RESILIENT AS ACTUALIZING AGAINST ALL ODDS

Imagine what life would be like and the possibilities if you were a young black boy, born in Texas at the turn of the 20th century, in the year 1900. How meaningful and productive do you think your life would have been?

That’s when Wilk Peters was born. He was born to a share-cropper in a part of Texas where the nights were rules by racial threat and the days were spent fighting off poverty by working the cotton fields. So by eight he was walking behind a plow mule. Now would you think that this is the place or context of the best conditions for self-actualization? Would you guess it to be a place of dreams?

Yet young Wilk caught a dream, and early. At 8 years old he happened to meet the only one educated man in his humble experience, an awesome figure in a tall black hat— the doctor. But even better, when he mentioned it to his dad, John Peters, his dad knew how to nourish the beginning of aspirations in his young son. He encouraged him. He validated knowledge and expertise and that he could become whatever he wanted to become.

And so the dream began. And as it began to grow, it put a passion in Wilk. It plants within him a fire for learning, for discovering the world, and for questioning. It put in him a hatred against ignorance and that became the emergent talent, skill, and competency of his life.

But there was a problem. And that problem was his immediate environment and the family situation. Specifically, by 13 his dad took ill in an accident and died so young Wilk had to step up to be “the man” in the family and talk care of the family. So he dropped out of school (fifth grade) and stayed home to tend the farm in his dad’s place. And so it went, adult responsibilities and no more school. How would he ever become a doctor? How would he ever pursue knowledge?

But by 18 his mother remarried and so left for another town, and that left Wilk alone for the first time in his life. Without education or skills, he took a job at a local lumbermill and that’s where he began to hear the other young men dreaming of getting an education. In fact, he had heard that some had actually gone to Tyler Texas and enrolled in college.

That sparked something in young Peters. It had a dramatic impact! Many decades later, Jon Franklin wrote about how this affected Wilks.

“If they could go, so could he! The gossamer fantasy instantly solidified in his mind, from

possibilities to dream to goal to necessity.”

Of course, this was his self-actualizing vision at that time. Yet up against that were many things ready to throw cold water on this dream. First, the men he talked to who had gone to college, went and had failed. They dropped out. Some mismanaged their money. Some couldn’t cut the grades. Some just lost their dream. Some failed to apply themselves. Some were put off by the racism of the day. Then there was the belief that was circulating in the intellectual atmosphere at that time.

“It was said that an illiterate, once he became an adult, was done for. The mind was set, firm, impossible to teach.”

Talk about interferences to the self-actualization process of unleashing one’s potentials! And, while Wilk was filled with cold terror, he refused to believe it. He absolutely refused to believe it. Ah, the creative and positive role of stubbornness! He told himself that if he ever got the chance, he would not drop out. “If I get the chance.”

Then he did something to begin to make his dreams real in his life. Looking around him and seeing the machinery at the sawmill, the first automobiles, the goods at the company store, it struck him that somebody had to know something. That’s when he made a decision. He would be one of those people! And with that he moved to a choice point of his life.

“The resolution made, his ignorance became suddenly intolerable, and he couldn’t wait. He borrowed some primers and when he wasn’t working, he reviewed arithmetic and grammar ... when he found it incomprehensible, he still refused to put it down.” (Jon Franklin)

And so the plan began. He began saving for school. Each payday he would save a little for his education; the rest going to his mother and family and some for his modest requirements. A year passed, then two, then three and all the while he was reading. Learning.

“The more he learned, the more voracious his appetite for knowledge became. Slowly the puzzle of mathematics yielded to his stubborn attack, and he was captivated by the sweet logic of it. As he learned, the idea of learning itself broadened.” (Franklin)

With his eyes opened to learning, he one day saw an opportunity. A notice on a church bullet board said that the president of Texas College was coming to give a lecture. So 23 years of age with only a 5th grade education, he showed up with the money he had saved in hand and asked if he was too old. The president didn’t have the heart to tell him otherwise, and simply said, “Nothing was impossible.” That was all Wilk needed to hear.

In the fall of the year he showed up to enter college. The admissions officials gave him a job shoveling coal and allowed him to attend 6th grade. So sitting with his knees jammed under a tiny table, he wrestled with long division and if there was laughing and jokes, he didn’t notice. “He viewed his place in class as opportunity, not insult.” How about that? Talk about having owned his powers to create meaning and to exercise that power! Talk about someone letting a vision direct his responses rather than taking his cues from the environment.

The school administrators thought that the embarrassment of being with little kids, of having to work at hard menial labor to put himself through school would be enough to quench his dream. It wasn’t.

The next year he was back and that’s when he discovered Shakespear; and Shakespear spoke to him. “To be or not to be: that is the question.” He memorized the words as he shoveled coal. That was also the year he discovered the library— a sacred place of unimaginable riches. And the books began to change him. His learnings began making him a different man. And he became a dreamer and in beating back ignorance, he was slowly turning his dream into reality. And as he has respected knowledge, now he was coming to respect himself.

Fast forward several years, and when Wilk was 28 he graduated from high school. And Franklin wrote that with that, all of his fears of failure vanished. Now he was ready for college. Now he would be a “college man.” But in the second year, 1929, the stock market crashed. That meant even fewer menial jobs. Yet as always, he persisted. Waiting tables in the student cafeteria, he did so until he graduated in 1931. During that time he become fascinated by languages and so started learning German, then Spanish while teaching math. Talk about an emergent passion taking a long time to arise in one.

When there was no work even with a college degree in mathematics, he volunteered at the college library. In it was in that context that the head librarian began noticing the reverence with which he handled each volume. That’s when she asked a question that plant yet another vision within him. “Why not become a librarian?” The rest of the story is that Wilk Peters applied for a scholarship to the Hampton Institute’s College of Library Science in Virginia.

Then, over the ensuing years he began traveling in his summers to see the world. A teacher most of the year, he spent 3 months each summer as a student, studying Spanish at the University of Barcelona, art and French in Paris, and his travels took him to Denmark, Switzerland, Portugal, Norway, England, Ireland, and so on. “His profession was perfectly matched to his dream of learning.” As a professor and lecturer, he lived his life traveling the world, searching for knowledge, and constantly beating back ignorance. He traveled to bring knowledge back to black universities around the world. And, in the end he discovered that the world wasn’t a stage at all as per Spakespear, but a campus. And that was the dream that caught his fancy in the first place, a dream that unleashed a ferocity of learning and turned him into a life-long learner.

Reference In 1983 Jon Franklin wrote The Ballad of Old Man Peters which was published it in the Evening Sun (Baltimore) and later in Reader’s Digest (Jan. 1984).