Carolina in my Mind

Last week I happened to drive through the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on the day the class of 2012 was due to arrive. The early morning sun sparkled on the freshly scrubbed campus streets and dorm windows. The student store stood with overstuffed shelves waiting patiently for the first of the wide eyed faces eager to purchase notebooks, pens, and tee shirts. I was carried back to my first small tentative steps across those brick walkways. Thirty years have passed since my brother dropped me off at the bottom of the hill of Hinton James dorm. After unloading my things he treated me to lunch at Roy Rogers where I had the first of many double “R” bar burgers. Parents with their station wagons and trailers were crowding the drop off circle making parking difficult, so we said our goodbye as quickly as pulling off a band-aid. The sting was no less sharp. I watched through watery eyes as his car disappeared in to the curve of Manning Drive.

My journey to Chapel Hill had started at least a year prior to my arrival. Those steps were sure and swift, a contrast to the tip toes of my first days on campus. Modern young women find our stories hard to believe. I have never thought of myself as a liberated woman, yet I have struggled to maintain my identity as an individual in a world of female stereotypes. The demarcation between traditionalist and feminist was blurry in the seventies. I wanted to be a journalist, but most of all; I wanted to leave my father’s house as quickly as possible. My father thought I should get a job as a clerk at the local Winn Dixie. He felt education was wasted on girls because they should focus on finding husbands and raising children, and he forbade me to pursue college. Self preservation and indignation rose up in a stormy duet surging me to defiance. I would find a way to leave his town, his house, his tyranny. I made my own way, without any help from him. In retrospect, I don’t know from where that strength of character came, but come it did, and I found myself alone, sitting in a tiny dorm room waiting for my roommate and my life to begin.

Was it yesterday or thirty years ago? Every step that I have taken since depended on those first steps toward independence and adulthood. My life is forever tinted “Carolina Blue”.