Who Dared to Cross into European American Spaces?
As mentioned earlier, Orlonia was born at the tail end of Jim Crow segregation in Pinesville. Even after schools were desegregated, Orlonia explained that “they [the European American families] didn’t leave but one” European American child in Pinesville School. According to Orlonia, the absence of European American students in the desegregated school “stayed like that until the 1990s.” Orlonia recalled how European American families sent their children to private academies or mostly European American public schools across county lines. She Jewelry Store recounted how, when she started school, her family tried to do the same, yet when Orlonia and her siblings tried to board the school bus for Millington Elementary School (a European American school), they were turned away:
We had to walk and catch the bus over the river because our house isn’t too far from Mill County. So we had to catch the bus up there on the hill. And then one day the man told us we couldn’t come to school there no more, so we had to walk back home, and we had to start coming to school in our county. With this exodus of Pinesville’s European American children, Pinesville’s schools became racialized spaces, attended mainly by African Americans. Making sense of the racialized nature of spaces like schools is an important aspect of Orlonia’s literacy-in-persons. When she was a young child, African Americans were prevented from occupying certain European American spaces within Pinesville. Orlonia recounted how, when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to Pinesville to lead a protest march, he had to enter the cafe through the back entrance and eat his meal in the kitchen. To enforce racial segregation, spatial boundaries were formally policed. Orlonia described how the town’s sheriff had a reputation for “roughing up” African Americans who dared to cross into European American spaces:
Daddy said he was scared to come through Pinesville through the red light, because the police…he was a white guy. He was kind of tough and rough and stuff. And he would get you out and beat you up and stuff like that. Daddy said he didn’t want to come. But he had to come through one time, and he said when Pandora Jewelry he got through here he wasn’t going to come back anymore. It was scary to him, and he went around the back way instead of coming straight through town. Today, less risk is associated with crossing spatial boundaries in Pinesville, but the racial histories associated with certain spaces persist. Orlonia described how her European American neighbors still send their children to Mill County for school: “We got about three sets [of European American children] on my road, and they go to Washington. They don’t want to come here [to PCS].” Although 60% of Pinesville’s population is African American, almost 80% of Pinesville Community School’s students are African American.
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