Dear and Gentle Readers,
I am glad that I woke up today; I awoke with an answer.
We wrote on a recent thread about waking up with answers to something troubling us or about something forgotten. Upon arising a few minutes ago, I instantly recalled four words very important but lost in a haze: "A Desk for Billie." A 1956 docu-drama put out by the National Educational Association, this little film influenced a very poor boy named CoCo. It's about a hobo child who gets education.
Please take time to read her story. I am so grateful for Google!
Love,
CoCo
LifeWriters Talk About LifeWriting
Dr. Billie Davis: Becoming a Real Person
(03/04, Vol. 8, Number 1)
Billie Davis has a unique story to tell. Her autobiographical account, I Was a Hobo Kid, relates her experiences as a migrant child. It originally appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1952, was reprinted in Readers Digest and many anthologies, and was made into a video entitled A Desk for Billie by the National Education Association.
I caught up with Billie at the Story Circle Conference in Austin where she was participating in a panel on the power of story to inspire and create change. As she told me in our interview, it was through telling her own story in the Saturday Evening Post article that she discovered an important calling in her life as a sociologist and educator.
Story Circle Journal: Billie, please tell us a little about your unusual childhood.
Billie Davis: My people were the true homeless migrant workers. I was born in 1923 in Oregon when my parents were picking hops. We traveled from there all up and down the coast picking fruits and vegetables crops. We traveled in much of the West, picking oranges and grapefruit in Texas and Florida. My Dad liked to shuck some corn in Nebraska and harvest the wheat in Kansas and then we’d travel up to Idaho for the truck gardening and peaches, then out to Oregon and down the coast. The first thing I remember was traveling in an old car, probably a Model T Ford.
Sometimes my dad would say, "I'm sick of doing the rich man's dirty work," and he'd go down to the river and cut willows and make baskets. And my mother would make crepe paper flowers. In all the places we traveled to, I'd go out and sell the baskets and flowers and I became very aware of community and this is the core of my story. As an outsider, I had an opportunity to see what a community really was—more so than the people who lived there, in many respects. In neighborhoods, I knocked on doors. In the towns, I went into the stores. I'd walk into a barbershop, for example, and quite often the men would be joking and pleasant. I liked the barbershops. Since I'd started out as early as I did, I wasn't afraid. I'd ask, What's that? What's that? People would tell me, Well, that's a library; that's a courthouse; that's a fire station.
SCJ: From an early age you became aware of communities. But how did you first start to join a community?
BD: My first really definitive experience was a library. I asked a lady who bought a basket to tell me what a library was and she told me that anybody could go there and read books. Anybody could go there. So I went into the library and I was fascinated. I was about six at the time. We didn't stay anywhere long enough for me to get a library card and borrow the books and I didn't have any address. Libraries didn't have children's sections like they do now in the magnificent libraries of today. It was just an old-fashioned library with shelves of books. But the library gave me a real goal: I wanted to learn to read the books.
My next climactic experience was the Sunday school. We used to camp by the river or out by the stockyards or the city dump where there were wide places where you could pitch a tent. I saw the children going by on the bridge. I asked my mother, "Where are they going?" She said, "They're going to Sunday school probably, because it's Sunday." They looked so beautiful. In those days, I called them the clean smooth children. That's a paradox for today. Kids nowadays want to be wrinkled and tattered. But in my day the wrinkled, tattered people were the hobos and the bums, and the clean smooth children had shiny shoes and ironed clothes. I thought that was wonderful.
I went down the road and I came to this little church. This was a small town probably in Kansas or Nebraska; it was probably one of those times when my Dad went off to shuck corn. There seemed to be a river, like the Platt River, but I couldn't say exactly where it was. And I went into this little church. The children went down into a basement room and I followed them. Again I wasn't afraid. I was reluctant—I stayed away from them because they were "real people." I sat down in a little red chair and listened to the story about Jesus, and that impressed me. The teacher said, "You are children of God." I thought, "Ah, if I could be a child of God, I wouldn't be a bum."
Usually, the kids would laugh at us and throw rocks and sticks. They'd say, "Look at the gypsies and the dirty bums." I'd hear people say, "Don't go down there by the river. Those gypsies probably have lice and probably steal chickens." And so when I first went to church, that's when I got the idea I wanted to be what I called a "real person" and live in a house.
SCJ: What was it about that early Sunday school experience that kept you coming back?
BD: It was an emotional experience. I've never been really mystical, although I realize that, if there is Providence, then God led me. At the time, I just wanted to be like the real people and if Jesus would love me and make me a real person then I was all for that. After that I started looking for churches. Eventually I claimed the church and felt I was welcome there. I had good experiences.
I was the kind of person who could sit through a session and then run away. I didn't expect to be made to feel at home or anything like that. I was an outsider. I didn't really belong there. We often say that, when people come into church, we have to make them feel at home. They'll feel resentful if nobody speaks to them. Well, that didn't enter my head because I was a different creature.
We didn't stay too long in one place in those early years. But later I did become very much affiliated with the church. In my teenage years I joined the Salvation Army and they sent me to a leadership training school.
SCJ: How did you manage to fit schooling into this wandering life?
BD: The first school was in Fort Laramie, Wyoming. Fort Laramie was an old fort town where they had a carnival celebration. My dad got acquainted with some carnival people and they went to the carnival to sell novelties. The people at the carnival said they were sending their children to town to the consolidated school because a bus would come right by the place where the carnival was.
I said to my mother, "I want to go to school, I want to go to school." I was already eight years old and my sister was less than two years younger. So we were both old enough to go to school. So we got on the school bus and went to school. The school was cogniscent of the migrant children and they were very kind to us. That was a very good experience. The film A Desk for Billie is about that experience, of beginning school as a hobo kid.
After that, I went to school wherever we went. My parents laughed about it and sometimes they were reluctant to let me go. They needed me to work in the fields. Until I graduated from high school, I was still going out to sell things on weekends. I estimate I went to about 40 schools in all.
Then finally we were in California and it was time for me to go to high school. I went to a consolidated high school. I stayed there part of one year. Then the next year we went to Bakersfield CA. By that time, they had the farm labor program and there was relief. We were staying in a little shack on the edge of town. These shacks were set up especially for the migrants. They didn't have electricity or running water. We used a common place to get water and the director of the camp or the janitor or somebody came around and turned on the electricity at night and then turned it off in the morning. We didn't touch the switches ourselves. There, I graduated from East Bakersfield High School.
SCJ: What was it that enabled you to accept your situation and take the best that was offered to you and use it to your advantage?
BD: I attribute that partly to the religious factor. I really did get into the Sunday school and the church and that kept me thinking that there was a possibility and I didn't want to throw away my chances. I was angry but I didn't want to be angry with the people. Rather than be angry I wanted to join them. I did a few spiteful things because I was mad at people for treating me that way but all in all I decided that it was to my advantage to take the opportunities to go to school, to go to the library, to go to church, and to get what the community had to offer. So much is there, if you'll just open your eyes and take advantage of it.
SCJ: How did you begin your career in Christian education?
BD: By the time I graduated from high school, I had become very much affiliated with the church. I wanted to become a Christian journalist. I had heard about the Gospel Publishing House in Springfield, Missouri. The Sunday school paper had an advice column by "Cousin Clara." I wrote her a letter and said I wanted to be a Christian journalist; what would she advise me to do? She sent back a regular form letter, saying obey your parents and so on.
But this is where the miracle happened. Soon after that, they were just beginning a Sunday school journal, a magazine for teachers and Sunday school counselors. The director of the Sunday School Department was talking to this Cousin Clara, saying he needed Christian writers. This was during the war. It was hard to find people. Cousin Clara pulled out my letter and he wrote to me and asked if I'd like a job. So I worked in an aircraft factory in Bakersfield long enough to buy a ticket to Springfield. I spent a few years there and that's where I met my husband. He also was training in the field of Christian education.
SCJ: It's a long journey from being a six-year-old homeless kid selling baskets of paper flowers to being a college teacher with a doctorate in sociology. Tell us how you came to go to college and how you chose sociology.
BD: I started going to college in Springfield. Before I finished and graduated, we had already moved a couple of times. (With my husband, I went from one kind of moving to another. Altogether I went to seven colleges.) I was taking classes at Southwest Missouri State College in 1952 when I wrote my story "I Was a Hobo Kid" and sold it to the Saturday Evening Post. Because of the story, I soon began getting all these invitations to speak. We were living in Springfield and my husband was still working in the Gospel Publishing house.
After I completed my BA at Drury College (now Drury University) in Springfield, I enrolled at the University of Missouri in Columbia, which had a great journalism school. But I decided that, more than the technique of writing, I needed to have something to write about, so I switched to the masters program in sociology.
In my sociology and psychology studies, I learned that the two great needs of mankind are meaning and belonging. You need to have some meaning, some purpose, to life, and you need to belong. So many people today don't have any meaning in their lives and they don't belong anywhere. That's the problem of our society in a nutshell.
SCJ: Tell us about your missionary work.
BD: In the 1960s, my husband and I went to the mission field to do Christian education work. We traveled in all the countries of central and south America and the West Indies. Altogether we have a service record of 42 years. We were in Costa Rica for four years and in Chile for four years, and then they put us back into Miami. From there my husband flew a little airplane out to the West Indies, while I got a job at the university part time and worked on my doctorate.
Even with all I've done in my life, what I'm most proud of is my daughter, whom we adopted in Costa Rica. She was seven and was an abandoned child. We were teaching in this little bible school in Costa Rica. One of the native women, a banana seller, had brought this little girl with her to bible school. She might have been the girl's aunt. They call everybody Tia so we don't know if she was a real aunt or an adopted aunt. She smuggled this little girl in and was living in the girls' dorm with her. One time when I was out in the little cabin that we used for a faculty office, this little girl came to the door. I asked her name. I found out she had been told to stay in the dormitory because they were afraid she would be sent home. When I found her, I took her in. Finally we found out where she came from and got a lawyer and adopted her. She is now a grown woman and lives in Bakersfield CA.
SCJ: Recently you've written about being a marginal person, in the sense of living at the margins between two cultures, and how marginality can actually be a benefit. How is that?
BD: I talk about this in my 1997 article in Eye on Psi Chi [the journal of the National Honor Society in Psychology]. If you are a marginal person you can learn to look both ways. As I grew up and got involved in the church and the schools, I was at odds with my people. They were angry at me for trying to "go over there and act like those nasty-nice school teachers, those high-falutin' rich people that kick you in the teeth and push you down and don't give a man a chance." They wanted to know, "Why do you want to do that?" Even among the hobos, I was an outcast. I didn't belong. I learned to be a marginal person, living in two worlds.
There is an advantage to being a marginal person. You develop a double consciousness or double vision that gives you two different perspectives on society. Psychologists now recognize that the adjustment needed for optimum multicultural relations to occur is to yield part of one's birth culture to merge with another. We call this becoming the 150 percent person; the person who is more than whole.
—Interview and article by Jane Ross
Billie Davis's writing credits include I Was a Hobo Kid; Teaching to Meet Crisis Needs; The Dynamic Classroom; People, Tasks and Goals; and Renewing Hope. In addition, she recently authored a chapter in the book, A Christian World View, and she contributed to the book The Ripe Harvest. She has been published in such periodicals as Country Folk and Christian Education Counselor. Billie was recently included in a biographical book entitled, People of Purpose, People Who Make a Difference. She is a winner of the Awakening the Giant Writing Award and has been awarded the Meritorious Service to Education from the Missouri State Education Association, the Outstanding Achievement award from Florida Federation of Business and Professional Women, and the Migrant Educator award.
—Credits provided by the Writers' Hall of Fame
About 'LifeWriters Talk About LifeWriting'"LifeWriters Talk About LifeWriting" is a series of interviews with LifeWriters published in the Story Circle Journal. The Story Circle Network is a non-profit organization that honors women's voices, celebrates women's lives, and encourages women to tell their stories. To learn more about this unique organization, go to www.storycircle.org; to become a member, go to www.storycircle.org/frmjoinscn.shtml. For information about the series or the Network, contact us via email: [email protected] or phone: 512-454-9833 or write to: © 2004 by Story Circle Network |
Last updated: 03/13/04
Shalon Maral Says: