Janet Cheatham Bell's latest book
The Time and Place That Gave Me Life
published by Indiana University Press in 2007, has been called “the best form of social history.”
After graduating from Indiana University in 1964, Bell began her professional career as a high school librarian in Saginaw, Michigan. In early 1968 she accepted a position at the Ohio University Library in Athens. A few months later, in the wake of student responses to Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the university recruited her to teach freshman composition and African American literature.
Bell left Ohio University in 1970 to work as associate editor of
The Black Scholar in Sausalito, California. Several months later she was hired as a research associate for the African and Afro-American Studies Program at Stanford University and, under the auspices of their Multi Ethnic Education Resource Center, published
Teaching Black: an Evaluation of Methods and Resources. While at Stanford, she developed a basic collection of books by and about African Americans for their undergraduate library and enrolled in their doctoral program in English.
In 1973 Bell took a leave from her doctoral studies and the following year accepted a position as Ethnic Studies Consultant for the Indiana Department of Public Instruction (now Department of Education) in Indianapolis. In late 1978 she moved to Boston to assist Ginn & Company, textbook publishers in Lexington, Massachusetts, develop a literature series for grades seven through twelve. That was her last full-time position. She resigned in 1984 to move to Chicago where she became an entrepreneur and published her own books.
In 1995 the
Chicago Tribune featured Bell in an article, "Harnessing the Power of a Well-Crafted Phrase." Chicago's Black Book Fair selected
The Soul of Success as Best Nonfiction Book in 1999, and
New City, Chicago’s news and arts weekly twice named Bell to “The Lit 50: Chicago’s Book World, Who Really Counts.”
Bell moved to Bloomington, Indiana in 2002 to research and write her memoir,
The Time and Place That Gave Me Life. She is currently writing volume two of her memoir, as yet untitled.
AN EXCERPT FROM THE WORK IN PROGRESS: MEMOIR PART II, Chapter 1
The Time and Place That Gave Me Life
ends when I move from Indiana to Saginaw, Michigan where I knew no one.
Michigan has burly pugnacious winters, not like the little sissified three-to-four month cold spells in central and southern Indiana. Heavy snowfalls, accompanied by towering wind-swept drifts, begin early and last well past the calendar’s barren proclamation of spring. I distinctly remember a year when I pulled my boots from the back of the closet in early November and wore them every day until May. I moved to Michigan, Saginaw to be precise, in the fall of 1964 in time for the opening of school. I had lingered on campus at Indiana University (IU) that summer after I graduated trying to unravel my feelings. I was fearful of going off on my own, yes, but my trepidation was completely overwhelmed by the anticipation of new and exciting experiences. Also as might be expected when you’ve earned a degree and a divorce in the same month, I felt emancipated—not only was I free of a marriage that had felt like a millstone, but I was an educated woman. I couldn’t wait to leave home, but aside from the years in Bloomington at the university, I had spent my entire life in Indianapolis. Now I was about to be completely on my own in a town where I didn’t know anybody, and aside from the high school principal who hired me, I had never met anyone from Saginaw. I reveled in the idea of making decisions without checking in with a parent or husband, but I knew my escape from their oversight couldn’t fail. Early in my marriage Mama made it clear that returning home to my parents was out of the question. I had to make my own place in the world; there was no turning back.
After I told my parents I had accepted a job in Saginaw, Mama pleaded with me to take the offer in Indianapolis. But the Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) had battered me much too long already, beginning when I was five. That’s when I learned that the neighborhood school was for whites only. The de jure segregation of IPS separated me permanently from my neighbor and playmate. She went to the school down the street and I walked a mile to attend an all-black school. After eight years of swaddling there, I was ready to enter the hallowed and heralded halls of the city’s lone black high school. But that much anticipated pleasure was blocked by desegregation. So I left the affection of my all-black cocoon, where I was a star, to be surrounded and isolated by people whom I regarded as the enemy. My stardom was invisible to most of the people in charge at the white high school; they believed I was capable of nothing more than a serving, or at best, a supporting role. Even after I graduated from high school, IPS had more licks waiting. At IU I innocently chose a high school for my student teaching based on its proximity to my living quarters, but IPS rejected my choice and assigned me to the black high school. Aargh! Did their idiotic obsession with race never cease? I was truly sick of them by then and dug in my heels, refused to cooperate, and took my dissent to higher authorities. IPS backed down and offered me another assignment, although still not the one I had asked for. I knew I was a marked woman when, without my having applied, the school system offered me a teaching position at a brand new school built in an area as far away from blacks as they could get and still be within the city limits. No, thank you. I was not about to offer myself up for another beating by IPS.
