MIRACLE MOM
She couldn’t go to high school in her segregated West Tennessee town. So Luella Carter pledged to send all 10 of her kids to college — and she did.
Luella Carter never got to go to high school — and, even as a kid, she hated that.
There were no secondary schools for Black residents in the 1930s in her tiny, segregated farming town of Halls in West Tennessee. And her sharecropper parents couldn’t afford to send her to any of the Black boarding schools nearby.
Carter, bitterly disappointed, swore she’d do better by her kids. She pledged to herself — and later to her 10 kids — that each one of her children would go to college.
She offhandedly told one of her older kids that all of her sons would be doctors and all of her daughters would be educators, one of the only professions available to Black women then.
Today, all four of her sons are doctors. Of her five daughters — one has died — three are retired teachers or school administrators. Each one of her children went to college, and nine of 10 graduated.
Carter and her farmer husband, William Sr., accomplished that while living week to week in a 1,000-square-foot house with one toilet.
“She was a miracle worker,” said their sixthborn daughter, Jannie Carter Williams, a 71year-old Brentwood Realtor and retired dental hygienist.
“I don’t know how she did it, but she did.”
Eventually she walked her talk — in 1992, at age 69, Luella Carter earned her GED certificate, a high school diploma alternative. At that time, she was the oldest person in Tennessee to earn a General Education Development certificate.
Carter died in 2017. She was 94.
To celebrate Mother’s Day, seven of her 10 children returned to their childhood home in Halls. On a rainy day last month, the grown children met a Tennessean reporter and photographer to share memories, pictures, laughs and tears.
Here is Luella Carter’s story, in her children’s words.
Fatback and a cold biscuit
“My mom grew up very poor. Her father sharecropped and they farmed someone else’s land,” said Rose Carter Ballard, 74, the fourth-born child who’s now a Brentwood
Realtor.
“I remember stories she told us about taking lunch to school. It was a piece of fatback and a cold biscuit that her mother made. That was her lunch every day in a little tin can,” Rose Ballard said.
“She wanted to go to high school and she couldn’t. There was no high school [for Black residents] in Halls. The closest [boarding school] was Ripley, Tenn. In those days, there was no transportation. Her parents didn’t have a car. They didn’t have the means or the money to board her.
“She was really hurt by that. And she was determined that her children would be educated.”
Uncomfortable race relations
“Race relations in Halls, Tenn.? It was very stiff,” Williams said. “The whole town was segregated. Our church, all Black. There was a water fountain for whites, and a water fountain for Blacks in the dry goods store.
“When we walked up to get an ice cream cone, we had to go to the side window of the Dairy Queen.”
Happy, hard-working home life as kids
“Growing up here, we had a very happy childhood. My grandfather had purchased land in 1904, the land this house sits on. My father and his brother and sister were born on the farm. We always had a real feeling for ownership,” said Geraldine C. Pitts, 81, the second-born child, a retired teacher living in Jackson, Tenn.
“We were always in the field around 5:30 or 6 p.m. after school, the girls, if there were cotton to be chopped or picked or whatever, we were there. Dad insisted that we did what we needed to do. We didn’t have any boys then, so we were it,” Pitts said.
“At one time, there were four girls in one bedroom, two at the head of the bed, two at the other end. My mother was a good foreman. I started cooking when I was 7, my sister started cooking when she was 9. From there, we learned the household skills.
“At the age of four, I really knew how to put on a diaper on a baby. She was a good trainer. She taught us cleanliness and to be proud of whatever we had. We had to be thankful for what we had.”
Dr. Kenneth Carter, the last child of the 10, said he remembered getting up at 4:30 a.m. in the summers to start farming.
“It was very, very hard work. Get some breakfast, start working basically when the sun comes up. And sometimes working past sundown because the tractor had lights on it,” he said.
“We could go to 10 or 11 o’clock at night if need be. Whatever needed to be done, you do it. And don’t ask a lot of questions.”
A sneaky teacher
“My mother liked word games. She used them to help teach us words,” Williams said.
“She would play a game with us. She’d give us a big word, like, let’s say, ‘Broadway,’ and say, ‘See how many words you can make with the letters in that.’ And it was so much fun, we didn’t realize we were learning words.”
Luella Carter was serious about her children working hard in school and on the farm, though.
“She was our strongest critic,” Williams said, “but yet she was our greatest advocate.”
Legacy of learning
“About 30 or 35 years ago, we were grown, my mother got us into Scrabble. Mom could play Scrabble better than most of us,” said Murfreesboro family physician Dennis Carter, 67, a longtime partner with Ascension Saint Thomas Rutherford.
“My mom got her GED, eventually, around 1992. She did so well, they asked her to teach in the GED program. She taught math and reading. She did that several years.
“When she got her certificate, we all showed up
and we were obviously very proud. They had a little graduation, went back to the house and ate and celebrated. All of her kids were there.
“Mom was the motivator, and a great leader,” he said.
All her children said they are thankful for her lifelong focus on education.
“I just really appreciate my mom for having that goal. She knew that long term, that was the way,” Ballard said.
“What we had in our brains was more important than anything else. That was something that could not be taken away from us.”
Do you know a super parent? I’d like to hear about them. Reach me, Brad Schmitt, at brad@tennessean.com or 615-259-8384 or on Twitter @bradschmitt.