Don’t Bother Telling This Dreamer ‘You Can’t’

All her life, people have told Barbara Lewis, “You can’t possibly.”

You can’t possibly leave your marriage.

You can’t possibly leave North Carolina.

You can’t possibly care for your children alone.

You can’t possibly go to college.

But Barbara Lewis is stubborn. She thinks she can do whatever she wants.

So she left the marriage. She left the state. Her kids are thriving. And she went to college.

It wasn’t easy.

When she was too broke to pay her electricity bill, she studied by candlelight. When she couldn’t pay the gas bill, she barbecued. When she couldn’t haul her children’s clothes to a Laundromat, she scrubbed them on her washboard in the bath tub.

And this year, the 30th anniversary of her graduation from high school, miles and miles from her little hometown of Wilson, N.C., Lewis donned cap and gown and joined the 2,780 students who received bachelor’s degrees from USC.

That’s not the only milestone she hits.

In the fall, she begins post-graduate studies at USC. Thanks to a Ford Foundation grant for minority scholars, she will receive tuition and living expenses for the next three years while she pursues a doctorate in English. She hopes to specialize in African-American women writers of the Harlem Renaissance.

Until she attended classes at USC, the only black women authors she’d heard of were Maya Angelou and Alice Walker.

What’s more, in August, for the first time since she arrived in California 10 years ago, she will bid goodby to county assistance.

It’s been a long haul for Barbara Lewis--mother of four, grandmother of four--but an extraordinarily satisfying one.

The decision to move to Los Angeles in 1982 was borne of desperation. Life was going nowhere in Wilson. Lewis was working as a tire builder at Firestone, feeling stifled and unhappy.

“After I left my husband, I had an ‘in-residence’ relationship with another man,” she said. “I was conditioned that a woman is pretty much nothing without a man. And yet I was completely miserable. I felt trapped. It was the kind of thing I have felt all my life without being able to put a title to it.”

Finally, she decided she had to get out of North Carolina to save herself.

Lewis settled on California for two reasons: College, she’d heard, was free, and it was as far as she could get from North Carolina without leaving the country.

In 1982, she sold her furniture, packed her trunks and boarded a bus with her three children. Her fourth was born in Los Angeles.

We talked at the dining room table of her modestly furnished, federally subsidized apartment on Exposition Boulevard, just east of Normandie, near the USC campus. At 47, she is a striking woman, with jet black hair, high cheekbones and a lovely laugh.

Rumbling trucks and wheezing buses made it difficult to hear her at times. But the strain was worth it.

In 1988, her youngest child kindergarten age, Lewis decided to get serious about college. She had fallen in love with the USC campus the first time she laid eyes on it.

“The people looked so busy, so well-educated,” she said. “They were doing something with their lives. The campus called my name, I swear to God! I just stood there with my mouth open.”

She found the registrar’s office, picked up an application and thought she might be able to scrape together the $310 she thought the registrar told her a single class would cost. Except she had misunderstood: USC cost $310 per unit . Each class was four units. USC was out of the question.

Los Angeles City College turned out to be her salvation. She studied hard and discovered campus politics, too, becoming president of the Associated Students Organization. After two years, she was ready to transfer to a four-year college, but financing a university degree was impossible. Still, she dreamed.

One day she told Ann Cade-Wilson, director of the LACC Transfer Center, how much she wanted to attend USC, but she just didn’t have the money.

“And she said, ‘Oh, honey, you don’t need any money to go to USC!’ And I have not spent any of my own money to go to that university, not even to fill out the application!”

With state, federal and university money, Lewis has not had to spend a cent. Had she footed the bill, she figures, her two years at USC would have cost close to $60,000.

On June 11, having just received her bachelor’s degree from USC, Lewis stood at a dais at LACC, looking into a sea of students receiving their AA degrees. She had been invited back to receive an outstanding alumna award.

“I am not ashamed to tell you that I am a welfare mother or that I was homeless when I moved here 10 years ago,” said Lewis. Her message was simple and eloquent: “If you dream, you can develop a plan. And with that plan, the dream becomes the truth.”

Several weeks earlier, the riots erupting around them, Lewis held her youngest child, Shanada, 8, as the child trembled in fear. The sky was full of smoke, the dairy across the street was on fire and Shanada was in a panic.

As they lay in bed together, Lewis tried to calm her daughter. “You know,” she said, “God has made such an investment in us. Do you think he’s gonna let anything happen to us now?”