Bookbeat: Lynchburg school integration prompts self-examination

By Darrell Laurant

Published: October 4, 2008

Patricia Wild’s latest book, “Way Opens,” took a long time to ripen and germinate. Its seed, in fact, was planted more than four decades ago, in the cafeteria at E.C. Glass High School.

It was 1962, the year Owen Cardwell and Lynda Woodruff became the first two black students at Lynchburg’s “white” secondary school, and this is the story Wild — then a Glass student — relates in her book:

“It was at lunch that day that I first saw Owen Cardwell, tall and thin, just as he emerged from the food-serving area and, carrying a tray, walked slowly toward the cafeteria’s long tables. The way I remember it, Owen approached one table and the two or three boys who’d been sitting there immediately jumped up and moved away. Owen sat down to eat alone.

“Yankee transplant, sneered at for being ‘tacky,’ I knew what it felt like to be a reviled and despised outsider. From Mrs. Mulfinger’s Reader’s Digest, I knew what had happened when German citizens remained silent in the face of Hitler’s oppression. Indeed, sitting in my piano teacher’s living room, I’d always imagined that if the Nazis came to my German village, I’d bravely do whatever was necessary to protect my Jewish neighbors. I knew that I was supposed to walk over to Owen’s table and sit beside him. But I did not.”

The daughter of a General Electric executive, Wild spent only a brief time in Lynchburg. Still, that encounter (or non-encounter) with Cardwell stayed with her.

At the same time, it would be simplistic to depict “Way Opens” as some sort of long overdue penance. Rather, Wild’s teenaged shame was only the irritant beneath the shell, producing a complex pearl. Reflected in its surface are elements not only of racial angst, but Quakerism as a philosophy and crusading for equality as a way of life.

All too often, the turbulent period of the 1960s and ’70s in the American South is depicted almost like a sports story, complete with good guys and bad guys, winners and losers.

Patricia Wild is neither an objective observer nor a cheerleader. She pours her emotions into “Way Opens,” and she coaxes forth the emotions of others. In the process, she doesn’t shy away from nuance or contradiction.

“Way Opens” is a Quaker expression, meaning ‘the serendipitous unfolding of God’s will.’

“If something is supposed to happen, just wait and it will happen,” Wild said. “I thought that was appropriate for the civil rights movement.”

It’s interesting that Wild, Cardwell and Woodruff all left Lynchburg — Cardwell to preach in Tidewater, Woodruff to become a college professor in Georgia. When their paths have crossed since, it has usually been on occasions Wild recorded in her book.

“This has taken a long time to come together,” Wild said, “and I’ve made a lot of trips to Lynchburg in the process. Sometimes, I have to remind myself that I actually live in Somerville, Mass.”

She will give a reading from her book at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 9 at First Unitarian Church. And she, Woodruff and Cardwell will do a panel presentation at 11 a.m. Oct. 11 at the Legacy Museum.
“I’ve done readings in other places,” Wild said, “but never in Lynchburg. That will be interesting.”

Footnotes
Kenya Lumpkin will be signing copies of her latest romance novel, “Quenching the Fire,” at 2 p.m. Oct. 11 at Randolph College’s Macon bookstore.
A recent transplant to Lynchburg, Lumpkin finished her book during previous stops in Hawaii and Maryland. It is a complex and rich mosaic of several love stories, all crossing paths en route and coming to very different conclusions.