Home is Everything

This Belongs to Pauline

When asked what home means to her, Ms. Wheeler. doesn't hesitate: “Something you own. Something you can call your own.”

An excerpt of Ms. Wheeler's oral housing history interview. The interview took place at Richmond City's Office of Aging & Disability Services at the Huguenot Community Center on Oct. 18, 2024.

It’s a meaning that carries the weight of history—from her grandmother who survived slavery, to the children raised on love and syrup-sweetened cakes and peanut candy made from memory, to her award winning writing.

Ms. Wheeler’s life, which has stretched across 102 years, is a living archive of hard-won freedom, familial love, and a demonstration of how the concept of home relates to justice, belonging, and joy. 

“My father gave all his children a piece of land before he passed,” she says. “He put our names on it: ‘This belongs to Pauline.’ ‘This belongs to Aaron,’” 

“‘Nobody tells you nothing … it’s yours.’”

She starts her story by describing her father’s fight for a home built on freedom.

Her father’s journey reads like folklore: cast out for defying his mother's house rules, his clothes left on the porch as a signal he’d gone too far. With no money, he hopped  a train to Atlanta, where he found work in a white man’s kitchen—cleaning, saving, dreaming. When he returned home, he shocked everyone when he bought 40 acres of land.

That farm, with its neat divisions, included orchards of 200 fruits, and provided a bounty for the family. “Everything was done methodically,” Ms. Wheeler says. “We produced what we needed.”

The land was more than sustenance; it was safety, stability, and identity. Her father, who was denied education past the third grade, instilled in his children the importance of land ownership and pride in how to care for that land. “He nicknamed me Sweet,” Ms. Wheeler recalls. “Because he didn’t have to tell me more than once.”

As the youngest of three girls, “Sweet” Pauline enjoyed being  her father’s right hand. She brushed down horses before school, ushered mules to their stalls, and absorbed his wisdom. She woke with the rooster's crow and completed her chores before school. “That was a fun life,” she says. “You look back and say, ‘I had a good life, and I didn’t know it.’”

 

The family’s land was not immune to racialized oppression. Neighbors mistook her father for a sharecropper—an assumption that bought him time. When they found out he owned the land, which was an anomaly in the rural South, officials redrew city lines to invoke eminent domain. 

They seized  the land without notice and without compensation. “They wouldn’t even let him come back for his tools,” she says.

The hostility ran so deep that Ms. Wheeler's grandmother feared for their lives. She warned, “If we don’t get out of here, they’re going to burn your house down.” Her father, angered by years of mistreatment and injustice, carried a shotgun with him everywhere he went. “If they come after me,” he said, “I’m going to at least get one of them.” Fear and defiance shaped Ms. Wheeler’s childhood landscape.

These were her earliest lessons in terrorism. Years later in 2001, while she and her son watched the deadly attacks unfold on TV on September 11, she turned to him and said plainly: “That’s what I grew up in.”

Ms. Wheeler’s father was once jailed over a false accusation. A neighbor’s cotton had gone missing, and without evidence, the white neighbors accused  him. But a local store owner spoke in his defense after the thieves bragged in his store. He vouched for Ms. Wheeler’s father, and he was released. He was dropped off miles away in a place called Panama, from which he made his way home to a family overjoyed to find him alive.

The family code of resilience set a strong foundation for Ms. Wheeler. In high school she met a hero and role model, George Washington Carver. She laughs when she remembers, “he was so shy. He didn't want to talk to nobody.”

Ms. Wheeler herself is a highly skilled speaker. Soon after meeting the reticent Mr. Carver, she wrote and delivered by heart a valedictory address titled Climbing the Mountain Though It Be Rugged. After high school she attended Friendship Junior College in Rock Hill, S.C. — a small, historically Black institution — on a scholarship earned through oratory contests. “I won all 12 contests,” she said with pride.

She had dreamed the scholarship would take her to a large  university, but she poured herself into college life regardless. She played college basketball and was elected class president. Her oratory  and writing skills continue to shine, and she wrote her first book at age 100.

The theme of agency is a  throughline through Ms. Wheeler's story. Seeking agency, grasping it, lacking it, or having it taken. When her husband was deployed in the military, he insisted she live with his father. Ms. Wheeler did not have a choice in the matter, but her son loved living with his grandfather. His transportation was a mule and a wagon and he was fully integrated into farm life. He looked up to his mother and listened to her life lessons carefully.

Ms. Wheeler never let bitterness or hatred take root and she imparted lessons of the strength of unity down to her children. “She didn’t let racism define us,” her son says. “She taught us strength, and love, and pride.”

That legacy continues. Her grandchildren are accomplished: one a retired Army major, another a CEO. Her son credits Ms. Wheeler’s compassion and refusal to hate for helping him bridge divides as a soldier and a citizen. Reflecting on generations of their family history, he calls for us to learn from the past in order to shape the future. "That's why history is so important, because a lot of people just haven't been told the truth," he said.

Ms. Wheeler shared her hopes for the future, and they revolve around her children:

 

“I want to see my children grow up to be principals, be senators of their little town, be doctors and lawyers, and treat us like we are human. Yeah. That's what I want. That's what I want to see in my lifetime. Have your own bank account. Have your own employees. Live a life that you think will be pleasing on down the road. Yeah. Something you can be proud of. Grasp hands, shake hands with your other race, and let them know your hands are just as firm as theirs. What you want in life is the same thing, baby. Yes, yes. Not that they're going to be so high up there. Come down and meet us halfway. Feels like you would like to be, too. Yeah. That's all you want. Have something of your own. Have something you can say, this is mine. That's all.

Her message is a reminder: Freedom is not abstract. It is justice, it is safety, it is aspiration, it is love. It is hers. As her father once said, “This belongs to Pauline.”

Full audio

Full transcript (currently undergoing revision)

Delano, J., photographer. (1940) Field of tomatoes on a farm near Shiloh, North Carolina. North Carolina United States Shiloh, 1940. July. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2017791112/.

Rothstein, A., photographer. (1942) Tuskegee Institute, Alabama. Dr. George Washington Carver. Tuskegee Macon County United States Alabama, 1942. Mar. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2017828725/.