My first thirty years, p.17
My First Thirty Years, page 17
The baby of the family was a girl of nineteen, two years older than myself, I emphasized; she was a little stupid, I did not like her. There were two boys, Deck and Dillard, who carried on a lot of comic conversation, and two ole maids; Miss Hester was about twenty-five, and the other one, I could not imagine her age; she had cataracts which seemed to be growing over both eyes. The ole man and the ole lady, I guessed, were awful good people. The ole man was a little bit comical too; he said someone gave him some advice twenty years ago, when he first came to Texas, which he always tried to follow (it was about the weather) and that was: when you go out in Texas you should take your umbrella, fan, and overcoat.
I had a talk with the County Superintendent; he told me I ought to urge them to build a new schoolhouse; the bonds had already been voted. I did write them a letter and told them that I had been advised by the County Superintendent that they had money at hand with which to build a new schoolhouse. I wanted to urge them for the sake of the community to complete the house as soon as possible; both they and the Superintendent knew what a bad condition the old house was in; and as for myself I regarded it as a disgrace to civilization. White told me later that they thought my statement pretty strong; I must be a very bold person.
The time came and I went back to take charge of my school. Monday morning found me with a rather large black oilcloth bag under my arm, making my way to the little schoolhouse. For weeks I had thought seriously and with some trepidation about this first morning. The thought seized me that I had been walking for a very long time; I did not see the schoolhouse; I turned back for a little and then decided I was wrong. At last, I faced a barbed wire fence and sank down on my knees to crawl under it; I felt myself the same size and aspect as in the seventh grade; I began to whimper and cry like a child. I could not remember how those girls went the other day. Fear and loneliness made me think to pray; I began the formula which I had gone through for weeks before with reference to my school, my teaching—asking for protection, wisdom, strength, and guidance…
I surveyed the country again and began to walk; I was sure the house in the distance was the right one now. At the door, two school children were waiting; I gave them a serious good morning and went in. The bag contained books, a pencil, a small clock, two bells—a small call bell and a hand bell. I took them out and placed them on the table. A man came in with his little girl; he asked if I were the teacher; I thought he must be a little silly; he irritated me; anyone could see I was the teacher. After he told me about his little girl, he stood around for a few minutes and I was afraid he was going to wait until I opened school. This would have made it more embarrassing, as I was going to open with a special and serious exercise. Maybe I would drop the book if an older person watched me read. At nine o’clock, I rang the bell and about a dozen boys and girls, mostly young children, entered the room. I took their names and set them to work and waited. If any were late for the opening exercises, those present would tell them about it. I drew out the Bible, asked them to put their pencils down and give attention. The selection was: “And though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not charity I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal…and though I have the gift of prophecy and understand all knowledge…and though I give my goods to the poor, etc., etc…and have not charity…I am nothing… Faith, Hope, Love, these three, but the greatest of these is Love.” Something like that. I asked them to bow their heads, and I repeated the Lord’s prayer. If I felt emotion when I began, I was bored before I finished. I noticed a few smirks from some of the children, but I went on in explanation of the rules and work of the school. We would have a devotional exercise on Monday mornings, and they were to learn the Lord’s prayer so they could repeat it with me. I had made a list of general principles defining what they could or could not do in the classroom or on the playground.
Before the day was over, I got tangled up in an arithmetic problem, but it was only because I was embarrassed. A sixteen-year-old boy in the fourth grade asked me to solve a problem of finding the area of a field; I found the distance around the field instead. He told me it was not the answer and looked as though he thought he had caught me: “Oh,” said I, “it’s the area you want, then you must multiply the length by the breadth.” After I had seen the answer, I was sure then; and I took the attitude that it was inconceivable that I should be wrong. The first few days were bliss; I recall nothing to mar them, not even anything similar to the arithmetic incident which I believe, now that I think again, must have happened several days later. I was not going to be a scold or a cross person like my teacher of the sixth grade; I would be one of the lambs and we would all play always.
But the wind howled and whistled through the cracks one day; the children had become well acquainted with one another, and seemed no longer to fear the accentuation or raising of my voice. They whispered and giggled and some of the older boys even talked out loud. I kept a small boy in, as an example to the rest, showing them they would be punished if they whispered or disobeyed my commands. The boy protested saying the large boy had talked much more than he had. I stayed awake at night; thought, prayed, and dreamed about school. Almost every night during the first three weeks, I dreamed of having to whip someone. Finally, a small boy furnished me an excellent opportunity of demonstrating the beginning of my reign of terror. Someone reported the little boy had said damn on the playground. He confessed; and I went out and cut a “limb” from a bush and switched him. Then I began writing down the names of pupils who whispered or disobeyed the rules and kept them after school. A boy a half a head taller than myself refused to stay one recess; walked out of the schoolhouse and said he didn’t have to obey me. I was in a frenzy; the nerves almost broke in the back of my head. I sent his brother for a good-sized limb and told him to come in the house, that he would have to take a whipping. He refused to come in, and I stamped and roared and told him, “All right, you are expelled from school!” The school laws stated that repeated insolence and refusal to carry out school regulations were punishable by expulsion.
The boy finally left the grounds, and I went on with the work. He was a nephew of the Snows, who reported that he did not like school anyway; that I should not worry, as they were going to move at Christmas. But I prepared for his return on Monday just the same; I put a leather strap about two and a half feet long in my bag, also a copy of the school laws. After the exercises, I made a long talk on discipline, obedience, and respect for others. I said the school had witnessed the conduct of one of its members on Friday, and that I was reading passages of the school law on his case. Before that boy could return to school, he had to take the most severe punishment that could be meted out to him; if he refused then the law expelled him, for I had the support of the trustees. Then I went on to say (I stood up very tall and my skirt grew even longer) that it did not matter one iota to me who the offender was; whether he was the oldest boy or the youngest boy in school, was of no consequence, that insolence and disobedience would be punished with the utmost severity. I warned against whispering and wasting time in school, the lack of preparation of lessons, and bad conduct on the playground. And by the time the first month closed for the Christmas recess I had formulated a code of regulations as rigid and tyrannous as those of my old sixth grade teacher, and had instilled almost as much fear in their hearts as Zora Shackleford used to create. The boy never returned to school; the first inning was in my favor. I had come in like a lamb and was going out like a lion.
The Snows often questioned me about my school, but I was as closemouthed concerning it as I was about the affairs of my family. It was difficult enough without having people use my own words against me. I mistrusted almost everyone and was almost as clever at keeping a silent tongue, on subjects which concerned me, as a woman of fifty.
I presented my first voucher at Christmas and received the sum of $65, which was enough to pay off two notes on the place, if there had not been so many other debts to pay. It was gobbled up, and I was given $10 to pay my board and a dollar or two which I required to go and come on the train. Emma and Charles came home for Christmas. They had given my mother $15 or so, but as she said, they always ate up more than the amount they gave. It was just a little “hush” money to keep her in a good humor while they were there. They were going to do so much, and they did nothing to help her. I think my mother watched my attitude in handing over the money to her and I believe she was not disappointed. Anyway, at that Christmas, she was sad and angry and quarrelsome. I remember telling Emma very seriously that I was going to try to make Mother happy and she cried about it.
Sumpter had come home and my mother said she wanted me to be good to him and not to argue with him; she had never seen a boy cry as he cried when he came back; he certainly was sorry and pleaded with her to forgive him; maybe he was going to settle down and help now. I think she remembered the terrific quarrel I had with him just before he left home. He was quarreling with my mother, because she wanted him to look for work, or to help do the washing, or something which he did not want to do. The older boys would do nothing about the house. For example, if they were out of work for days and weeks and had absolutely nothing to do, they would not turn their hands to help me with the washing, even though there was enough labor connected with it each week to kill a horse—not even to build fires or bring water. Oh, God, how I hated my brothers! Sumpter was calling out to my mother as they quarreled: “It is a lie or you are a liar!” and I drew the shovel from under the stove and screamed: “You’ve got to shut up!” He laughed in a diabolical way and said he would not leave a greasy spot of me if I struck him with that shovel. Then he turned on me: “Why in the devil don’t you git out and go to work.” “My God,” said my mother, “just look at her wrists, sometimes it looks as though the bones are coming through the skin.” All the trouble with my wrists, she said, came of washing his ole heavy underwear and the sheets; I washed as much as any nigger in town; talk about work, I earned my living at washing. “And she’s not going to wash your clothes anymore when you are lying around here doing nothing,” she said.
Well, after a year or two, he was back and we must be friendly. If he asked me to go to the show with him, as he had apparently told my mother he was going to, I must go. A young man, whom I met during the summer normal, asked me to go, but I turned him down and went with my brother. Anyway I was not at all interested in any special man; I suspected them all, but in spite of it all I dreamed and hoped. We went to see Saint Elmo. I had just read it the month before at the Snows’; it was the first love novel I ever read. I wept copiously and was afraid some of the Snows would come in and catch me… As we were going in the opera house (the theater was always referred to as the “opera house”) I met one of the young men who was graduating from Simmons College that year; he was to receive the AB degree. How I hated introducing my brother to him! Fancy, my brother was in the first or second grade when he left school and now he was nineteen and had received little improvement; he was unable to speak the simplest sentences correctly. Besides I hated having people I knew see me sitting in second- or third-rate seats. Another thing which irritated me and brought ugly thoughts and pictures to my mind was what Sumpter said, as we were going down; yet I felt he was trying to confide in me. “When a feller is tryin’ to live right, there is al’ays some nigger on every corner.” I was startled and disgusted and made no answer. I was fidgety and troubled and tried to suppress it all. In the end I was compensated a little; the heroine’s name was Edna; that is my first name.
I was glad to leave for my school work again; for at the Snows’ I was often alone in my room; anyway, if they asked questions which I did not want to answer, or which embarrassed me, I changed the subject, or simply did not reply. I had ordered the Normal Instructor, a teacher’s journal; the Superintendent had recommended that all teachers read William James’s Talks to Teachers that year; and then there was other reading material at the Snows which found a warm place in my heart. It was the Appeal to Reason edited by Eugene V. Debs. Oh Lord, here was a paper which discussed women’s rights! I do not believe that it had occurred to me that there were people in the world who were thinking and writing seriously about this question. Equal rights for women was one of the planks in the socialist platform. Of course, the whole socialist program stirred me deeply, but I had in some way sworn allegiance to women first. I believe I read the socialist ideas in the Appeal to Reason with perhaps more fervor and hope, and I am sure with more intelligence, than I learned the stories of Christ on the colored Sunday School cards, when I was six or seven years old. There were twenty planks in the socialist platform, and I think I once knew what all of them were. And how the criticisms of life in that paper interested me! Old man Snow would say to Deskin, “Did you show Gertrude this?” (sometimes he’d gasp and repeat “Miss Gertrude”), or he would ask me what I thought of some other article. I talked socialism with the boys, especially Deskin, quite a lot. He explained the socialist land system; all land would belong to the state and each man would be given what he could work; the system of taxation was often discussed too.
I kept a firm grip on my school after Christmas. The strap I had with me always; and I was exacting and severe. But I read my William James religiously also; perhaps I thought it appeared clever to say I was studying psychology; or maybe the suggestion came from some one of the Snows. Once when I read aloud (we all sat around the stove in the evening) what James said about old fogyism, the old woman seemed miffed and said all young people in those days looked upon their parents as old fogies. Much of the book was not clear to me, but I did derive the doctrine of interest; and while I was severe and perhaps punished too often, I planned all sorts of work which I considered of interest to the child mind, in drawing, map work in geography, and made special plans and required definite work from all in each subject. We moved into the new schoolhouse before very long and all children started to school. Once two families of boys had a great quarrel and fight on their way to school; and it was reported to me. I discovered just who they were and kept them after school and tanned the last one of them; I would teach them how to quarrel and fight and use profane language when they were coming to my school. The strap was a heavy one, and I had worked myself up to a high pitch; as a consequence it was said that nearly all these boys carried black and blue rings on their legs which they showed their parents. One man even reported the affair to the County Superintendent, and came to me in a great fit of anger. The Superintendent and trustees applauded me; they said that community had been running wild for a long time; they needed a good tight rein; and I think they did not object to my using a heavy whip. The trustees visited, the Superintendent visited, and others came in to look on. Once I heard a whisper that someone had said I kept the best school they had had in that community. The kids were scared to death of me; I could squelch them with a look. The punishments which I meted out were usually for misconduct outside the classroom.
I met a young man that year who called on me about twice a week. I knew his parents and sister, and two of his young brothers came to school to me. I had licked both of them. We used to go to prayer meeting almost every Wednesday night. Not that we went there to pray, for I usually did my praying in private. He had a new rubber-tired buggy and a fine horse; and then he was jolly; he could amuse me; we laughed a lot. He had sense enough to know that I considered myself a woman of intelligence and he egged me on. How one saw and felt my superiority in the presence of those country girls! We became friendly and he made love to me; and we used to hold hands almost always when we drove home at night. One moonlit night when the horse had fairly crawled home and was walking in at the Snows’ gate, he asked me to marry him. I began laughing, as though something extremely humorous had just burst in my mind. He asked why I laughed, and I said because I knew exactly what he was going to say. When the buggy stopped at the Snows’ yard fence, he tried to kiss me before we got out. I pushed him away. The moonlight was streaming through the mesquite and oak trees in the yard, where we walked through, almost like day.
He kissed my hand. I drew away from him and began to talk to him as though I were his aunt. All the trouble in the world came through kissing. People did not stop at kissing and presently they had lost everything. But he could kiss me, he said, without going any farther. He told of a love affair with a girl whom he used to kiss; when they parted, nothing more ever happened. His parents both knew he was in love with me; he cared; and he wanted me to care. We shook hands and I tripped up to my room. I looked out of my window on the still, sweet night and I wished we had done everything. A sexual emotion swept me; but I composed myself and bradded down the head of the demon within me. Had the ole lady Snow seen him kiss my hand! I was startled… Now I was able to criticize him. He was a fool or maybe he thought I was one; but I was not fool enough to let a man kiss me. He kept coming and went on holding my hand, but never tried to kiss me again. Many times he talked to me about marriage, which I laughed off or made a joke of. I was the strangest person he had ever met, sometimes he thought there was absolutely no emotion in me; perhaps it was only because I did not care for him; he knew I did not care, but he wished I would try. When he put his hand over mine he felt no response; only once had my hand ever moved in his. He told when it was. He had wanted to cry. Everyone knew he was inclined to be a little wild, but he would be an excellent man if he married a good woman.
