White Christmas

(The following essay is a re-post from Growing Up Under Southern Apartheid)

White Christmas

In east-central Alabama, we typically don’t get a white Christmas, at least not like the one Bing Crosby sang about. When I was a kid, I looked at many a picture book with snow-laden Christmas scenes and saw Christmas cards come in through the mail that featured snow-covered villages. In the South, we could wish for snow, but we were more likely to get rain. Snow might come later (if only for a day) but never as early as Christmas.

As children, even without the snow, we began to feel the anticipation of the holiday as the time drew near. Adults would start it. They’d say, “What’s Santy Claus gonna bring ya?” or “Have you been a good little boy this year? Well, mind your Mama ‘cause Santa’s comin’.”

Sights and Sounds of Christmas

One of the things that really set the stage for the holiday was putting up the Christmas tree. In rural Alabama back in the 1950s, most folks cut their own trees. Cedars grew wild in the pastures and farmland in the area. I remember going with Dad one year to look for a tree. We went to a farm owned by an older man who let us walk through the pasture to find the one we wanted. I remember Dad stopping back by the old man’s house to pay him, but the farmer just waved him off and wouldn’t hear of it. It was probably because my Dad was the preacher in town. In those days, churches paid their preachers a meager salary but people tried to make up for it in other ways. Someone might have a good day fishing on the river with too many fish to clean, and he’d take the preacher enough to feed his family. Someone else would have some corn or beans coming in and would take a mess of vegetables to the preacher’s house. Many merchants in town offered discounts for clergy.

At our house, by the time the Christmas tree went up, we had Christmas records playing. We had a little record player that played 45 and 78 RPMs and we’d delight in hearing “Up on the Housetop,” “Jingle Bells,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” and the like. Of course, in Sunday School we would sing “Silent Night,” “Away in a Manger,” and “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” 

And then there were the Christmas stories.  Dad would thrill us in reading Clement Moore's poem, ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas. On Christmas Eve, Mom would read Why the Chimes Rang, by Raymond MacDonald Alden to set a solemn yet magical tone for the holiday. Our excitement could hardly be tamped down because the next morning would be filled with drifts of wadded wrapping paper, stockings filled with candy, and the unmistakable Christmas aroma of new plastic from all of the toys gathered under the tree.

 Santa Comes to Town

We lived in Wedowee, Alabama from 1955 to 1960, so that makes it easy for me to place a relative time period on my early childhood memories since I was only a year old when we first arrived. I suppose in those days every community had its own way of marking the beginning of the Christmas season.  In Dadeville, Alabama, where I began the sixth grade, the local Girl Scouts sang carols on the courthouse steps on a Saturday afternoon as the town turned on the Christmas lights for the first time on Main Street.

In the small town of Wedowee, the county seat of Randolph County, the Christmas season was heralded by Santa riding into town on the back of a red fire engine. Children would gather at the town square in glad anticipation. Sure, New York City had the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade with Santa and his sleigh as the grand finale, but we ushered jolly old St. Nicholas into town in grand style!

1955 GMC Pumper 

I remember when Dad took my brother and me to join the crowd of kids waiting to see Santa come to town. At the appointed time, we heard the siren wailing in the distance. Soon the fire truck appeared, driving through the town, Santa standing on the back and waving to the crowd. When the fire truck stopped, Santa began handing out bags of candy to all the eager children.

Christmas in the South was as segregated as all the other community activities, but there must have been some allowances in Wedowee for Santa’s visit. That day when we went to see Santa ride into town, it was an event for all children, both Black and white. It made such an impression upon me as a child that one particular image stands out in my memory to this day.  As I made my way up to see Santa who was handing out the candy to all the children, I saw a little Black girl walk up to get some candy. She was younger than I – I would have been around five, so she must have been around three years old. She had on a blue dress and pink bows tied up in her hair. The little girl walked slowly up to Santa at her mother’s encouragement, and what did Santa do?  He bent down and picked her up in his arms!  He then walked around, continuing to wave at the kids, carrying the little girl in his arms.


Of course, we knew this was not the real Santa. It was clear that he was a man in a costume. I have no idea who Santa was that day, but I never forgot the way that he carried the little Black girl in his arms. I was not accustomed to seeing Black children because Black people and white people lived separate lives and the children went to separate schools. While the little Black girl did not fit into all of the Christmas images and songs that I had in my head at that young age, that day a new image of Christmas was added to my memory. Throughout my childhood, though we never had snow, all of my Christmases were white, except for that one day.

________________________

Photo credit:

• Vintage 1950s Christmas card was found on Pinterest
• "Unmanaged eastern red cedars" photo from Wildlife, a publication of The Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation.
• The record player and fire truck images were both found on Pinterest with no credit attributed.

For an index to other essays in Growing Up Under Southern Apartheid, go here.

-

White Christmas

(From Growing Up Under Southern Apartheid)

White Christmas

In east-central Alabama, we typically don’t get a white Christmas, at least not like the one Bing Crosby sang about. When I was a kid, I looked at many a picture book with snow-laden Christmas scenes and saw Christmas cards come in through the mail that featured snow-covered villages. In the South, we could wish for snow, but we were more likely to get rain. Snow might come later (if only for a day) but never as early as Christmas.

As children, even without the snow we began to feel the anticipation of the holiday as the time drew near. Adults would start it. They’d say, “What’s Santy Claus gonna bring ya?” or “Have you been a good little boy this year? Well mind your Mama ‘cause Santa’s comin’.”

Sights and Sounds of Christmas

One of the things that really set the stage for the holiday was putting up the Christmas tree. In rural Alabama back in the 1950s, most folks cut their own trees. Cedars grew wild in the pastures and farmland in the area. I remember going with Dad one year to look for a tree. We went to a farm owned by an older man who let us walk through the pasture to find the one we wanted. I remember Dad stopping back by the old man’s house to pay him, but the farmer just waved him off and wouldn’t hear of it. It was probably because my Dad was the preacher in town. In those days, churches paid their preachers a meager salary but people tried to make up for it in other ways. Someone might have a good day fishing on the river with too many fish to clean, and he’d take the preacher enough to feed his family. Someone else would have some corn or beans coming in and would take a mess of vegetables to the preacher’s house. Many merchants in town offered discounts for clergy.

At our house, by the time the Christmas tree went up, we had Christmas records playing. We had a little record player that played 45 and 78 RPMs and we’d delight in hearing “Up on the Housetop,” “Jingle Bells,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” and the like. Of course, in Sunday School we would sing “Silent Night,” “Away in a Manger,” and “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” 

And then there were the Christmas stories.  Dad would thrill us in reading Clement Moore's poem, ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas. On Christmas Eve, Mom would read Why the Chimes Rang, by Raymond MacDonald Alden to set a solemn yet magical tone for the holiday. Our excitement could hardly be tamped down because the next morning would be filled with drifts of wadded wrapping paper, stockings filled with candy, and the unmistakable Christmas aroma of new plastic from all of the toys gathered under the tree.

 Santa Comes to Town

We lived in Wedowee, Alabama from 1955 to 1960, so that makes it easy for me to place a relative time period on my early childhood memories since I was only a year old when we first arrived. I suppose in those days every community had its own way of marking the beginning of the Christmas season.  In Dadeville, Alabama, where I began the sixth grade, the local Girl Scouts sang carols on the courthouse steps on a Saturday afternoon as the town turned on the Christmas lights for the first time on Main Street.

In the small town of Wedowee, the county seat of Randolph County, the Christmas season was heralded by Santa riding into town on the back of a red fire engine. Children would gather at the town square in glad anticipation. Sure, New York City had the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade with Santa and his sleigh as the grand finale, but we ushered jolly old St. Nicholas into town in grand style!

1955 GMC Pumper 

I remember when Dad took my brother and me to join the crowd of kids waiting to see Santa come to town. At the appointed time, we heard the siren wailing in the distance. Soon the fire truck appeared, driving through the town, Santa standing on the back and waving to the crowd. When the fire truck stopped, Santa began handing out bags of candy to all the eager children.

Christmas in the South was as segregated as all the other community activities, but there must have been some allowances in Wedowee for Santa’s visit. That day when we went to see Santa ride into town, it was an event for all children, both Black and white. It made such an impression upon me as a child that one particular image stands out in my memory to this day.  As I made my way up to see Santa who was handing out the candy to all the children, I saw a little Black girl walk up to get some candy. She was younger than I – I would have been around five, so she must have been around three years old. She had on a blue dress and pink bows tied up in her hair. The little girl walked slowly up to Santa at her mother’s encouragement, and what did Santa do?  He bent down and picked her up in his arms!  He then walked around, continuing to wave at the kids, carrying the little girl in his arms.


Of course, we knew this was not the real Santa. It was clear that he was a man in a costume. I have no idea who Santa was that day, but I never forgot the way that he carried the little Black girl in his arms. I was not accustomed to seeing Black children because Black people and white people lived separate lives and the children went to separate schools. While the little Black girl did not fit into all of the Christmas images and songs that I had in my head at that young age, that day a new image of Christmas was added to my memory. Throughout my childhood, though we never had snow, all of my Christmases were white, except for that one day.

________________________

Photo credit:

• Vintage 1950s Christmas card was found on Pinterest
• "Unmanaged eastern red cedars" photo from Wildlife, a publication of The Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation.
• The record player and fire truck images were both found on Pinterest with no credit attributed.

For an index to other essays in Growing Up Under Southern Apartheid, go here.

-

The Pastor and the Klan

Growing Up under Southern Apartheid, Part 11

Ku Klux Klan Rally in Opelika, 1925
(Photo from The Encyclopedia of Alabama)

My grandfather was a Baptist preacher who pastored churches in South Alabama’s Black Belt region during the first half of the 20^th century. Churches in that day were often simple clapboard structures built with pride by hard-working people. They would gather in those churches to sing beloved hymns such as “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” “Blessed Assurance,” and “Amazing Grace.” Since he died over a decade before I was born, my knowledge of my grandfather comes through my mother’s recollections – that and a notebook of his containing the sermons he preached. 

Poverty and humility have long been considered Christian virtues, and that was certainly the case in my grandfather’s day. It was said that one of the deacons in his church would pray, “Protect our pastor in your love, Lord. We’ll keep him poor if you’ll keep him humble.”

The KKK Comes Calling

One of my mother’s early memories of her father involves an encounter with the Ku Klux Klan. This would have been in the 1920s. According to The Encyclopedia of Alabama, the KKK rapidly increased in its popularity and influence in the 1920s by cultivating alliances with industrialists as well as Black Belt planters. They would raise funds to support local community organizations such as schools, libraries, and churches – their ulterior motive being to promote white supremacy. “By the mid-1920s, the Klan claimed to represent Alabama's social and economic elite: lawyers, newspaper editors, educators, physicians, business leaders, judges, Masons, bankers, ministers, and politicians (1).” Indeed, it was a period in Alabama’s history when politicians sought Klan support, or even membership, in order to get elected to state and local offices.

My mother recalled that at that time, the Klan would often supply pulpit Bibles for churches and would support ministers with cash to supplement their meager ministerial salaries. The encounter she recalled happened one Sunday night during the evening church service. She said she was a small child at the time. Her account is a little more detailed than one would expect from a child, so I suspect that the incident must have been a frequent topic for discussion in her family. On that night, a group of men wearing white robes and hoods arrived unannounced, marching into the church during the middle of the service. Such an unexpected disruption by men in full Klan regalia must have had a startling effect on the people gathered for worship. The hooded leader went up to the pulpit where my grandfather was preaching to offer him an envelope filled with cash. My grandfather, as my mother recalls, shook his head, giving no verbal response, but refusing the offering from the Klan. The Klansman then forcefully brandished the envelope, emphasizing that it was intended that the preacher receive it. My mother recalled the uneasy tension that seemed to fill the room. When my grandfather again refused the envelope, the Klan then marched out of the church, their motives having been thwarted.

I have no idea where the church was that the Klan encounter took place. Knowing the South, my grandfather’s actions did nothing to change any attitudes on race. Segregation in the South in the 1920s was the accepted norm. What his actions did show was that there was one preacher who would give no credence to the authoritarian views or acts of violence perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan. 

A Country Preacher’s Message

My grandfather was born in the mid-1880s. He came from a farming family (as did most in those days). He must have been a man of some vision and determination in that he went to college and seminary at a time when higher education was not the norm.

I mentioned that some of my limited knowledge of my grandfather comes from his own leather-bound notebook containing his sermons. My mother passed the notebook on to me before she died. The sermons are not written out in full, but in an outline form with major points listed numerically similar to what we might think of as “bullet points” today.  I imagine that a well-honed preacher could take the notes from any one of those two-page outlines and expand them with a message shaped to relate to any particular congregation he might stand before. That notebook also records where he preached. In the upper margin, he wrote the names of places where each sermon had been delivered probably to ensure that if he preached there again, he would not repeat a message already proclaimed.

Looking through my grandfather’s sermons, he covers topics of life and faith, with titles such as “The Commonplace Life Glorified,” “Christ, the Way the Truth and the Life,” “Death Is Swallowed Up,” and “The Wonderful Teacher.” He also has a few notes indicating that he was one to keep his eye open to analogies of faith seen in everyday life. Here are two of his anecdotes:   

In the summer of 1912, while making the trip from Coffeeville to Cunningham by river, one of the deckhands on the lower deck was sounding the depths along the shoal and calling out, “9, 3, 6,” etc. “Deeper to the right…deeper to the left.” The pilot kept in the deepest water.  So God puts his children over life’s sea with Christ as their pilot, in deepest mercy and grace.

Sept. 26, 1921, while walking down the street in the town of Grove Hill, Ala., I reached down and picked up my little four-year-old boy who was weak and worn out. He threw his arms around my neck, patted me on the back and said, “I did not ask you to do that, Daddy.” God the father does many things for us we do not ask for.

Then and Now

In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was finding a renewed stronghold, not just in the South, but throughout America (2). During that time, my grandfather was confronted with a choice.  The Klan was offering a monetary reward and all he had to do in return was to continue with his ministerial role.  He must have known that buying into what the Klan was offering would exact a greater price from his soul. Aligning himself with such power and influence would obviously go against the grain of the life of faith and service that he had thus far forged for himself and his family.

I don’t think my grandfather suffered any repercussions from his refusal of monetary support from the Klan. Perhaps certain Klansmen might have used their influence to make his life a little better off financially, but he chose instead to live a life consistent with his core values.

Nationally, the influence of the Klan quickly waned in the 1930s with the Great Depression. They instead concentrated their efforts in the rural South rather than upon a national agenda (3). Though racism remained rampant, most people were not willing to accept the Klan’s message of hate and violence. By the 1960s, when Martin Luther King, Jr. was leading marches in Montgomery, Selma, and Birmingham, though the South resisted and the Klan in the South continued unabated, the nation as a whole had enough of a conscience to realize that a change had to come.

Today, we are seeing once again a renewed effort by white supremacists to influence national policies. After Barack Obama was elected President in what many saw as a sign of racial progress, the nation erupted in a backlash of racism and hatred. We have seen the pendulum suddenly swing back, making it appear that the nation is ready to return to a day when white people may have lived free, but Black people lived in fear and oppression. The way ahead will probably not be easy, but what if a few people can live by higher values rather than capitulating to authoritarian hatred and violence? What if a few people of faith can resist buying into an unholy political alliance? Better yet, what if a significant number of people can answer to a higher calling? What if we decide to do what is right for the common good rather than seeking to preserve our own self-interests?

< Index to previous essays 

__________________

1. From “The Ku Klux Klan in Alabama from 1915-1930,” The Encyclopedia of Alabama, at http://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-3221.

2. See “When the KKK Was Mainstream,” NPR History Dept. at https://www.npr.org/sections/npr-history-dept/2015/03/19/390711598/when-the-ku-klux-klan-was-mainstream.

3. For a concise presentation of the history of the Ku Klux Klan, see "The History of the KKK in American Politics," JSTOR Daily where news meets its scholarly match at https://daily.jstor.org/history-kkk-american-politics/.

-

Growing Up Under Southern Apartheid -- Bending the Arc

Bending the Arc

I am in the midst of writing my memories of growing up in the segregated South. For an index of what I have written so far in Southern Apartheid, go here. I will be taking a brief hiatus in these postings, but I will return in the near future with more recollections.

The reason I began my Southern Apartheid series is that while my upbringing in the South was full of idyllic moments, I had a very limited understanding at the time of the world that Black people lived in. They cooked and cleaned for white people –even raised white folk's children, but they were kept under control by tactics of terror. There were enough beatings and lynchings that were ignored by the legal system, and enough incidents of black people being "accidentally hit" by cars as they walked down the road to act as a warning to anyone who dared to challenge the system.

As fate would have it, I just learned that two of my friends from the Birmingham Unitarian Universalist Church in Birmingham have a film project addressing the dystopian environment of terror and suppression that existed here in the South for Black people at the same time that I was spending my carefree childhood years. Pam Powell and David Brower have produced a film, Bending the Arc: The Vote “about the hard-fought battle to expand voting rights to all people in Alabama in the 1960s. Sacrifices made, lives lost, obstacles overcome, and the need to continue the fight.” 

To learn more about the Bending the Arc Project and upcoming films in the mini-series, please visit the Bending the Arc website bendingthearctojustice.com

Check out the trailer below:

-

Growing Up under Southern Apartheid, Part 10

-

The Last Work Song

My family moved to Jackson’s Gap, Alabama around the time I turned six. It was a small rural community, known as “The Gap” to folks living around there. Small farms were scattered throughout the county where textile mills had become the major source of employment. For my family, it was a move from town to country and my world changed from small-town sidewalks to creek banks and woods. 

Our small house at the Gap was flanked by a pasture on one side and woodlands on another. In front of our house, just across the road lived a black couple who were our nearest neighbors. If you walked down that road just a little piece, you would pass Mr. Wilson’s fish pond just before you got to the site of the old train depot. The train no longer stopped there but the old folks remembered when you could catch the train and go down to Opelika or you could go in the other direction to Alexander City. There remained only a cement platform where the small train station had once been. 

Watching Trains

The one activity that still occurred at the old depot site was mail pickup and delivery. The postmaster would go down every morning before the nine o’clock passenger train came through. He would hoist a canvas bag of outgoing mail on a chain that ran up a pole beside the tracks. When the train came by, someone on the train would swing out a hook to grab the bag of mail. Simultaneously, a canvas bag containing incoming mail would be tossed from the train onto the ground. The postmaster would then pick up the bag of mail and take it to the post office to be sorted and delivered. 

The quiet of my childhood home on the hill by the woods was disrupted only by the routine passing of the trains. When we had first moved there, the midnight train would jar me from my sleep as it barreled through blowing its horn, “whining low” as Hank Williams described it in song. In a short time, I grew accustomed to the sound of the trains as they passed through. 

There were freight trains: the Georgia Pacific and the L & N were two of the lines that came through; and there were passenger trains, sleek and black with a red line along the side. The passenger train came through twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening. I enjoyed watching them pass by, rumbling down the tracks.

On one memorable day, it was a different sound down by the old depot that got my attention. It must have been around 1963 or 1964. I would have been 9 or 10 years old when I heard the nineteenth-century echoes of rhythm and harmony that lasted into the night. 

What I heard was a loud and robust men’s chorus chanting songs along the railway. It was not the sweet strains of a church choir, which was where I normally heard songs being sung, but it was bracing and compelling. My father took me down to see what was happening. Down by the old train depot, we saw a crew of Black men laying new rail along the tracks. They were singing songs I had never heard before, but the sounds seemed to go directly to my chest and made something stand up on the inside. It was the first and only time I had seen men singing together while they worked. 

My father told me that the singing was a tradition that went back to the old plantation days when slaves would sing in the fields. When doing hard physical labor, that singing helped to keep them going, my dad said. The pounding of a hammer or the chopping of a hoe might become the beat of a song, and the song kept them together with their work. Much later in life, I would learn that musicologists classified the songs we heard as “negro prison work songs.” I would also learn that the railroad employed Black work crews that they could dispatch for such labor-intensive projects. 

Black workers on the B & O Railroad line

A New Day Ahead

That vivid work song memory has remained with me as a briefly opened door to the past. Perhaps I was witnessing one of the last remnants of the Old South. Even though Brown v. the Board of Education had been settled by the Supreme Court in 1954, it had yet to have an impact in our community – or even in our state, for that matter. As I stood on that summer evening listening to the Black men singing songs that could be heard in the distance from our front porch, I had no inkling of the drastic social changes that would soon be headed down the line. 

The bus boycott in Montgomery had been the first wave of unrest. My parents would have known about it, but I, of course, had no knowledge or understanding of the unrest that would soon erupt. Cities like Selma and Birmingham were tinderboxes ready to explode, but it would take a little longer for change to arrive in small rural communities like Jackson’s Gap. 

As I continued to watch the trains go by throughout my childhood years, I noticed with each passing year that the numbers of passengers grew smaller and smaller. I was witnessing the nation’s shift in traveling habits as train use declined. In the end, the passenger lines stopped. They would be replaced by Amtrak, but not on these lines; not in Jackson’s Gap. By the time I finished high school those sleek black trains with the red stripe along the side were no more. 

The railway lines were fading, as were the sounds of those work songs that had pierced the night so many years before. It would soon become a distant memory – as if the turning of a page could instantly place a child’s memory into a past era. While cities across the country would erupt in violence, we would quietly hunker down to greet the new day with varying degrees of resistance and acceptance. 

We were neighbors, after all, Black and white. We knew everybody’s dog and saw each other's backyard clothesline. We would all find ways to navigate the new rules of the day, and somewhere in my being I would retain the strains of those work songs that made something stand up on the inside>  

< Part 9, Learning to Read and Other Important Things              Index >

________________                                                                                                                   

Photos Credits:

Upper: Illinois Central's train 25, the "Southern Express", an all stops local from Chicago to New Orleans is seen passing through Fraser on the north side of Memphis on Oct. 02, 1965.

Bill White Photo. Collection of Phil Gosney. (See Illinois Central Passenger Trains, Memphis, TN)

Middle: "African-American track workers labored long, hard hours. They were known as 'gandy dancers' and used rhythmic songs and chants to maintain motion and unity necessary to move sections of rail, hammer spikes, and perform other back-breaking labor to build our nation’s rails." (Photo and quote from B & O Railroad Museum, found on Pinterest.)

Lower: "Autumn Leave on Railroad Tracks" (Getty Images)

-

Growing Up under Southern Apartheid, Part 9

Learning to Read – and Other Important Things

I’ll never forget the day the first-grade teacher, Mrs. Mary Barron, began teaching us to read. She went to a cabinet in the back of the room and pulled out a stack of “Tip” readers. There was a colorful picture of a dog named Tip on the front. She put one on my desk and said, “Charles, do you want a book to look at?” With that, all the kids in the class began raising their hands asking for a book to look at, too. Once everyone had a book, Mrs. Barron told us that we were going to learn to read this book. All of the excitement was suddenly deflated once we realized that there was work involved.

But learn we did. We read the Tip book, and then we went on to Dick and Jane and other children’s storybooks. I enjoyed the stories, and after school as my brother and I walked home from school, I would tell him the story we read that day. He was in the sixth grade and was impressed that I didn’t just tell about the story, I told the entire story verbatim. “How can you remember all that?” he remarked. He was so impressed he would sometimes bring his sixth-grade friends around during recess and get me to tell them a story. After a while, I would get tired of telling stories and would head out to the playground to join the other kids in my class.

While we did the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, there was much more that was instilled in us at school. In the first and second grades, we began each day reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, followed by the singing of “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee.” In the third and fourth grades, there was often a devotional reading at the beginning of the day, but that was not a hard and fast rule as I remember it. Those kinds of things seemed to be up to the individual teacher.

Civic Duties

The fifth and sixth grade classes had flag duty. Students were responsible for raising the flag each morning and lowering it at the end of the school day. The process required two people, making sure the flag never touched the ground and being careful to properly fold it into a triangle after taking it down. I witnessed my first flag-burning at school; it may have been when I was in the third grade. Our flag had become worn and tattered and we needed to replace it. The principal at the time, Mrs. Hinsdale, supervised in one of the two proper means of disposing of an old flag (burning or burial). In this case, the chosen method was to burn the old flag. All of the school gathered around as the old flag was dipped in kerosene, run up the flag pole, and then torched. Afterward, the new flag was raised.  

Fifth and sixth graders were also assigned lunchroom duty. This was another job requiring two-person teams. Lunchroom duty basically involved waiting tables. We did not have a cafeteria-style lunchroom. It was just a kitchen with large pots and pans. Miss Lindy would serve up the plates, and the students who had lunchroom duty would set the plates at each table for all of the grades. Once each place was set, the kids would file in and take their place at the table. Mrs. Barron, the first and second grade teacher, was the lunchroom supervisor as well. She would lead all the children in “singing the blessing” before eating:

“Thank Him, thank Him, all you little children,

For our food, for our food.

Thank Him, thank Him, all you little children,

For our food, for our food.”

Near the end of the meal, the lunchroom assistants would get the desserts which Miss Lindy had set out on trays, and serve each student their dessert. After lunch, everyone would take their plate to the kitchen, rake off any leftovers into a big garbage can, and place their dishes in the sink. One of the local farmers would come by each day to buy the scraps which he would feed to his hogs.

Workdays

I can remember a few days at school that were set aside as workdays. These were days when the teachers and the students all set about to do a major clean-up. Usually, these workdays involved sweeping, dusting, wiping down walls and window sills, and burning trash. There were two big metal drums off to the side where trash was collected then burned. There was one day I remember when the wooden floors in all of the rooms had to be oiled down. This required moving school desks out so that the floors could be mopped with oil. Afterward, we had to be careful for a few days because the floors would be slippery. Some of the kids figured out that if they ran f down the hall and dropped to their knees, they would slide on down the hall. It soon became a contest to see who could slide the farthest.

Those workdays to us kids were a refreshing break from having to sit attentively in the classroom. Most of us thought nothing of it.  One of my classmate’s parents had immigrated from The Netherlands to run a dairy farm in Jackson’s Gap. After one of our workdays, his father let his disapproval be known to the teachers. “I send my son to school to learn, not to verk. If I want him to verk I can keep him home on the farm!”

Our White World

Looking back at our educational curriculum, our first-grade readers reinforced the comfortable white world that most of us were accustomed to. All of the colorful pictures depicted rosy-cheeked white children living in nice houses with white picket fences. Fun with Dick and Jane, however, was not just a Southern phenomenon. Those were part of the nationwide reading curriculum. In that sense, the rest of the nation served as co-conspirators in maintaining a segregated South.*

In our normal school day, the only Black person we encountered was Miss Lindy, the cook in the school lunchroom. We didn’t even have to encounter Black people in our textbooks, except for the occasional social studies class. There were two exceptions, however, in my elementary school experience.

Once when I was in the fourth grade, Mrs. Mary Railey’s class, a young Black girl came into the classroom to hand the teacher a note. Mrs. Railey looked at the note and nodded, then left the room with the girl. Everyone wondered what the little girl was doing there. One of the kids wondered if that little girl was going to try to come to school with us. When the teacher returned, someone said, “Mrs. Railey, that girl better not come to school with us.” Mrs. Railey scoffed and said, “Oh, she’s not coming to school here, you can stop that kind of talk.” She then moved on with the classwork at hand, and the girl with a note remained a mystery. Mrs, Railey was the wife of Hugh Railey who ran the store that serviced the Black community (see Part 5), so there is no telling what the incident with the girl and the note may have been about.

The other exception came that same year when a gypsy family moved into the community. They brought their son, George, to be enrolled in the class. Mrs. Railey talked to the class ahead of time to make sure we welcomed George, who was dark-skinned due to his Romany heritage. The class welcomed George heartily that first day and invited him to play baseball during recess. He was a bit awkward at the game, but so was I (never being the athletic one). In the classroom, George was not at our scholastic level. Mrs. Railey had to make some accommodations to take him aside separately so she could teach him at his level. George was not in school the entire year because his family moved on to Georgia.

For most of us growing up in Jackson’s Gap, our school days reflected an idyllic time. We were nurtured and protected and had little awareness of the winds of change that were beginning to shake the foundations. My years at Jackson’s Gap Elementary School ran from 1961 to 1966. Our school days were quiet and stable while beyond those rural hills there was unrest brewing. George Wallace was making his famous stand at the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama, Martin Luther King, Jr. was leading marches in Birmingham and the historic March on Selma would become known as Bloody Sunday. The effects of that unrest would slowly and quietly make their way into our community. 

< Part 8, School Days at the Rural Schoolhouse

                                                                                                                 Part 10, The Last Work Song >

_________________________

* It was not until 1964 that the Dick and Jane reading series of books added some Black people in the books' illustrations. A Mental Floss article by Mark Mancini, "15 Fun Facts about Dick and Jane" states that in 1964, "As the nation finally outlawed public segregation, Fun with Our Friends added an African American family to Dick and Janes's neighborhood."

-

 

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>     

__________________

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.

-