The Best Hug: Still Learning from Guidance Counselor Minnie Dukes
Column
By Antionette Kerr
At Fox & Olive a few days ago, I found more than a cup of tea — I found Minnie Dukes, and a piece of my past. For a moment, time folded in on itself — the clink of tea cups fading into the sound of my pre-teen heartbeat. We laughed about how Facebook keeps us connected, a small mercy of modern life that helps us hold on to the people who once held us up.
Minnie was my high school guidance counselor, but she was really something else entirely. She had that gift — the quiet knowing of when a child’s world had cracked, even if she didn’t say so out loud.
I was twelve when mine did.
My father had a stroke — he didn’t die, but the man who tucked me in at night was gone in a different way. My mama worked hard, and I learned early what survival looked like in the eyes of a woman doing it all.
Minnie saw that too.
She didn’t ask for explanations.
She just opened her door.
I became a regular on her counseling couch — a safe place where I could talk or sit in silence, both equally accepted. Some afternoons she’d let me come to her home after school, where the world felt softer, lighter.
She’s one who made me believe that being smart and different wasn’t something to hide. When I challenged my social studies teacher — a woman who wasn’t eager to change her lesson — to include apartheid in our study of Africa, she smiled that thin teacher smile and asked if I wanted to teach the class.
Minnie didn’t hesitate.
She said, “Go for it.”
And I did.
That small permission became a spark — the first flicker of a voice I didn’t yet know I’d need.
Before “Project Potential” ever had a name, Minnie was already doing the work — connecting students like me with mentors like John Walser, coaxing confidence from the shy, direction from the lost. She wasn’t just a counselor; she was a cultivator of courage.
Today, she lives in Raleigh, loving on her daughter and grandchildren the way she once loved on all of us. Her hugs haven’t changed — big, hard, and long enough to erase the years between them.
And in a perfect, full-circle way, her husband, Lee, is being honored for his work as one of the founders of Hospice — a legacy of care built on compassion, just like hers.
Some people pass through your life.
Others build part of it.
Minnie Dukes built a piece of mine.
And today, standing at the counter of Fox & Olive, I realized that the greatest lessons don’t always come from books or classrooms — sometimes they come from people who teach you how to hold on, how to care deeply, and how to keep showing up, even when the world is falling apart.