2. My Mama

But now, without further digression, we must return to my mama. When she was only fifteen, her eighteen-year-old sister Mary (my Aunt Molly, one of the happiest and most lovable of all the women I ever knew) who was the teacher in a country school a couple of miles from the Cassel home, fell ill in midwinter, and Mama volunteered to take over until they found somebody.

Apparently the trustees were satisfied with the way things were going; and because Aunt Molly’s bad cold was followed by a siege of malaria, a pernicious disease which for many years was endemic in the undrained swamp lands of Indiana, Mama finished the term. Her education was limited to what she had received in that same ungraded school over which she had now presided. But that elementary education was not as inadequate as you might suppose.

I think something should be said here about the advantages of this old-fashioned country school. A child of twelve who was brighter and more inquisitive than his sluggish contemporaries could listen to the recitations of the older ones, while the little dunces who were being hustled too fast into long division could take a refresher course by listening to the younger kids who were still wrestling with short division (and all points east of that).

Mama was quick to learn. Besides whatever she absorbed in school, she read everything that came to hand. There were not many books to be had, certainly not by the Cassels who were “poor as Job’s turkey”; but Mama was able to borrow a few old books and magazines from newly come neighbors who had brought them along on their trek from Pennsylvania.

By the next fall, Aunt Molly had married Uncle Paul; and Mama, having acquired a license, continued to teach in the school where she had so ably substituted. The chief qualification of a country teacher, at that time, was courage. It was no trick to maintain discipline when school opened in early September, for only the younger children put in an appearance. But when the crops were in, and the corn had been husked, and the winter wheat had been sowed, a dozen or more man-sized farmer boys in the middle and later teens would stroll in, to squeeze themselves between the rear desks and benches, resolved to give the teacher a rough job.

Mama became known throughout that area as “a good disciplinarian,” which was one way of saying that she would, at the first sign of insubordination, grab a six-foot, one hundred and seventy-five pound yokel by the hair, drag him out of his seat, and “whale the daylights out of him.” She was more terrible than an army with banners, and quickly won the respect of any and all who were foolhardy enough to dispute her authority. Yessir, Mama “made the fur fly.” Not only did we learn of this from her own testimony. We believed it, and could furnish corroborative evidence if called upon.

But Mama’s prowess as a schoolmarm was not based entirely upon dauntless bravery and skill in battle. She was an excellent pedagogue. At least she taught the youngsters how to read and write and spell and do problems in simple arithmetic, which is ever so much better than is being done in our progressive schools at present. Maybe Mama did it the hard way, but the kids—when she finished with them—were literate and knew the multiplication tables.

Somehow we have recently come by the idea that adult education, now being made much of, is a modern institution. In Mama’s day the little red schoolhouses, throughout the rural areas, were crowded on Friday nights by bearded farmers and their chunky wives, to participate in hotly contested spelling matches. Night classes were held to practice penmanship under the tutelage of some journeyman writer who amazed his disciples by decorating the blackboard with his free-hand drawing of tropical birds with elaborate plumage. Singing bees were held, too, attended mostly by young fellows and their girls. They sang geography lessons about the nation’s rivers and lakes and capital cities.