Back in the Days

The following was published in a newsletter Carole and I edited a few years ago. At the time, June was a dean at the University of Arizona in southern Arizona; she has since retired from that position and moved to Dallas where she is currently teaching at a college there.

As many of you remember, June and her family moved to Arizona in 1952.

Back in the Days
By June Harris

I can still remember my first day of school at Plantersville Elementary, even though it's coming up on sixty years since we started there. (Okay, so it's only fifty-nine. I rounded up.)

I remember waiting for the school bus with Jean West and my Uncle George Harris, my father's youngest brother. George had been designated as the person who was to deliver me to Miss Dixie. He and Jean were “big kids;” I think George was in seventh grade and Jean, perhaps in sixth, but to me, they were practically grown. I don't know how George was persuaded to take charge of me. To say that we were not exactly friends is a vast understatement. George had been the baby of the family until I came along, and his nose was out of joint over being replaced by me for years. Maybe my father bribed him to drop me off

At any rate, I remember being led to Miss Dixie's classroom, and little else about the rest of the day.

I do recall that we only went to school half-days for the first six weeks or so, because those of us who were farm kids had to go home from school to help pick cotton. When we started going all day, the town kids were unhappy, but I was ecstatic. I got to go to school all day!! Yay!! No more going home, changing clothes (verrrrry slowly), eating dinner (verrrrry slowly), and walking down to that #$%!&* cotton patch (verrrrrry slowly) to spend the rest of the day in hard labor.

I don't recall whether I knew any of the kids in the first grade except Burma Jo. As cousins, we'd known each other virtually since birth. I do know, however, that the group that began first grade that September was largely the group I left when I moved after seventh grade.

I recall that Mary Ellen didn't begin on the first day with us, but she came later. I can remember when her parents brought her to enroll.

Second grade was in Miss Maida's room. Miss Maida had a reputation for being-umm-harsh. I cannot ever remember seeing Miss Maida smile. We brought eggshells to school in the spring and strung them up, filled them with soil, and put seeds in them to make little plant hangers.

I can remember in Mrs. Blackwell's third grade that Mrs. B. stood up to a group of unbelieving eight-year-olds, dictionary in hand, to point out that the word "pretty" actually was pronounced “pritty,” not, as we would have it, "perty." That was the year I remember discovering the Book Mobile. We could check out a few books each, and the teachers could check out another stack. I don't know how often the Book Mobile came, but by the time it showed up again, I'd have already read all my books, several that I'd traded with classmates, and all the ones the teachers had checked out for us. Hey, what can I say? We didn't have TV. Life in Plantersville was not exactly a whirl of social excitement, and life in EAST Plantersville where I lived (not an actual place, just sort of a figment of the postal department's imagination) was even less thrilling. So, books worked for me.

When I started at Plantersville, there was a swing in front, sort of like a May pole, with bars hanging from chains. We grabbed the bars, ran like crazy, and swung on that contraption. That was about the only entertainment we had other that stuff like jump ropes, hopscotch, and such. Video games? What was a video? Later, maybe in third grade, we got a merry-go-round. That eventually led to the infamous “Let’s ride without holding on!” experiment that left a group of us girls dunked in a huge mud puddle. Some of the girls were wearing dresses under overalls (Yup, we did that then.) but alas, I was not. They could take the overalls off and still be almost presentable. I had to go home to my mother, mud from one end to the other.

My mother was not amused.

In fourth grade, the Gooches arrived in Plantersville, and we had Mrs. G. for fourth and fifth grade. I remember Mrs. Gooch's frustration in teaching us fourth graders geography: “When I ask you where we live, I don't want anyone saying ‘South America' again!” Well, we lived in the South; we lived in America. I suppose it was a natural mistake.

When we started sixth grade, we moved into the new building. Those cement floors provided a great place to play jacks. I earned the dubious distinction of breaking the first window in the place. The boys were throwing black walnuts against the wall and bouncing them off it; I tried it and missed the whole wall. That remains an early indication of my athletic ability (or lack thereof), and my friends will note that to this day I have never been good at any event that involved hitting one object with another object.

In seventh grade, my mother finally consented to let me attend the fair with my friends instead of going with her and my brother. As I recall, Mary Katherine, Mary Ellen and I did the fair that day. That was the fall that there was a fad for wearing poplin jackets with our names embroidered on them. We walked past a barker who looked out at us and said over his speaker, "Well, hello, Mary, Ellen, and June!” I was startled. How had he known our names? (What can I say? I was always a little slow on the uptake.)

I tell my own children about my Mississippi childhood, including stories about how we could go to the Strand (AKA the Tupelo Theater) and see a western, a B-gangster/Bowery Boys/Abbott and Costello film, a newsreel, a short subject or a serial, a cartoon (sometimes two), and have a coke and a candy bar for a quarter. They think I lie. I think it might have been our moms' way of getting an afternoon off from us, because we'd go in during early afternoon and spend the rest of the day at the movies.

After the movies, we were off to Woolworth’s or Kuhn's or some place similar. If I were with my grandmother, we'd have chicken salad sandwiches at TKE. (My grandmother Harris always insisted that I hold her hand crossing the street, even when I was certain I was much too old for such baby stuff. If my grandmother were still alive today, she'd still insist on holding my hand to cross the street.)

I have so many memories of my childhood: Spending an afternoon riding bikes up and down the road with George Morris and my cousin Price; going into the bank in downtown Tupelo to weigh ourselves on their scale; the jewelry story that had little mechanical, animated scenes in their window; that block of street just before the Lyric Theater that was brick; the statue of the Confederate soldier in Court Square; Vacation Bible School; riding to school on Mr. Willie Morgan's school bus. (Fred Westmoreland called Mr. Willie "Walking Willie" because he drove so slowly, but when Junior Morgan started driving, we sometimes got up to nearly thirty.) Anyone else remember
leggings? And do folks still do fireworks on Christmas Eve?
I don't suppose anyone would have bet on the success of a bunch of kids from a little country school like Plantersville in a place like Northeast Mississippi. Still, as I'm fond of pointing out to those who disparage my birthplace, it doesn't matter where you come from and what you've got. It's where you go and what you do with it that matters. I think we've gone far and largely done right well.