Students in a Hick College

I

ONCE in a while the Georgia mountains are invaded by an outside observer. Not long ago one of my old friends from Boston, one who is skilled in historical research, came here to visit me and the little college in which I teach. He is the provoking sort of person who not only loves to see remote and impossible places, but also insists on prying into their past. Upon encountering a place for the first time, he always asks intently, ’How did it get that way?’

Now, as it happens, his mind had been idly dallying (that is, as idly as he ever allowed it to dally) with the subject of hick colleges. He had heard rumors, he said, of little mountain colleges, almost wholly destitute of money and buildings, which nevertheless managed to offer a liberal training to boys and girls of the Appalachian country. He had heard that I could produce a sample, and was encouraging me to do so.

I saw at once that there was no possibility of peaceful living — no chance of doing any of the things I really wanted to do, such as going out to hunt for persimmons and chinquapins — until I had satisfied him. So I started in.

I showed him our college buildings, cleverly fabricated from old livery stables and boarding houses—and he admired them; I told him of our founder, Brother Spence, whose name has already become a sort of magic legend — and he nodded wisely; I pointed proudly to our faculty, with its Southern aristocrats working peacefully side by side with Yankee preachers — and he took it in with gently smiling jaws. But, after all my efforts, he would not be content.

‘You haven’t hit it yet!’ he declared. ‘These things are only the framework. Show me your students. Tell me about the homes they come from, their difficulties in getting here, and the things they want to do. Let me know what they think and feel — and then I shall understand why you, and the others who work with you, are so irritatingly resigned to linger here, while the world’s stream rushes on!’

I wish I could answer this demand with ease and simplicity. To do so, I should need to know all the subtle and baffling traits of the rural South, which have largely eluded us, in spite of the best and the worst that writers of fiction have done. It is a record which should be quickly seized and cherished, for it is already fading. Already our students are picking up the jargon, are taking on the exterior semblance, of the ordinary American college. Yet at heart they are in many ways profoundly different — and it is this difference, as I have observed it for the last twenty years, which I shall try to show you.

II

Each autumn they come to us anew; and if I were asked to name at once their most striking quality I should venture: Outwardly, it lies in their extraordinarily good manners; inwardly, in the predominance of sentiment over all other considerations.

By good manners I hardly mean familiarity with the latest book of etiquette, but grace and dignity of bearing, with tact and kindness for even the most casual of encounters. As one follows the Appalachian Mountains from Georgia to Pennsylvania, driving northward through the Shenandoah Valley, he will observe that the spelling and grammar of the road signs grow steadily better, while manners grow steadily worse. And when the Mason and Dixon line is reached, the change, within fifty miles, is so abrupt as to be startling. The infinite patience of a Georgia garage man in explaining a difficult route is all too often replaced by a surly insolence which resents the mere thought of ‘accommodating’ a traveler. This is so disconcerting to many Southerners traveling in the North that they come home quite confirmed in the determination to consign all Yankees forever to outer darkness; and even I, who am not Southern by origin, have been so soothed by Southern manners that I flee from Northern traffic cops as Georgia rabbits flee from ‘hound dogs.’

To quote again my Boston observer: ‘In the North, cultivated people have good manners; in the South — amazing fact — everybody has good manners! ’

It is this, more than anything else, I think, which makes classroom work in the Georgia mountains so delightful. If it were merely the surface smoothness of the well-bred, it would not be so. But the friendliness and good will apparent on every hand are genuine. The problem of classroom discipline hardly exists, and that sophisticated boredom which has beclouded the work of so many young instructors in Northern colleges has never made its way among our students.

This courtesy to the teacher, though quite sincere, is sometimes carried to an almost ludicrous extreme — as when my chair, tilted back somewhat farther than is my custom (perhaps on account of my enthusiasm as I lectured on Wordsworth), slipped treacherously from under me. Among my students there was not a laugh, nor even a smile. Since they retained their dignity so beautifully, I managed to retain mine, continuing my lecture uninterruptedly, and pronouncing, if I remember rightly, three learned words while flat on my back on the floor.

III

‘Southern sentiment’ is, of course, a mere pawn in our collection of stock ideas; but one must live with it to realize its power. Often it is beautiful; but even more often it melts down into a sentimentality which recalls pink ice cream or overripe watermelon. Every year I ask each member of my freshman class in English Composition to write a theme on his favorite war poem. I give no further hint as to what sort of poem it ought to be. Many of the girls show remarkable fondness for a reminiscence of the Civil War entitled ‘Somebody’s Darling,’ while the boys seem most deeply satisfied with ‘In Flanders Fields.’ In the course of ten years, only one or two have ever discovered Rupert Brooke; and certainly no one has ever stumbled across Siegfried Sassoon!

This sentimental quality pervades the whole tone of life in the rural South. It has encouraged that artificial chivalry which makes most Southern women so blithely sure that they can eat their cake and have it, too. It has imposed an almost conventional demand that Southern funerals (among all but the most highly placed) should be painful and embarrassing spectacles of abandoned feeling. In school and college life it has inflicted upon us the oratory of the boys and the ‘elocution’ of the girls.

Of course — in my capacity as potentate of the classroom — I have prepared a lecture to correct all this. I administer it to my classes as a dose of medicine each autumn. I try to point out to my students the intangible line which separates sentiment from sentimentality; I direct their eyes toward that great gulf which lies between Harold Bell Wright, whose works they have all read, and W. H. Hudson, of whom they have never heard! But after I have given my lecture I am not wholly content. I begin to suspect that I am not more than half right, because my understanding has been less than half complete. Even in that terrible weeping over the dead, I ask myself, is there not a humbly frank avowal that we human creatures must bow before a common sorrow, which all our pride is powerless to resist ?

If, in the future, understanding shall come, it will grow out of such adventures as this one which I had the other day. I had set out for a solitary walk among the tumbled hills which lie to the west of us. Through the October afternoon the sun shone hot, but the air was cool in the hollows. For several miles I followed the course of Hazel Creek, and came at length to a hill which I had never seen before — an abrupt, conical hill, heavily wooded, and quite surrounded by stretches of bottom land which had once been cornfield. I climbed to the top, and there, on the very summit, I stumbled across two graves, apparently long forgotten.

The place was abandoned to a scraggy growth of oaks and pines which thrust up their trunks between the granite ledges. The larger grave was marked by a thin stone of white marble, but wandering cattle, or the wind, had broken it off, so that it lay half buried in the leaves. After I had lifted it up and propped it in its place, I was strangely carried out of myself by what I read: —

MART
WIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON GRANT
BORN 1814
DIED APRIL 20, 1832

And under this, a verse: —

One hundred years ago, when Mary Grant died, a wife of eighteen years, she was not consigned to any public ground of church or village, but laid in the warm soil of home, on the land which she and her people had loved. And those who placed her there had comforted themselves with visions of a bright shore, from which, as they confidently believed, she smiled.

As I came down the hill I saw the whole picture, and it taught me more than many volumes of Southern lore could have done. I stopped to pull up a root of the sassafras which had inherited the cornfield; and after I had washed it in the water of Hazel Creek I went home chewing its spicy sweetness.

IV

But I am getting all tangled up in Southern manners and Southern sentiment. I set out to tell about, students in a hick college. It would be easy to exaggerate the picturesque surface. So brilliant an observer as the late Cecil J. Sharp, who came from England to collect ballads in our Southern mountains, occasionally fell into this error. In the account which he wrote of his adventure, he speaks with admiring wonder of the skill with which the mountaineer walks slender footlogs over rushing streams. Now footlog walking is a very simple art which I taught to my inquiring Boston friend in two lessons, and which I will undertake to teach in three to any Londoner who earnestly wishes to learn.

I shall not dwell on foot-logs and log cabins, however — though you will find plenty of both, if you leave the main highways. By no means all of our students are mountaineers, strictly speaking. When Brother Spence founded the college, he astutely placed it at the foot of the high mountains, rather than among them. Here it would be accessible to the whole Piedmont Plateau, that stretch of red clay hills which lies between the mountains and the coastal plain. Among these woods and gaunt little farms the life of North Georgia has reached its most characteristic development. And from such a background, almost wholly lacking in a knowledge of books, and greatly hampered by inadequate schooling, our students come eagerly to our doors.

Two thirds of them are always turned away — not because we wish to keep them out, but because nearly all of them must earn a part of their expenses, and there are not jobs and scholarships enough to go round. Nor would our buildings hold them if they could afford to stay.

Occasionally a student is so fiercely determined to make his way that he will build an education out of nothing. I recall especially a girl from the mountains who worked harder for her college training than any other student I have ever known. She was brought up by her grandfather, who came down from his farm on Bald Mountain and built a little shack in the woods just out of town. Twenty years ago I remember seeing the old man shooing the child along with a peach sprout, which he shook at her with pretended menace. Nobody knew how the two of them lived. The old man’s skill as a blacksmith was a matter of the dim past, and when I knew him he seemed only to tinker with locks and guns which people brought him to repair.

As the child grew up, she had every obstacle of poverty and village prejudice to overcome. She was too near at hand to arouse anybody’s missionary zeal. But with grace and wit and tireless persistence she made her way. When at last she reached college, she began to write such freshman themes as I had not read for years. One of her longer papers was a beautiful piece of irony which gave portraits of the various social leaders of the village for whom she had done housework. No names were given, but each sketch was recognizable, and with sharp but genial wit she had reached the essential truth in every case. She hotly resented the menial position into which her employers sought to thrust her.

Of course it might be pointed out that she was logically wrong — that one who undertakes to do household work should not object to dining in the kitchen. But her resentment was natural enough. Young Jonathan Swift was fired with anger against those mighty but shallow men who patronized him at Moor Park. Not only did this rebellious young freshman suspect that the people who looked on her with polite disdain were not really superior to herself, but she also cherished memories of mountain freedom in a wide, if barren, domain. She was quite willing to work, and she did work — desperately — for those who treated her with even a small degree of sympathetic discernment.

Quite in keeping with her pride, she refused a gift of money for college expenses from one of our Northern trustees. All that she received from the college she paid for with her own work, and she finally took her degree with honors. Ever restless and ambitious, she has gone to the city, as many of our best graduates have done, and, according to the last news I had of her, is doing well in business.

V

The teacher in the rural South, more than in any other part of America, will see reflected in the life of his students pictures from the past. It is as if the Muse of history obligingly stood still for our more careful scrutiny. The speech of the mountaineer is in part Elizabethan, the formal manners of the Southern colonel suggest the eighteenth century, and the predominant social and religious tone of the region recalls — perilous though it be to speak it — the gracious days of Queen Victoria.

All this leaves one with curiously mixed emotions. Sometimes one feels that all the best fruits of modern knowledge have been — not so much repudiated as ignored. In other moods, one looks with a certain admiration at a system of final truth which offers so ready a refuge for the harassed mind. And, since there is much beauty in these pictures from the past, I observe them with divided sympathies. In such a frame of mind, one finds it better to observe, suggest, and learn than to offer dogmatic certainties.

But dogmatic certainties are of tremendous import in the South. My disregard of this fact accounts for the one occasion on which I remember making a student seriously angry. Thus it was not personal wrath, but that deadliest of all hatreds — odium theologicum. In clearing up a passage from Milton, I had quoted a few sentences from the Encyclopœdia Britannica, in which an eminent scholar referred to the creation story of Genesis as a myth, and compared it with other myths of the ancient world. Certainly such a statement would not ordinarily create excitement in a college classroom. But I noticed a marked agitation in one member of the class. He was a man whose education had been delayed, and who was somewhat older than I; hence he felt that he could speak freely.

After class he confronted me, whitefaced and trembling. He offered no argument, but demanded by what right I was robbing young people of their religion. His earnest concern, his genuine goodness, compelled respect; his intellectual attitude, as it seemed to me, deserved only scorn. I tried to administer a suitable portion of each; but from that time forth I was to him a corrupter of youth, and the Encyclopœdia Britannica an heretical work which should be torn from the library shelves and burned on the altar of an unchanging faith.

The incident itself is unusual, but the attitude which it represents is not. And it takes us back to that untroubled time when the great textual critics were just beginning their deadly work — to the time when Darwin was still harmlessly sailing around the world on His Majesty’s Ship, the Beagle.

VI

These matters of controversy are easily forgotten, however, when one comes to know his students as human beings. Last June I found myself in the depths of the Nantahala Mountains with a newly graduated senior, who was showing me his home country. He had grown up among these mountains, which lie far beyond our familiar Blue Ridge, over in North Carolina. We were accompanied by a timid young sophomore, fresh from the Georgia cotton mills.

All day long we had tramped with packs on our backs, now and then stopping on the sunlit crest of a ridge to look at the country below. On one such occasion the senior remarked, ‘Maybe you think it’s mighty pretty up here now; but in October, when the leaves have turned, it’s so beautiful that it seems like a man can’t hardly stand it.’ Knowing that such expression of feeling was rare with him, I took this as a confession of faith, a declaration of that love for the soil which is so swiftly vanishing from the modern world. I was truly thankful that college had not robbed him of his religion.

We spent the night on Winespring Bald, where the last of the North Carolina panthers are said to lurk. In order to escape the sharp wind, we camped down a bit from the top, sheltered by gnarled chestnut trees. We were so far from any house, from any trail, that we could forget the new and alien civilization which beat at the gates of the mountains. I threw more wood on the fire, leaned back against the tree roots, and peacefully listened for panthers. But, since the panthers were slow getting started, I had to be content with a couple of hoot owls, which called to each other from opposite sides of the ravine.

Our isolation and the firelight invoked a strange brotherhood among us. We could pause for a moment, and dispassionately consider the ways of gods and men. The senior’s life already had unity and wisdom. Whether he stayed in his native valley or went away, he would always be a part of it, and would carry its peace with him. I, too, had found a restless sort of peace. But our sophomore, with his cotton-mill childhood still heavy on him, was troubled about many things. Down there at the college, he seemed to peer wistfully at the world, wondering what it was all about. Up here on the mountain, he was suddenly released, and seemed glad that we let him do most of the talking.

‘I aim to be a preacher,’ he said, ‘though there’s a lot o’ times when I think I ought not to be. A person can’t believe all the things preachers used to believe. But when I git to worryin’ about it, I always fall back on one thing: there’s a lot o’ people in this world that need help. I don’t know whether I’ll ever git. through no theological school or not — seems like I ain’t doin’ much good with that Greek I’m a-takin’.’

The sophomore paused a moment and looked quizzically around to see if we appreciated his difficulties with Greek. Then he continued: ‘But I know something about the cotton-mill folks. Seems like they always wanted me around when they was in trouble. . . . I seen a boy git killed once. I hope I won’t never see nothin’ like it ag’in. I was workin’ in the mill, an’ several of us had started up on the freight elevator. A green boy that had jist come down from the mountains about a week before tried to jump on after the elevator had started. He caught on with his hands and tried to pull himself up, but he could n’t make it in time. He was drawed up through a crack about two inches wide, an’ I reckon it broke every bone in his chest.

‘I don’t see how he done it, but he lived all that night. An’ while he was fight in’ for breath he talked all the time. “Don’t tell my mammy about this,” he says. “Her an’ Pappy did n’t want me to come down to the cotton mill — an’ now I’ve done gone an’ got myself killed. Don’t tell ’em about it — jist tell ’em I’ve gone off somewheres!”

‘No, I hope I won’t never see nothin’ like that ag’in,’ continued the sophomore. ‘ But if I’m goin’ to be a preacher I reckon I’ll have to. . . . Don’t you reckon, Professor, that I could help folks — especially young folks — back there at the cotton mill, if I was to study hard enough?’

The firelight shone on his face, half grotesque, half pathetic. I recalled his dogged persistence, his faithfulness, and the extent to which he had already improved.

‘Help people?’ I queried. ‘Yes — yes, I think you can, and will.’

He was satisfied with that. And the eyes of all of us were heavy. To roll up in a blanket, to stretch out on the ground, to go to sleep — that is a gift, with which, fortunately, all of us were endowed. Thus passed our first night in the Nantahalas.

VII

It was some such tale as this which I told my inquiring friend from Boston on those afternoons when we walked over the Georgia hills together.

‘Well,’ I declared on the afternoon which I knew would be the last one, ‘you have heard all about students in a hick college. You know what the place is like. But have you found out how it got that way?’

He smiled an inscrutable Bostonian smile which lit up the Georgia landscape like some exotic gleam. ‘You expect too much,’ he said. ‘Nobody will ever find out exactly how any place got the way it is. But I have discovered enough to fill a nice ponderous volume — if only I had the power to write it.’

So he went back to Boston, with all his notes and paraphernalia. And I for one, waiting here on the banks of Hazel Creek, devoutly hope that power will be granted him. I long to see that ponderous volume!