If Sarah Bracey White”™s life reads like a novel, that”™s because she”™s a natural storyteller and because her story is a quintessential American tale of struggle and triumph.
Nurtured in a middle-class, integrated community in Philadelphia, only to be thrust into the poverty and racism of segregated South Carolina, then orphaned at 17, White made her way through the worlds of academia, politics and business to find love and professional fulfillment in New York.
Through it all, the one constant has been her passion for reading and writing. White, executive director of Arts and Culture for the town of Greenburgh, will be doing a lot of both this fall as she becomes one of the first fellows of the new Purchase College Writers Center. Along with South Salem poet and editor Pamela Hart and Hastings-on-Hudson fiction writer Christine Lehner, White will be given a small stipend, an office in the college”™s library and access to its data base.
White says she is thrilled at the prospect of what Virginia Woolf called “a room of one”™s own”:
“At home (in Ossining), I”™m interrupted by all the things you could possibly do,” she says. “This will force me to focus on the life of a writer. I intend to be there.”
Not that she”™ll be doffing her other artistic chapeau. As Greenburgh”™s arts consultant for 17 years, she has mounted exhibits at Town Hall”™s Madeleine Gutman Gallery; Town Court, next to the police station; the Multipurpose Center at Anthony Veteran Park; and the Theodore D. Young Community Center while also spearheading a series on ekphrastic poetry, which is inspired by artwork.
White is also working with Thomas Madden, Greenburgh”™s commissioner of community development and conservation, on the upcoming East Hartsdale Avenue Art Walk.
“Sarah does an incredible job for the town,” he says.
For her part, White is gratified to do it.
“You get a new exhibit in and people (at Town Hall) say, ”˜I love to take my lunch and look at art. It”™s the equivalent of a water-cooler conversation ”¦ People are interested in art. When times are difficult, it”™s the thing that soothes us.”
Certainly art, in the form of literature, was what gave White solace in a hardscrabble childhood. The daughter of South Carolina teachers, White was sent to live with an aunt in a comfortable Phillie neighborhood for the first five years of her life.
“My father was a serial abandoner,” she says of the man who turned to drink to assuage the bitterness of being blacklisted for his involvement with the NAACP.
Ultimately, White”™s mother decided that she had to be surrounded by all of her children, and White came home to a world of poverty and prejudice that might as well have been the far side of the moon.
“Honey, I was absolutely incensed,” she says.
She remembers her mother smacking her once in a store for bristling at standing on line while white customers were served.
“Good,” White recounts a white customer muttering. “Teach her to stay in her place.”
School ”“ and in particular reading and then writing ”“ became a way out. White lied to the nuns to start a year early. She acquired a pen pal ”“ a white girl in South Dakota. (Their correspondence is the subject of the young-adult novel she”™ll be polishing at the Writers Center.)
The year she turned 17 and graduated, both her parents died: She was no longer tied, she says, to a place that they had loved so much and that loved them so little in return. White”™s early school admission, then, had turned out to be fortuitous. But then, she says, we often do things in life with one purpose in mind. It”™s only later that we realize there was another reason all along.
After majoring in English at Morgan State University and acquiring a master”™s in library science from the University of Maryland, White worked as a legislative librarian and a speechwriter for Baltimore Mayor William Donald Schaefer, who went on to become governor of Maryland.
Moving to New York, she took the only job she could get, as an administrative assistant at an engineering firm in Valhalla. She wrote poetry, she says, because she couldn”™t afford therapy. She taught at Mercy College.
Most of all, she learned to understand her parents and the South ”“ penning the still-unpublished novel “Carolina Love Song” and a memoir of her youth that will also be part of her work at The Writers Center. She also learned, she says, to let go of her own prejudices.
“If Martin Luther King said he wanted to be judged not by the color of his skin but by the content of his character, isn”™t the same required of me?” she says.
Today, White is happily married to Robert Gironda, who”™s retired from the engineering design company in which he was a partner. You sense from her conversation that she”™s his sparkplug while he”™s her anchor.
At the moment, though, she”™s off with a group of female friends called the Sapphires, a writing club whose members meet once a New England summer to eat chocolate and map out their writing lives.
White no doubt will chart a course into her rich Carolina past.
Says she: “I want to tell these stories that are real.”
