“He used the ‘N’ word, and I ran home to ask Mother what it meant,” says Harvin, a light-skinned African-American who was four years old at the time. “Mother just smiled and never answered. She did curb my playing with him.”
On her third birthday in 1942, Harvin moved from Martinsville, Va., to the Sandhills with her parents Oran and Cloie Baldwin, her older sister Betty, and a cousin who lived with their family. Her father and mother came to Moore County to work for the Royalton Pines Dairy, which was located on Young’s road.
“We were taught that character mattered more than color, but there was always prejudice around — even among people of my own race,” says Harvin. “My parents were both of mixed blood, and my sister and I were light-skinned. We were too white to be black and too black to be white.”
Harvin wrote a paper about American mulattos in a class at Sandhills Community College last year.
While researching, she found a poem that struck a chord, she says. The poem is “Cross” by Langston Hughes, a gifted black writer from the early 1900s. One verse of that poem contains these words: “My old man died in a fine big house. / My ma died in a shack. / I wonder where I’m gonna die / Being neither white nor black?”
“Times have changed, but because I’m light-skinned, I’ve been called high-yellow, red-bone, and other names,” says Harvin. “I had an elementary school teacher who wouldn’t let us use yellow pencils. She didn’t want reminders of a time when light-skinned blacks were considered ‘of better blood.’ Some people had a saying: ‘High-yella, you better — but black, get back.’
“This is the type of thing that Martin Luther King fought to overcome. He wanted to bring unity within the race as well as outside it.”
When she was 7 years old, Harvin’s father took a job with the convent at Notre Dame Academy in Southern Pines, once a private boarding school for Catholic girls. He became the caretaker, chauffeur, and bus driver for the Sisters of Notre Dame.
There was a Catholic day school for African-Americans in the building now known as the Douglass Center on West Pennsylvania Ave., but Harvin’s family was Baptist, so she attended West Southern Pines, an all-black public school.
“Mother believed in church attendance, and I collected a few perfect attendance stars. I joined the First Missionary Baptist Church and was baptized when I was 12,” she says.
Harvin says she loved movies and remembers sitting upstairs in a segregated section at the Sunrise Theater. Her family had to order food at most restaurant windows because they weren’t allowed to sit inside.
“I learned to be a good actress and not show my hurts,” she says.
When Harvin was about 12 years old, her mother, blinded after surgery for a brain tumor, was adjusting to her loss of sight just as Harvin entered high school.
“I was having a terrible time adjusting to being a teenager. I began smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol,” says Harvin.
Blessed with a good voice — she still sings gospel solos — Harvin enjoyed school glee club and graduated third in her class of 19 in 1956. Her sister became a nurse, but Harvin didn’t attend college because she “was needed at home.”
She worked at babysitting, hotel, and sales jobs, and continued drinking, she says.
“On my 43rd birthday, I told my late husband Fred that I would no longer drink alcohol and was going to follow God,” says Harvin, now 63. “He couldn’t believe it and neither could my six children, I guess.
“Fred came to realize that my mind was made up. He even congratulated me for sticking with my decision before he died in 1995.”
Diagnosed with breast cancer last May, she has almost completed post-surgery chemotherapy and radiation treatments. A Sandhills Community College Pell Grant student who is studying office systems, she works part-time with a catering business.
Harvin worked for a babysitting service in the early ‘80s and was called to assist in the nursery at Sandhills Assembly of God Church in Southern Pines.
“Someone said that the most segregated hour in the United States is Sunday morning from 11 to 12, but I talked with nursery workers while I worked, and they invited me to attend Sandhills Assembly,” says Harvin. “Members welcomed me, and I never heard a negative comment about my attending. I’m still a member at the church.
“A friend asked me, ‘Why do you want to go to that white church?’ I said, ‘It’s not a white church. It’s God’s church, and white people just happen to go there. I believe God led me there.’
“If people can see Christ’s light shining through me, that will evaporate color.”
