ShareThisThe ragged and bloody fabric of history is woven with threads of countless personal stories, unrelated, yet intertwined, each making the others stronger.
Like you, perhaps, and millions of other hopeful Americans, I spent hours glued to a TV, watching the events leading to the moment when Barack Obama placed his hand on the Lincoln Bible and became the first African-American to be president.
Most of us who came of age in the civil-rights era know a lot of stories about people whose sacrifices helped to make that moment possible.
Some of the stories are more memorable than others. This one, if fairly uneventful, is the one that I will never forget.
Her name was Carey Boyd. I met her in the fall of 1965, when we began our senior year of high school in Landrum, S.C.
Two things stood out about Carey. First, she was black -- the first black student to integrate the district's "separate but equal" school system.
Second, she smiled basically all the time -- a big, dazzling grin that never entirely seemed to leave her face.
Growing up in the '60s in the segregated South, I had never had a conversation with anyone who wasn't white, except for occasional polite exchanges -- "Thank you, sir," to an elderly man who held the door for me at the post office, or "Pardon me, ma'am," to a woman I bumped into on the street.
Every morning, while waiting for a bus that would take me to school, I'd look across the hill and see a half-dozen black children waiting for a different bus that would take them to a different school.
I remember once asking my mother why we couldn't all just go to the same school.
She shook her head. "We don't mix," she whispered.
"Why?" I said, and she put a finger to her lips to say "hush."
I soon discovered that she was right. We didn't mix in schools or public restrooms or movie theaters or the waiting room at the local hospital. We didn't even mix in church.
Then one day, without a stir, as if it were normal as thunder on a summer night, there was Carey and her big grin.
She simply showed up, or so it seemed to me, and the world as we knew it -- the old, unmixed world of separate, but equal, inequality -- would never be the same.
Looking back on that day and the days to follow, I realized the simple act of showing up is anything but simple. It can require enormous courage and sacrifice and resolve. Often it's the best and only path to take.
Carey showed up that first day of our senior year and most every day afterward, as I recall, all the way to graduation.
No one, to my knowledge, did anything to make her feel either welcome or unwelcome.
She showed up. She smiled. She did her homework. And she survived. She also helped me, on occasion, with trigonometry.
I wish I could say we became close friends. I'm proud to say, at least, we were classmates.
After graduation, I went off to college on a scholarship, and I heard that Carey had married and moved out of state.
There were so many things that I never got to ask her, things I never got to say.
I've often wondered what became of her, what she did with her life. This week, especially, watching the events around the inauguration, I wanted so much to see that big smile again, and to thank her for her part in making history.
When we were 17, Carey and I, we could never have dreamed we would see the changes and sights and wonders we've seen.
Anything, yes, is possible.
As long as we all show up.
(Sharon Randall can be contacted at P.O. Box 777394, Henderson NV 89077, or at www.sharonrandall.com.)
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