The Punishment That Built The Inventor
When Bessie Blount was seven years old, her teacher hit her on the knuckles.
The offense: writing with her left hand. This was a common correction in early twentieth-century American schools, where left-handedness was considered improper and teachers were expected to enforce right-handed penmanship, sometimes with physical force.
Bessie Blount did not simply switch hands.
She taught herself to write with a pencil in her mouth. Then she taught herself to write with her toes. If she was going to be forbidden one natural pathway, she would find others.
This response — defiant, inventive, completely practical — turned out to be the defining characteristic of her entire life. When presented with a problem she considered solvable, Bessie Blount found a solution. When the established authorities told her the solution was unnecessary, she found someone else who would use it.
She was born on November 24, 1914, in Hickory, Virginia, in what was then Princess Anne County and is now the city of Chesapeake. She attended Diggs Chapel, a one-room segregated schoolhouse built after the Civil War to serve the children of former slaves and Native Americans. The school had no textbooks. Bible verses were used to teach reading until the school eventually inherited discarded copies of whatever the local white school was no longer using.
Her formal education ended after the sixth grade. There were simply no more educational services available for Black children in her community. Her father, George Woodard Griffin, died as a result of injuries he had suffered during World War I. Her mother, Mary Elizabeth Griffin, eventually moved the family north to New Jersey — the familiar path of the Great Migration, the movement of Black families from the South to the North in search of better opportunity, better treatment, better life.
What followed is a story of a woman who built three distinct careers, received no adequate recognition for any of them during the prime of her life, and died at ninety-five having definitively proven her own point.
She called it, eventually, a simple statement: “A colored woman is capable of inventing something for the benefit of mankind.”
She proved it. Repeatedly.