Texas native’s memoir charts journey from poor childhood to the heights of academia

Many up-by-the-bootstraps memoirists reminisce about their hardscrabble childhoods and conclude by saying: “We were poor, but we didn’t know we were poor.”

Not so for Ruth J. Simmons, who as president emeritus of Smith College, Brown University and Prairie View A&M has left an indelible imprint on American higher education. She grew up as the 12th child of a Black sharecropper in rural Texas. “When you’re hungry,” Simmons says, “you know you’re poor. It was a valiant struggle, and a successful one.”

In her new memoir, Up Home: One Girl’s Journey, Simmons tells her story as only she can: simply but eloquently, directly, with a devastating honesty. Her narrative gathers strength and power as the young Ruth Jean grows from innocent child to awkward adolescent and then aspiring young woman, gaining both academic knowledge and hard-won life experience along the way.

She was the family’s last baby, born in East Texas in 1945. But for decades, the Stubblefields lived a meager, 19th-century existence. Ruth Jean’s younger years were lived in a drafty, leaky shack with no electricity, running water or indoor plumbing, and no heat aside from a wood stove in the winter. They were marginally better off after moving from Grapeland to Houston’s Fifth Ward for better work opportunities, but things never got easy for them.

Her father, Ike, was a farmer, laborer and preacher. Her mother, Fannie, worked 20 hours a day to feed and clothe her family, and not just at home: She also went out to work as a domestic to scrub and clean the homes of white people.

Yet no matter how hard the elder Stubblefields worked, no matter how much their children helped, there was never enough of anything. Not enough money, food or clothing, much less hot water, bath soap or medical care. Least of all were there the luxuries Ruth Jean most craved: attention, imagination, books and the leisure to read them.

Here was a true case of “It takes a village.” For Ruth Jean, support came not only from caring family members and dear friends, but from extraordinary teachers who saw in her the potential to become a scholar, a shining star. Those teachers convinced her “that learning was supremely important, thoroughly enjoyable, and immensely expansive.”

Her first-grade teacher in Grapeland, Ida Mae Henderson, was the first one who really “saw me,” Simmons says — saw beyond her “thick, unstraightened plaits; large, bulging eyes; a homemade, ill-fitting dress; and the odor of the bacon fat my mother had smeared on my legs to treat my ashy skin.” Ruth Jean “could not understand how such a magnificent person could heap praise on me, an ugly country girl!”

But praise her, she did. As Simmons wrote: “Miss Ida Mae made me think that I was the princess of W.R. Banks [School] — equal to or better than any other child in her class. … I found it remarkable that this woman greeted me with ‘Hello, precious!’ or ‘Good morning, baby!’ By telling me I was valued … she invited me into a world of mystery and magic. What would I discover in such a place? Perhaps the key to the realm that I had long imagined, one varied and interesting, where I would be equal to others.”

After an academic career that carried her from vice provost at Princeton to president of Smith and then president of Brown, “I had no intention of taking on another job,” Simmons says. But five years later, when Prairie View A&M came calling, she felt called to use her talents on behalf of HBCU students “who deserve an education, just like my students at Brown.” Her family already had a connection to Prairie View, for her older brother Clarence had played basketball there and later became a coach.

As the university’s eighth president, Ruth Simmons brought her own game to recruit more funding and scholarships before stepping down earlier this year. She now lives in Houston, where she is a President’s Distinguished Fellow at Rice University. For, despite all her years away, “Texas is home for me,” Simmons says. “And I’m beginning to learn that I’ll never be done. I’ll always be involved in a positive way.”

Up Home: One Girl’s Journey

By Ruth J. Simmons

(Random House, 224 pages, $27)

Due out Sept. 5