At the end of the school year, Miss Christella told my parents that I had done well enough to skip a grade. Now and then a child was allowed to jump ahead. When school ended the first of May, Mama checked out the second-grade books from the courthouse, which supplied textbooks for the county schools. I sat in Granny’s front porch swing and plunged into my new books. Her gardenias smelled so sweet it gave me a headache to sit there long. The motion of the swing, with the odor of the gardenias, made me giddy. Still, I read the two readers immediately—Down the River Road and another Alice and Jerry. Over the summer, I completed the workbooks and read the books several times. Granny helped me some with the numbers and spelling, when she wasn’t busy with corn and beans and damson plums.
“I never heard of a body getting their lessons in the summertime,” Granddaddy said.
“She’s smart,” Daddy said.
“Don’t let anybody hear you say that,” Granny admonished him. “They’ll think you’re bragging.”
In August, I entered the third grade. The girls were big, the boys rough. Two of the girls—Betty Lou and Susie Ann—befriended me. They had such big arms, I noticed. They had red hair and buck teeth and wore faded hand-me-downs. All of Betty Lou’s clothes were trimmed with rickrack. These girls chaperoned me like a little sister and shielded me from the boys on the playground. They told me where babies came from and said their bus driver was a shit-ass. “Shit-ass,” I said to myself over and over.
Two of the Tucker girls were in my class, Shirley and Patsy. Shirley had failed the third grade twice and was the tallest girl in the room. Under an oak tree at recess, Patsy asked me, “Do you wear underwear?”
“No!” I said quickly. It sounded dirty.
Shirley and Patsy laughed. Patsy pointed at me, sawing one forefinger with the other.
“Shamey, shamey, shamey,” she said.
“You don’t wear no underwear, you don’t wear no panties,” said Shirley.
I didn’t know that underwear was what you wore under. Daddy wore “longhandles” under his bluejeans when he milked the cows in the winter. I wore panties and a slip, and in the winter I wore a T-shirt and bluejeans under my dress, but they weren’t called underwear.
I thought the Tucker kids were stupid. They were fond of saying “Kiss my old rusty!” in response to almost anything anybody said.
“Have you got a nickel?”
“Kiss my old rusty!”
“The sun’s out.”
“Kiss my old rusty!”
I loved the third grade, the strangeness of it, with its array of bright new books issued by the county. I was looking forward to multiplication. The first and second grades had tables and little chairs, but in the third grade I had my own desk with a lid that lifted, where I could keep my colors and tablet and pencils. There was a hole for an ink bottle, but nobody used ink. JOHNNY + BONNIE SUE was carved inside a heart on the desk. The letters L-O-V-E fit neatly into the corners of the plus sign, and the letter S snaked through the plus, making a sort of dollar sign. I traced my finger over the lines. Johnny plus-loves Bonnie Sue. At the desk across from me, a boy called Billy slobbered and mumbled. “He can’t talk plain,” Betty Lou had told me. I saw Billy open his pants and play with something he was hiding inside. Spit ran down his chin. He couldn’t follow the reading lesson.
One morning, about a week after school began, I was sitting at my desk working arithmetic problems, not daring to look at the boy across the aisle. In the middle of the arithmetic lesson, the principal, Mr. Jones, walked in. He stopped at my desk and towered over me. He was so tall he had to bend double to speak to me. He said quietly, “I know a little girl who’s in the wrong grade. She’s supposed to be in the second grade.”
There was a new rule that year—no grade skipping. The teacher did not protest as Mr. Jones led me away. I retrieved my tablet, colors, and pencils out of my desk and went with him, all the eyes of the room following me like marbles rolling across a floor. He led me to the second-grade room, where Mrs. Virginia made a place for me at one of the tables, between Peggy and Jerry. I felt I had somehow visited the future, although in the week I was in the third grade we didn’t get to multiplication. The second-grade class was reading Down the River Road, which I knew by heart.
The buildings were larger, but school hadn’t changed much since my parents’ and grandparents’ day. Each grade occupied a room with a potbellied coal stove. The unfinished wood floors were oiled with heavy black oil twice a year. Above the blackboard, the alphabet was writ large on a series of placards, each letter in print and in cursive. Along the wainscoting in the back of the room, near the door, a row of black, double-pronged hooks claimed our coats, and we set our galoshes below. We had no lockers, no science projects, no aquariums, no library, no show-and-tell, no field trips, no school nurse, no foreign languages, no black students. Few students had moved in from somewhere else. No one was gifted or disadvantaged. There was no plumbing except for the water fountain. The outhouse was one building—girls on one side, boys on the other. We did not wash our hands.
Still, school was filled with pleasures. A traveling troupe, a vestige of vaudeville, might happen along and offer us a show—magic or music or acrobatics—for a dime apiece. The teachers often had to lend us the money, and some of the poor children had to sweep the classroom or fetch a scuttle of coal from the coal pile to earn their way. We saw a movie once. In the fourth grade, the school assembled to watch Penny Serenade starring Cary Grant—not for any educational value, but simply because it was available. If a man with a herd of goats had come along and claimed that his goats could play follow-the-leader, we would surely all have been ushered into the gym to see the show. For holidays the teachers cranked out more purple drawings on the ditto machine—simple outlines of pumpkins, turkeys, Santas. We colored them appropriately, and the teachers pinned them in a row on the wall.
I delighted in the new books each fall, the intricate puzzles of words and numbers in the workbooks, the surprises from the larger world that appeared in the Weekly Reader. But reading lessons were frustrating. One by one, down the row, we took turns reading aloud, and some of the feeble struggles to read were excruciating to sit through. I raced ahead in the book. In the English workbook I learned that “ain’t” was wrong. We were supposed to feel shame if we said “ain’t.” All my family said “ain’t.” Everybody said it, even the teachers. But the workbook said it was wrong.
As the school years went by, I began to realize that school was not devoted primarily to learning. It seemed to be devoted mostly to basketball. In the third grade, I was a flower girl in the basketball queen’s court. Carrying an Easter basket filled with flower petals, I marched down the center of the gym, scattering petals in front of the queen so she could step on them as she minced slowly toward her throne. Every year, to raise money for the basketball team, we sold seeds to the neighbors. I treasured the cardboard box with its neat row of seed packets—cucumbers, corn, radishes, pole beans, and one or two packets of flowers. And our mothers sent us to school with cookies and Rice Krispies squares and divinity fudge—all sorts of homemade confections wrapped individually in waxed paper. We sold them to each other for a nickel apiece so the team could buy uniforms.
We were herded onto the bleachers for pep rallies. The high school cheerleaders—bold in their Crayola-green corduroy circle skirts, saddle oxfords, and turned-down socks—led the cheers, stirring the student body up into a revival-night fervor. They clapped their hands in rhythm and orchestrated their elbows in a little dance.
Chick-a-lacka, chick-a-lacka chow, chow, chow,
Boom-a-lacka, boom-a-lacka bow, wow, wow.
Chick-a-lacka, boom-a-lacka, who are we?
Cuba High School, can’t you see?
I didn’t care for yelling and whooping. The shrieks and hollers assaulted my ears like a melody being ripped from a song. I sat like a stone. I barely comprehended the issue. Howie Crittenden, the razzle-dazzle dribbler, and Doodle Floyd, with hi
s fancy windmill hook shot, were leading the Cuba Cubs to the state tournament. Who could have imagined this little country team would get all the way to the tournament and challenge the powerhouse teams from Louisville and Lexington?
Locomotive, locomotive, steam, steam, steam.
Strawberry shortcake, huckleberry pie.
Go, Cubs, go! Fight, Cubs, fight!
The cheerleaders pirouetted and zoomed skyward in unison, their leaps straight and clean like jump shots. They whirled in their circle skirts, showing off their green tights underneath.
The Cuba Cubs traveled to Lexington for the tournament. In the final game they were behind at the half, but they grabbed the lead late in the game, and then Howie ran out the clock with ball handling like nobody had ever seen. And then the Cubs—the Cinderella Cubs—won the championship. The whole school—and the region—erupted in mad, unrestrained, we-can’t-believe-we-did-it joy. To this day, the Cubs’ 1952 victory is legendary throughout Kentucky.
As I walked past the army of trophies gleaming in their glass display case next to the high school gym, I wondered why basketball worked people up so much. Eventually, I came to a disturbing realization: each high school class dwindled from year to year as kids dropped out to marry or to help their parents farm. They gave up learning, apparently abandoning any hopes they might have had of high achievement. Basketball would do until they slipped into their fate.
Somehow, my family allowed dreams—even those dreams they’d given up for themselves. They prized learning. Mama had quit school in the tenth grade, but she always regretted it, and she wanted me to get an education so I could have the chances she missed. Daddy was always reading paperbacks. Mama subscribed to Parents Magazine. Granny liked to read along with me in my schoolbooks. “You might make a schoolteacher one day,” she told me. She had wanted to be a teacher. When she graduated from high school, in 1905, she wanted to go to the academy in Mayfield, which took advanced pupils, but her family could not pay the tuition; besides, she lived six miles from town. Instead, her teacher let her continue attending Coulter’s School, the two-room school within walking distance of her parents’ home.
“He tutored me and let me borrow books,” she told me. “He had me write a history composition and he made me read eleven books!”
Granny kept going to Coulter’s School until she was twenty-two, and she postponed marriage until she was twenty-eight, but she did not get the chance to teach because she had to care for her ailing parents. She married soon after her father died. Married women didn’t teach then, and once married, a farm woman wouldn’t go to the library (even if one existed nearby). She had other duties. But I saw how Granny tried to keep her mind active. She read the newspaper and Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and the Saturday Evening Post. Granddaddy read the Bible every night, following the words with his finger and calling them aloud. He sat in his rocking chair by the fireplace in winter, or in the summer he read on the porch till nightfall.
9
My grade-school teachers didn’t all have college degrees, but they attended Murray State Teachers College in the summers. Mrs. Virginia, my second-grade teacher, whose Raggedy Ann–red hair waved in wings above her ears, was loud and funny. When she confronted a child with a misdeed, she would say in a singsong voice, “A little bird told me you’ve been bad.” Mrs. Gisela was pregnant when I was in the fourth grade. When she mysteriously ordered us to lay our heads down on our desks for ten minutes, some of the girls decided she had had her baby then and hidden it in the desk drawer. At recess they peeked in and found chalk and erasers.
In the afternoons, the teachers read to us. Mrs. Alene, round and black-headed, read us The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in the fifth grade, and in the sixth grade Mrs. Isabella read us Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Littlest Rebel. That year an old silent film of Uncle Tom’s Cabin arrived at the Princess Theater in Mayfield. The teachers wanted us to see it. It seemed urgent. One teacher rounded up children in her car to go. She honked her horn on the road in front of our house. “Hurry!” Mama said. “She’ll run off and leave you.” I rushed out the door, racing toward the promise of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I remember Eliza hopping the ice-floe stepping-stones, escaping from a slave trader while frantic music played.
I did not know why, in the sixth grade, we were suddenly being instructed about slave times. The messages were contradictory: slavery was bad (Simon Legree), but the loss of those old days (jovial, loyal darkies) was regrettable. We wanted it both ways. My head was full of the littlest rebel, the sorrows of her family, the persecution they experienced. The cruel Yankees burned their house down. Now and then, out in the country, I saw the black ruins of wood-frame houses with coal stoves. One morning a cluster of sad-faced children met my school bus in front of the remains of a house that had burned to the ground, all but the chimney. After that, I was consumed with fear on the bus trip home from school each day, afraid I would find our house burned to the ground. It was as if the Yankees were still in the land, spreading their havoc.
But secretly I was attracted to them. They were mysterious and foreign. They spoke a different language, rough and superior. And they were the winners. I went snooping for Yankees in books and movies, in order to spy on them and listen to their talk. But when I tried to read Gone with the Wind, a tale of Yankee mayhem, Mama said, “Don’t read that. It might have bad language in it.”
I knew that pig Latin was one way to disguise bad language. Ell-hay, amn-day! And then I stumbled on real Latin. Daddy’s old ninth-grade Latin book was a remarkable discovery. I was astonished that there could be another language, from another time and a vanished place, in which people used strange-sounding words. Puella and puer and agricola. The girl and the boy and their farmer dad. I was especially intrigued by words that resembled our own. Agricola—agriculture. Nauticus— nautical. In a fit of confidence, I showed Mrs. Isabella the Latin book, and she asked me to read a page to the sixth-grade class. Standing in front of the room, I was trembling. Instead of reading the Latin words, which would make no sense and which I would probably pronounce wrong, I read my translation. It was a simple story about the farmer and the boy and the girl. I could have been reciting from the Alice and Jerry reader. The class had to take it on faith that I was extracting this spine-tingler from a page akin to hieroglyphics, secret codes, and pig Latin.
Rome was just above the knee on the Italian boot in my geography book, like the scab on my knee from one of my bicycle mishaps in the gravel of the driveway. I loved geography. In class, we copied the full-page maps from the book and colored them with crayons (which we always called “colors,” as if color didn’t exist otherwise). I tried to copy the maps exactly, with the shapes and proportions accurate. I wanted to go to Africa, to Indonesia, to the coast of Brazil. I colored oceans and forests and mountain ranges and printed the names in tiny neat letters. Most of my classmates did not seem interested in such faraway places. Mayfield was distant enough, with enough barriers to discourage country people. Other continents, foreign countries, were mere abstractions. But I believed in them. I knew I would go to France and Australia and Lapland one day.
The Bobbsey Twins ruined me. They went on vacations in every book and never did chores. They were Yankees. They sledded and skated and made snowmen. I languished through hot Kentucky summers, longing to go to Snow Lodge or Clover Bank or Eskimo Land. By age nine I was in a tizzy over The Bobbsey Twins in Mexico. Mexico was hot but exotic. I wanted to go to Mexico so badly I tried to learn Spanish.
One summer morning Mama woke me up excitedly. “Get up, get up, guess what! Surprise!”
“Are we going to Mexico?” I cried, leaping out of bed. The song “In My Adobe Hacienda” ran through my head.
No, it was Daily Vacation Bible School. I was crazy to think we could leave the cows and chickens and Granny and Granddaddy and drive thousands of miles in our eccentric gray Chrysler all the way to Mexico.
Daddy and I were walking down the lane after a cow that hadn’t
come up for milking. Boots, the latest dog, was with us. He was sort of a collie with golden-red hair. I said to Daddy, “When you read a book the second time, do you imagine a scene the same way you did the first time?”
“I don’t read a book over. I go on to another one,” he said.
“I like to read ’em again,” I said. I had just reread The Bobbsey Twins on Blueberry Island. I was particularly fond of the scene where the Gypsies came and picked all the blueberries, but a kind boy named Tom led the Bobbseys to a secret bush that the Gypsy tribe hadn’t found. When the Bobbseys picked blueberries, they were on vacation and the blueberries were there for their pleasure; when Gypsies picked blueberries, it was called stealing. We didn’t have blueberries. They sounded so much nicer than blackberries.
When I reread a scene, it unerringly sprang to life the same way it had before, as if my imagination worked primarily in space and time—as though I were traveling along a familiar road. An image in my mind always had a direction and a size. And I could remember where it appeared in the book—top, bottom, left, or right on the page. But the more I read, the greater my frustration grew with my real life. When I pictured a scene in a book, it was always some variation of a familiar place—with an added element of strangeness, so that the scene appeared slightly bent from reality. Like a circus marching down our lane. Or Gypsies in the barn. Gypsies were a frequent menace to the Bobbseys, but I wanted to find some Gypsies.
I asked Granny, “How does a writer think up a whole book? Does she just make it up as she goes along?” Granny allowed as how Laura Lee Hope, the Bobbsey author, got the plot all worked out in her mind beforehand. She made plans. She didn’t just write the first thing that came into her head. I studied on this idea for some time.
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