I came home one spring afternoon during my senior year of high school and told my mother I wanted to go to college.
She listened. Then she said, “Son, college is for people who have money. Look at this house we live in — the roof leaks, no insulation, no air conditioning, and any high wind could blow this house away. The farmers here have money. They send their kids to college.”
She wasn’t being unkind. She was telling me the truth as she knew it. And she was right about the facts, even if she was wrong about what they meant for my future.
That conversation closed a door. I didn’t argue, because I couldn’t. We owned nothing but an old car, some furniture, and the clothes on our backs.
What I didn’t know that day was that the door closing was about to send me toward the Air Force, and the Air Force was about to send me toward college after all — just by a much longer road than my friends were taking. This is where A Journey from the Turnrows of the Delta to the Front Rows of Higher Education begins
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