Looking back at a lifetime’s journey

In a corner of the living room, a daughter urges her mother to tell her story.

Tell her about picking coal from the railroad track, she says.

Tell her what y’all ate.

Dorothy Pemberton hesitates each time, then launches into a detailed description of her life, recalling that time long ago when black people were colored, when living in the projects was considered “living high on the hog” and fun was having corn flakes on the front porch of her step-daddy’s sister.

Until recently, the great-grandmother from Stone Mountain hadn’t thought much of her life, about the distance she has come since she and other African-Americans had to pay a poll tax to vote, since she made sandwiches to help feed students participating in local sit-ins.

Her story, she insists, wasn’t that much different from other African-Americans who came of age during the Great Depression, who lived through the Jim Crow years and the civil rights movement.

Few people, though, get to tell that story and instead they become bald concessions in history books.

Dorothy Pemberton knows that, and so just days before Thanksgiving, she revisited the story she’s been telling her children and grandchildren for years.

She said she was an only child, born in 1926 to Gillian Hutchins and Carl Bates.

She was 2 or 3 when her mother married again and the two of them moved from Marietta to Buckhead Alley.

She lived in a shotgun house on Irby Street just behind the old Capri Theater. “Across the street from us it was just woods,” Pemberton recalled. “In the winter we’d go down and drag fallen trees up to the yard and cut them up to stay warm.”

Other times, she picked up coal that had fallen from trains along the railroad tracks.

They never stayed in one place long. The minute rent came due, they moved.

Pemberton graduated in 1944 from all-black Booker T. Washington High School with Martin Luther King Jr. She knew the late civil rights leader simply as M.L., she said, smart and two years her junior.

After high school, he headed to Morehouse and she went to Reid’s Business College to study secretarial science.

By then, Pemberton said, her mother had moved to Detroit, where factory jobs promised a better life. She stayed behind with her grandmother, then in 1947, she moved there, too.

Her first job, she said, was as a secretary in a doctor’s office, then as a dietary aide at a Detroit hospital.

Fifteen years later, her mother returned to Atlanta. In 1954, the year she met and married her husband, David Pemberton, she moved back, too.

She was 26 and five months pregnant with twins. Two more children would quickly follow, so she never worked again until 1972. That was the year the youngest of her four children turned 16.

Pemberton was a data clerk with the Georgia Department of Human Resources until 1990, when she retired.

At 82, she hasn’t forgotten when blacks couldn’t work for the state. Or when maids, including her mother and grandmother, worked from morning to night every day for $3 a week.

She hasn’t forgotten the day Buckhead chief of police Claude Webb threatened to “whip some heads” if blacks cheered Joe Louis’ win over Max Schmeling; or the times the Ku Klux Klan marched through the neighborhood just to intimidate people; or the times her great-grandfather Jack Emerson was referred to as a “honorable old darky” by his owner.

She remembers when blacks were considered second-class citizens; when her senior class had to pay a poll tax to vote; and stories of other African-Americans forced to read and explain portions of the Constitution or guess how many bubbles were in a bar of soap before they could vote.

Their story was her story and now suddenly America had done what seemed impossible only a short while ago. It had elected an African-American president, which was why Pemberton couldn’t help but remember what used to be.

As the morning wore on, Pemberton smiled at hope, walked her guest to the door and told her to “come back and see me sometime.”

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