9 Nelly

Nelly

   Nell Clyde Goodson (1899-1986) loved her Arkansas woods. She was born in Black Diamond, near the Texas line to the west, the Louisiana line to the south. Like most Arkansas villages formed toward the end of the century, this one was on the railroad. Today neither the rail line nor Black Diamond exists. She had older brothers able to bring in a crop, so her father bought forty acres north of nearby Fouke from a timber man, A. J. Burgess. Nell's earliest memories were of living there. When she was a wee girl her brother Gerald would let her climb a pine sapling and cling to the top, so he could cut it down and give her a ride. There was a spring branch on the place where she could entice sun perch with a straight line and a bent pin. She taught her son to put a twig-man in a leaf-boat and send him spinning off down the clear, rushing waters. She knew how to pull off a black gum twig to make a toothbrush good for dipping snuff. Her older brothers and sisters could make a willow whistle or a number four trap. They knew how to cut grapevine to smoke like a cheroot. Nelly always threw a kiss, even into her old age, to a redbird.

   The rural countryside was somewhat more densely settled in that day. Nell's father delivered the mail in a buggy, and Nell was responsible for grooming his horses. They were usually named for the man who had sold them, e.g., "Go hitch up Mr. Walraven, Nelly." Tom Goodson, pushing fifty when Nell was born, had grown old and hard to please. He liked to read, and his eyes were failing, so it was also Nell's ungrateful task to keep his lantern globe perfectly polished. Her mother, Molly, was sometimes at loose ends, even though her older daughters helped care for the large family, and when Tom would storm out of the house, late for his mail route, Nell would have to run after him with his lunch. Happily, Tom was made postmaster in Fouke under Theodore Roosevelt, whose portrait can be seen on a photo of his one-room post office.

Now the Goodsons moved nearer to Fouke. It was while they were working out in the field there that a family going into town on foot remarked to them, "Guess y'all know your house is afire." And indeed it was. It just took more than a flaming roof to ruffle unflappable Arkansawyers. Tom and Molly sold that house to the Attaway family, so that today the road up to their Old Place is known as Attaway Lane. The new house in Fouke probably looked the same as in this picture during the first decade or two of the 20th century. It sat on the corner of two sandy lanes. By the time I came along, a white picket fence stood in front and on one side. That is where Gerald was walking when Molly caught him and called out, "Gerald, you get down off that fence! An' I catch you doing that one more time I'll give you a licking." "Do it and then talk about it," was his reply. So she did. --It was also at about this time when Florence, always querulous, came crying to her mother. "Mama, Gerald hit me. He hit me just as hard as he could." "If I had hit her as hard as I could," Gerald grumbled, "I'd a' killt her."

        As you can see, a row of oak trees stood outside the fence. I remember them as very big, with a swing hanging from a limb over the yard. It was a long rope tied by either end to a branch, with perhaps a foot-long notched board as seat--the kind of swing common in those days, but no longer seen. If you look close, there is also a porch swing visible beside the door. By the time I was about four, a chinaberry tree stood over on the right, in front, with one of those big, horizontal boughs at just a good height for a little boy to sit on. When Tom Goodson was very ill, I walked round and round this house praying fervently that he might not die. But he did, and they laid his open coffin on the library table in the living room, right where you see those two windows. This table, sans lower shelf, seems much smaller where it stands today in my living room.

        On the porch-like structure behind the house you can see the well. This arrangement was very customary in those days. When "city water" was piped to the house, a big wooden water tank was set on stilts out back for storing it. The back porch then became screened in (with a trapdoor to the well). When my family lived in this house for perhaps four years, my father dug a new well in the back yard and set a little pump house beside it. In the vacant area behind the house we had chickens, a sow with little pigs, and a sweet quarter horse who was very intelligent. The house visible on further back belonged to Uncle Tom and Aunt Matty Batt, who were very, very old. They lived there with their widowed daughter, Aunt Ethyl Turner, who took in boarders. Aunt Ethyl was a corpulent woman, immensely good natured and busy. When she came out of an early morning to feed her stock she whistled religious hymns with marvelous fluency and volume. Although her meals were notoriously sumptuous, Aunt Ethyl's surviving children, grown-ups when I knew them, were emaciated. Tom, an elegant young man with a pencil mustache, soon died of tuberculosis, as had his siblings before him. Elza lived to be an old lady without ever putting on flesh. She became head of Nurse's Training for New York Polyclinic, then returned to Dallas to live out her life with Raye and suffer for her own improvidence.

        If you look close, there is another window beyond the chimney. That was the dining room. Tom liked to sit before the fireplace in a red plush chair with a footrest which would slide out, and read by a well-polished globe. When I was a child they still had no electricity, although there were gaslights on the walls. Once when Tom was sitting before the fire a burning log rolled out onto the hearth and he, quick minded as he was, grabbed it and threw it out the window before it could damage his floor. That is the window there which you can barely see. It was closed at the time.

   I guess those are railroad ties there in the foreground providing a walkway across the ditch. Down the road to the right lived the oldest son, Albert. Behind the camera is a city block almost empty except for the old Maxwell house, derelict in my day, but formerly the elegant home of the bank owner. The bank occupied a two story brick edifice just down the street. During the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft Fouke had been a prosperous little community named after a lumberman whose exploitation of the great hardwood and pine forests had brought a railroad spur this far (1888). It serviced the many saw mills, and in Fouke a big cotton gin as well. There were numerous mercantile enterrpises, including the huge Paulk and Dickert general store which provided credit until harvest time for farmers all the way to the Red River.   Fouke was selected by the Seventh-Day Baptists as the site for one of their schools. The Seventh-Days were one of those vigorous, militant denominations which emerged from the Great Awakening. Doctrinally self-conscious, they traced their origins back through Reformation Sabbatarians all the way to the Waldensians of the Middle Ages. They had been especially active in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and West Virginia, had sent missionaries to the Netherlands and to China. Their university in Alfred, New York is still thriving. A Seventh-Day history was written by Corliss Fitz Randolph, who was only one of a large family pre-eminent in the church.   Gideon Henry Fitz Randolph was a promising young pastor dispatched together with his wife to the well established Seventh-Day mission in Shanghai.   After his service there he returned to take charge of the Seventh-Day establishment in Fouke. He hired an additional teacher from South Dakota and had local help.

This was the teacher Nelly best remembered. She was just entering her teens when she attended the Seventh-Day school, and she remembered Fitz Randolph as the most learned, handsomest man she had ever beheld. Among other subjects, Fitz Randolph taught German. Nelly learned Stille Nacht in what must have been Fitz Randolph's own translation from English back into German. I have no writings from this member of his family, but a survey of the offices he held in his church suggests that he was a serious and, no doubt, literate man.

When Nell was sixteen, she obtained a teaching post of her own at a little school four or five miles south of Fouke, I believe the name was Mount Olive. She had to take room and board with a family whose children attended that school, the same A. J. Burgess family from whom her father had bought the Old Place. Some of the country fellows were boisterous and boastful, such that the Burgess boys became a little apprehensive about Nell’s safety when she walked through the forest to her school at dawn and dusk. Apparently they did not wish to alarm her, but they would regularly slip out into the woods of an evening so as to keep watch over her. She, of course, caught them at it and laughed them to scorn. One of these young gentlemen, Rudi Burgess, went ahead to become fairly prominent in local politics, County Judge, I believe. Before my mother died she made me promise not to permit one of the long-winded, vacuous preachers whom she so detested come preach a sermon at her grave. So I asked Rudi to speak, and he came. Later, among the funeral paraphernalia, I found the guest book, with his scrawled, "I love you, Nell."

As a consequence of the teaching credential gained while living with the Burgesses, Nell received an Arkansas certificate. It was good for Texas, too, and she came to value her teaching certificate very much during the hard times she and Frank were to know. As Nell's experience shows, the Goodson family was somehow better equipped than the Hailes for the inexorable transition from agrarian life to the unforgiving new urban world of business. Both Tom and Molly were literate people, Molly especially proud of her Scottish heritage. She listened with tears to Sir Harry Lauder. Robert Burns and Walter Scott were much quoted, and read with great sentimentality by her children. "Well-read" was the standard by which the Goodsons judged people, and several of the children lived up to the standard, most particularly Nell and Harry. I still have Nell’s impressive diploma from the College of Industrial Arts in Denton, Texas (today a part of the University of Texas). She and Raye spent a summer studying at the University of Chicago.

Contents Home