Memories of a mother, and island summers help woman climb to the top of the world Barbara Hillary stood on top of the world, bursting inside at conquering a trip she called a combination of heaven and hell, heaven and hell, heaven and hell. When told she was there, she jumped up and down, absent-mindedly taking off her gloves to give a thumbs-up signal into a camera. That cost her a bit of frostbite, but it didn't chill the joy of the 75-year-old cancer survivor believed to be the first African-American woman to make it to the North Pole. A moment later, she thought of her childhood summers on steamy Hilton Head Island. And she thought of her mother, Viola Jones Hillary. The woman they called "Ola" left her native island to seek her fortune in New York City. If she was to have children, she wanted them to get a more comprehensive education than the Lowcountry offered. All this flashed through Hillary's mind, standing on skis in a sea of ice. "This story is you, Hilton Head," Hillary said from her home in the Arverne neighborhood in Queens... She dedicated the trip to her mother, her hero. "I want all the young people to hear this" Don't forget the bridge that brought you across." Viola's husband died when Hillary was 1 year old. She was a domestic worker who reared two daughters in Harlem -- Barbara, who spent half a century in nursing; and former Hilton Head business, civic and arts leader Dorothy Aranda. "We never had a sense of mental poverty," Hillary said. "There was no 'woe is me.' We were taught to respect others and their property." Christmas brought a few toys, but also books. Viola took the girls rowing in Central Park and exposed them to the arts. Comic books and incorrect English were forbidden. Talking back, Hillary said, would lead to "instant death, six months in ICU and two years of rehabilitation." Viola Road off William Hilton Parkway and the Ola & Sunday Trailer Park off Wild Horse Road are today's local reminders of the woman who stood on top of the world April 23. Hillary struggled to raise some $40,000 to make the trek. The first two stories about her in The New Yorker magazine helped. Physical training could bite like a 40-below wind. And then there was the skiing. "We didn't learn that in Harlem," she said. "It wasn't fashionable." Hillary never married. She speaks her mind. She says old people have no excuse to be bored, and no right to be b-o-r-in-g. She tunes out negative people, like the ones who told her she could die in the ice. "Wouldn't it be better to die doing something interesting than to drop dead in an office and the last thing you see is someone you don't like?" She howls laughing at that. She also laughs at her childhood memories of arriving on Hilton Head in a boat sitting fat in the waves, filled with chicken and produce. She loved to run free in the clean air. She liked riding in the woods on horseback, going to church in a horse-drawn wagon and playing with a great novelty in her grandmother's yard -- a water pump. "It was a glorious time," she said. "It was a glorious place." Don't ever underestimate the lessons that quiet world taught people like Viola Jones. "People today think the world owes them something," Hillary said. "The world doesn't owe you a damn thing. You get off your ass and you work."
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