I’m a product of Florida schools, the kind of educational system Ron DeSantis is trying to resurrect.

I attended white schools. Black students had their own schools. Separate but equal, supposedly. My teachers were white. Not until, as a seventeen-year-old, I had a job as a waitress, did I ever engage in a conversation with anyone who wasn’t white. When business slowed, Norman, the Black cook, had the patience to take my immature inquisitiveness seriously. 

I studied white history. At Robert E. Lee Junior High, I learned that the Civil War was not fought over slavery but over whether a state could leave the Union. The only Black historical figure I recall learning about was George Washington Carver. Something to do with peanuts, which didn’t much impress me. 

I studied white male history. Sure, there were Jane Addams, Clara Barton, and Betsy Ross, all doing what females were supposed to do: sew and take care of others. Meanwhile, White Men of Power waged war, invented things, and benignly governed.

I’ve since expanded my knowledge of history, some of it related to Florida. Gilbert King’s Devil in the Grove is the compelling true story of a 1949 tragedy. The Lake County, Florida, sheriff and the KKK viciously hunted down four young Black men falsely accused of raping a nineteen-year-old white girl. Two of the men were murdered, two sentenced to life in prison. King writes, “From 1882 to 1930, Florida recorded more lynchings of black people (266) than any other state, and from 1900 to 1930, a per capita lynching rate twice that of Mississippi, Georgia, or Louisiana.”

In Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920, Paul Ortiz writes of the efforts of Black Floridians to build lives and community following the Civil War. When Black men tried to vote in the 1920 election, white supremists and the KKK attacked them, killing twenty.

I and many of my generation were taught a skewed history of America. Yes, in truth, there were White Men of Power, but most of us trace our roots to racial and ethnic groups that suffered and persisted, suffered and persisted, suffered and persisted. To deny their role in the shaping of our country is to distort American history. 

Perhaps I read history because the word is built around story. Stories broaden my perspective. They increase my capacity for empathy by revealing others’ struggles and heroism.

Why would we deny our children that gift?

For 19 years I worked in college learning centers. One of the colleges was in rural New York, the other in downtown Chicago. Both were small, private schools. Neither was selective. That is, they accepted many applicants who were academically unprepared for higher education. Whether or not the odds for graduation were promising, a Financial Aid Office made sure students could put together enough in loans to pay tuition. 

Some who sought the services of the Learning Center were B students striving for A’s, but most who came struggled academically. Often they were the first in their family to attend college. Because I worked with students individually, I learned of their aspirations and struggles. Most hoped for employment in public education, social services, and the hospitality industry. Women balanced lives as mothers, students, and employees at minimum wage jobs. 

What you might not understand about student debt is that many colleges are small private institutions whose survival depends on student tuition to pay bills. Often this has been a predatory practice, as young men and women who had little chance of graduating were burdened with debt they would likely never be able to repay.

You probably know that our public-school systems, particularly urban ones, are not preparing students for college. Yet college graduates earn more money over a lifetime than non-graduates. This reality preys upon the aspirations of those who dream of someday having a family and home. So why would a young person, even one academically unprepared, NOT choose to attend college? 

For many I worked with, graduating required persistence…and a willingness to accumulate debt.

I feel blessed to have known them and admire them for the contributions they’re making to their communities. As a taxpayer, I am willing to contribute to their debt relief and that of others exploited by a system that never had their interests in mind.

During the summer of 1973—while I canned fifty quarts of tomatoes, fifty quarts of tomato juice, and twelve pints of catsup (not to mention the green beans and corn)—less than two hundred miles away Men in Power were asking what did Nixon know and when did he know it. Toiling in my narrow kitchen—with its five feet of counter space, a Youngstown metal sink, and an ancient four-burner electric stove—I faithfully followed the Senate Watergate Hearings on a fifteen-inch black and white TV. 

I wanted answers too.

Canners of blue-and-white-speckled enamel occupied two burners; on another a tea kettle maintained a low whistle. On the fourth burner a pan of water boiled. Frequently I’d interrupt the flow of work to wipe my sweating forehead with the tail of my sleeveless blouse. As Tom Daschel posed questions to men who swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, I prepared tomatoes for easy pealing, briefly immersing them in the pan of boiling water.

Nixon was in hot water too, and everyone knew him to be a sweating man, even when he sat in the air-conditioned Oval Office, signing his now besmirched name. Had he been in my kitchen the heat would have convinced him he was in hell.

While H.R. Haldeman scalded the truth, I stuffed whole tomatoes into quart Mason jars, which I filled to the top with boiling water from the tea kettle. From a saucepan resting on the sink drain, I lifted sterilized lids, placed them on the jars with tongs, then screwed on the metal rings. The whole country had been screwed.

Both canners held seven jars. After placing a newly filled jar in each slot of a wire rack, I gently lowered the heavy rack into the boiling water bath. Pausing to rest a moment while the stove and canners carried out their responsibilities, I sat at the kitchen table staring at the TV, engrossed in Daniel Inouye’s line of questioning.

The Simple Life, that was the path my husband, Jim, and I had chosen. Self-sufficiency. A quarter of an acre in tomatoes, corn, green beans, and other vegetables, enough quart boxes in our twenty-cubic-foot freezer to feed us until next harvest. Quite an undertaking for a young woman who’d grown up in the city and a young man whose previous gardening experience had been limited to reluctantly weeding alongside his father. We sought advice from other gardeners and read organic gardening magazines, which recommended that we keep records of what we’d planted and when. The simple life, we discovered, was more complicated than anticipated. 

Life was turning out to be complicated for John Dean, as well, who testified for seven hours one day. But he’d kept records, could tell the senators what Nixon and Haldeman and Ehrlichman had said in his presence. Pulling the weeds of deception out by the roots, he was. 

My glasses steamed as I lifted the racks out of the canners. One by one I carried the hot jars to the counter, lining them up on layers of dishtowels, then beginning the process all over again: dipping whole tomatoes in boiling water, putting on lids, lowering jars into the water bath.

Our garden was a political statement, something young people of the 1960s needed to do to declare our disdain for the Establishment. We refused to buy into the capitalist dream, shunning the symbols of affluence and power. That summer everything on my little TV supported our decision. The government was corrupt, and the Watergate hearings were proving it.

Still I was shocked when on a July day, while I was stirring a batch of catsup. Alexander Butterfield testified that Nixon recorded conversations and phone calls. So there was evidence of wrongdoing. To make sure I didn’t miss anything I walked away from the pan to stand beside the TV. By the time I returned to the stove the catsup was sticking to the bottom of the pan, scorched, ruined. 

Jars on my kitchen counter cooled. Every now and then a lid would ping, a sign that the jar had sealed. Two at a time I carried them down the basement steps into a small dark room lined with shelves. Evidence of Jim’s and my success at being self-sufficient.

“Now I’m just a country lawyer,” Sam Erwin said, obviously shrewd in spite of his self-deprecating words. A country lawyer butting heads with urbane fellows acting as if they were above the law. Stepping away from the stove to cool off, sweeping a strand of wet hair from my face, I pictured Erwin as a young man laboring in a garden (though he probably didn’t).

Twenty holes filled with water, twenty tomato plants, their stems wrapped in strips cut from paper grocery bags to protect them from boring insects. In 1973 our young bodies were agile. For hours we would bend over a hoe, work on our knees, gently place the tomato plants in the holes, pack the muddy soil down around them. Dirt caked our hands, got under our fingernails. Surely the fingernails of Haldeman and Ehrlichman were well manicured, their cuticles not ragged.

When I dropped in bed each night from exhaustion, in those brief moments before I fell asleep, I considered the sleepless nights many in Washington were experiencing, innocent and guilty alike. Senators Howard Baker and Lowell Weiker worrying about how the Republican Party would ever recover. Charles Colson and G. Gordon Liddy becoming aware that they might spend years in prison; Butterfield and Dean fretting about betraying those they worked for. Then of course, Nixon himself. He couldn’t be sleeping well.

Why was I so obsessed with watching the Watergate hearings? In many ways they were like a soap opera, where any minute the plot takes an unexpected turn. At times I imagined background music changing tempo, the tune becoming somber, dramatic. Yet I, like many Americans, sensed that history was being made; that bringing down a president was no light matter; that the country would never be the same.

There was probably a more personal reason, as well. In spite of Jim’s and my goal of self-reliance, of our choosing to isolate ourselves from capitalist society, I recognized that we could never be separate. Just as I had vowed to stay married for better or for worse, I was a part of a country for better or for worse. I was tied to its fate.

Nancy Werking Poling is author of the novel, “While Earth Still Speaks,” and the non-fiction book, “Before It Was Legal: a black-white marriage (1945-1987).”