The woodpile outside of Lottie Smith Payne’s house in Willisville never seems to get smaller.
“They look out for me. Sometimes I’ll come home and there’ll be a pile up here. They know us, because we’ve been here forever. Got a little load over there now. Somebody dropped that off the other day. I said, ‘Well, I’ve got a wood angel; thank you!’”
Her cats are also abundant. There are ten in all, including Maine Coon Gizzy, a tortoiseshell called Knucklehead, and orange tabby named Ginger.
“I leave the kitchen window up during the day, so they can come and go. But they come in around dark. They all have their spots. I have some igloo houses outside for the others. They know. Under the shed, or, under my back porch. Cat here, there, there, deer walking up the driveway. I said, ‘This is the life.’ I love it up here, nice and quiet and peaceful.”
Payne’s spent her entire life in Willisville, a small community of about 18 homes in Northern Virginia’s Loudoun County that dates to the mid-1800s. At one end is the schoolhouse where Lottie’s mom, Ethel Rae Stuart Smith, taught Black students in the 1950s. In the middle is the Willisville Methodist Church, which Payne and her family still attend.
And a few miles up the road is Banneker Elementary, where her mom also taught, and which Payne and her late brother Stephan attended with other Black kids in the area until 1968. That was the year that Loudoun, one of the last American counties to desegregate its schools, integrated. Payne’s mom had agreed to teach at the all-white Round Hill Elementary. Payne went, too. She was in fifth grade.
“She said, ‘I’ve been transferred to Round Hill for one year.’ She said, ‘I’m only going one year and I’m going to put in to transfer back to Banneker.’ So that was just that. So, we hopped in the station wagon and rode to Round Hill. I was nervous because I was the only little colored girl, and Stephan was the only little colored boy. We were young, so we got along. We didn’t know everything at that point in time the way things were and stuff. So.”
After attending Valley High School in Purcellville, Payne had a son, got married, and worked as an accountant and, later, as a Notre Dame Academy cook and caterer. Today, she is her mom’s full-time caregiver, which brings her both joy and worry.
“If I have two breaths, she’s got one of them. The only thing that’s been getting me and that’s got me now is I’m worried about my world when God calls mama home. Cause she’s everything. She’s 97, so, I don’t want to think about life without her. Especially since last time, she’s in the hospital and stuff. She said, ‘You think it’s my time?’ I said, ‘You’re not going nowhere yet; you’re too hard-headed to go anywhere.’
‘But I’m tired, I can’t live forever.’ I say, ‘Your house is not ready yet, mama.’ God said, ‘There are many mansions that I have built for you.’ I said, ‘Mama, He doesn’t have your mansion ready yet.’ But she can barely get around through the house, so I know she’s tired. So, everything’s just a body just moving slow.”
Payne’s as devoted to her 18-month-old granddaughter, Ethel, as her own grandmother, Jennie Smith, her mom’s mom, was to her. Jennie was part Cherokee and part white, took Payne to church, and taught her to make butter. Payne called her “pawpaw.”
Jennie is one of 12 people buried in the Smith family cemetery, which Payne passes each day on the short walk to her mom’s. Ultimately, they’ll both be buried there, their homes passed down within the family. Even in that Payne is lovingly accommodating.
“Everybody knows where I want to go; I’m going right by my brother. I was going to go by mom, I told them, I want to be by her, but there may not be enough space, so I said, ‘Put me over there by Stephan. That way I can kick him.’”
“I have two strong women in my life: my grandma Jennie, pawpaw, and mom. Yes sir. And I tell anybody any day: that’s it, my strength.”
You can read more about integration and the history of Loudoun County in the book, Dirt Don’t Burn: A Black Community’s Struggle for Educational Equality Under Segregation, by Larry Roeder and Barry Harrelson.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.