Episode Three - Third Grade (more or less)

I don't recall very clearly my third grade year, and I seriously doubt that it's because something traumatic happened. However, I do remember that we were living in the country near Lambert. I had made a change from Marks Elementary at some point during this year when my dad became a sharecropper for someone I don't remember.

We had no electricity in our house, so there were a number of coal oil lamps scattered around the place. Once when my dad had gone overnight to bring back a tractor for the landowner, my mother and I were on our own. She somehow knocked over one of the lamps, and we had a bit of excitement until she extinguished the fire.
The other big events that year were my picking my own sack full of cotton so I could have money to spend at one of the little traveling fairs/sideshows that came to Lambert. Most of the time I rode on my mother or dad's cotton sack while they picked, but I had made a deal with my dad to pick a sack full in order to get fair money. I think my bag was a 25-lb. size, quite a bit for a youngster anyhow.
The other bit of excitement that year was that the a newly- constructed stretch of road from Lambert to Marks ran very close to our place. My dad had an old Model A Ford, and he decided that my mother needed to learn to drive. So, he drove us up to the stretch of finished but unopened road and got ready to turn the car over to my mother. By the time of this event, I'd already bugged him to let me sit in his lap and steer and was becoming quite good at it, I thought. My mother was quite nervous but got into the driver's seat with my dad sitting beside her and me leaning over from the back seat to give suggestions to her. She managed to keep the car on the road for about a mile, maybe less, and her knees were shaking as she said, "I can't do this, Chick." I remember pleading from the back seat, "I can, Daddy, let me have a turn!" Of course he didn't. My mother got the car stopped and was out the door quickly before he could insist that she try again. I don't remember that she ever attempted driving after that occasion.
I do remember that every time we went from the delta to the Mississippi "hills" to attend Memorial Day weekend church services and visit with Daddy's family I managed to get him to let me steer, once even over the Mississippi River bridge at Greenville. Early on I made up my mind that I wouldn't be afraid of driving like my mother and couldn't wait for the time when I'd be able to drive by myself.
That annual trip to Eupora, Mississippi, was a great time for me because it meant spending time with my favorite cousins on my dad's side. We'd leave home on Saturday morning before daylight on the big journey and would arrive in Eupora around 3 or 4 that afternoon. Daddy would park on the main street - the only street really - where all the stores and their one movie house was located. Usually shortly after we arrived my folks would begin to see people they'd known or were kin to, and there would be loud, cheerful greetings and lots of comments about "little Alice Faye" and how she had her daddy's brown eyes. Some would even call me "little Chick," a nickname my dad had gotten in his youth. His nephew, the same age as my dad and a boyhood companion, told me later that it had something to do with my dad stealing a chicken from someone on a dare when he was a boy. I never did know for sure.
After buying some artificial flowers to take to the cemetery the next day, catching up with those who knew us from the past, and maybe even getting to go to a cowboy show at the theatre, we would drive to the cousins' house to spend the next couple of nights. If we were lucky my dad's cousin and his two boys would have been "grappling" for catfish in the Mississippi or some other good hole, and there would be a big black washpot ready with hot grease for frying up a mess of fish. Along with the fish would be homemade potato salad, fried potatoes, slaw, and maybe some of my cousin Mayford's fried pies, which I loved. The problem was saving room enough to enjoy them after all the other good stuff.
The cousins lived in a big white house with a "dog trot" down the middle of it. It had belonged to my dad's sister, Belle, who had looked after my grandmother after the death of my grandfather. My grandmother was very old when she died of skin cancer in that house. My girl cousins Ruth and Lily Belle slept in the front bedroom where my grandmother's casket had been placed (a custom that people practiced in those days) for a day or so before the funeral.
The only downside to visiting them was that I was also put in that same bedroom with them and still had a vivid memory of being lifted up by my dad to look at my grandmother in her casket when I was about five. Naturally, that was all I could think of that whole time I was meant to be sleeping in there. On a couple of visits I can remember that I wound up sleeping with my parents because I just couldn't handle it. My cousins laughed at me, of course, and tried to tell me ghost stories to upset me, as children are wont to do when they find someone's weak spot.
In spite of their teasing me, they were very good to me and took me to all their favorite spots on the farm. They let me draw up water from the well, pick apricots from the trees, and play with their puppies. The girls were a few years old than I was, and I enjoyed their attention.
I remember being pleasantly surprised when their mother Mayford announced she was expecting and hoping maybe my mother would make a similar announcement, but it wasn't meant to be. I was and would be for the rest of my life an only child, dependent on cousins for family connections. It had its advantages, but all in all I would discover later there were more disadvantages to having no siblings.

By the time I had been promoted to second grade, I came to appreciate school as a mixed bag of good and bad times. The good involved getting to ride the school bus with other friends, even though it wasn't much more than a mile or so from our house to school. It also involved an experience in food sampling that I enjoyed. Our school had no cafeteria serving full meals but was truly a "soup kitchen," providing those who could buy school lunches with something hot to eat. Those of us who brought our lunches would sit through lessons each morning within smelling distance of the cloak room where we had to stow the paper bags filled with all sorts of delicacies such as bologna sandwiches, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, pieces of fried chicken, a pork chop, or whatever other leftovers there were from the previous night's supper.

Oftentimes, some naughty youngster would get caught trying to pinch something from his or someone else's lunch sack when we were allowed to go in and get our coats for recess time. Every day we'd sit at the long tables in the lunch room and bring out various least favorite items from our bags which would be offered up in trade to someone who had something we liked better. It was a great opportunity for us to try some foods new and different from the usual fare we got at home.

Second grade wasn't the glorious experience that my first year had been, all because of the wicked Miss Greenhill, who had the audacity to slap my hand with a wooden ruler just because I talked to a seat mate. Teachers should try that today and see how fast the parents would haul them into court. Of course, it had the desired effect; I ceased talking during class time. However, to this day I still bear a grudge against my second grade teacher - may she rest in peace. It was a good year in one way; we were learning to write sentences. This meant that I could write notes to my friends telling them how unfair the teacher was instead of risking getting caught talking. The second-grade mind doesn't realize that note-passing is even riskier when an experienced teacher is at the helm. So, yes, I did get my notes read out a couple of times and wound up having to write lines but had no more ruler slaps.

The most memorable experience of my elementary school days came while I was in second grade. As I said before, I was one of those who rode the bus to school. So, each day I got off at my house and walked up the dirt drive to my front door. Each day but one, that is. My best friend and I were sitting on the bus heading home that fateful day, when she asked if I'd like to get off at her house and play for a bit instead of going straight home. It struck me as a wonderful idea, so I got off at her place.

We played for hours, and her mother called us in for supper. "Alice," are you spending the night with Pauline?" her mother asked me. What an out for me! By now it was getting dark, and I knew my mother would be wondering where I'd been; so, I immediately said, "Yes, ma'am." My seven-year-old brain had decided that the best thing to do was spend the night there, go to school with Pauline the next day, and then get off at my house at the usual time when the bus brought us home after school. That way, everything would be as it should.

What a wonderful time I was having - more playing, eating a good supper, and listening to the radio. Suddenly there was a knock at their front door, and I knew without seeing or hearing him that it was my father. I went into Pauline's room and crawled under her bed, knowing in my heart that it was just a stop-gap measure.

All too soon my dad's voice sounded outside her room, "Alice, it's time to go home.

Your mother's been worried." I crawled out and slunk into the front room. He was very polite to Pauline's parents, but when we got to the car he didn't speak to me nor utter a word on the whole drive home. Pulling up in front of our house, he told me to go in as he got out and went around to the back yard. My mother was standing in the doorway crying, and I greeted her by asking, "How did you know where I was?"

It was all very simple to figure out. My father drove to the bus driver's house, and the driver remembered that he had let me off the bus at Pauline's. No telephone was involved, and no neighbors alerted - just my father's keen common sense. It soon became apparent to me just how worried he had been, however, when he came into the house with a small peach tree switch. I had the misfortune to be wearing a dress that day, and my poor little legs were soon covered in red marks while I howled as though the very demons of hell were attacking me. As he switched my legs, he kept asking, "Are you going to do that again? Are you going to scare your mother and me again? What did you think you were doing?" It was only years later when I became a parent that I fully realized that he was punishing me like that because he had been so frightened that something awful might have happened to me. Did I consider contacting the authorities because of parental abuse? No, I just thought what a foolish child I'd been and promised never to do something like that again. Nor did I ever. Peach tree switches were quite effective behavior modification devices. Did this punishment make me stop loving my father or warp me for life? Not at all, though it has remained a distinctive memory for me, one that the adult Alice knows was a punishment administered by a scared, loving parent. There were no further physical punishments from my father after this event.