Growing up in rural Yanceyville, in Caswell County, North Carolina, in the 1960s was grueling for Barbara Johnson and her family. As sharecroppers, they moved from farm to farm, spending long hours working the land for little money. She suffered abuse — physical and sexual — and often struggled with not having proper clothes or enough food to eat.
But Johnson rose above her circumstances and graduated from Bennett College, a women's school in Greensboro. Johnson, now a retired AT&T customer service manager in Charlotte, wrote a memoir about how she learned to persevere. She's been featured by the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library Foundation and won the Jacobs/Jones African American Literary Prize, administered by UNC-Chapel Hill's creative writing program. The book is titled "A Head of Cabbage." She talked with WFAE’s Gwendolyn Glenn about the back story of that title — and what it took for her to succeed.
You can hear their whole conversation below.
