O.Henry Ending
The Patient Fisherwoman Lessons learned from the end of a bamboo pole
By Felton Foushee
G
rowing up in Greensboro, I was fortunate to spend a lot of time with my great-grandmother, Dorethea Raleigh, a daughter of Collins Grove, a small African-American community off Fleming Road near what is now Bryan Boulevard. Once upon a time, there were a number of similar communities scattered around the Gate City, many of which have been swallowed up by Greensboro’s growth. If it’s true that the earliest years of life are the most important in terms of shaping a young person’s attitudes and character — those moments that occur, if you will, without the learner even being aware of it — then I count myself very lucky to have been around Miss Dorethea during the first twelve years of my life. She was a woman from another age who was born in 1909 and lived to the ripe old age of 77, the matriarch of our family whom everyone simply called “Grandmother.” Not surprisingly, she was pretty rigid and Old School about a lot of things — how you behaved and what you said and whether you lived up to your promises. She was also a woman of faith and one of the hardest working people I ever saw — up every morning before the sunrise making a full breakfast she expected you to eat, always gardening or canning vegetables. In our family, Grandmother’s word was final — and her discipline wasn’t something you wanted to experience first-hand. The breadth of her life came to fascinate me. She’d lived through so much social change — from Prohibition and the rise of the glorified American gangster to the Great Depression and the Second World War, the birth of the modern civil rights movement right here in Greensboro, an event that changed all our lives for the better, black and white alike. Upon her passing in 1987, an uncle gave my sister Loraine and me some of our great-grandmother’s things. Inside a small leather binder were a number of expired driver’s licenses that Miss Dorethea had possessed over the years. The photos on the licenses were oddly comforting because they showed her at various stages of life. The clothes changed, the years changed, the style of eyeglasses she wore changed. But the expression she wore was always comfortingly the same, and our great-grandmother looked just as we remembered her. Proof of this was right on the licenses themselves, the designation of the license owner’s race. On the oldest one she was listed as a “Negro,” on the next “Colored,” and finally “Black.” It was as if our great-grandmother’s identity seemed to always be in flux, yet she was as consistent a person as I have ever known. Most memorably of all, at least where I am concerned, Miss Doretha was a passionate fisherwoman, and if the weather was tolerable she was most likely on the bank of a favorite pond with her beloved casting rod in hand, waiting patiently for a hungry fish to make the grave mistake of tugging
96 O.Henry
June/July 2012
her line. The fish’s error in judgment always ended up costing him, for I never knew my great-grandmother to lose a fish once she had it hooked. Her gentle tugs at the line were an extension of her remarkable patience. She would never rush the experience, and I spent many hours playing, fishing, napping, snacking and often being bored out of my young mind while she sat patiently on the bank waiting for the big bass to finally bite. Every so often she’d turn her head to check on what I was up to, but mostly her eyes remained fixed on the line, even when she relieved her mouth of a wad of snuff and saliva. Lunch consisted of canned pork and beans or Vienna sausage and always a ginger ale — and still her eyes never left the line in the water. Mind you, we kids all got to fish too, but only with bamboo poles and conventional bobbers. For the most part, we observed these behaviors from a distance as she would not allow us to play anywhere near her chosen spot on the bank, and certainly not to touch her casting rod. Too much noise was bad for the fish and disturbed her intense concentration. I don’t think she ever failed to bring home a good-sized fish. Last month, upon graduation from college, I couldn’t help but think how pleased and proud Miss Dorthea would have been of me. More importantly, the older I get, the more I appreciate her hard-earned wisdom and take solace in these special memories I have of Miss Dorthea Raleigh because she showed my sister and me the value of having patience in life, and with it. Her life, by all accounts, was full of moments when that fabled patience and endurance were tested, yet she lived without fear and worked hard and raised a family and passed down one valuable life lesson after another to generations of our family — many of which she was probably never even aware of. My great-grandmother’s days were ending on this Earth more or less as mine were beginning. Her love was fishing. Mine is golf. But something still passes between us. We all seek solitude in some form or another. As another summer dawns, I can’t help but think about how far I’ve come — in golf and more so in life — because of the lessons in patience she taught me. She was in her own world when sitting on the bank of Black Cow pond or the meandering Haw River, or even casting from the end of pier down at Topsail Beach. Fishing was her sanctuary, and waiting patiently for a big fish to come along and tug on her line, I think, was a reward for a remarkable life that had come so far and given so much. OH Felton Foushee recently graduated from UNCG with a degree in media studies. Illustration By Meridith Martens The Art & Soul of Greensboro