Sallie Peace-Graves, determined, ambitious, and talented.

by Sarah Williams

The fascinating life of Sallie Peace-Graves

Sallie Peace-Graves has a brilliant smile and a kind hello for everybody. Countless Asheville High School graduates remember her as Mrs. Graves, who walked the halls giving good advice to students. But students often don’t know much else about their teachers, and in the case of Mrs. Graves, there’s a lot to learn, beginning with her childhood in Henderson, N.C.
“I lived in a house with no running water,” she recalls. “Our bathroom was on the back porch. I took a bath in a tin tub after heating the water on top of the stove. I picked blackberries along the highways and in the bushes. I sold those blackberries for 25 cents a quart after picking all day. I walked the streets and sold butter beans for 25 cents a quart.”

From the earliest age she understood that education was the key to success in life.

“Everybody walked to school in my neighborhood because the school was less than a mile from us. When you walked to the end of our street, it turned into a paved street and on this street the teachers, doctors, and lawyers lived. As an elementary student, I knew then I was going to be a teacher because then I could live on a paved street and have a nice house that had an indoor bathroom.”

A small, simple thing — having hot-and-cold running water inside the house — was important to her as a child, she notes. “It was not where I came from or what I had, [but] what I wanted that made me who I am,” she says.

With that ambition, it comes as no surprise that Sallie was an active, successful student at the segregated Henderson Institute. She excelled academically as a member of the National Honor Society chapter at the school, and she also was a head majorette, played basketball and softball and ran track.

She remembers how she loved going to church and singing in the choir, and taking on the responsibilities of Sunday school secretary and then the church secretary. And, of course, having some fun as well.

“Our neighborhood boy friends would go to Bible study or BTU so they could walk us (the girls in the neighborhood) home when it was over. We didn’t have boy company when it rained because the roof leaked.”

There was always work to be done. “I worked in the tobacco fields during the summer. I picked cotton so I would have enough money to go to the fair but we would sneak in so we would have more money to ride the rides. My four sisters and I had one bicycle and we still had to share it with the neighbors — everybody took turns riding it.”

As if advising one of the students at Asheville High, she points out, “Life is not always the way we want it but it can be what we make it. Your circumstances can change with hard work in school and a desire to be more than what you see. I still could be what I wanted to be because the key to success then was education and determination and a desire.”

And Sallie pursued education with determination. She earned her B.A. in Business Education, with a minor in Business Administration, from Barber-Scotia College in Concord, NC. Later she attended Western Carolina University in Cullowhee and earned a Master’s in Business Education, another in School Guidance and Counseling, and a Certification in Administration. While earning her degrees, she attended school at night and during the summer months while she worked full time.

She started working as a teacher at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College in 1972. She went to Asheville High as an assistant principal in 1990, and after thirty-three years of service, she retired from the Asheville City Schools system.
She also married, and she and her (now ex-) husband reared two children. Nevaina graduated from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, and Gramel graduated from the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. She has four grandchildren.

But retirement from one job doesn’t mean retirement for life. Sallie has written two books of poetry. Too Weak to Fight & Too Strong to Hold On is a collection of poems for the broken-hearted. She notes that a person’s heart can be broken in a second, a minute, an hour or a day, and that words can sometimes soothe the heart. Her second book, The Truth Will Make You Lie, tells stories of times when love and life collide, and the damage that remains when life and love divide.

She also works part-time at Partners Unlimited, a nonprofit organization with offices on the lower level of the W.C. Reid Center. (Anderson Davis is founder and executive director of this program, and Jim Drummond is the president of the board.) The organization, like many nonprofits, is constantly in need of volunteers and funding, and Sallie encourages everyone with free time to share it with the group.

As if those activities aren’t enough to keep her busy, Sallie and another City Schools retiree, Lyndia Chiles, are co-owners of B4U & New Resale Boutique. The shop, located at 63 Brook Street in Biltmore Village, is open Tuesdays through Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sallie notes that if they don’t have what you are looking for, they’ll do their best to help you find it.
Determined, ambitious, and talented people often live lives as full in retirement as they ever were during their “working” years. And they usually have lives that would surprise many people who think they know someone. As Sallie puts it, “[I] always wanted to ask someone, anyone, anybody, this question, thought it would generate a conversation. ‘When you look at me what can you see…?’

And what a lot there is to see, when we take the trouble to look!