Mine Own People

IT was by the merest chance that I fell into teaching. Possibly that is why, unfettered by pedagogic traditions and theories, I was able to throw myself unprejudiced into the life of the children and of the community, there to find adventure and happiness.

One who has lived in the madness and folly and suffering of war is likely to have a temporary antisocial reaction. I remember the longing to get far away, to be in quiet, to be independent — out of all turmoil. And so, to regain health which had suffered through gassing and exhaustion in France, I settled, after marriage, in the Sand Hill section of a Southern State. I built a bungalow by my own labor and the generous aid of a brother, and set out several thousand peach trees. We loved the farm life there. We brought many trees and shrubs from the woods to plant about the house. We knew each of our chickens by name and even by cackle. The peach trees, however, required little attention in the winter, and we thought of teaching as a means of supplementing our funds.

The near-by school was in no need of a principal; at least the need was not recognized. And so it happened that I became principal of the public school in Federal, a town of less than five hundred inhabitants, thirteen miles through the woods from the farm.

The town of Federal lies near the centre of Walter Page’s land of the ‘forgotten man ‘ and the ‘ forgotten woman.’ And his description of poverty and ignorance and overwork of twenty years ago is, I grieve to say, almost as accurate to-day. Put as I entered the town it seemed an ideal hamlet, calm, peaceful, contented, filled with unusually hospitable and kindly folk. If one would study the staunch people of Colonial America, let him go to Federal. There he will find no infusion of foreign blood or foreign ideas. The people are one hundred per cent American and one hundred years behind the times. The church has always been the centre of social life. And, while revivals are held each year, few join the church, for only children are not already members of long standing.

But one modern idea had penetrated Federal. It had come down the State highway, and had somehow persevered long after the improved road gave out. It was the idea of bonding the community to build a school. The conception fell on fertile ground, for the people, of Scotch descent, were devoted to the ideal of education, and had had a ‘firstrate’ academy in ‘those good old days that never were,’ as Page would say. The Governor of the State had attended this school; and it must have been an academy of diligent students. But I was amused to note the heavy, slavemade shutters which still clung to the adjacent church, and which had been placed there ‘to keep the boys from breaking out the window-lights.’

The people voted twelve thousand dollars, unanimously, for a new school. It turned out that this was more than the value of the property would permit. Another vote was taken, this time for eight thousand dollars, and a six-room brick building was erected.

It is amazing what poor but proud rural people can do. In four years’ time they had raised their property assessments and voted twenty-five thousand more in bonds, and built eight more rooms. Six trucks carried the children in from one hundred and forty-four square miles. The school committee borrowed five thousand dollars with which to build the principal a home.

The situation indeed approached the idyllic; the school became the project of the entire community. One climax was the day of the return of the Governor. On this occasion an exposition was held, to which crowded two thousand persons. Farm exhibits filled a gymnasium, fifty by seventy feet. This the boys had built and paid for by their own labor. Even the derricks by which they erected the great scissors rafters, weighing a ton each, were of their own contriving. They had bought a movingpicture machine, and paid for that by a school cotton-patch. The four acres of school grounds were planted in native trees from the woods. The children calcimined all the inside walls of the building. The home economics and agricultural equipment was housed in rooms which contained also prizes won at the State Fair. And, as a final touch, three hundred dollars’ worth of good pictures resulted from an increased respect for the beautiful. A prouder people never welcomed home their Governor.

In four years’ time one comes to know such a community well. He knows all five hundred of the children and their thousand parents, where they live, their social and economic status, all the roads, the holes in the roads, many of the cars and trams along the road, and all the advertising signs.

But best of all he knows the ‘ bad boys.’ And if he really knows them he loves them as well. Such a boy was Rafe Bomley. It was said generally among the teachers that he was a kleptomaniac. The whole Bomley family had been tarred with this, from the days of ‘Baron’ Bomley who, it seems, had been a belated feudal robber living in the near-by hills. Rafe was true to type, and I had several times to whip the boy for minor thefts. I thought I had to; I knew no other way. But he carried the grit of his grandfather, and I never saw him flinch or shed a tear, though the thought of striking him always aroused rebellion within me and brought tears to my own eyes. It is no small matter for a young man to be suddenly entrusted with the moral keeping of several hundred children. Due to inexperience on my part, there arose in the first year thirteen incidents in which I felt corporal punishment to be the only recourse. The next year there were but eight, the next three, then none. This does not mean that vital issues were evaded. I learned gradually to investigate the causes of misdemeanor, believing with all my heart that each child inherently craved to achieve his best self. There must therefore, I reasoned, be causes which set him against Society. And invariably such causes were to be found — hookworm or tuberculosis, parental abuse, bad associates, overwork in the fields, ignorance in the home, low intelligence, or malnutrition. For such causes, over which the children had no control, I learned that almost all of them were whipped daily at home, sometimes brutally. And I learned further that school whippings had no relation to the discipline of the school, while love, interest, understanding, and removal of disabilities seldom failed.

One day during my first year I found the school in a suppressed furor. The boys felt that they had evidence to prove that Rafe Bomley was the culprit who, during athletic contests, had been stealing from the pockets of the clothes left in the dressing-room. On an earlier occasion the thief, being surprised in the act, had jumped from a window, leaving the print of a torn half-sole in the damp sand. Such a shoe they said Rafe wore. But fortune, intuition, or necessity had led him to use the stolen money for new shoes, and the old ones were never seen again. On this day, however, he had been stalked from the ball game and seen to break open the locked school door and tiptoe into the dressing-room. The room was dark, and when the trailer opened the door Rafe dropped a pair of trousers, moved on into the next room, and drank from the water fountain.

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We decided to settle the matter by a formal trial. The entire school attended. I pitied Rafe, as he sought twelve jurors from among the indignant student body. He had no witnesses, and pleaded his own case. Pale always from emaciation, he was now livid. But I believe everyone admired his composure in defending himself. He was not guilty, he said. He realized that it all seemed probable, but he had come for water only. He had not pushed on the door very hard, and it opened. He knew, he said, that he should not have been in the school after hours, and for that reason he had tiptoed. He was thirsty, and in hurrying through the dressing-room he might have knocked a pair of trousers off the bench. The room, he concluded, was pretty dark, and he could n’t see very well; neither did he think it possible for anyone to have been sure it was not an accident.

The lawyers for the school showed more resourcefulness than I had expected. They mentioned a well which was nearer the athletic field than the school fountain. They produced three witnesses to prove that the door of the school had been, and was at the time, locked; and they asked searching questions as to the incident in the dressingroom.

Sand Hill children are a stolid breed. I could not read the feelings behind a single expression in the room. Only one who knew them could guess the deep emotional stir going on. The jury was out only a short while. Then the foreman declared that there was in the minds of the jury some doubt of guilt on the charge of theft. The room was dark; it might possibly have been an accident. They therefore declared him not guilty of the first count, but recommended a whipping in the presence of the jury for breaking into the school. The room was terribly quiet as we filed down to the office. I steeled myself to my repugnant duty.

During the ordeal I watched Rafe’s face constantly for signs of a break. But to the end there was only a clinched jaw that would have done credit to a Spartan. The palpitation of the blood vessel at the base of his neck alone betrayed the tempest within. Finally the foreman of the jury stepped forward. ‘Rafe,’ he said, in a friendly voice, ‘you’ve had your medicine. You’ve stood a fair trial and been declared not guilty of the main charge. For the other you ‘ve been punished. If any member of this school ever twits you about this matter, you have but to tell any one of this jury, and we will handle him. The whole thing is over.’ He reached out his hand to pat the younger boy on the shoulder. But something had happened. Those words of frank kindness had done what nothing else could do. They loosed the dam of emotion, and the torrent flowed unchecked. Rafe sobbed as though his heart would break.

The others left, but Rafe was unable to control himself for several hours. My heart went out to him, and all the while I hoped for what later really happened. From that day he was a different boy. Everyone marked the change. The old Rafe with the sneak-thief look was gone, and we came to know a Rafe who could be trusted with collecting money at games and entertainments. He became a member of our champion basketball team. Once he stayed a week with us in our home. He came to be a great help to me in the school, and I cannot tell the benefit to others of his new moral influence. He even kept a list of his errors in speech, and tried to overcome them.

I was growing to know the community fairly well, for every weathered door of every unpainted house — and there were few others — was open to me. And so I came to learn that all was not so serene as I had at first thought, though there was indeed a backbone of remarkably substantial people. 1 learned that ignorance is not so much an evil in itself as that it keeps such bad company. Diseases of the most shocking kinds existed everywhere. And the crime, apparently, was not in having them, but in being known to have them. I shall hint at what I came to know of the families within, say, three square miles. And yet I shall only hint at the iniquity which smoulders on like a charcoal fire, without smoke or flame. It is patient, cruel, eternal. In cities such things are illumined by red lights; the orchestra of the cabaret calls attention; social workers unearth ev every evil; newspapers make headlines of domestic broils, and divorce proceedings are public property. In rural districts, I say, the fires burn without smoke and all appears tranquil.

But when one has become disillusioned; when he has seen pale children, boys and girls, driven with a whip by a drunken father to work beyond their strength, the wife beaten, yet ever faithful, though thankful when her husband dies in delirium tremens; when he sees white children and colored children with the same name and the same father living in the same yard, but different houses; when he meets on the road a veritable demon driving off at top speed with a woman who has just left her bedridden husband to die uncared-for in their miserable hut; and when one sickens with the thought and cannot go on to tell of even worse things than these, then he knows the silent torture of rural ignorance. Then, if he has a heart, it cries out within him that he exert all his strength toward public education. If he is strong, he loves these people still. He understands that, beneath the apparent guilelessness, ignorance and crime lurk and are always to be found down winding, unimproved roads, no matter how picturesque, how shady, how inviting they seem.

The people, however, are not dissatisfied, for this is all that life has ever meant. But, once they see the light of truth, like Rafe they grasp at it. Rafe and I often talked over the problem, and on many points we agreed. For one thing, we saw that the children were suffering from various diseases, and also from corporal punishment. We felt that the latter was due to ignorance, and that, in any case, whippings do not reform children, since those most often and most severely whipped are always the worst.

We spoke of Terry Atwater — poor, thin, wiry boy. His body fought a brave struggle to subsist on corn bread and pork, from which he extracted energy but to feed the hookworms which by the hundreds buried their ugly heads in the soft tissues of his frail body to sap the vital fluids. The spirit seemed but to flicker from the blaze with which his life at birth was kindled. That blaze, alas, was all the warmth the mother had, and Terry had somehow survived without a mother. His mind, never nourished, — say nothing of stimulated, — had settled into the dull apathy which is Nature’s way of being kind in such cases. To this boy it was, this Terry Atwater, that I had on several occasions applied the lash. Is it any wonder that he would not study from insipid books of things and places and people utterly removed from his own life? My conscience burned as I recalled having added to his misery because he could not remember his Bible verse, ‘God is love.’ I began to wonder whether he knew its meaning. I resolved to see what I could do to shield the boy from further brutalities, and asked Rafe to go with me to see Terry’s father.

It was with difficulty that we brought the car to position in front of the house, as the right wheels rested in so deep a gully. Terry was harrowing with a moderately well-fed team (I wash I could have used the same description for the boy). He showed no emotion or surprise as we came suddenly into view, though I knew he guessed something of our errand. The house was of the universal weathered gray. Beside it was a ‘Chaney-berry’ tree, beneath which were two ploughs and some other rusty implements. The only other ornament in the yard besides the tree was a small, ill-favored patch of flags. I noticed, however, a newly made bird-house, on a tall, slender pole. I learned later that Terry had made it.

Beside the house door was a tall, angular man. His face and clothes were the weathered gray of the house itself, but the grizzly face was breaking out with many unformed sores. I had expected him, on my approach, to wipe both hands on his trousers and then extend one of them. But he remained motionless, and answered my greeting with a denial of the title ‘Mr.,’ substituting ‘Joe.’ I tried to command as much of self-assurance as he showed, and began, as though confident of sympathetic understanding, talking about Terry. I saw that I was right in assuming a friendly sympathy, but there was the same lack of understanding I had always encountered in talking with Terry. And the father always came back to the same question: ‘Well, I say, why don’t you larrup him?’ ‘I have,’ I at last admitted, ‘but I never seem to move him. I can’t get next to him. 1 can’t make him cry.’ ‘I can,’ was the quick answer. ‘I do, every day.’ I hesitated, but risked the assertion: ‘I can raise red and white welts, but I can’t make him flinch.’ He seemed pleased, first with Terry and then with himself, and remarked: ‘I cut the blood out of him.’ I knew that such practices were common in that section. The State law allows a teacher to draw blood, provided he does not bruise or break a bone. But I faltered in reply. What could I say?

I was relieved at this moment by the sudden appearance of the community doctor, the approach of whose car, so absorbed had I been, I had not noticed.

‘Is someone sick?’ asked the doctor.

‘Well, I nearly died last Sunday, but I could n’t get word to you till now. What’s the matter with me? There’s something on my face.’

‘Smallpox,’ was the calm reply. ‘And you’re going to have a beaut of a case. Sunday? Well, it’s not too late to vaccinate the others of the family.’

‘ I don’t believe in any of this damned vaccination stuff.’

‘I know you don’t. That’s why you’ve got smallpox.’

By this time I had moved back to a distance of six or eight feet, had removed my coat, rolled up my sleeve, and was being vaccinated lor the second time that week. Mr. Atwater watched with keen interest.

‘You‘ve got it, and every member of your family is going to get it,’the doctor added.

I thought I detected a note of surprise in Mr. Atwater’s voice. ‘ is that all there is to it?’ he asked.

‘That’s all. Oh, sometimes it makes a sore arm for a few weeks.’

‘And that will keep a fellow from catching it?'

‘Yep; every time.'

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I want ‘em all to get vaccinated.’ And without turning his head, or raising his voice, the father called each member of the family by name. He seemed to know that they were all hiding behind a door, or listening through an open window. Terry was the first to show up, from behind the near corner of the house.

‘Why, Terry’s been vaccinated,’ the doctor said.

The father laughed dryly. ‘Naw, he ain’t. I tol’ him I’d beat the life out of him if he took it in school.'

‘But I’m sure he was among them,’was the reply. ‘Come, Terry, and pull up your sleeve.’

The sleeve would not pull up. The cuff caught over a swollen arm, and the shirt had to be removed. The swelling from vaccination was the worst I had ever seen.

‘Had he never spoken to you of this?’ the doctor asked.

‘Naw; he knew better’n to.'

I thought of his hours of suffering while harrowing and in other labor. I looked reproachfully at the father, for the habit is strong in us to accuse the ignorant — who themselves, of course, suffer most for their ignorance. On his face was the first real smile I had seen there. It was one of pride. The father looked down into his son’s face, and there was an instant interchange of affectionate glances. In what primitive, ill-shaped ways do these people understand one another when we cannot? I admired Terry now more than ever, and felt something of love drawing me near him.

When the doctor — who, it chanced, was a school committeeman — had gone, and when the children had returned to their listening-posts, we came back to our former theme. But I still met the same obstacle as before. And when we had argued the old round once more, the father announced, in final accent, ‘Well, all I says is, beat him. Do like I do. Cut the livin’ blood out of him! I say you can’t do no harm, an’ you might do some good.’

I was at a loss—defeated. Then unexpectedly I heard Rafe’s voice. It rang with a rush of emotion that was startling. ‘I’ll tell you, Joe Atwater, you’re wrong! Think! Think, man! You’re dead wrong! You are certain to do no good, and’ — he paused, as though about to hurl a harpoon — ‘you have already done a world of harm!’

I was at a loss to understand Rafe’s boldness. And still more was I at a loss to comprehend the strange influence his words had upon the other man. There was a sudden, singular pallor on the man’s face, which drew all the color even from the sores forming there. There was a dry gulp and a loosening of the body muscles as though from shock.

On the way home I began to understand.

The year before, Terry’s brother had died. I had not heard the details until Rafe told me now. The little boy had been found in bed, sick. For two days he would say nothing, nor would he allow anyone to come near him. On the third day he was delirious, and they carried him to the hospital. There, an hour before death, he told the surgeon the trouble. His father had forbidden his climbing the ‘ Chaney-berry ‘ in the yard; he would, he said, ‘beat the life out of him’ if he did. The child had climbed the tree, had fallen on the plough below, and a point had entered his side. Fear had sealed his lips, and he now lay dying.

My anger kindled against the brutal father. But slowly it subsided. ‘How,’ I thought, ‘had he been brought up? What chances, what hardships, had been his lot? What patience, what love, even, must he have exerted in caring for the motherless infant! How fine he had been to turn about and have the children vaccinated! How Terry had returned his look of affection! How ignorance and disease were punishing him! What self-reproach had Rafe’s words brought! Perhaps, though without benefit, of knowledge, he could yet be a better father.’

My anger turned into a solemn resolve. I would never forsake these starving people. Education would henceforth be my religion.

Rafe was speaking in a voice that choked. ‘ Do you realize,’ he said, ‘ that I was brought up in just that way? I should some day have been just such a father if it had n’t been for that trial.’