Susan Davis Grant

It's not just
a man's world

Susan Davis Grant wouldn't let her gender or her race interfere with getting a job.

From barber school to a steel mill's school of hard knocks, Susan Davis Grant refused to take no for an answer. Her reward: a working life with few regrets and more than a few stories for the grandkids.

A Georgetown, S.C., native, Grant graduated from high school and moved to New York City in the 1950s, eventually enrolling in barbering school even though the owner said he couldn't guarantee finding a job for a woman. When she went to take the licensure exam, the testing authorities were shocked to see a woman—they first insisted she was in the wrong place—and probably were even more surprised by the flying colors with which she passed.

The barber shop owner where she went to work was pessimistic about her chances, and she waited a week and a half for her first customer who, on seeing a female barber, commented, “Oh, what the hell, my hair will grow back.”

In spite of his less-than-rousing enthusiasm, Grant delivered a fine haircut and was soon overrun with customers. Eventually, Grant bought out the barber shop and operated it until her divorce in the early 1970s.

With two children to support, Grant decided to move back to Georgetown and thought the steel mill would offer the best wages. “I didn't want a girly-girly kind of job because I needed to make some money to take care of two children,” she said. The fact that she was a black woman—none had ever worked inside the mill—didn't enter the equation in her mind.

At first, the mill management tried to ignore the woman who kept showing up looking for work, day after day. After several days, she finally had an opportunity to talk with the company president and personnel manager. Then a foreman showed up to escort her to her first task.

“ ‘So you want to work in the mill,’ he said to me. ‘You'll be sorry.’ I said, ‘I don't think so,’ ” Grant recalled. “It was one of the hottest and dirtiest parts of the mill—I had never been inside a mill in my life—and I thought that I had died and went to hell because sparks were flying all over the place. And he asked me to pick up a jack for the ladle.”

Grant didn't know what a jack or ladle was but realized it was an unusual request when she saw several men gather around to watch. The foreman showed her the jack and watched in disbelief as she ably picked it up and placed it on a stand.

“I was praying, ‘God, you've got to give me the strength to do this,’ ” she said. “I remembered my mother always telling us to lift a laundry basket with our knees, not our backs, and that's what I did with that jack. I later learned that two men would usually pick up the jack.”

Grant eventually became a crane operator at the mill and worked there 28 years before a disabling shoulder injury ended her career.

Grant's pioneering story of life in the traditionally male world of a steel mill and barber shop was captured in a video documentary by students in the Tales of the Tidelands class, an interdisciplinary course taught this past fall by history and media arts faculty. Read Grant's story or watch a video clip of the documentary, “It's Not Just a Man's World,” by going to www.cas.sc.edu/
talesofthetidelands

Susan Davis Grant

Tales of the Tidelands

Students in this interdisciplinary class plunge headfirst into the culture of a coastal town and resurface with stories of perseverance, heritage, and change

By Chris Horn

It's the end of the semester—students are sweating through final exams all over campus—but the jovial mood in one large classroom feels more like a film festival than a three-hour examination.

That's because the 20 students in this course have been cramming all semester for their final, and after weeks of work and hundreds of miles of field trips, their projects are done. It also feels like a film festival because, in a sense, it is: with their professors looking on, the students are screening their videotaped documentaries and PowerPoint presentations for a final grade.

“I didn't realize it would take this long to make a film,” one student tells another. “I spent seven hours just logging the scenes.”

The class, “Tales of the Tidelands,” is the brainchild of two faculty members—Tom Lekan in history and Laura Kissel in media arts, who taught it together and plan to offer it again. The semester-long course immersed students in the history and culture of Georgetown, S.C., and required them to gather, interpret, and present stories of cultural, environmental, and industrial change in that small coastal town.

For the students, that meant finding and interviewing key people to create oral histories and videotaped documentaries. Here, the marriage of history and media arts proved to be a happy one. History students showed media arts students how to conduct oral history interviews; the media arts students, in turn, shared their technical expertise with digital recorders and video cameras.

One group of students focused on the coastal Gullah culture and traveled beyond Georgetown to Charleston and McClellanville, logging 700 miles in search of authentic Gullah-speaking people. Their fascinating documentary, “Uprooted,” and the documentaries and oral histories of the other students will be on display in USC's McKissick Museum in a future exhibit. S.C. ETV has selected one of the student-produced documentaries for its “Southern Lens” series.

College courses that combine two or more separate fields—in this case, history and media arts—used to be an anomaly in higher education but not anymore. USC offers several such courses that blend the perspectives of different disciplines and provide students with rich learning experiences and the opportunity to develop important work skills.

“Many academic disciplines are looking at their curricula in new ways and rethinking what learning is all about,” Lekan said. “This course tried to take a research-based learning approach, giving the students the tools to go dig for information themselves.”

Research learning-based courses such as Tales of the Tidelands aren't for the timid—they often involve a steep learning curve and a willingness to jump in first and learn to swim along the way.

“Much of the learning takes place in the process of doing,” Lekan said. “We had some required readings and a lot of discussion about producing oral histories and documentaries, but the students really got their feet wet by going out and doing it.”

“It's definitely a trial-by-fire experience,” Kissel added. “But the sink-or-swim method is sometimes the way to go. We've said to these students, ‘We're going to give you lots of freedom to pursue your projects, but you have to strive for excellence.’ Set the bar high, and let them excel.”

One group of students focused on the craft and cultural significance of storytelling, particularly about ghost tales of Georgetown. They found Captain Sandy Vermont, a colorful, professional storyteller who often plies the brackish backwaters of Georgetown with groups of tourists in tow.

On one of their visits to Captain Sandy's rustic home—whose outdoor inhabitants include chickens, a now-tamed feral pig, and a rowdy dog—the students trained the camera on their man as he wove a mesmerizing tale of hags and ghosts, gesturing behind a crackling fire. In the finished documentary, the students included scenes from a 19th-century Georgetown graveyard where Alice of the Hermitage is believed to be buried. According to the tale, young Alice dies of heartache when her beau's ring is snatched from a chain on her neck. Those who walk backward around her grave seven times can supposedly feel her ghost tugging at their rings.

“The thing about creating a documentary is that it's so organic,” said Josh Rose, a senior media arts student who was part of the storytelling group. “You talk to one person, and he steers you to someone else and the focus shifts. You have to adapt and think and figure out what your story is really about.”

After the Captain Sandy documentary concluded on final exam day, undergraduates Whit Ashley and Catie Blocker presented a PowerPoint presentation on the origins and purposes of storytelling. Here, the educational dynamic of this class is particularly evident. The students learned the theory of storytelling from their professors and their assigned readings, and now, after weeks of research and talking to storytellers in Georgetown, they connect the dots and become teachers for a brief moment, sharing their newfound knowledge.

Students Kathryn Vignone, Mary Lohman, and Kristin Morris explored the significance of Georgetown's steel mill and discovered Susan Davis Grant, the first woman to work inside the plant. Her remarkable story of perseverance and pioneering became the foundation for their oral history project and imparted a life lesson for the whole class to absorb.

Other students in the class investigated Georgetown's shrimp and fishing industry; the history of an old slave cemetery and of Hobcaw Barony, the estate of Bernard Baruch and his daughter, Belle; and the philosophies of a Georgetown real estate developer and a conservationist.

“Students learned both content and method in this course,” Kissel said. “They learned to use the Internet in a scholarly way and, perhaps more importantly, how to struggle through a project and bring it to a successful completion.”

And successful it was. Through their documentaries and oral histories, the Tales of the Tidelands students captured a diverse portrait of Georgetown and other coastal areas. Their presentations will become part of a McKissick Museum exhibit, scheduled for 2007, and some of the students plan to screen their work in Georgetown. Lekan plans to lead a seminar for senior history students this year that will dig deeper into some of the projects produced by the fall 2004 class.

“We'll continue to build on this in future courses,” Lekan said. “And there are so many other possibilities we could pursue: perhaps a history of Highway One near Columbia, or Tales of the Congaree Swamp, or Tales of the Fall Line.”

Hmm, Tales of the Fall Line. Sounds like a catchy title for a documentary—and another research-based course that will set the bar high and motivate students to excel.