One day I had my children lined up. I didn’t even have to tell them to line up in front of the steps. This little boy—he was about ten or twelve, I guess—was lined up. His name was George Hunter. The principal came along and had a magazine in his hand. It was just about as heavy as that one [pointing to a magazine]. Then he hit him over the head with that magazine. I said, “Let me tell you something. As long as I teach at this school, don’t you ever do that again! You go over there and discipline your own students.” He would go and drink coffee in the lunchroom, and I would have to quit teaching to go over there and discipline his kids and make them be quiet so I could teach. “Now, I mean it,” I said.
He said, “Mrs. Merrell, I want to see you after school.” I told him that I didn’t have a thing to say to him after school. I just walked on like a big fat dog. He tried his best to get me to quit teaching there, but I had my contract. I told him there wasn’t anything he could do to get me to quit teaching. I didn’t want to teach with him either. He knew I didn’t. In later years, the church bought the Cashiers school and made a church out of it. It is still in Cashiers. Now it is a bakeshop.
PLATE 11 “My husband and the babysitter moved us to the house by horse and wagon.” Mrs. Merrell’s home in Cashiers, North Carolina
I remember when I was teaching that some of my students would have sore feet. I had a balm of Gilead [Populus candicans]. Do you know what a balm of Gilead tree is? It is mentioned in the Bible. I would take that and pine rosin [resin] and make a good salve out of it, and I would tear up any old rag that I had or that anybody had given to me, and I would take it to school. I had an old porcelain wash pan, and I would put water in the pan and put it on our stove and heat it and get it good and warm. I would have the children put their feet in that wash pan, and I would wash them up. Then I would put some of that salve on their feet and tie a clean cloth around it. Their feet would heal up.
When my students misbehaved, I had a hickory [to whip them with], but I usually had good children. I didn’t have to use that hickory much. My children would march up to the door and form their own lines. I think they knew from the beginning that I was the one that would tell them what to do and what not to do. That helped a lot. I showed them a lot of love, too. I played with them. I was good to them—just as good to them as they let me be. I am a good teacher. The reason I say that is because I love the schoolchildren. I want them to do their best. If they are teachable, I will teach them how to read and spell. I had the sweetest students; I didn’t have hardly any discipline troubles.
The big children would help the little ones. That’s the reason I got as much in as I did because they would help them while I had another class. I taught everything for grades one through seven. I taught geography and history. It took me all day long. At one school I had forty-five students. The boys were as big as I was, and the girls were, too, but they were not as old. I had a good time with them. I would get out with them at recess time, and they would play. The girls would play in one place, and the boys would play in another, but they had the queerest ideas down there. We got one of the first radios, and they thought if they talked about us at their houses that we could hear them. I will never forget; they said, “You better watch what you say. She can hear you.” They thought we could hear them through the radio. They would come to our house at night to listen to music. We listened to the Grand Ole Opry. That was when it was so popular. We heard Loretta Lynn, and Hank Williams was on there, and Roy Acuff.
I retired in the early eighties. I just got to where I couldn’t teach on my certificate [due to state laws governing certificates]. I was in my eighties when I stopped teaching completely. I kept driving until I was eighty-four. I took a lot of correspondence classes. One afternoon I was doing correspondence work, and I felt somebody at my back. Have you ever felt like someone is behind you, at your back? I felt somebody looking at me, and I turned around, and there was a rifle barrel pointed at me coming in the door. It scared me to death. That man thought it was funny. I said, “That wasn’t a bit funny. You could have caused me to have a heart attack.”
I substituted for about fifteen years at the old Glenville School after I retired. I also taught adult school at night sometimes. They hired me to teach night school at people’s houses. I made twelve dollars a week. I went to the houses and taught. I let them tell me what they wanted to learn. When I would go to their houses, you know, some of them could write, but they couldn’t write very well. I would help them with that.
PLATE 12 “One of my former students who I still love is Delbert McCall.” Mrs. Merrell with her great-niece, Renee White, and a former student, Delbert McCall
One of my former students who I still love is Delbert McCall. Delbert has done well. He is a preacher and still comes to visit me. Delbert’s mother, Danie, had a hard life. She was married to John Crowe, and he died, leaving her with three children—Mildred, Bessie, and Lee Roy—to raise. She then married Clarence McCall, Delbert’s father, and had three other children: Joe, Wanda, and Delbert. Clarence McCall had cancer. Danie had such a hard time. She done all she could. After Clarence died she bought some property from us, and some men moved an old house from Bull Pen onto the property. The house was in the woods next to me. Danie’s children would come through my field on the way to and from home. We had a big ol’ hound dog that my son, Dink, and Delbert’s brother, Lee Roy, played with. They had picked her pups up and looked at ’em and threw rocks at her and aggravated her—she hated them. She hated for anybody to bother her. She would bite; I knew she would. I told them never to come through my field to my house because that dog might be loose one day. Luckily, they never got bit. I had two black walnut trees in my yard, and one day when Delbert came by I had hung out my white sheets to dry. When I washed them, I would put a little lye in sometimes, and I would boil them to get them white. That day, I looked up, and Delbert had a walnut in each hand ready to throw at my sheets. If he had hit my sheets with them black walnuts, I never would have gotten the stains out. He was ready to, but I put a stop to that. He never has forgot it. When he was little, Delbert liked milk and bread. I would have him a glass full of milk and some bread when he got home from school. Delbert sings and plays the guitar. I don’t remember him singing when he was a child. He has brought me his tapes, but I think the first song he sung to me was when I was up yonder in the hospital [the hospital is connected to the nursing home where Mrs. Merrell resides], and his aunt was in the hospital. He come up next to my bed, and he took my hands, and he sung “Amazing Grace.” He sure can sing. I would like for him to sing for me when I die.
I used to read a lot. I read everything that came out. I was an avid reader. That’s what hurts me so bad, sitting here not reading. [Mrs. Merrell cannot see well enough to read now.] I read everything—all the local things. My daddy told me, “Honey, read. Just read.” I would read the current books that came out. I would go to the library and read. Like I said, “If you can read, you can move mountains.” Out of all the books I read, the book Little Big really stands out in my memory; that was a story about the Appalachian Mountains. Also, the Hannah Fowler books that were written by Janice Holt Giles were real good. I had them at home. I had Hannah Fowler and some more. The Hannah Fowler books were about a girl who went to Texas to teach school, and she was a lot like me.
When my husband died, Dink, my son, said he would be willing to let me stay in Cashiers if I would get my driver’s license. I was sixty-two. He come and bought me a little Ford Falcon. I went and tried to get my driver’s license that summer. I want to tell you, everybody in the country tried to help me. The teachers tried to help me, and the driver’s education teacher helped me—even the sheriff tried to help; everybody wanted me to get my driver’s license. You know, I got my driver’s license when I was sixty-two. I tried out all summer. A woman, Daisy Watson, would ride with me to Highlands, North Carolina, to try out. I wouldn’t have ridden with me knowing that I couldn’t drive any better than I could. I finally got the
m in August. I drove for years, but I wasn’t that good of a driver. I knew a woman who wanted to go get her license, and nobody would ride with her but me. You know, you have to drive so much with someone who has a license before you can get them. Nobody would ride with her, so I told her, “I will ride with you.” I went with her, and she finally got them. She was like me; she wasn’t the best driver.
This girl that comes and helps me sometimes asked, “How did you get your nice complexion?” I told her that I didn’t put any soap on my face. I said, “Well, I credit it a lot to God for taking care of me all the years and for being with me through the valleys and the high mountains. Also, growing up I didn’t smoke, and I didn’t drink. I ate the right kinds of foods. I had good genes. I had to have had good genes.” That is what I attribute to my longevity.
You asked about my favorite president. I think President Roosevelt was sent by God. I thought he was the finest man. When President Roosevelt was president, he made jobs for people. It was back during the Depression. I will tell you, Jimmy Carter was the most Christian. Billy Graham said he was the only Bible-toting president we ever had, but Jimmy Carter was too good for all that mess. He couldn’t work with them. They were too sinful. I liked Bill Clinton. He just got caught up in it all. The economy sure was balanced when he was president. I hope we do not have a woman president. I don’t want them to put that off on a woman.
Looking back on my life I think … my husband died January 7, 1969. Even when my first child died, I still had my husband and my other child. When Merrett died, I still had my son. When my last son died, I don’t see how I lived through it. I guess it is because of my grandchildren. All of my grandchildren live in Macon, Georgia. I have three grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
I am still as active as I can be here in the nursing home. Two mornings a week, I have devotion. We have singing and usually memorial services. At night, we have trivia. Some of them are as smart as me, but I still try. I am pretty good at Bible trivia. I have been exposed to the Bible my whole life. In my earliest recollection, it was one of the things that was right there.
Editor’s note: Mrs. Merrell passed away from a brief illness just after the completion of her article, so she never saw it in print. She is greatly missed by her family and friends, and we will always treasure the memories and stories she shared with us. She was a very special lady.
“So that’s pretty well my eighty-nine years.”
~Jack P. Nix tells us about his career~
On a hilltop overlooking the remnants of his parents’ farm, Jack P. Nix lives with Ruby, his wife of more than sixty-five years. This home is the one they built in retirement after Mr. Nix served more than a decade as the state school superintendent for Georgia during the 1960s and 1970s. The middle son of a farmer, and a student who disliked school, Mr. Nix nonetheless went on to a long and accomplished career in education.
As we spoke on a warm July morning, Mr. Nix shared his memories with me in a straightforward, unaffected manner, describing everything from his own schooling to an appearance before a Washington congressional committee matter-of-factly. On a few occasions, however, his emotions did betray him. The broad smile on his face when he talked of his industrial agriculture students left me with no doubts of his sincerity when he shared how much he enjoyed them. After all these years, the frustration of dealing with a governor who was adamantly opposed to integration was also still very clear. And when he spoke of his wife, Ruby, and his very accomplished children and grandchildren, the smile that shone from his eyes said much about a man who loves his wife and family.
When I called Mr. Nix to request an interview, he expressed surprise that I would want to know about his tenure as state school superintendent, given how many years had passed since his retirement. However, with Mr. Nix, as with so many of our Foxfire contacts, I am, once again, reminded of the old adage that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Mr. Nix described a legislature and teacher community occasionally at odds as to who was best to make decisions concerning public education. He talked of the importance of giving students the opportunity to produce something of value in the process of their education. His own life story tells of how a dedicated educator, while simply doing his or her job, can change for the better the entire trajectory of a young person’s life. Those lessons are as valuable today as they ever were. And, though I would claim Mr. Nix if I could, we are not related.
—Lacy Hunter Nix
I’m Jack Phillip Nix, born October 6, 1921, about one o’clock in the morning, my mama said. I started school in 1926. It was a one-room school with about forty students and one teacher. I went to that school for about two weeks, and they consolidated it with the Cleveland, Georgia, schools. We had a teacher for each grade then. In the first grade we had a “Baby Ray.” It was a book, a Baby Ray book, and we studied that book for a whole year, but you didn’t get out of the first grade that year. You stayed with Baby Ray one year and the first grade one year. Then you went on to second, third, fourth, fifth. So it really was kind of a kindergarten, too.
At that time we were having to pay to get to go to school. My dad had timber cut off our farm for firewood to be used at the school. If you didn’t have that, it would cost you two dollars and a half a month to go to school. There were schools in the United States back in the 1700s, but they were private schools or organizations, one or the other—no state money for it and no public money going into it. It was all private. I believe it was about 1919 or 1920 that we got a poor-school fund started. The legislature appropriated twenty thousand the first year. Can you imagine twenty thousand for the whole state?! Then they finally got it up to a hundred thousand, but those were still awfully poor schools. In 1870, they worked out the constitution that would make it legal for the legislature to appropriate school funds for public education.
When I started school, you didn’t even have to have a high school diploma to teach school. I believe it was about 1940 that the state board passed a policy that if you got any state money, then you had to have a college degree. That’s when we started really putting colleges of education in most of the four-year institutions.
All my elementary and secondary education was in White County, Georgia. I went to Cleveland and graduated in 1938 from high school. I stayed out of school two years and a half before I went to college. I didn’t like school. I had a teacher that never taught me, but he became interested in me, and talked me into going to the University of Georgia. This teacher was Bud Moss. He came here as a vocational agriculture teacher. He borrowed some money from Dad to buy a carload of cans. He built a canning plant. He needed cans, so he borrowed some money. The county board of education didn’t have money to let him have. He would buy these cans, and when he canned stuff, people paid him for canning. About every week or two, he’d come out here to the farm and make a payment. He kind of liked me and invited me to go to Lake Rabun to the 4-H place there one summer with his students. I was the only outsider in the outfit, and while we were there, he talked to us about everything there is to talk about, like going to school. So he talked me into going.
One day he had me get in his car and took me to the University of Georgia and enrolled me in school and found me a place to stay. I got room and board for sixteen dollars a month, and my tuition was twenty-seven dollars and a half a quarter. I graduated from high school in 1938, and I started college in January of 1941. I graduated from the university in August of 1943. I spent two and a half years and received my degree. Later, I received my master’s and my six-year on the GI bill as a veteran.
During the two and a half years I was out of high school, I worked here on the farm. We had a mowing machine and a hay rake. In the fall of the year, I would go around the community cutting community members’ hay for them and raking it. They’d pay me for the length of time I worked. It didn’t cost anything for the horsepower because we always had the horses. I saved up about two hundred and twenty-five dollars, and that paid my first year of co
llege. The day before Bud came to pick me up to take me to Athens to get enrolled, I told my dad, “Well, tomorrow I’ll be leaving.” He reached back in his pocket and pulled out his checkbook. He said, “Here’s you a checkbook. Don’t break me up, but live like the other boys.” He couldn’t have said anything that made me anymore stingy [laughs]! I have a little book upstairs in the attic in a footlocker where I wrote down everything I spent—cost me eighteen hundred and some few dollars to get my degree.
My mother used to sell a lot of milk and butter. People would come out and buy her vegetables. She had a little glass in the cabinet in our home where she kept the money. When I’d come home from school, she’d slip me a five-dollar bill or something like that, so I’d have some “walking around” money. They were proud of me. I was the first one in our family to ever graduate from college. My sister, just older than I am, went to college for one summer. She taught school for one year on a high school diploma, but then she got out of it. From me down, we all graduated from college. There were nine of us, and I was the middle one, four boys and five girls.
I met my wife, Ruby, on a bus. I was hitchhiking home from the university. I could hitchhike from Athens to Gainesville pretty easy, but there wasn’t much traffic on the road then from Gainesville to Cleveland. I’d have to catch a bus in Gainesville. I had met her sister once before when I was getting on that bus, and I saw her back there. I went back and sat down with her, and we started talking. She said, “Oh, I want you to meet my sister.” I looked over the back at her, and she was curled up in the double seat. I said, “Where do you go to school?” She said, “I’ll have you know I teach school.” Those were the first words we said to one another [laughs]. She was teaching school in McIntosh County, way down on the coast of Georgia. A fellow from Union County was principal down there, and he talked her into going to work with him. We went together about three years. Then when I was out in Texas, training troops, I called her one day and said, “If you’ll come out here, we’ll get married.” She caught a train and came out, and we were married August the eighth, 1945, at nine forty-nine at night.
The Foxfire 45th Anniversary Book Page 6