Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 5, 1993 TAG: 9305050029
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MADELYN ROSENBERG STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Let this woman, who loves the spoken word, tell you about growing up along the winding roads of Elliston just after the South became integrated. Let her say, in a regal, graceful voice, that she still fears some places in the South and the people who liked it better the old way.
And let her explain how she came to be back in Virginia - living in a Virginia Tech dormitory, of all places - at 59.
"In many ways, I have a sense of unfinished business here," she says from an office chair she bought for her small room in Main Campbell Hall.
"I was never confident that the South truly was integrated. I never quite believed I could live life here as a normal person."
Carter is comfortable in front of her IBM computer, one leg up on the seat of the chair, the other on the ground, slowly rocking. She is comfortable, too, with her decision to return to school to earn her doctorate from Tech's Center for Public Administration and Policy.
She wants to influence policy-makers, she says.
"I don't know if I can write, but I'd like to. And I'd like to teach . . . to help broaden people's horizons and perspectives. And to help myself continue to learn."
Not that Carter hasn't learned a lot after 25 years as a consultant in human resources, 10 as president of her own firm. Or from the other jobs she's held since 1956 when she started working in research, community and program development in New York and Massachusetts.
She does not look like the typical students who frequent these corridors and who, on a sunny afternoon, are improving their tans in the quad behind the dorm of mostly graduate students.
Carter leaves the door to the room open to suck in a breeze as it blows across the Drill Field.
This town is not as she knew it years ago when she grew up in Elliston, attending a two-room school.
She remembers traveling down back roads with her mother, looking for the restaurants that would serve them in a still-segregated world.
Her mother wrote letter after letter, trying to find a college that would accept her middle child: Dean: My daughter is a Negro."
"I remember it so clearly in her handwriting," Carter says. Just as she remembers the reply with the exclamation point from Sister Aurelia at a Catholic school in Chicago saying: "Of course we accept Negroes!"
Except for some visits home to family, that was the last Carter saw of the South for many years.
"In reality, I had no choice but to leave. Had I tried to go to Tech's campus, I believe I'd have been shot on sight. That may not have been true, but that was my image."
It's an image that has taken up permanent residence in Carter's memory.
When a few students asked her if she wanted to accompany them to the New River, Carter said no. She still fears that she would stand out as a city person or a black person or a woman and that there might be backlash.
"I'm afraid," she says, "that I might be used for backwoods target practice."
Carter has spent a lot of time thinking about race. She still carries a lot of anger, "though a lot of it has been siphoned off through what I call living the good life."
Now, she says, "for the first time, I'm learning to be a citizen. For a long time, I had considered myself to be an alien."
A hanging basket breathes life in a corner of Carter's small dorm room, which is filled with a flowery smell - though no live blooms are visible, just some dried buds in a vase.
The radio plays classical music, softly.
Outside there are shouts from the students, honks from cars, a sporadic blare from a passing radio.
It is a life Carter chose hesitantly, for "just a semester" because she didn't know Blacksburg when she arrived from a job as a legislative assistant in Washington, D.C., just before classes were to begin.
But it is a life she says she will stick with for at least another year, even if the students do continue to ride bikes and Rollerblade in the hallways.
"I feel like a student. I dress like a student. I hang around in the corridors and complain like a student."
Carter spent most of her life in the Northeast's larger cities, working as a consultant in human resources and organizational development.
In the 1960s, she served as assistant commissioner in New York's Human Services Administration.
In the '70s, she served as an assistant dean and adjunct professor at Columbia University.
She advised companies and corporations, such as CBS, on social diversity.
In 1979 she founded Elaine Carter Associates, working with Fortune 500 companies on that same theme.
But her happiest days, when all of the consultants she had hired were busy working, were also her worst days. Because, while business was booming, she didn't have the hands-on experience she loved.
This, coupled with a failing marriage, caused Carter to close the firm in 1989 and go back to solo practice.
This way, too, she could try to work more with the public sector.
"I'm interested in the public life - in equality, equity, justice, social harmony, opportunity," she said. "I wanted to support social policies rather than individual firms' policies."
In 1991, she became ill. Her kidneys were failing and one doctor blamed it on exhaustion, saying Carter was physically and emotionally spent.
She moved to Richmond to be near friends who could give her support. For a year, she thought about her future.
"I wanted to study - it was one of the things I'd always wanted to go back and do," she said.
So she decided to go for her doctorate, even though, if she stuck to a strict schedule and finished her doctoral thesis after two years of course work, she'd be 62 - old enough for early retirement.
Carter is young enough to scoff at that, young enough to know she can still be useful.
She immersed herself in campus life.
Had she lived off campus, she said, "I still would have felt like I had to be a 59-year-old woman with an extensive career and grandchildren."
On campus, she said, "I realized I didn't have any responsibility to the other world at all."
Carter has grown used to her small space and shared bathroom, her single bed and lamp from Wal-Mart.
She has a coffee maker, a television and a "boom box" like the other students.
And she carries a worn leather briefcase to class, more befitting a professor than a student.
"I looked at knapsacks," she said. "I went into the mall and stared at them. And then I said, `Elaine, give me a break. That's just not you.' "
But most of this world has become normal to her - a 13-by-12-foot space, papers strewn about.
Many of the people in Carter's program are nearer her age - say, 39. That helped her adjust more quickly to Tech, as did the acceptance of the younger students.
Peggy Allen, 23 and a Blacksburg native, invited Carter to a party before a Tech football game, for instance.
"When I was that age, I would not have invited someone like me," Carter said. "Of course when I was that age, I'm not sure I knew someone like me."
Allen, who is in the master's program, said she never gave Carter's age a second thought. "I figured she was looking to fit in," Allen said.
Jim Wolf, director of the Center for Public Administration and Policy, remembers interviewing Carter for the program last year.
"She was impressive," he said. "We take people that we see as promising students."
The main worry for students who go back to school after many years is whether they'll have problems with the transition.
Carter, he said, "was a trouper," though she might answer differently.
Her biggest obstacle was the computer sitting on her desk. She had taken typing in high school, but this was foreign.
Bill Haraway, also in the center's program and living in the dorms, sat her down in front of it and made her write her first paper.
If she wasn't through before class, he told her, he would type it.
Carter finished it 25 minutes before her deadline.
In the dorms, students still use what Carter calls "that more emphatic language of the younger generation - the `f-word.' "
When they slip in front of Carter, they're embarrassed. She doesn't mind, though she refrains from using those kinds of words in front of the students. "It blows some young people's minds."
Carter says she has no need to be like the young people she sees down the hall.
She didn't go to Allen's party because she wouldn't have gone when she was 20, she said. "But I love them for asking."
They whoop sometimes in the hallways, another thing Carter cannot quite get used to. "It's what we used to call a Texas hoot - `Woo-hoo.' I just don't think it's proper, screaming in public places."
But it is these same students who taught her to adjust. Who sometimes help her with the computer. Who are around if she has questions about using the library, about how to document everything she writes.
It is these students, Carter says, that she will be living with for at least another year, in this dorm that overlooks Virginia Tech's Burruss Hall, in the heart of campus life.
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB