Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm your host, Suzanne Rust. All throughout 2022, for the 25th anniversary of the Moth, we've been taking a look back at every year we've been around. We're up to 2011.

In 2011, we were expanding our slams and we were on a tour with the USA Network called Characters Unite that included main stages and Moth workshops in high schools throughout the country.

Megan Markle, future princess, was even a special guest at an event where she talked about the power of story to build bridges and to celebrate our commonality.

These workshops focused on sparking dialogue for change in the world. For this special Juneteenth episode, I'm going to share a story about a person whose worldview was changed. It's one of my absolute favorite stories from the Moth's history.

It's called Beyond My View Master Dreams and it was told by Alvin Hall. Stay tuned after the story, then we'll hear a little more from Alvin. Alvin Hall told this at a Moth main stage in New York City. Here is Live With The Moth.

We only went to town once a month when I was a little boy. We had a farm, we grew raised, haunted everything that we had. When we went to town, my mother and grandmother would give us a nickel or a dime to buy whatever we wanted as a treat.

I so looked forward to that. While my brothers and sisters would go off and buy toys and candy, I would go to the back of the five-in-dime store to this one area where they had these little bitty discs with bits of film in them and I would buy a few master's slide.

I would go through the road and look for places like Rome, London, Paris and a town called Constantinople. I would then come back home in the truck, go into the backyard, pull out my view master's slide and point it at the sky and I would sit there in reverie for hours. I would cross the boss for us. I would go up the Isle Tower.

I would create these travel logs or word I didn't know at that time in my mind until my mother called me to do a chore in the house. I was raised in a very waspy black family.

We did not talk. My parents spoke insolables. If they really liked what you did, they would go, mm, mm.

If they thought what you did was adequate but expected, mm, mm, mm. If they thought what you did was horrible, it was, mm.

And the lower the register of that, mm, the more judgment was imparted by that. When I was nine years old, my mother, I recall my mother making this statement all the time.

She kept saying, I raise you to leave my house. When you got to be 18 years old, all of you. I raised you to leave my house. My brothers and sisters and I would look at each other and wonder. At age nine, I decided to tell her, I'm going to leave this place. My mother looked at me. She said, what did you say? I said, one of these days, I'm going to leave this place.

She went, mm, integration occurred in 1968 and I went from an all black school named Shadeville, very Faulinarian, to the county school.

And there I had probably my second fight of my entire high school career. This guy called me something and we got into a fight and I fought to win.

At the school, people became aware of me and so they recommended me to a program, a Lyndon Baines Johnson program called Project Upward Bound, at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, what a destiny I had.

Nonetheless, I got into the program and there was a lady who ran the program, the most glamorous black woman I had ever met, a lady named Miss Freddy Grooms. She had a medium-sized afro that was perfectly quaffed every day.

She wore clothes that were in blocks of colors, I can see them to this day. And at this program, she really took an interest in me. In my classes, however, I was the eager kid. I was constantly putting up my hand, every answer, I knew the answer to everything and I was really, really on.

And the teacher said to me, how do you know so much? And I said, I read the World Book in Cyclopedia. When we had no money at night, my mother, who subscribed to the World Book in Cyclopedia, would say to us, Don, my middle name, pick out the letter Q boy and read something to us.

Well, let us, we know that I was learning all that stuff. So in class, I was really eager. This does not make me popular with the other people at the program. Eventually, I got into a little scuffle, I was put on parole. But Mrs. Grooms took interest in me and recommended me to her friend, Dr. Vloak Joe Fleischman, who had started a program at Yale University called Yale Summer High School. And I applied to that program.

The day I got that letter, I sat in the kitchen of the house and I knew with everything in me that I was going. I was going to go if it took everything to make it happen. And I think my parents suspected that. So in the day I got ready to go, I wasn't afraid of anything, not a single thing. Because in my mind, I'd already traveled to parents.

And London, and Constantinople. So going up to New Haven, Connecticut, cinch. I got on that plane, got to New Haven, Connecticut. And for the first time in my life, I felt like I was home. There was John Wall, John Limley, Alba Clyde, all the tutors and counselors made me feel so at home, I loved it. At the end of the summer, I had to come back home.

...