(A True Story)
In the South in the 40’s and 50’s, if you were very poor, you were “dirt poor”. If you were black, you were just dirt.
Frank Albritton was born in South Carolina in 1944 – dirt poor and black. He often went without shoes, sometimes without food. He never finished school, he never even went long enough to learn to read. He had to stay home and help support his family — by picking cotton, by doing odd jobs, by driving trucks – all the time while making sure not to be “uppity” to the white men under whom he always had to work.
Frank had a lot to be angry about. He could have been crushed by poverty and racism. Instead, he forged those cruelties into courage and pride and goodness. That’s a funny thing about dirt. If you live close to the soil, you can draw strength from it. You can pull integrity and power from it, not just weeds.
When he was barely 20, Frank moved north to New Jersey. Unable to read, he was limited in the kinds of jobs he could get. He drove trucks. He learned to repair them and learned he had a special talent for fixing mechanical things.
He got a job with a company that leased portable toilets for events and building sites. The toilets were brought to the site beforehand, picked up afterwards, dumped and cleaned.
Frank started out as a driver, but when the company discovered his mechanical talents and personal integrity, they made him head of maintenance and the unofficial supervisor of all operations. He soon became the heart and will of the company. Frank was the one everyone turned to when a hard job had to be done, when a truck broke down 150 miles away on a rainy Sunday or when drivers didn’t show up.
He married a young New Jersey girl, white, pretty. They soon had a daughter. They became his reason for living and working hard.
For thirty years he never missed a day. But in 1998, he got sick ten days after Thanksgiving. For over a week he ran a fever and threw up. He got weaker and weaker. The doctor said it was just the flu. Day after day, Frank forced himself to go to work, until one day he couldn’t get out of bed. The next day, a Sunday, his terrified wife took him to the hospital.
There, despite putting him through a number of procedures and tests over the next four days, the doctors couldn’t locate the problem, so in the early hours of Thursday morning, they took him into surgery. Something happened in the operating room, and he never made it out.
The following Saturday, two days before Christmas, this good, honorable man returned to the soil — a long, long distance up from the dirt of South Carolina.