As kids, they picked cotton and dreamed about the 'mansion' across the road. Now they own it.

““Standing together on the wraparound front porch of this bungalow-style home, Dorothy Giles Ngongang and her younger sister Sandra Giles McBeth gaze across Pea Ridge Highway at a vast field and a large storage building filled with hay.

And memories of their childhood flow.

Back then, instead of the storage building, a small, dilapidated five-room hut housed the two of them, their parents and their eight siblings. Back then, they ate mostly what they could catch: rabbits, squirrels, river cooters, robins. Back then, during the cotton harvest, the Giles kids were only allowed to go to school when it rained - because on every dry day, they were needed in the fields.

A visitor can't read Ngongang's eyes, hidden behind dark sunglasses, but she smiles softly as she takes it in.

"It's just a blessing," says the 72-year-old Charlottean, "to be on this side and not that side. It just shows you what the Lord has brought us from. All this time and all these years. ... We really came from _"

Her sister interrupts, forcefully: "Nothing. We came from nothing."

>snip<

Its paint was white. The lawn was manicured. There were cozy-looking rocking chairs on the wraparound front porch.

"We thought that house was a mansion," Dorothy Ngongang says.

It was on another large, rolling plot of land that was not a part of the farm they worked on, and it was owned by an affluent white couple with three daughters: Joan, Marian and Peggy Wheeler, who were close in age to several of the Giles kids.

In the era of Jim Crow laws that relegated black people to separate schools, separate drinking fountains and separate movie theater entrances, this was practically the only sliver of earth where Dorothy and her siblings felt equal to whites, she says. That's because the Wheeler girls didn't care that the Gileses were black.

They were just happy to have other children to play with.

"Mama wouldn't let us go over there, unless there was an adult with us, but they could come over to our house every day," recalls the youngest Wheeler, Peggy McKinney, who is now 67 and still lives in Jonesville. She laughs at how they'd circumvent this rule: "Mama would be inside watching TV and my sister could run like a racehorse, so I'd get out on the porch and make racket like me and her was out there playing, and she'd go running over there to get 'em."

The kids would play ball out on the perfect front lawn in the shadow of a giant tree. Jackstones, pick-up sticks, marbles on the porch. Hide-and-seek underneath it.

The Giles children cherished these times. Says Ngongang: "It was like a little refuge."””
     — Théoden Janes

Tags: Théoden Janes ∙ Dorothy Giles Ngongang ∙ Peggy McKinney ∙ Sandra Giles McBeth ∙ Jim Crow ∙ sharecropping ∙ children