[US] Education lifts Delta man from poverty

from The Clarion Ledger

By Richard Lake

CLARKSDALE — Eddie Gates did what he thought he was supposed to do when he become a man: He got a job.

He made $6 an hour hunched over an assembly line slapping cabinets together. Seemed like a good thing for a guy who'd grown up like he had, which is like lots of people in the Mississippi Delta: poor.

"I was OK with it," said Gates, 36, who was born and raised in Clarksdale.

Later on, life taught him hard labor would not be enough and he would need an education.

He'd grown up in the Chapel Hill Heights housing projects, the youngest of six kids. His disabled mom couldn't work, so the family survived on charity and welfare.

Gates was never a standout student in high school, but he knew how important it was to finish. And so, when he earned his diploma in 1988, thoughts of college never entered his mind. He worked, just like he was supposed to.

But then he met his future wife. She, too, worked on that assembly line. She already had two children, so they knew a few hundred bucks a week wasn't going to cut it anymore.

So, Gates got a job on another assembly line, working the night shift at $9 an hour. Two more children came, so Gates got a better job, making a couple dollars an hour more working at yet another plant, on another assembly line.

A decade passed. But then, he lost his job.

Though his wife was still working, she was not bringing in enough money to support the family.

Gates went backward.

He got a job paying $6 an hour as a janitor dozens of miles away in Bolivar County. On the side, he mowed lawns and picked up junk metal in his 1978 Chevy pickup, selling it to scrapyards.

Rising gas prices were killing him, so Gates got a job closer to home, again as a janitor, and again for $6 an hour.

But this one was different. He was cleaning out trash cans and mopping floors at Coahoma Community College in Clarksdale.

"When he got that job as a janitor here, that opened a whole new world for him," said Rosetta Howard, the school's academic dean.

Gates began to see possibilities instead of limits. He saw teachers and students every day who did not seem so different from him.

"There was something in him where he knew he could do better," said Vivian Presley, Coahoma's president.

Gates began to ask about a new program in respiratory therapy that had just been established at the college.

He did not know what respiratory therapy was, but it seemed promising. The average salary for a respiratory therapist is about $40,000 - almost twice the median income in Clarksdale.

"My children were growing and I knew working for $6 an hour, I couldn't support them," he said.

The oldest, Lashonda, had dreams of going to college.

So Gates applied to Coahoma. He was scared to death.

"His mere acceptance did something to his self confidence," said Howard. "It made him feel different than he ever felt before."

Scholarships and grants paid for his tuition, but Gates no longer had time to work. He was taking day classes, night classes and studying all the time.

He quit his job as a janitor and went back on welfare.

If his schedule was tough and the classes were hard, the tests were even harder. Gates had never been a great student, had never been a great test taker, but he was determined to do this right.

There were seven students in that first respiratory therapy class. The instructors helped everyone individually, especially Gates.

"They watched me closely," he said. "They knew I didn't have the background the others had."

Then his mom got sick, had heart surgery, and trouble with her eyes led to blindness. All five of Gates' brothers and sisters live out of state, so it was up to him to be there for his mother.

It was enough to push a less motivated man over the edge. Gates endured.

His wife, Hester, never wavered.

"I've seen the worry in her face, but she never verbalized it," he said. "She never said anything that might cause me to stop."

Once, during a nighttime study session, Gates' frustration got the best of him. He stood up from the kitchen table, where he'd been leaning over his books for hours, and tossed the books at the wall.

"I am too tired," he declared.

Hester "peacefully got up, picked up every book, every paper, walked over to me, put them all back in front of me and very patiently said, 'You'll get it,'" Gates said. "That was a big deal to me because I knew that she supported me no matter what."

He graduated on the same day in 2004 that his daughter graduated from high school. She went on to Mississippi State, where she is studying banking and finance.

Gates went to work.

He secured a job with Northwest Mississippi Regional Medical Center in Clarksdale as a respiratory therapist, though keeping the job was contingent upon his passing the state licensing exam - another test.

He studied for that thing like he'd never studied before. The day he walked in to take the test, he was sweating like he'd been out working in the fields all day.

He failed it by two points.

He took it again, failed it again, this time by one point.

The next time, he was not nervous any more. He knew enough about the test to pass, and he did by one point. It was the hardest thing he'd ever done.

"We knew that Eddie knew the information, it was just him taking that test," said his boss, Sherie Denham.

The news spread fast. As soon as he was off the phone with his wife, it began to ring with calls of congratulations - co-workers, former professors, friends and family.

"When you come up against something that's hard for you, and you know it's hard, and you overcome it. It's that feeling," he said.

He is now a certified respiratory therapist. Next, he'll take the test to become a registered respiratory therapist, which delivers a higher salary.

Then, if everything goes like he wants it to, he'll get his bachelor's degree one day.

He won't say how much he makes now, only that it is enough that he can take his wife out for dinner now and then.

Now, though his children, Eddie Jr., 12, and Kierra, 7, are too young to figure all this out just yet, what Gates has done has had an influence elsewhere.

Shawonda, the 16-year-old, already has plans for college. She wants to study nursing, or maybe respiratory therapy, just like her dad.