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Who. What. Where. When. How. The basic elements that have long guided journalists in their pursuit of truth are the same ponderables Pearl Ceresia Hood has employed for many of her more than nine decades of life.
Born Pearl Holland in Pinetown in 1912, the now longtime Milton resident grew up in the then, as now, tiny rural black community where everyone knows one another.
“Pinetown was all colored people. Pinetown was the best foundation that I could have had,” Hood said, remembering her years growing up in the small enclave.
As a girl, she worked as a domestic for a few of Lewes’ upper echelon families, among them prominent physicians including Beebe Medical Center’s founder Dr. James Beebe.
Hood said as a black woman working in the homes of Lewes’ social elite, she couldn’t remember a moment of ever being treated with disrespect by an adult.
But she said the children of the families for whom she worked, while not disrespectful, found her to be a curiosity and sometimes said things that made her wonder.
“They’d look at you from your face to your feet and say ‘How are you doin’ today? You’re colored aren’t you? But you can’t help from being colored, can you?’ Now, where did that come from?” Hood said.
It was during those years that she was developing a thirst for knowledge and a desire to pass along what she had learned.
“Dr. Beebe had children going to school and those girls would always ask me questions that I could answer because I was in a higher grade than they,” she said.
Despite her age, Hood’s diction, grammar and use of English could rival that of a John Milton scholar. She said her manner of speaking has always been the way it is now and was one of the reasons she was hired to work in doctors’ homes.
Hood said it was early in life that her speech and “just the way I am” set her apart and developed into an aloofness that she readily admits.
“I wasn’t too much of a friend to people. I would talk to you but I didn’t have too much to give you. I was the same way in school,” she said.
Hood’s years in school – as a student and as a teacher – were largely spent in a segregated world. She graduated from Delaware State College with a degree in education. Later, she continued her education at the University of Delaware and was among the few blacks attending the school at the time.
She said in those days, obtaining the equivalent of a master’s degree could be achieved through continuing education, something she pursued by taking coursework at Temple and Rutgers universities.
Her first teaching job was a year spent at the Blackwater School in Frankford. There she taught black children in the first through eighth grades in a one-room schoolhouse.
“There wasn’t any kindergarten then, and I might not have had any eighth-graders. But you wouldn’t know anything about that unless you were related to somebody who told you,” she said mindful that not everyone is in the loop.
She spent years teaching at Selbyville’s Philip C. Showell School, another all black school, where she also taught her own daughter whose name is also Pearl.
Hood’s daughter said it was questionable luck to be a student in her mother’s class.
“I went to school with her for seven years, from Milton to Selbyville, going down, coming back,” the younger Hood said. She said that when she reached the eighth grade, she had gone as far as she could at Showell and welcomed the chance to ride a school bus to the Jason School in Georgetown.
Hood said her years teaching in Selbyville prepared her well for what was ahead. “I got more respect from the white community than I did the colored in Selbyville. Teachers were highly respected then, but they were ready for criticism at any minute. Anything that they could get against you, they would,” she said.
Hood said she had a bit of a reputation for being a tough teacher but not so harsh that kids didn’t want to be in her class.
“They were happy getting me but they also said, ‘She’ll crack your fingers.’ ” Hood said she used a ruler a few times but preferred more subtle methods. “I’d taken a number of courses in psychology. Sometimes all I had to do was to look at them,” she said.
When Delaware’s schools were integrated in the late 1960s, Hood got a job teaching in Milton’s school. It was her first integrated teaching experience, and she remembers having no problems in the school.
Hood said she grew up in a time when young people had more respect for everyone.
Nowadays, she frequently asks herself the “why” question as she observes the rude behavior of some youngsters.
“I fault the parents. I can’t fault the children. You have to stop things before they start. But the parents don’t do it,” Hood said.
She’s likes high school basketball and still goes to the games. She’s an Alpha Kapa Alpha sorority member, a member of the Order of the Eastern Star, the Delaware Council Missionary Society, the Molly Jackson Missionary Society, Bethel AME Church, the National Council of Negro Women and serves on a variety of church-governing panels.
When she was in her seventies, she took a group trip to Jerusalem and was unimpressed.
“I wouldn’t want to live there because you can’t change them. Whenever they talk to you there’s always a why, but it’s a why that’s only in their minds. They didn’t talk to you,” Hood said of her experience.
And therein lays the journalist in the educator, or if not the journalist, the educator’s ever inquisitive mind.
“Those words stay with me every day I get up. The words just come, one-by-one. While a person’s talking to me those words: who, what, where, when how, come to me. I wonder why that is?” Hood asks.
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