by Howard Owen
But the plain, hard truth is that after the fourth grade, and five years of school, I couldn’t write my own name. Of course, my spelling was awful, too, and somebody’d have to read the stuff off the blackboard to me, so I would try and sit next to somebody I could trust not to make fun of me or make me feel more stupid than I already felt by telling me the wrong thing. Momma was always on me about the bad grades I got, but, like anything else, if you live with it long enough, it gets to seem normal. I got so I hated books because they made me look so dumb and feel so bad, and whenever there was a chance to help Daddy in the fields instead of going to school, school didn’t stand a chance. When I could get Lafe to write me a note, I’d skip altogether, but this was risky business, because half of the teachers went to Geddie Presbyterian like we did, and they was just as like as not to come up to Momma or Daddy on Sunday and ask if Littlejohn was feeling better. Lafe got one of the worst beatings he ever got when my fourth-grade teacher caught him and me forging an excuse note and told Daddy.
But somehow I kept passing. My fifth-grade teacher, Miss Hattie Draughon, fixed that.
Miss Hattie was actually Momma’s first cousin, practically family, but she didn’t cut nobody no slack. I knew from Century and Lafe that she wasn’t going to let me slide, and she lived up to my worst fears on the very first day. We didn’t start school till all the tobacco was in, but it was still mighty hot, everybody sweating and ill, just hoping to get our books and get out of there. But Miss Hattie kept us the whole day, longer than the other grades, and about two o’clock, after everybody had ate their lunches outside, the boys sitting together under the big sycamore tree out by the Ammon Road, she told us she wanted us to write two hundred words about what we did over the summer, before we left that day.
Well, one person could of told you what they did that summer in East Geddie just as good as another’n could of. We worked. We plowed. We suckered tobacco. We cropped tobacco. We barned tobacco. We cured tobacco. We raised and picked cotton. There wasn’t anybody in East Geddie going on no European vacations.
Miss Hattie, of course, knew this. She’d lived there already sixty-some years. But she said we’d have to do all two hundred words before we left school.
Some of the girls got through in a half hour. Then the boys started to leave, and by 3:15, there wasn’t nobody there but Sammy Tolar and me, and Sammy Tolar was about half retarded. Finally, even Sammy turned in some bunch of nothing, and it was just me and Miss Hattie.
She hadn’t expected to be staying much if any past 3:00, and here it was 3:25. She went back to my desk and took the paper I was pretending like I was working on away from me.
“Littlejohn McCain, what in the world is this mess?” she asked. I had never, in five years of school, had to write more than a sentence, and that right off the blackboard.
“This will not do, young man,” she went on. “I know your momma and daddy, and they expect better from you than this.”
She finally let me go, but she told me I better have that two hundred words done when I got there the next morning. That night, Lafe was in an ill mood, and he wouldn’t help me. I sat there until Momma made me go to bed, trying to somehow wish them words on the paper, I reckon.
The next day, first thing, Miss Hattie called me to the front to give her my paper. I took that long walk up to her desk and give her the messiest paper she’d probably ever seen.
She looked at it, turned it sideways, then turned it upside down, while my face was burning up and the children behind me was laughing and giggling like it was Christmas.
“Littlejohn,” she said, “I want you to go to that blackboard there and show us all how you write your ABCs.” And she ripped the paper I’d give her in half.
I started doing what I only hoped was my ABCs, but by the time I got to C, I knew I was in trouble. I kept going, hoping she would stop me and let me go back to my seat, but she kept telling me to keep writing. With the tears welling up, I got as far as N before I just stopped. No matter what she said to me, I wouldn’t go no farther.
“Littlejohn, you’re going to get a beating,” she said, tapping her ruler, and finally she took me out in the hall, this big old board in her hand. She whaled the tar out of me, then made me go back inside and move my desk to the dunce’s corner.
“That desk is going to stay there until you learn how to read and write,” she said. “I don’t have time to teach fifth graders how to read.”
Every blessed day she’d send me up to the board, and every day I would mess up the ABCs a different way. She’d have little Alice Fay Cain, who had skipped a grade and weren’t hardly nine years old, almost three years younger than me, go to the board to show me how to do it, and that really got everybody to laughing.
Momma and Daddy knew what was going on, because Miss Hattie would give them a report every Sunday at church, and they made Lafe work with me, but Lafe knew what a hopeless case it was, and his heart just wasn’t in it.
My last day of school was November 16, 1917. I remember the date because it was the same day Gruff went off to the Army. Miss Hattie brought in these three teachers from Port Campbell that was here for the day just to observe.
“Littlejohn,” she called to me from my seat in the corner, “I want you to show these here ladies how you write your ABCs.”
After being the class fool for a month, I had got used to the other young-uns laughing, and I could still whip any boy that made fun of me on the playground at recess, so things was tolerable. But here was these women I didn’t even know, all dressed up and looking at me like I didn’t have no more feelings than a potato bug or something. I was about to “h,” although you couldn’t tell it from looking at it, I’m sure, when I looked over at Miss Hattie, and she was trying to keep from laughing.
Now, I had endured Miss Hattie’s wrath, even a beating now and then, but right then I knew she didn’t really care whether I ever learnt to read and write or not, that she was just a mean person that was actually enjoying tormenting me. I didn’t throw down the chalk and run out of the schoolhouse crying, like I had done twice before and got took to the woodshed back home for it. I turned around real slow, looked right square at Miss Hattie and said, “I ain’t doing this no more, Miss Draughon. I’m fixing to leave now.” And I walked out.
It was the first time I had ever sassed a grown person, and I knew it was going to cost me. I got back to the house just before dinner, but of course I couldn’t go in, and I’d left my lunch back at the school, so I hid in the near woods until Lafe and the rest come home. He was walking with Annie Williams, who was in the ninth grade, too, and I had to catch him down by Rennie’s house to tell him what happened, which of course he had already been told five times by the other young-uns.
He talked me into telling Momma and Daddy before Miss Hattie got to them. She might walk all the way to our house with news this good.
It was a sad time at supper that night, with Gruff gone and all. It was the first time that I could recall that one of our family was gone and not coming back anytime soon. Lex and Connie still lived at home, and folks already was figuring that neither one of them might ever get married. Century worked as a bookkeeper down at the lumber yard, although, unbeknownst to us, Maurice Bunce already had took a shine to her and would marry her within the year. And Lafe had near-bout three years of high school left.
We all prayed for Gruff, and there was a lot more heart in it than in the usual prayers we had to say at supper. Gruff seemed to live up to his name more and more all the time, and him and Momma fought a lot. One time he said “shit” and she chased him all the way around the house, twice, with her old sedge broom turned around so that she could conk him on the head with the hard end of it. Everytime she hit him, a little spray of broom straw would come flying up. But Gruff was good-hearted. He’d give us pennies to buy candy at Dawson Autry’s store, and nobody loved a good joke any better.
So, with everybody feeling blue about Gruff and all, it wasn’t a good time to tel
l them I wasn’t ever going back to school again. But I could just about hear Miss Hattie’s footsteps.
I told Momma and Daddy what happened, with everybody at the table, hoping for a little mercy. Lafe chimed in, telling them how Miss Hattie made fun of me in front of the other children.
Daddy wasn’t any too pleased about it, but he might of bought it if Momma hadn’t cut such a shine.
“You are going to keep on going to school until you can read and write,” she said, her voice rising with every word. “And I am going to beat you good for talking to Hattie like that. Why, she’s my first cousin.”
And then Momma started in to crying, probably more on account of Gruff being gone than because of Miss Hattie, who she said later she never liked much anyhow. I didn’t sass her right there at the table, but I knew I’d run away and live in the hobo jungle we’d see down by the river on the way to Port Campbell before I’d ever set foot in that classroom again.
For six school days in a row, they’d get me up to feed the chickens and milk our old cow, then we’d have breakfast, and then me and Lafe would go back to our room to dress for school. Lafe would come down all cleaned up and carrying his books, and I’d come down with him, dressed just like I was before we ate.
The first day, Momma couldn’t believe her eyes. She’d tell people later how I’d always been such a sweet boy, although it’s a good thing she didn’t know what all went on with us and the Lockamy children. But now, I was just flat refusing to do something. She got her a switch and wore me out, but I just looked at her and said, “I still ain’t going to school, Momma.” So she screamed and hollered some more, and then Daddy took me with him down to pull the dried peanuts off the hills where we’d stacked them back in early October. Me and him worked all day, just sitting and talking while we picked peanuts off the dried bushes and put them in burlap sacks. I told him everything about how bad it was at school, and he told me about his younger brother, Jim, that never did learn how to read and write but had a good mind nonetheless. He said he’d try and help me with Momma.
I took my beating for six school days, with another one thrown in for good measure on Sunday when Miss Hattie refreshed Momma’s memory. But on the seventh day, Momma rested.
“Littlejohn,” she said, “I am tired of beating you ever morning. If you won’t learn, you won’t learn.” I don’t think Momma ever did understand what the problem was. Years later, when it was solved, she always seemed to think of it as a miracle. And maybe it was.
I would run into Miss Hattie from time to time over the years, and the older she got, the more she seemed to like to tell that story about me leaving school, and she acted like she thought right much of me. But I didn’t go to her funeral.
CHAPTER SEVEN
August 8
It’s funny how, looking back at it, there’s whole big chunks of my life I don’t remember too much about. Just work, eat and sleep. And then there’s places where something seemed like it was happening all the time. My fifteenth and sixteenth years was like that. First Babe Ruth, then the catechism and finally, in the fall of 1922, Lafe dying.
Momma and Daddy should of been tickled that I quit school, because it meant one more full-time hand around the farm during the fall and winter and early spring. With Lafe still in school and Gruff gone to war, there was me and Daddy, plus Amos Lockamy, the tenant farmer, and his two oldest boys. Rennie was my age, and he was still at Indian school. It tore Momma up that a Indian boy was going to learn more from books than I did.
Rennie and me, we was close when we was little. Rennie’d meet me down in the near woods between our house and his, and we’d play hide-and-go-seek or throw rocks at squirrels or play in the crop ditch, where Daddy and Rennie’s daddy was trying to bring some of the water from the swamp to the near fields for irrigation. But when I was seven, Momma told me I wasn’t to play with Indian children no more. I hadn’t even thought of Rennie as being any different until then. It would of been hard for our parents to keep us from getting together, but Rennie’s folks told him the same thing, probably after Daddy talked to his daddy, and we just kind of drifted apart, so that by the time we was eleven, we’d work together in the summer, drink from the same pail, share the same watermelon and then turn and go our separate ways at quitting time without ever thinking about it. When Rennie died, near-bout ten years ago, I did go to his funeral, but we wasn’t close.
Anyhow, while the other children was at school, we’d be working around the farm, which was fine with me. Anybody around here’ll tell you I ain’t ever been afraid of work. Working hard made me feel important, like I was worth something, which was not a feeling I ever got at school.
In October, before the first frost, we’d dig Irish potatoes and saw and chop wood to build up a supply for the winter. Then we’d pick the last corn, take it to the barn and shuck it. Some of it would be took to the mill to be ground into grits and cornmeal, some was fed to the hogs and chickens and some was fed to the mules, whole. Then we’d cut the stalks for fodder.
Before Thanksgiving, we’d do hog killing, which took up the better part of a week. We’d get old Babe McNeill, a colored man that lived down in Old Geddie, to come over and take charge. Babe knew how to kill hogs, how to dress them to get the most meat out of them. The smell of a hog killing is like nothing I ever smelt at that time. But there was some good eating between Thanksgiving and Christmas, with all the fresh sausage and ham and liver puddin’ and scrapple and chitlins. There’d be enough to last just about the whole year, but by October, we’d be starting to run low, so hog killing was something of a celebration, after you got over the smell of it.
We’d try to get all the repairs to the house and barn done in November, too. One of the barns was built right after Sherman burnt all Captain McCain’s old barns to the ground. It seemed like it was old in 1917, but now it looks like it’s going to outlive me. There was always boards to be replaced and fence to be fixed around the chicken yard and hog pen.
The hatefullest job, though, to me, was cutting ditch bank. We’d have to go along Locke’s Branch, the whole length of the farm, half a mile, cutting all the reeds out, using a bush ax. It was always cold when we done it, and we’d always get wet. We’d spend the whole day out there and maybe go two hundred yards with four of us at it. Then when we got done with the branch, we’d have to do the crop ditch, all the way over to the near fields. All summer I’d see them reeds building up around the branch and know what was waiting in November.
In November, December and January, we’d hunt some, me with the Iver-Johnson single-shot 12-gauge that Daddy bought me, the one I give away in 1922. We wouldn’t usually have time to take the whole day and go into the Blue Sandhills hunting deer until after Christmas, except for Saturdays. I think that from the time I was eleven until I stopped hunting, we shot two deer. But there was lots of squirrels and rabbits then.
By February, it was time to plant the tobacco beds and start the whole thing over. We’d break up the land in early March and plant Irish and sweet potatoes not long after. Daddy always said, plant stuff that grows underground in the dark of the moon, stuff that grows above ground in full moon. That might sound like a lot of bull to some, but it seemed like it worked.
Lex would work down at the lumber yard in the winter, helping run things. We was out of the sawmill business by then, never really did much with it since I was born, but the Godwins had started their big operation down by the millpond, had already run their tram tracks from the pond up to the Campbell and Cool Spring line at McNeil. Soon as they built the tram, it was the favorite place to hunt deer, because there was about a fifty-foot gap cut in the thicket. The tram had this one little engine and about six flat cars where they’d stack the pines and ship them to McNeil, where the main office of Godwin’s was, and there they’d cut them up and ship them out on the train.
Back then, there was bobcats down there, and every once in a while, somebody would shoot a bear. Daddy said that before I was born, a bear chased o
ne of Aunt Mallie’s nephews all the way up to their house. They claim there ain’t any alligators north of South Carolina anymore, but I saw this:
There was a Hittite named Jake Formy-Duval that worked in the logging camp at the millpond. He had one of the little cabins that was there for single men. He had come from deeper in the sandhills, a place called Kinlaw’s Hell, where all the Hittites come from, and he would trap for beaver when he wasn’t logging. One day, he come back with a alligator. This gator was maybe five feet long, and Jake Formy-Duval had somehow managed to chain it to a tree not too far from the camp. Nobody knew where he got it, but he’d feed that gator, which would eat just about anything, on whatever he shot or trapped. I was about six when Daddy took me and Lafe down there to see it. There was a dozen or so men standing in a little pine clearing near the water, in a circle. We got closer, and there was this gray scaly log with eyes that didn’t pay us no attention a-tall. We got as close as we dared to, moving ahead about a inch at a time, when this squinty-eyed, black-haired fella with bad teeth grabbed me from behind.
“Time to feed the gator,” he yelled as he picked me up. He held me in the air over the gator for a few seconds before Daddy made him put me down and threatened to cut him. The gator didn’t last but about a month before some drunks turned him loose and they had to shoot him. Daddy said a man who was supposed to know how to count alligator years said that one was more than a hundred years old.
The years after I quit school until 1922 wasn’t bad years, not looking back on them now, at least. I worked alongside Daddy and the other men until he fell and broke his hip after Lafe died. After that, he mostly did what he could around the house and barns. But we’d work hard all day and play hard on Saturday afternoons and in the pink of the evening.