The Coalter family lived on about forty acres of farm land near Delta City, a few miles northeast of Nitta Yuma, Mississippi. Mama attended a one room school. Students from first through twelfth grades were all in the same room with one teacher. The students had no paper or pencils in the lower grades. For paper they used slates, which are thin, flat, gray slices of rock. You could scratch on it with a sharp rock to write, and when finished, you could "erase" your work with your fingers or a soft cloth. After learning the basics of reading and writing, using a slate, kids would continue school using books, paper and pencils purchased by parents.
Since the Coalter farm was way out in the country, a school wagon pulled by mules picked up the children early in the morning and returned them home in the evening. Mama and her sisters got up before the early morning light, completed their milking chores, sometimes slopping the hogs, sometimes frying up bacon and eggs for the big farm family breakfast at about five o'clock, and then got ready for school.
Getting ready was a chore in itself. Each one braided her sister's hair and looped/pinned it up where it wouldn't be a bother while doing school work or wouldn't be a temptation to pesky boys to yank the "pigtails" as braids were called in those days (the early to mid-1920's). Mama had very long, beautiful black hair. Unbraided, it hung all the way down to her hips in the back. Her sister, Bertha who was a couple of years older, was Mama's hair-braider, and she would loop up the long braid several times at the nape of Mama's neck and tie it with a colored ribbon, leaving the ends of the ribbon hanging down below the braided loops. It was very neat and pretty.
The driver of the school bus wagon was famous throughout the region for being talented with a horsewhip. He could kill a horse fly buzzing around the mules’ ears ten feet in front of him without touching the animals. Sometimes the mules didn't like to expend the energy necessary to bring the heavy wagon load of children through the huge Mississippi mud-bogs that dotted the country roads lined by cotton fields. The mules would balk... They would stop dead still, and just stand there, apparently oblivious to the driver's verbal insults or coaxing words. But when it was necessary to convince the stubborn mules they could pull the wagon out of the deep ruts of mud, that driver knew how to touch them with the whip so they would go. He never brought blood. He simply convinced the mules that with the next snap... he might.
That driver always turned his body around and paid special attention to where Mama sat on the wagon seats, and who was behind her. (Wagons don't have rear-view mirrors.) Then they would take off from the Coalter farm and jolt along to the next stop. To the boys already on the wagon, it was a game to sneak up behind Mama and watch for an opportunity to snatch that ribbon and make her braids come down. Whoever could yank them down first won. But Mama would start screaming and crying. Without even looking back, the driver would flick that whip around with his left hand and it would snap so close to the boy's head as to make his ears wiggle. Everyone would get really quiet then, and the driver would drawl, “Awright, y'all, leave that gal alone.”
And they would, for the time being.
Mama loved school and learned so fast that she was promoted from the second to the fourth grade in one year. She surpassed her older sisters and they eventually dropped out of school. Mama continued through the ninth grade, the only one in her family to do so.
I can clearly see a picture in my mind of Grandma telling this story. I think she told us this one about half a dozen times when she lived with you on Jeff street. I never knew she so exceeded in school though.
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