The Community Times Dispatch

The movie is set in the 1950’s and focuses on the town and a kid name, Homer Hikam. Homer has only one future in sight, to work in the local coalmine like his father. However, in October 1957, everything changes when the first artificial satellite, Sputnik goes into orbit. With that event, Homer becomes inspired to learn how to build rockets. With his friends and the local nerd, Homer sets to do just that by trial and a lot of mishaps. Most of the town and especially Homer’s father think the boys are wasting their time. Only one teacher in the high school understands their efforts and lets them know that they could become contenders in the national science fair with college scholarships being the prize. Faced with the hurdles typically associated with a small town, the boys’ hopes seemed doomed before they ever started to compete in the science fair. Homer at one point tried to rally the others by asking, “Do you want to be known as a bunch of hillbillies, to which one lad replied, but Homer, we are a bunch of hillbillies.”

The movie does have an exciting ending; in fact it is based on a true story. Now fast-forward to today or rather, the 1970s and 1980s. Segregation has just ended on the books but not really in people’s hearts. The perceptions of folks from small towns were the same in Colleton County as any other town. Unless a child had visionary parents, he or she were still doomed to either work on a plantation or on some guys “get-by” job; really back-breaking work with no real future or any remote chance for success.

Now imagine a young black girl from a place like Bennett’s Point aspiring to become a teacher. I’ve heard people refer to Bennett’s Point as the place where ‘God had to pump sunlight or, a place located behind God’s back’. Imagine the audacity of this girl’s hope! When Jesus Christ was introduced to Nathaniel, Nathaniel replied, “can any good thing come out of Nazareth”, prompting I am sure many to asked, can any good thing come out of Coalwood, or out of Bennett’s Point? When I was a very young child, I rode the school bus down to Bennett’s Point and I’d fallen asleep and awaken only to learn that we’d hadn’t passed my stop from where the bus picked me up earlier. I almost wondered, what’s the point of going to Green Pond school now, ‘jeez, just put me off at my stop after that long ride’. Then I later learned that some people from Bennett’s Point had to ride a ferry type boat across a very large and no doubt deep river channel called ‘the cut’, only to go to school.

It seems that young people have always been persuaded by their environment. They behaved or misbehaved because of the pressures of their peers and the direct influence of their parents. During one discourse with his father, Homer related how he did admire this German scientist, however, he solemnly related, “but dad, that man is not my hero”. It takes a special few to rise above what many may refer as the inevitable. When Homer was told that he’d wind up in the coal mines just like his dad, he did not ‘just accept it’. He loved his dad and at one point, did go to work in the mines. But life has a process of providing a way when there seems to be no way, a way out of Coalwood, West Virginia and a way out of Bennett’s Point in Colleton County.

How does it all end, well I’ll spoil it for you if you haven’t seen the movie. Homer goes on to become a scientist working at NASA and fulfill his passion of working with rockets, and the little black girl from Bennett’s Point, she went on to become a teacher and then Chief Executive Officer or Superintendent of all Colleton County Schools.

Joseph Hamilton
Green Pond, SC