a burgeoning caseload means that the definition of “serious” gets more extreme every year. There’s a better chance that the mother angered by the CPS visit, will not bring Simone back to LFS. Nothing will be gained, and a child’s oasis will be lost.
But the law is the law, so they notify the authorities.
And then Sally and Eula spend a long and anxious weekend praying for that child. Next Monday, the woman shows up. She is not smiling, but she leaves Simone in the care of LFS.
What else could she do? With CPS interested in her case, she has to leave the child somewhere safe while she goes to work. But Eula Mae Sanderson will gladly settle for these minor daily miracles in the way of answered prayers.
She prays a lot. She always has, hut even more alter the ’60s turned into the 70s and the 70s began to edge toward the ’80s. Because of Pleasant Grove’s reputation as a blue-collar community, anybody with white-collar pretensions wanted to leave, and most did, taking their money and leaving behind steadily declining property values.
As property values fell, the houses became increasingly attractive to low-income South Dallas residents, African-Americans who knew they could get more for their money in the Grove- which, sad to say, further hastened the decline in value, and the white, blue-collar middle class also began leaving in droves, driving values (and thus maintenance levels and pride, particularly in older apartment complexes) e\ en lower,
The boom was over. The Grove’s slow, grinding bust had begun. Many of Little Folks School’s paying clientele joined the exodus-younger, abler, more financially secure couples with children. White flight left an oversupply of housing and rental stock that was now, by definition if not quality, “low income.” And it left high and dry land “stuck” in the Grove those older homeowners who’d paid off their homes at had a substantial equity, but couldn’t get a price sufficient to let them start over at this late stage in life.
And many didn’t want to flee. Eula Mae was one of these, though her reasons were different. Sure, she’d seen the increase in crime; eight years ago she was mugged in her own driveway. And a few years later someone put a bullet through the window of her home.
But Eula did not pay undue attention to these developments, even as her paying, moderately affluent students were whisked away by moving vans, because she was noticing something. As white people moved out and black people moved in, there was still pretty much the same number of children, if not more, one day to the next. They were black instead of white, and poor instead of middle class. Many of them were the offspring of mothers who were little more than children themselves, fathered by men who were soon absent.
But Eula also noticed that they were little folks. And little folks go to school.
What’s more, these little folks needed her a million times more than all the generations of good solid Dallas citizenry who had preceded them through those happier days at Little Folks School and gone on to become some of the city’s doctors, lawyers, and businessmen.
Its not just the large and dramatic problems of violence and drugs that motivate Eula Sanderson to fight for these kids despite her advancing age. There is also pathos in the little things, and in just how little these deeply disadvantaged children of the ghetto know ahout the world which, if they are not careful, may one day eat them alive.
There was the girl, 9 years old, who went on a held trip to the Galleria. When they got to the ice rink, the girl was frozen, transfixed in open-mouthed amazement. Nine years old, and she’d never heard of such a thing as ice-skating and had a difficult time mentally encompassing the concept of it, even after Eula Mae had explained it to her at some length. Ice-skating was not part of her world.
When LFS staffers take the kids to the Science Place, the Arboretum, etc.-the big attractions aren’t the attractions themselves, but the elevators and escalators that many of these children have never seen before.
And all newcomers to the school are invariably fascinated with the caladiums and flowers in the neat beds in the sprawling playground. Small wars break out among the kids over who will get to use the hose to water them, for there are no hoses accessible in the projects and apartments where these kids live. It’s hard to imagine a childhood without the delight of a summertime romp with a water hose. But that’s what you find so much of at Little Folks School: Children who do not otherwise have childhoods, greedily drinking down the one offered them at Little Folks.
There is a sad progression to be witnessed here in this fragile oasis of security and childhood in one of the toughest parts of Pleasant Grove. Look at the littlest of these little ones, the 3- and 4-year-olds playing on the swings and seesaws, and you will still see what is arguably the most wonderful creature in all creation: a child.
You’ll see that wide-eyed, awed, and awesome innocence beaming out of these black, brown, and white faces, just the same as it does in children all over the world, from Highland Park to Haiti. It’s a look that calls to mind fresh air, clean water, sunshine, and love, both God’s and man’s.
Says Sally Sanderson Fay, as she surveys the playground: “The big difference I’ve noticed is that kids this age here are much more apt to hug you. They’ll hug anybody. They want attention. The children of my middle-class friends, on the other hand, they’ve got a good home life and they’ve got self-esteem and parents who think they are great, and who do everything for them; they are not as apt to he as affectionate to me as these kids are. These little ones just come running to hug your neck-especially if you’re male. If you’re male, well, with them, that’s the ticket. Especially for the little girls. Sheila, Bennis’ sister? Bill McCord came into the yard for something, and she ran up and hugged him. Never seen him before in her life.”
But go over to the other side of the playground and take a look at the children who are 6 and up. In many cases, the older they are, the more you will see that the childish, innocent look in their eyes is going, going, gone. As Eula Mae laments, “Yes, one of those days, the smiles will stop. And all we can do is, while they are here, help them as much as we can to he just happy little kids.”
With these older children, curiosity is often replaced by suspicion; innocence by dark unfortunate knowledge; intelligence by low cunning; spontaneity by angry impulsive compulsions; and friendliness by fear. As you look at them looking at you, you realize that the older ones are calculating, sizing you up:
What’s the angle on this white man? Do I smell cop?
In a little classroom at LFS, two of these older boys are sullenly coloring a happy-sappy mimeograph of the Easter Bunny.
Tyrone, 7, is smiling and animated, but it is the smile of a con artist, all shuck and jive. What’s this guy got that I want, and what kind of tap dance will get it?
His companion, Latrece, makes no such overtures at play-acting: He has indeed “gone”-as lifeless and disinterested as a cinder on the dark side of the moon. If there’s anything at all in that face, it’s sullen suspicion. This is not one of those happy little black faces they like to show in commercials about Jamaica. This is a face of stunted hopes, rage unvented, doubt and anger made flesh.
The tap-dancing one, Tyrone, chirps, “Want me to tell you a story?” He figures “cute” is the ticket here, and without waiting for the answer launches off into some rapid-fire yarn about the Easter Bunny, all the while cannily watching my face to judge the mark’s reaction, so he can fine-tune the cutesy-wutesy. But this particular mark is paying little attention to Tyrone, instead watching Latrece as he dispassionately, listlessly colors the meaningless bunnies on his page. The colors are dark, like Latrece’s inner landscape: All browns, blacks, cold blues, and concrete grays.
Tyrone’s wandering, nonsensical monologue finally peters out, no sale, at which point he chirps, “Hey! Want me to tell you another one:”
“No. I want Latrece to tell me a story.”
Latrece looks up suspiciously from the page, assessing my reassuring smile. I’m a big old whits man, probably every bit as reassuring as a barracuda, but 1 try. “Just tell me a story, Latrece.”
“What about?” he asks, scowling.
“Anything.”
Long dark pause.
Then: “Ok ay, I’ll tell you one about the Easter Bunny, too,” and he begins to extemporize, although from a different script than the one that Tyrone used.
“See, there was this kid, and this guy kept coming ; round and breakin’ into the apartment an i stealin’ stuff and beatin up his mama and hurt her bad. He hurt the kid, too.
“See, he was a real bad dude, man, he was a killer, man, but the police, they wouldn’t do nothin’ about him, because, thing was, they was afraid of him, too, because he was a killer.
“Easter time was a-comin, and his mama, she axed him what he wanted to do, and he said, ’I dunno, eat somma them Easter eggs, I guess,’ and he did, but they made him sick. And while he was sick in the bed, the killer, he come back around, and this time, he got a gun. His mama, she say, ’Please don’t hurt me,’ but the killer, he gettin’ ready to kill her, but all of a sudden, the Easter Bunny, he come bustin’ in the door. See and the Easter Bunny, he got a gun, too, and he shoot the killer. Killed him dead, man. After that, everybody is happy. The end.”
In the projects and shabby welfare apartments, even the Easter Bunny does not go around unarmed. In fact, the only fiction in Latrece’s tall tale is the intervening rabbit; otherwise, as Latrece knows, this is the commonplace stuff of daily life. You can call the police all you want-but only the Easter Bunny is gonna get there in time to do any good.
For Latrece has seen things, hence his darkness-his “shades” against the savage glare of gunfire, violence, and hate. He already instinctively suspects that he can either live that kind of life, or let it kill him. He sees no third choice.
In the aftermath of one drug deal gone wrong, in fact, he saw the bullet-riddled bloodstained body lying out in broad daylight. He remembers it well; if you ask him about it, he will admit it. His younger brother saw the body, too, but says he does not remember it; Eula Mae Sanderson believes the memory is merely repressed.
Latrece does not often talk about the body–and when he does, it is not in English but in that difficult-to-understand ghetto patois by which black kids are intent upon showing solidarity with each other- and which will hold them back just as woefully as everything else in their backgrounds. Driving a school van each day, Bill Sanderson has gotten to know the kids and learned to speak their language.
“Those mamas are working hard to raise those kids,” Bill says. “They can’t help it that they’ve had the kind of cosmic bad, bad luck to both be trapped in poverty and single parents. Those mamas come home tired and the kids, they have a lot of energy and need a lot of attention, but for the mamas, at the end of the day, there’s just nothing left for the kids sometimes. Everybody’s doing the best they can; we are just trying to hold the line and help the best we can.
“And these kids desperately need some kind of violence counseling, We need a social worker at Little Folks School, but the government says it doesn’t have enough for much of that at DISD, much less us.”
So Latrece’s future remains, at best, a crapshoot. Every passing day in this nightmare reminds him of his choices. He can be like the ventilated chump lying there deader than the parking lot he died on. Or he can he cool, like the Easter Bunny.
Looking at his increasingly cold expression, a chilling thought: I would not wish to be the convenience store clerk or liquor store owner who looked up from my work and saw that face again, only 20 years from now, and that much colder.
Eula Mae stays on at LFS year after year, long past retirement age and easily 15 years past the point where the neighborhood’s income level would allow her to make anything like a good living off the place. She stays because she knows that if she’s not there to do it-attempt to provide these children with a childhood at least something like the one she and her children after her enjoyed-nobody else will.
“Family values” is, for her, more than just a buzzword the conservative politicians use to cut funding out from under the very kind of kids she takes care of. She came by her family values honestly. Her roots run deep, back into those better times.
Many of the mothers who wish to enroll their children in Little Folks School neither have the money to pay for it nor qualify for the federal assistance which in some cases will pay for half the cost of care ($67.50 a week, the very lowest amount Eula Mae can charge and still offer her range of services, but still a considerable stretch for single-parent households that may be subsisting on minimum wage).
So LFS has to scrounge for funding, either in the form of government grants or private donations from a growing network of supporters (she opted for nonprofit status in 1979, after the school became truly unprofitable), and still she’s uncertain whether she’ll he able to keep the doors open.
But Eula Mae, Sally, and Bill all know that the availability of day care may literally mean life or death, home or home-lessness for these fractured little families; she has many times “donated” LFS services to the least fortunate, placing her faith in God that it would all balance out in the end.
And so far, it has: Her proudest moment came this spring when alums from the good old days surprised her with a $5,000 gift towards the Eula Mae Sanderson Scholarship Fund.
That charity also manifests itself in little ways that are no less important, because Eula Mae believes that when people are treated better, they do better.
“These mothers have been stereotyped as ’welfare mothers,’ ” Eula Mae says. ’But it’s not true. Some of them are very good mothets-and the ones that aren’t want to be, but just haven’t had any very good examples.” It’s one of her goals to get the funding to offer classes in mothering skills.
Sally interjects, “This one mother came in here one day to see about child care. She had an 8-year-old and another child who was 2. She really needed care for these kids, and since she was working, and needed a better job, she didn’t qualify for job training. All kinds of problems.
“It was sad, but we had to turn her down. We’d already responded to so many hard-luck stories. It kills us to have to do that; there she is, standing there with tears in her eyes, trying to figure out what she can do with her kids…”
To help these mothers, Eula and LFS try to impart those messages from the old days concerning things like the strength of one’s convictions. There is no preaching or Bible-thumping per se, but Eula Mae is not embarrassed about imparting those underlying values.
But most important, Eula Mae believes, is the underlying message of everything she’s reflected upon so far: While growing up on the large farm that would someday become most of Pleasant Grove, she had what she now believes every child desperately needs.
Two parents. A mother and a father.
And that is one thing that Eula Mae Sanderson cannot provide for these children. All she can do is keep on scrambling, trying to find the funding to extend a childhood to as many of these fatherless children as she can, and, she hopes, undo some of the damage.
She stands amid the children in the playground-her children. “I feel blessed to have touched so many young lives, and in the community we’ve always loved. Other people go around the world to have their careers; 1 never had to leave home. Sure, times are tougher now than they were when I or my children were growing up, hut kids are kids, and they still need our patience and understanding- For as long as I can, I will continue doing what I feel I was put here to do.”
How long will that be?
There is, in the middle of the school’s playground, a venerable old hackberry tree. Years ago, way hack when the community of Pleasant Grove was mainly just the McCoy farm, there were no trees on this part of it. Eula Mae’s father, who ran the farm for Mr. McCoy, would go down into the wooded areas and, with his mule team, pull up entire trees for transplanting to the bare parts. He planted this tree. Like his own offspring, Eula Mae, it is well rooted in this land. It’s still bearing fruit.
Eula Mae looks up into its branches.
“This is my tree. I’ve told my kids that when it goes, I’ll go. 1 hope it’s hanging on. We’ve got it braced.” She laughs. “Maybe we need to get me braced.”
Maybe so, because like that springtime tree glowing green with life, Eula Mae is quietly and stolidly supporting something very important to the future of the world- new life, and growth.
