Growing Up under Southern Apartheid (Part 8)

School Days at the Rural Schoolhouse

Jackson’s Gap Elementary School was a simple white framed wooden building with three classrooms and a lunchroom. Concrete steps led up to the front porch and straight ahead from there was the classroom for the first and second grades. A turn to the left would lead to another door that opened onto a long hallway that led to the lunchroom in the back where Miss Lindy served up some of the best southern cooking around. Miss Lindy was a Black lady who was employed to cook all the meals in the school lunchroom. I never saw Miss Lindy in a bad mood. She always had a bright smile and a twinkle in her eye. She was short and round, usually had her hair tied in a kerchief, and she wore sneakers with cuts in the side where her pinky-toes would stick out. I gathered that her feet were too wide for her to find comfortably fitting shoes, so she had to make alterations. She would walk to work, getting to the schoolhouse early, and by 10:30 in the morning, fantastic aromas would be wafting down the hallway.

Oh, yes, we are still in the hallway I was describing. On the right was the boys’ restroom. The entry to the girls’ restroom was back out on the porch beside the first and second-grade classroom. Just past the Boys Room was the classroom where grades 6, 7, and 8 were taught by the teacher who also served as principal. Further down the hallway to the left, before you reached the lunchroom was the classroom for grades 3, 4, and 5. That hallway also held a Coke machine and a freezer box that held ice cream bars that kids could buy during morning recess.

First Day at School

I can remember my first day at school. It was a momentous day marking a shift in my life from days centered at home to days spent learning new things in the classroom. My Dad took me to school that day, and we arrived early before the bell rang. We may have been the first ones there, or more likely, a few other students were slowly coming in. It was a large room with tall windows across the back wall. In front of the classroom ran two long blackboards, with a third blackboard on the far side of the room where the second-grade class sat. Above the blackboards were the letters of the alphabet, wrapping from one wall around to the other. On the side of the room near the doorway, there were two large pictures. They were reproductions of paintings. One was a farm scene featuring a red barn and a young boy leading a horse around the barnyard. The other was a reproduction of Winslow Homer's famous painting, “Snap the Whip.” The painting portrayed school children playing outside a little red schoolhouse. Dad walked to the back of the room and raised one of the windows to let some fresh air in. There was no air-conditioning in the school (most houses did not have air-conditioning either).

Out in front of the schoolhouse were a few large oaks. Just beyond them was Jackson’s Gap Baptist Church where my father pastored.  Just beneath one of the oaks was a well, covered by a concrete casing. The well supplied all of the water for the school. Everyone in Jackson’s Gap had their own well; there was no “city water” supplying our homes or businesses. We had running water, of course, and indoor toilets, but each well required a pump to get the water from the well to the plumbing. Sometimes at recess, we would organize a game of chase or hide-and-seek. We would sometimes use the concrete casing over the well as “base” for those games.

 Out on the Playground

As for the playground, we had three large open areas, one in the front and two in the back. One of the areas in the back of the school was a baseball diamond where the little league would practice in the summer, and which kids made use of during recess.  When baseball season came around, the older kids would play baseball. The school did have a few bats and a softball. Some kids would also bring their own ball and bat and everyone needed their own glove if they were going to play.

There was no playground equipment, however – no swings or slides, no see-saws or climbing gyms.  During recess, children would find ways to play together. Some days we brought our bags of marbles.  We younger kids would have fun shooting marbles, some of the big kids, though, played for keeps.  

We often organized games of chase, Simon Says, freeze tag and Red Rover. Freeze tag was always a fun innovation on the basic game of tag, and Red Rover required two teams, often involving kids from several grades. Each team would form a line, linking hands to form what was hoped to be an unbreachable link. One team would call out to the other, “Red Rover, Red Rover send _____ right over.” They would call out the name of a person on the opposing team. That person would then charge ahead and attempt to break through the line. If he broke through, he carried a person back to his/her team, if he failed to break through, he was assimilated into the opposing team.  

I wish I had a picture of the school where I spent those formative grade school years. While it was not a “little red schoolhouse,” having no playground equipment or city water, Jackson’s Gap Elementary in some respects did resemble the painting that hung on the wall of the first-grade classroom. We never played snap-the-whip, but we often played a similar game we called “sling train.” in that game we formed a long line with each one holding onto the hip pockets of the kid in front of us.  The kid in front would lead us running down the playground, taking twists and turns as kids gradually were slung to the side and onto the ground. Eventually, the teachers ruled that we could not play that game any longer because parents were complaining that kids were coming home with the hip pockets ripped off their jeans.

When the School Bell Rings

I mentioned at the outset that on my first day of school, Dad got me there before the bell rang. The school bell marked the beginning and the end of the school day it also marked the beginning of recess and the called us to return to class at the end of recess. Most people probably think of the school bell as that electric bell located somewhere on the walls of the school. At Jackson’s Gap, it was a handbell that was kept in the principal’s desk drawer. He would ring it in the hallway, and he would hold it outside the window to make sure everyone on the playground heard the bell. Often he would let a student ring the bell. One day, Walter Dreshler and I asked if we could ring the bell to end recess. As first-graders, that was an awesome thing, indeed!

Some of the older kids would sometimes think they could extend recess by hiding the bell. That tactic did not work, however. The Lion’s Club met at the school and they had a brass bell on a stand with a hammer that they would tap to call their meetings to order. When the mischievous ones hid the bell, the principal, Mr.Paul, went to the closet and took out the Lion’s Club bell. Two of the older girls set the bel in the window and pounded it with the hammer. We went up to the window and said, “Is that the bell?”

“Yes,” they told us, “this is the bell until we find the real one.” 

I’m just glad I wasn’t there when Mr. Paul found out who took the school bell. We heard stories about the paddle that man had in his desk drawer!

Our Learning Enrichments

In addition to no playground equipment, Jackson’s Gap Elementary had no library. Each classroom did have a corner reserved for books. Every two weeks, the bookmobile ran from the Tallapoosa County Library System to the school. Teachers would select books that they wanted for their classrooms until the bookmobile returned. During the summer, the bookmobile came to The Gap every two weeks for anyone in the community who wanted to check out a book. It would park in the Jackson’s Gap Baptist Church parking lot under the shade of the trees while people in the community came to make their selections. Dr. Seuss was among my favorite selections in first and second grade, especially Horton Hears a Who, and Horton Hatches the Egg.

Jackson’s Gap Elementary School was perhaps an anachronism in our time. It was a vestige of a time when a small schoolhouse and a small church were the center of community life in rural America.  After my first-grade year, the school had gone from eight grades to six grades. Word had it that the County School Superintendent wanted to shut the school down.  At the end of my fifth-grade year, our family moved into Dadeville, and the following year the school was closed. While we had limited resources, it was a supportive environment where we were able to learn the basic grammar school curriculum.

The school was, in keeping with the times, all white. As I have related my childhood stories of life in the segregated South, most of my stories have only a limited appearance of Black people. The reason for that is that our society was kept segregated so that there was very little interaction between white people and Black people in my childhood experience. For example, Miss Lindy, the cook for the lunchroom, was the only Black person we ever saw at school.

What I cannot tell you in my reminiscences here is what the school for Black children was like. I had no first-hand knowledge. It may be that they were bused on up the road to Dadeville which was four miles away. Council School served the Black community there. Jackson’s Gap Elementary may have seemed backward and limited in comparison to the school in the county seat of Dadeville. Compared to the learning environment that was offered to most Black children, however, we were still among the privileged class – we just didn’t know it.  

A rural Black school in Alabama

      Next week: Learning to Read – and Other Important Things

<Part 7, Breaking Ground  

         

                                                   Part 9, Learning to Read - and Other Important Things>     

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Images:
Top: "Snap-the-whip" (1872)
Artist: Winslow Homer 

Medium: Oil on Canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Bottom: Black students in Alabama gather outside their segregated school, 1965. (Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos). Read about School Segregation in Alabama at Equal Justice Initiative.

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