We packed up our meager belongings in our Volkswagen Beetle and made the long drive to Chapel Hill in the late summer of 1968. I was very excited about going to city planning school and Embry had managed to land a job as a computer programmer, working for one of the planning school professors.
A good friend of ours had been living in the area and asked if we might be interested in taking over his lease of a small house located in neighboring Carrboro. The house was located on a quiet street in a modest neighborhood in the Black section of town and only a 10-minute bike ride to the UNC campus. It sounded perfect to us and we took it. It was our first real house, about three times the size of our New York apartment, and we loved it.
We soon met my classmates and I was very impressed. There were about 25 students in my class, and they came from all over the country. About a third had taken time off to get a breath of fresh air after college, spending time in the Peace Corps, working for nonprofits, trying out another graduate school (like me), or working in interesting jobs. Unlike at Union where most students were men, over a third were women. Many of my classmates had graduated from elite colleges, and they were just as sharp as my Union Seminary classmates but without the angst and theological baggage.
One of my vivid memories of planning school was when a guest professor in “social planning” from Boston College showed up and admitted he had not been to the South or ever met anyone from there. He started off his first lecture by asking “How many of you Southerners have ever heard of a newspaper called The New York Times?” When no one raised a hand and we all feigned ignorance by giving each other bewildered looks, he said that he understood and went on to describe the newspaper, adding that we should not feel too bad about never having heard of it; and if we continued with his class, he promised he would teach us ignorant Southerners a lot. At that point I walked out of the class and never returned. My exhausted classmates, who universally disliked the condescending professor and resented my absences, shook their heads in disbelief when at the end of the semester I got the same grade, a “pass,” as everyone else.
The faculty was more practical and less erudite than the professors I had at Union, and several seemed close to my age. They were all bright and enthusiastic about the field of city planning. Most classes were small and generally engaging. It felt like the right fit for me.
The big event for us the fall semester of 1968 was the birth of our daughter, Katherine Lindsay Howell, a six-pound baby girl, born in Watts Hospital in Durham, NC on November 19,1968. Al Lowenstein, the charismatic civil rights activist and future congressman from New York, was staying with us at the time along with his wife Jenny, sleeping on the sofa bed in our living room. We squeezed our way out around them just after midnight as they wished us good luck as we headed to the hospital.
Embry had enrolled in a class preparing expectant mothers for natural childbirth and gave birth to Katherine without any medication as I provided moral support and stood by her bed. The delivery was not without pain, of course, and made me appreciate being male and not having to go through anything like this. I was especially proud of Embry for her courage and determination to have a natural delivery, personality traits that have remained with her to this day. I had never seen Embry happier or more content than she was as a young mother in those early days of Katherine’s life. She loved that baby with all her heart and soul. We were able to find a great childcare arrangement with a kind, Black woman who specialized in providing childcare to infants of planning students. Life was good.
Well, more or less. There was one incident. During the second or third week after the birth of Katherine, we were in our new home and I was at my desk in front of my computer. I heard something scratching at my window and was startled and astonished to see the face of an aging Black woman with her nose pressed hard against the window, staring at me. She announced, “Get out, get out of my house, white trash! Get out!” I quickly pulled down the shade and tried to get my wits about me. Could I be experiencing a ghost?
Embry pointed out that she had seen this old woman going in and out of the garage behind the house.
The next morning, I called our landlady in New York to try to figure out what was going on. She apologized and explained that before we moved in, she had recently renovated the garage for her mother to live in and was sure nothing like this would happen again though she confessed that her mother did have some memory problems. This routine happened several nights in a row . I tried to ignore her, pulling down the shade each time.
Then soon after the appearance of this strange woman all the laundry we had put outside to dry on the clothesline disappeared. We knocked on the door of the renovated garage to ask the elderly lady if she knew what might have become of the laundry and saw it neatly folded on a side table in her vestibule. We grabbed the laundry and charged back to our house, locking the door behind us.
I called the landlady again to complain. Several weeks passed without incident. Just as we were beginning to relax, we returned to the house after working in the garden in our front yard to discover to our horror that our daughter, Katherine, had disappeared from the crib in her room. Panic! We immediately raced to the garage and pounded on the old lady’s front door. As she opened the door slowly, I peaked in and saw Katherine lying on her bed. Embry forced her way in and grabbed the infant.
This was the last straw. After I called to relate the incident to landlady, she drove down the next weekend, taking her mother home with her. We never saw the landlady or her aging mother again.
This was the best of times and a new beginning for us. Despite our ordeal with our landlady’s confused mother, all was right in the world. New home, new career track for me, new job for Embry, and our adorable first child. This had to one of the best years in my life and in our marriage.
It would not finish that way. What happened next will be the story of the next post.