NewsLady

AuthorHouse

Contents

Prologue...............................................................xiChapter 1. Time to Go..................................................1Chapter 2. Becoming Me.................................................5Chapter 3. A Child's Eye View of Racism................................13Chapter 4. The "Colored" Lois Lane.....................................21Chapter 5. From the Urban North to the Rural South.....................31Chapter 6. Take Me Back to Chicago.....................................41Chapter 7. I Am Woman..................................................49Chapter 8. Dr. Martin Luther King Gives Me a Boost.....................61Chapter 9. Black, Female and Pregnant..................................69Chapter 10. Ms. Simpson Goes to Washington.............................81Chapter 11. The NBC Push to ABC........................................93Chapter 12. ABC Newswomen vs. ABC Newsmen..............................103Chapter 13. NewsLady to AnchorLady.....................................117Chapter 14. Reporting on "The Other America"...........................129Chapter 15. Cry, The Reviled Country...................................153Chapter 16. In To Africa...............................................169Chapter 17. The Double Whammy..........................................179Chapter 18. The 1992 Presidential Debate...............................189Chapter 19. Death Threats..............................................201Chapter 20. Letters. I Got Letters.....................................207Chapter 21. Having It All..............................................219Chapter 22. What's Wrong With Me?......................................231Chapter 23. My Fall From Grace.........................................237Chapter 24. Paying The Price...........................................247Chapter 25. The Anthrax Debacle........................................255Chapter 26. The Newslady is Banished...................................269Chapter 27. Older, Wiser and Happier...................................275Chapter 28. Take-Aways.................................................281Epilogue...............................................................283

Chapter One

I don't know for sure when I was born. My birth certificate says December 7, 1940. But my mother told me she was in labor with me when news of the Japanese aerial attacks on U.S. Navy ships moored in Pearl Harbor, blared from the radio striking much more fear in her than my impending Caesarean birth. One of my aunts was with her and swears she heard the same alarming reports from the hallways of St. Luke's hospital in Chicago. In all the excitement, were the nurses so nervous they put down the wrong year on birth record? I would like to think so.

I always preferred the Pearl Harbor date. It made me a year younger and I would have been born on the day President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called, "a day that will live in infamy." I always had a flair for the dramatic. But that official 1940 birth certificate date follows me. I always want to correct it with, "Hey, I was really born in 1941."

Although I took my first breath in Chicago, I always felt that my roots sprang from the South. My mother, Doretha Viola Wilbon, was born in the small rural town of Washington, Georgia. Her father was a white man, one of the sons of the richest man in town, Pembroke Pope. When my grandfather, Frank Wilbon, was sixteen years old, he fell in love with a young black girl, named Hilda Stalnaker. She was only twelve. Frank had seen her playing jump rope and ball in her front yard. One day he got up the courage to stop at her house to ask her father if he could court his daughter. My great grandfather must have been astonished. The son of the richest white man in town wanted to court Hilda? He told Frank that Hilda was a little too young to be courting, and suggested he wait until she was older, maybe in three years. Frank agreed. Over the years he would steal peeks of her around her house and waited.

No Negro girl was courted by a white man in the 1880's. If a man wanted to have anything to do with a black girl, he just had his way with her, and a black father better not complain.

When Hilda was fifteen Frank came "a'callin'". My white grandfather followed the etiquette expected of a proper young gentleman of his time. After a year of visiting in the front parlor and sitting outdoors on the big porch swing, he asked Hilda's father for her hand in marriage. My great grandfather gave his blessing. Once Frank had taken a black woman for his wife, unheard of in that place and at that time, he was treated as a black man for the rest of his life. To see his own father, he had to go to the back door with his hat in his hand.

My mother, Doretha, was the eldest of Frank's eight children. Hilda died in childbirth at age twenty-nine and little Doretha was only nine years old. She had to become the "woman of the house," caring for her little brothers and sisters, cleaning and cooking for Poppa and the family. She always regretted that she didn't have her mother in her growing up years. She had no one she could ask questions or who could teach her things. Her childhood was cut short with no time for fun and play. When my mother was twelve, Poppa realized Doretha couldn't handle the increasingly difficult job that had fallen to her, so he took a new wife, another black woman, Eva Hayes. Together they had thirteen more children. That's a total of twenty-one children that Poppa sired. Between the two sets of siblings, there was never any distinction made between half-brothers or whole sisters. They were all Poppa's children and my mother, as the eldest, became the matriarch to them all.

My grandfather owned 160 acres of land deeded to him by his father when he was a boy. Like other farmers of his day he wanted lots of children to help him in the fields. He had cows, pigs, a horse and a mule, chickens, cotton and vegetable crops. He was also a Baptist preacher, who had a circuit of four small black churches around Wilkes County.

Every Sunday he would drive his horse miles from home to minister to one of his various flocks. He was one of those "hell and brimstone" preachers, too. He would jump and shout in the pulpits of the tiny, white frame churches, until he got red in the face and had to pull out his big white handkerchief to wipe the sweat that glistened around his whole face. As a little girl I watched him baptize people in small creeks, pushing each nervous man, woman and child face up under the muddy water for a few seconds, and then pulling them up dripping wet and shouting for joy. He told the family: "I leave some of 'em underwater a little longer than necessary, `cause it scares the love of Jesus into `em. And some of these sinful folks really need to "love them some Jesus." Poppa sounded just like a black preacher.

Once Mama Eva took over the household, my mother was able to go to school, but she didn't get past the ninth grade. Photographs of her at thirteen show that she was already beautiful, with dark brown hair so long she could sit on the ends of it. One day one of the white men in town told my grandfather he wanted her, and he said if he didn't turn her over to him, he would take her. Poppa said, "Over my dead body."

Poppa was an incredible shot. My uncles say he could shoot a rabbit running toward him right between the eyes. He got out his best rifle and sat at the...