Texas finally is getting power! I'm still praying for the ice-flooded homes in Algonac. Hitting the 20s, even though the windchill is less, is cause for celebration!
The contrarian, or maybe just wishful thinking part of me, tends always to think of summer when snow and cold grinds on. Whatever schools are open in the pandemic were closed for a Snow Day earlier this week. Michigan's talking about requiring the 2021-22 school year to include Summer School to make up for all the losses from the Pandemic.
It's time to read about a time when opening a school in the summer was a cause for joy.
I frequently present as a "One-Room School Teacher", giving a view of Michigan's early 20th century rural schools and also its roots. Michigan does have areas where the following description by W.E.B. DuBois of southern schools in the hills of Tennessee in 1886 might match their development. The book, Upward Path; A Reader for Colored Children, at one time was described by Amazon as:
THE UPWARD PATH contains some of those no-longer-proper words and ideas, but this is what was considered the right kind of reading
for African-American children and students in 1920; to pretend it was
different would rob us of the chance to understand the past a little bit
better.
As someone who is not African-American I confess to struggling with those "no-longer-proper words and ideas" when reenacting yet a different program. As Liberetta Lerich Green, when reading actual letters from her brothers during their Civil War, I find myself editing on the spot to omit those words. Even describing the very people traveling the Underground Railroad involves choosing words with a mind inside 2021. This is at the very heart of looking at history. The past often includes language and actions no longer acceptable, but it is necessary. In today's case the book was compiled by two people, a principal, Myron T. Pritchard, and Mary White Ovington, Chairman of the Board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, America's oldest and largest civil rights organization. While some humorists have renamed it the "National Association for the Advancement of Certain People", this old way of referring to African-Americans is still part of their name.
DuBois himself, at the founding and naming of the NAACP, suggested the word 'colored', rather than 'black', was used to include 'dark skinned people everywhere' according to his biographer, David Levering Lewis. DuBois was long-time editor and reporter in the NAACP journal, "The Crisis" and possibly today's remembrance comes from it. Whatever its source it reminds me of another book of his, Darkwater; Voices Within the Veil, where he used the term "veil." Lewis explains:
The 'veil' was that which covered colored people around the world. In
the book, he hoped to lift the veil and show white readers what life was
like behind the veil, and how it distorted the viewpoints of those
looking through it – in both directions.
Darkwater came out in 1920, the same year as The Upward Path. Let's lift that veil and see how a young Fisk University student experienced those early schools.
MY FIRST SCHOOL
W. E. B. DUBOIS
Once upon a time I taught school in the hills of Tennessee, where
the broad dark vale of the Mississippi begins to roll and crumple to
greet the Alleghanies. I was a Fisk student then, and all Fisk men
thought that Tennessee—beyond the Veil—was theirs alone, and in
vacation time they sallied forth in lusty bands to meet the county
school-commissioners. Young and happy, I too went, and I shall not
soon forget that summer.
First, there was a Teachers' Institute at the county-seat; and
there distinguished guests of the superintendent taught the teachers
fractions and spelling and other mysteries,—white teachers in the
morning, Negroes at night. A picnic now and then, and a supper, and
the rough world was softened by laughter and song. I remember how—but
I wander.
There came a day when all the teachers left the Institute and
began the hunt for schools. I learn from hearsay (for my mother was
mortally afraid of firearms) that the hunting of ducks and bears and
men is wonderfully interesting, but I am sure that the man who has
never hunted a country school has something to learn of the pleasures
of the chase. I see now the white, hot roads lazily rise and fall and
wind before me under the burning July sun; I feel the deep weariness
of heart and limb as ten, eight, six miles stretch relentlessly
ahead; I feel my heart sink heavily as I hear again and again, "Got
a teacher? Yes." So I walked on—horses were too
expensive—until I wandered beyond railways, beyond stage lines, to
a land of "varmints" and rattlesnakes, where the coming of
a stranger was an event, and men lived and died in the shadow of one
blue hill.
Sprinkled over hill and dale lay cabins and farmhouses, shut out
from the world by the forests and the rolling hills toward the east.
There I found at last a little school. Josie told me of it; she was a
thin, homely girl of twenty, with a dark-brown face and thick, hard
hair. I had crossed the stream at Watertown, and rested under the
great willows; then I had gone to the little cabin in the lot where
Josie was resting on her way to town. The gaunt farmer made me
welcome, and Josie, hearing my errand, told me anxiously that they
wanted a school over the hill; that but once since the war had a
teacher been there; that she herself longed to learn,—and thus she
ran on, talking fast and loud, with much earnestness and energy.
Next morning I crossed the tall round hill, lingered to look at
the blue and yellow mountains stretching toward the Carolinas, then
plunged into the wood, and came out at Josie's home. It was a dull
frame cottage with four rooms, perched just below the brow of the
hill, amid peach trees. The father was a quiet, simple soul, calmly
ignorant, with no touch of vulgarity. The mother was
different,—strong, bustling, and energetic, with a quick, restless
tongue, and an ambition to live "like folks."
There was a crowd of children. Two boys had gone away. There
remained two growing girls; a shy midget of eight; John, tall,
awkward, and eighteen; Jim, younger, quicker, and better looking; and
two babies of indefinite age. Then there was Josie herself. She
seemed to be the center of the family: always busy at service, or at
home, or berry-picking; a little nervous and inclined to scold, like
her mother, yet faithful, too, like her father. She had about her a
certain fineness, the shadow of an unconscious moral heroism that
would willingly give all of life to make life broader, deeper, and
fuller for her and hers.
I saw much of this family afterwards, and grew to love them for
their honest efforts to be decent and comfortable, and for their
knowledge of their own ignorance. There was with them no affectation.
The mother would scold the father for being so "easy";
Josie would roundly berate the boys for carelessness; and all know
that it was a hard thing to dig a living out of a rocky side-hill.
I secured the school. I remember the day I rode horseback out to
the commissioner's house with a pleasant young white fellow who
wanted the white school. The road ran down the bed of a stream; the
sun laughed and the water jingled, and we rode on. "Come in,"
said the commissioner,—"come in. Have a seat. Yes, that
certificate will do. Stay to dinner. What do you want a month?"
"Oh," thought I, "this is lucky"; but even then
fell the first awful shadow of the Veil, for they ate first, then
I—alone.
The schoolhouse was a log hut, where Colonel Wheeler used to
shelter his corn. It sat in a lot behind a rail fence and thorn
bushes, near the sweetest of springs. There was an entrance where a
door once was, and within, a massive rickety fireplace; great chinks
between the logs served as windows. Furniture was scarce. A pale
blackboard crouched in the corner. My desk was made of three boards,
reinforced at critical points, and my chair, borrowed from the
landlady, had to be returned every night. Seats for the
children—these puzzled me much. I was haunted by a New England
vision of neat little desks and chairs, but, alas! the reality was
rough plank benches without backs, and at times without legs. They
had the one virtue of making naps dangerous,—possibly fatal, for
the floor was not to be trusted.
It was a hot morning late in July when the school opened. I
trembled when I heard the patter of little feet down the dusty road,
and saw the growing row of dark solemn faces and bright eager eyes
facing me. First came Josie and her brothers and sisters. The longing
to know, to be a student in the great school at Nashville, hovered
like a star above this child-woman amid her work and worry, and she
studied doggedly. There were the Dowells from their farm over toward
Alexandria,—Fanny, with her smooth black face and wondering eyes;
Martha, brown and dull; the pretty girl-wife of a brother, and the
younger brood.
There were the Burkes,—two brown and yellow lads, and a tiny
haughty-eyed girl. Fat Reuben's little chubby girl came, with golden
face and old-gold hair, faithful and solemn. 'Thenie was on hand
early,—a jolly, ugly, good-hearted girl, who slyly dipped snuff and
looked after her little bow-legged brother. When her mother could
spare her, 'Tildy came,—a midnight beauty, with starry eyes and
tapering limbs; and her brother, correspondingly homely. And then the
big boys,—the hulking Lawrences; the lazy Neills, unfathered sons
of mother and daughter; Hickman, with a stoop in his shoulders; and
the rest.
There they sat, nearly thirty of them, on the rough benches, their
faces shading from a pale cream to a deep brown, the little feet bare
and swinging, the eyes full of expectation, with here and there a
twinkle of mischief, and the hands grasping Webster's blue-back
spelling-book. I loved my school, and the fine faith the children had
in the wisdom of their teacher was truly marvelous. We read and
spelled together, wrote a little, picked flowers, sang, and listened
to stories of the world beyond the hill.
At times the school would dwindle away, and I would start out. I
would visit Mun Eddings, who lived in two very dirty rooms, and ask
why little Lugene, whose flaming face seemed ever ablaze with the
dark-red hair uncombed, was absent all last week, or why I missed so
often the inimitable rags of Mack and Ed. Then the father, who worked
Colonel Wheeler's farm on shares, would tell me how the crops needed
the boys; and the thin, slovenly mother, whose face was pretty when
washed, assured me that Lugene must mind the baby. "But we'll
start them again next week." When the Lawrences stopped, I knew
that the doubts of the old folks about book-learning had conquered
again, and so, toiling up the hill, and getting as far into the cabin
as possible, I put Cicero "pro Archia Poeta" into the
simplest English with local applications, and usually convinced
them—for a week or so.
On Friday nights I often went home with some of the
children,—sometimes to Doc Burke's farm. He was a great, loud, thin
Black, ever working, and trying to buy the seventy-five acres of hill
and dale where he lived; but people said that he would surely fail,
and the "white folks would get it all." His wife was a
magnificent Amazon, with saffron face and shining hair, uncorseted
and barefooted, and the children were strong and beautiful. They
lived in a one-and-a-half-room cabin in the hollow of the farm, near
the spring. The front room was full of great fat white beds,
scrupulously neat; and there were bad chromos on the walls, and a
tired center-table. In the tiny back kitchen I was often invited to
"take out and help" myself to fried chicken and wheat
biscuit, "meat" and corn pone, string-beans and berries.
At first I used to be a little alarmed at the approach of bedtime
in the lone bedroom, but embarrassment was very deftly avoided.
First, all the children nodded and slept, and were stowed away in one
great pile of goose feathers; next, the mother and the father
discreetly slipped away to the kitchen while I went to bed; then,
blowing out the dim light, they retired in the dark. In the morning
all were up and away before I thought of awaking. Across the road,
where fat Reuben lived, they all went out-doors while the teacher
retired, because they did not boast the luxury of a kitchen.
I liked to stay with the Dowells, for they had four rooms and
plenty of good country fare. Uncle Bird had a small, rough farm, all
woods and hills, miles from the big road; but he was full of
tales,—he preached now and then,—and with his children, berries,
horses, and wheat he was happy and prosperous. Often, to keep the
peace, I must go where life was less lovely; for instance, 'Tildy's
mother was incorrigibly dirty, Reuben's larder was limited seriously,
and herds of untamed insects wandered over the Eddingses' beds. Best
of all I loved to go to Josie's, and sit on the porch, eating
peaches, while the mother bustled and talked: how Josie had bought
the sewing-machine; how Josie worked at service in winter, but that
four dollars a month was "mighty little" wages; how Josie
longed to go away to school, but that it "looked like" they
never could get far enough ahead to let her; how the crops failed and
the well was yet unfinished; and, finally, how "mean" some
of the white folks were.
For two summers I lived in this little world; it was dull and
humdrum. The girls looked at the hill in wistful longing, and the
boys fretted and haunted Alexandria. Alexandria was "town,"—a
straggling, lay village of houses, churches, and shops, and an
aristocracy of Toms, Dicks, and Captains. Cuddled on the hill to the
north was the village of the colored folks, who lived in three- or
four-room unpainted cottages, some neat and homelike, and some dirty.
The dwellings were scattered rather aimlessly, but they centered
about the twin temples of the hamlet, the Methodist and the
Hard-Shell Baptist churches. These, in turn, leaned gingerly on a
sad-colored schoolhouse. Hither my little world wended its crooked
way on Sunday to meet other worlds, and gossip, and wonder, and make
the weekly sacrifice with frenzied priest at the altar of the
"old-time religion." Then the soft melody and mighty
cadences of Negro song fluttered and thundered.
I have called my tiny community a world, and so its isolation made
it; and yet there was among us but a half-awakened common
consciousness, sprung from common joy and grief, at burial, birth, or
wedding; from a common hardship in poverty, poor land, and low wages;
and above all, from the sight of the Veil that hung between us and
Opportunity. All this caused us to think some thoughts together; but
these, when ripe for speech, were spoken in various languages. Those
whose eyes twenty-five or more years before had seen "the glory
of the coming of the Lord," saw in every present hindrance or
help a dark fatalism bound to bring all things right in His own good
time. The mass of those to whom slavery was a dim recollection of
childhood found the world a puzzling thing: it asked little of them,
and they answered with little, and yet it ridiculed their offering.
Such a paradox they could not understand, and therefore sank into
listless indifference, or shiftlessness, or reckless bravado. There
were, however, some—such as Josie, Jim and Ben—to whom War, Hell,
and Slavery were but childhood tales, whose young appetites had been
whetted to an edge by school and story and half-awakened thought. Ill
could they be content, born without and beyond the World. And their
weak wings beat against their barriers,—barriers of caste, of
youth, of life; at last, in dangerous moments, against everything
that opposed even a whim.
******************
Some of this matches my own audience's appetite that also "has been whetted to an edge by school and story and half-awakened thought" when talking about one room schools.
Here in Michigan, at
https://www.miorsa.org/ I'm delighted to see the tentative plans for nearby Brighton to host an annual conference.
Beyond that, the long ago community in DuBois's reminiscence deserves a lifting of "the Veil."
******************
This
is part of a series of postings of stories under the category,
"Keeping the Public in Public Domain." The idea
behind Public Domain was to preserve our cultural heritage after the
authors and their immediate heirs were compensated. I feel
strongly current copyright law delays this intent on works of the
20th century. My
own library of folklore includes so many books within the Public
Domain I decided to share stories from them. I hope you enjoy
discovering new stories.
At
the same time, my own involvement in storytelling regularly creates
projects requiring research as part of my sharing stories with an
audience. Whenever that research needs to be shown here, the publishing
of Public Domain stories will not occur that week. This is a return to
my regular posting of a research project here. (Don't worry, this
isn't dry research, my research is always geared towards future
storytelling to an audience.) Response has convinced me that "Keeping
the Public in Public Domain" should continue along with my other
postings as often as I can manage it.
Other
Public Domain story resources I recommend-
There
are many online resources for Public Domain stories, maybe none for
folklore is as ambitious as fellow storyteller, Yoel Perez's
database, Yashpeh,
the International Folktales Collection. I have long
recommended it and continue to do so. He has loaded
Stith Thompson's Motif Index into his server as a database so
you can search the whole 6 volumes for whatever word or expression
you like by pressing one key. http://folkmasa.org/motiv/motif.htm
- You may have noticed I'm no
longer certain Dr. Perez has the largest database, although his
offering the Motif Index certainly qualifies for those of us seeking
specific types of stories. There's another site, FairyTalez
claiming to be the largest, with "over 2000 fairy tales,
folktales, and fables" and they are "fully optimized for
phones, tablets, and PCs", free and presented without ads.
Between those two sites, there
is much for story-lovers, but as they say in infomercials, "Wait,
there's more!"
The
email list for storytellers, Storytell,
discussed Online Story Sources and came up with these additional
suggestions:
-
Story-Lovers - http://www.story-lovers.com/ is now only accessible
through the Wayback Machine, described below, but the late Jackie Baldwin's
wonderful site lives on there, fully searchable manually (the Google
search doesn't work), at https://archive.org/ . It's not easy, but go to Story-lovers.com snapshot for October 22 2016 and you can click on SOS: Searching Out Stories to scroll down through the many story topics and click on the story topic that interests you.
You're
going to find many of the links on these sites have gone down, BUT
go to the Internet Archive
Wayback Machine to find some of these old links. Tim's
site, for example, is so huge probably updating it would be a
full-time job. In the case of Story-Lovers, it's great that
Jackie Baldwin set it up to stay online as long as it did after she
could no longer maintain it. Possibly searches maintained it.
Unfortunately Storytell list member, Papa Joe is on both Tim
Sheppard's site and Story-Lovers, but he no longer maintains his old
Papa Joe's Traveling Storytelling Show website and his Library
(something you want to see!) is now only on the Wayback Machine. It
took some patience working back through claims of snapshots but finally
in December of 2006 it appears!
Somebody
as of this writing whose stories can still be found by his website
is the late Chuck Larkin - http://chucklarkin.com/stories.html.
I prefer to list these sites by their complete address so they can
be found by the Wayback Machine, a.k.a. Archive.org, when that
becomes the only way to find them.
You
can see why I recommend these to you. Have fun
discovering even more stories!
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.png)
.png)
.png)
