My Girl, Mary Pearl

Excerpted from Chapter One

Turn down any dirt road in Alabama and unless you're in the Black Belt, your tires will create a whirlwind of choking red dust. Just down the road there's a piece of history, leaning with the weight of its years. A house, three-four rooms, maybe covered with a little tar paper, maybe just aging, silvery clapboards, with a porch on the front. Around back, where the kitchen was, there might be an old hand pump or just a well head, capped with cement.It's a shotgun style house: stand at the front door and shoot straight out the back door. To the east, the west, or all around the house are fields.Seventy-five or a hundred years ago the crop was corn and cotton.

The biggest difference between then and now is that mechanized farm equipment allows farmers to ride in air conditioned comfort while they tend acre after acre. Not too long ago, a man could only work a field with his two hands, a mule, his wife and children. These farmers rarely owned the land they worked; they planted and harvested what they could, then turned over most of the profits to the landowner. Sharecropping dominated Alabama until the labor of a single man could tend vast tracts of land.

Howard "Blue Eye" Cook, through a sign language interpreter, told his story with great drama. He was born in 1927, and shortly after that, "My father came in from working in the fields...and I was in my mothers lap and my mother was hollering at me. When there was no answer my father told my mother 'that baby's deaf!'"

That baby, Blue Eye Cook, went to Talladega and the Alabama School for Negro Deaf and Blind when he was old enough to go to school. Like hundreds of others, black, white, deaf, blind, he needed a way to learn, and a place to do it. Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind would become a new world for all of them. The four campuses -- deaf school, blind school, each in black and white -- were remarkably similar to their sister schools all over the country. Yet there is something unique here too. Only in Alabama could these stories develop, because of who and what we are. These stories, each one from an individual perspective, may or may not reflect a literal truth. But each one represents a personal truth.