Live and Learn.(102-year-old author, George Dawson)

George Dawson spent his youth working on farms, only learning to read when he was 98. Now 102, he's written a memoir. Its title: Life Is So Good.

THE ONLY STUDENT IN the adult-education class not puzzled by the question was George Dawson, who would celebrate his 102nd birthday in about a month. The question was, What famous monument in Washington, D.C., is closed for renovation? The teacher, Carl Henry, dropped a hint: It's named for America's first president. One student guessed Lincoln. Another ventured Clinton. Dawson looked around the room at the other students, mostly black like himself and all far younger, and smiled at the confusion. He didn't necessarily know the correct answer either, but he understood from decades of observation the source of their puzzlement: There are two Americas.

The gravity of this observation permeates the pages of George Dawson's memoir, Life Is So Good, which will be published by Random House this month. That's right. Dawson, who didn't learn to read and write until he was 98, is now a celebrated author. He has appeared on Oprah (and is scheduled to appear on Good Morning America this month), and he has been interviewed by Dan Rather. He's been given the VIP tour at NASA and invited to watch a game from a luxury suite at the Ballpark in Arlington. The schools of Dallas, public and private, compete for the privilege of hearing his secret of longevity. "Ain't no secret," he tells them, adding, "All I'm doing is going to school, to get what y'all don't want."

His fellow students in the adult-education class fawn over Dawson as they would a mascot but are bewildered by his generation's benign submission to white power. When Dawson related an event from the twenties--the time eighteen members of his baseball team lined up to drink from the colored fountain while the white fountain next to it sat vacant--they shook their heads and rolled their eyes. "Woooee!," exclaimed a pretty young woman named Deborah. "We'd be in the white man's face sooo fast!"

A short, compact man with gray cottony hair and inquisitive eyes, Dawson is fragile but blessed with the constitution of a mule. He walks without a cane, has his own teeth, and though he has a pair of reading glasses, he doesn't like to wear them. Since his fourth wife died twelve years ago, he has lived alone in his small cottage near Lincoln High School in South Dallas. All seven of his children graduated from Lincoln, and three went on to college. He stopped driving just after his hundredth birthday--with all the celebrating, he forgot to renew his license--and depends on a son, George Junior, and his teacher, Carl Henry, for rides. Dawson isn't comfortable with his celebrity status ("I'm nobody special," he assured me). It distracts him from his primary mission of getting his GED. He hasn't missed a class since he began going to school three years ago.