Dr. Whitfield walked out of the front doors of the school in her click of heels, turned around on the broad stone steps, looked up at the lintel, and read the carved letters aloud. “Corinne Bowden Elementary School. Nineteen eighty nine.” She read it twice, the second time in a whisper. Then she came back inside and stood in front of me in the hallway with her hands hanging. I am Corinne Bowden, seventy eight years old, and I stood by the water fountain with my reading glasses on a chain and a picture book under my arm. The two secretaries had stopped smiling.
In 1975, I became the first Black principal in the Orange Mound district. I was twenty seven. The school had a leaking roof and a library of three hundred books, and I spent my own money on the first thousand. For twenty four years I walked those halls every morning at six. In 1989, the school board, without telling me, carved my name over the front doors. I cried for an hour in the supply closet. In 1999, my husband fell sick, and I left to care for him, and took a job at a laundromat to keep our insurance.
The silver torch pin on my blouse was the district award for forty years of service in the schools, counting the years I taught before I led. I wore it to read to the second graders, as I had signed up to do. Dr. Whitfield, who had been principal for two years and arrived each morning through the side parking lot, had never once come in the front. The old janitor in the hallway, whose name was Mr. Odom and who had mopped those floors since the day the building opened, set his mop in the bucket, took off his cap and said, very softly, “Miss Bowden. Welcome home.”
A name carved over a school door gave one old principal the reading hour to bring a young principal back to the history of her school in Memphis.
I gave my terms in the hallway, to a young woman who had gone as white as her pantsuit. “Dr. Whitfield, I am not going to ask for anything. You are a good principal, and I have watched you with the children. You said what you said because you were busy, and because you have been taught to look at who is standing in front of you instead of who they are. What I ask is that you come through the front door every morning from now on, and that you teach your office staff the name of this school.”
The voice of Dr. Whitfield trembled. “Miss Bowden, I read your name on the program the first week,” she said. “I looked you up. I thought you were a legend, someone who lived a long time ago.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist, smearing her mascara. “I have spent two years trying to prove to this district that I belong here. And I treated the woman who built it like a lunch lady.” One of the secretaries burst into tears. The other covered her mouth with a stapler.
But in her embarrassment, Dr. Whitfield reached out in one wild gesture and snatched the silver torch from my blouse, saying she would take it to the office and have the archive confirm the date, and she hurried down the corridor with it clutched in her hand. She had gone fifty feet when a teacher turned the corner leading a line of twenty six second graders to the library for reading hour. The teacher, seeing what was happening, said something quick and quiet, and the children, with perfect obedience, sat down in the middle of the hallway.
Twenty six small children in rows, cross legged, blocked the corridor from wall to wall. A boy with missing front teeth looked up at the principal with enormous eyes. “Dr. Whitfield,” he said, “are you in trouble?” The janitor chuckled behind his hand. The principal stood in front of the children holding the pin in her fist, looking at the little faces, and then she knelt on the shining linoleum and set it in the palm of the smallest girl. “Please take this to Miss Bowden,” she said, “very carefully.” The child carried it down the line with both hands.
The consequences were lovely and loud. The radiators clanked, the fire doors banged, and a hundred small voices drifted down from the upper floors, the sound of a school doing exactly what it was built to do. That afternoon, the school held an assembly in the gym, and Dr. Whitfield told the story of the first principal to every child. I read to the second graders, as I had planned, and the whole hour felt like a church. The district hung a portrait of me beside the front doors, and invited me to speak at the graduation of the principals each spring. Dr. Whitfield now comes through the front doors every morning at six thirty, and holds the door for the teachers.
In the name of my husband Ellis, who passed in 2009, I started the Ellis Bowden Fund. It pays for books and tutoring for children in public schools and for scholarships for teachers who want to become principals, in Shelby, Fayette and Tipton counties. In the first year we placed three thousand new books in classroom libraries and sent sixteen teachers to leadership school. One was a first year teacher from Orange Mound who now runs a reading program for four hundred children.
On a Tuesday in May, with the windows open and the smell of cut grass drifting in from the playground, I sat in the little chair in the second grade classroom with a picture book in my lap and twenty six children cross legged at my feet. Dr. Whitfield stood in the doorway in her flat shoes, listening. I read the last page and closed the cover. A boy raised his hand. “Miss Bowden,” he said, “is that your name on the door?” I looked at him, and at the principal, and at the sun in the window. “It is,” I said. “And the door is yours.”
