“When do you plan on getting married and starting a family?”

This chapter narrates my educational journey, beginning at age four, in a one-room schoolhouse in Haywood County, Tennessee where I was under the tutelage of Miss Earline, a W. E. B. DuBois “Talented Tenth” teacher who was the only Black teacher in my entire educational experience, including high school and undergraduate and graduate school. My educational journey was fraught with race, gender, and class obstacles characteristic of life for a Black woman in the 1950s and 60s. The chapter details these barriers which included mandatory speech correction therapy for my “Negro Dialect,” an abusive marriage, struggles with what today is decried as “respectability politics,” and trials and tribulations in pursuit of a Ph.D. in English, including initial rejection of my dissertation by senior professors unfamiliar with the then-newly emerging Labovian Language Variation paradigm and quantitative sociolinguistics.