9 Nelly

School Teachers

          Her birthplace was a village on one of the railroads built to harvest the great Arkansas forests. The village is gone today, as is the white oak, hickory, and the beech--even the railroad. She had four brothers, and when her father deemed them old enough to bring in a crop he bought eighty acres from a timber man, A. J. Burgess. Nell's earliest memories were of living on this place. When she was a wee girl her brother Gerald would let her climb a pine sapling and cling to the top, so that by felling it with his axe he could give her a long ride down. The Goodson place had a spring branch on it where she could dangle a straight line and a bent pin. She could watch the little little sun perch nibble at a worm and, maybe, bite. She liked to put a twig-man in a leaf-boat and send him spinning off down the clear, rushing waters. She knew how to pull a twig off a black gum 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, even into her old age, threw a kiss to a redbird.

       The countryside was more densely settled in her day than it is now. 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 crotchety and hard to please. He was a great reader, but his eyes were growing dim, so it was also Nell's ungrateful task to keep his lantern globe perfectly polished. Her mother, Mollie, was sometimes at loose ends, even though her older daughters helped care for the large family. 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 spotted in this 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 obviously took more than a flaming roof to ruffle unflappable Arkansawyers. Tom and Mollie sold that house to the Attaway family, so that today the road up to their Old Place is known as Attaway Lane. During the first decade or two of the 20th century, their new house in Fouke probably looked the same as in this picture. 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 Mollie caught him and called out, "Gerald, you get down off that fence! An' I catch you up there one more time I'll give you a licking." "Do it and then talk about it," was his reply. She probably did. --It was also at about this time when Florence, always querulous, came crying to her mother. "Mama, Gerald hit me. Mama, Gerald hit me. He hit me just as hard as he could." "If I had hit her as hard as I could," Gerald allowed, "I'd a' kilt her."

        As you can see, a row of oak trees stood outside the fence (to the left). I remember them as very big, with a child's swing from on high. It hung on 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. After "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 was screened in and floored (with a trapdoor to the well). When my family lived in this house in the late 1940s, my father dug a new well in the back yard and set a little house beside it for an electric pump and a pressure tank. 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 (no kin to us), who were very, very old. They lived there with their widowed daughter, Aunt Ethel Turner, who took in boarders. Aunt Ethel 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 Ethel's surviving children, grown-ups when I knew them, were emaciated. Tom Turner, 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 Nell's younger sister Raye, and suffer for her own improvidence.

        If you look close, there is another window beyond the chimney. That is for the dining room. Old Tom Goodson 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 there was still no electricity, but hissing 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 in the picture. It was closed at the time.

   I guess those are railroad ties there in the foreground providing a walkway across the ditch. Down that 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 further on up 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 enterprises, including the huge Paulk and Dickert general store which provided credit until harvest time for farmers all the way to the Red River.   Fouke, once a gentle, busy town, is long since sunken away, like mist enshrouded Germelshausen, or Brigadoon, into the highway dust.

     But with its new railroad in 1888, it was important enough to be selected by the Seventh Day Baptists as site for one of their schools. The Seventh Days were one of those vigorous, militant denominations which had 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. Seventh Days 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, 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 in China he returned to take charge of the new Seventh-Day establishment in Fouke. He hired an additional teacher from South Dakota and had local help as well.

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 the Fitz Randolph family, but a survey of the offices he held in his church suggests that he was a serious and, no doubt, a literate man.

After the turn of the century, Arkansas passed a law requiring children between seven and fifteen to attend school, and a teaching post became available just south of Fouke. Nell got it, although she had just turned sixteen herself. She had to take room and board with a family who lived only a few miles from the school, the same A. J. Burgess family from whom her father had bought the Old Place. His children had married Nell's cousins. 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 did 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 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 valid in Texas, too, so she came to value her certification 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. I still have Nell’s impressive parchment diploma from the College of Industrial Arts in Denton (later Texas Womens' and today a part of the University of Texas). She and her younger sister spent a summer studying at the University of Chicago.

There were many young women like her, grown up in a still predominantly rural America. Her parents, Tom and Mollie Goodson, were literate people in a day when religiosity was part of erudition. Tom's father was named John Wesley, after the founder of Methodism. Tom bestowed his own middle name, Watts, on his first child, after the English poet Isaac Watts, master of English hymnody. Since the first child was a girl, he later gave the same middle name to one of his boys, too. Mollie was proud of her Scottish heritage. She listened with tears to Sir Harry Lauder. Robert Burns and Walter Scott were much quoted in her house, and read with great sentimentality by her children. These authors instilled piety toward traditional values of selflessness, especially devotion to family. Consider Burns' "A Cotter's Saturday Night." These were among the classics as embraced by Mollie's Scots Irish forebears. "Well-read" was the standard by which the Goodsons judged people, and themselves.

Literacy for the Goodson family went beyond reverence for their English-language heritage, and included current commentary and opinion. They shared American enthusiasm about Woodrow Wilson, sang all the popular World War I songs. The 19th Amendment took effect just weeks after Nell attained voting age. Her readiness to explain to her son, a quarter century later, the meaning and origin of the slogan "normalcy" reveals her interest in the 1920 presidential campaign. It does not tell us whether Nell cast her first vote for or against Warren Gamaliel Harding, but she did have a high opinion of Calvin Coolidge, Harding's successor. She loved to tell the story of "Silent Cal's" meeting with Will Rogers. Rogers was probably America's most beloved public figure in the 1920s, even world wide. Having begun as a rodeo cowboy turned vaudeville performer, Rogers became a noted columnist, celebrated for his timely, ironic adages, e.g.,

America is becoming so educated that ignorance will be a novelty. I will belong to the select few.

Noted for his humor, Rogers had accepted a bet that he could not get even a smile out of the dour Calvin Coolidge. When presented to the President, Rogers extended his hand, cocked his head to the side, and asked "I didn't catch the name?"

        Rogers died in the crash of a hybrid airplane put together by his friend Wiley Post, the first round-the-world solo pilot. Aircraft adventures were a theme of the day. The most celebrated and inspiring hero of all was a young Kansan, just two years older than Nell, Amelia Earhart (1897-1937), whose brilliant, tragic career and championing of women's independence set an example. Earhart made her solo transatlantic flight in 1928, in the same summer Nell married one of two brothers who operated an airport in Austin, Texas. They performed just such barnstorming at state fairs as had captured Earhart's enthusiasm for flight. The Haile boys took people up in small planes, exactly the same experience as had inspired Earhart to obtain an airplane of her own.

       Other prominent women just a little older than Nell were the writers Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980), Pearl S. Buck (1892-73), Rebecca West (1892-1983); also Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), known for her sharp tongue, and the dedicated columnist and radio commentator expelled by Hitler, Dorothy Thompson (1893-1961). Almost exactly Nell's age were the romantic novelists Zelda (b. 1900) and Scott Fitzgerald (b. 1896).   The influential research by Margaret Mead (1901-1978) in anthropology, to be sure, was not well known until the middle of the century. Just a bit younger than Nell were the politically involved screenwriter Lillian Hellman (1905-84) and the novelists Mary Renault (1905-1993) and Ayn Rand (1905-1982). These women born at the turn of the century appear as a wave of genuine feminism, very conscious of their own womanhood, dedicated to self realization and independence. I suspect that Nell eventually read all of them, but I list them here because they articulate for us the kind of world they knew in the early 20th century. The fin de siècle, with its exaggerated Nietzsche mustaches and hoopskirts, with the can can and the Comstock laws, had culminated the Victorian Age of their mothers. Whether in Europe or America, all these girls grew up into a world which was rejecting, more or less strenuously, the 19th-century culture.

        Nell at sixteen, teaching at a remote Arkansas country school, may not yet have heard about any of these. She may even have been shelgered from Margaret Sanger's newsletter The Woman Rebel, although it was creating a sensation in New York. Sanger fled to Europe to escape being arrested for it. Certainly before Nell was twenty she had at least heard of a new concept for which Sanger coined the term The American Birth Control League, which she founded in 1921, today's Planned Parenthood. Nell is certain to have read the classic The Pivot of Civilization (1922), with its fervent praise of conjugal love. These developments meant more to a young woman of that day than they possibly can to us.

        I see my family as representative of many other American families in having undergone, over the past dozen generations, three great transformations. The first trial was, of course, giving up the security of 17th-century England for "adventure" in the wilderness of colonial Virginia. There followed almost a century of progress and prosperity. But the second great change came down as invasion and devastation of their homeland in the great War of the 19th century, which scattered and estranged the survivors. The third great crisis came with the 20th century, as the transformation of motherhood. Nell is a very typical representative of this last great transition to life in modern America.

        She was one of the many young women with aspirations beyond those of her parents, but she also at the same time cherished that same ancient ideal which she saw fulfilled in her own mother.   Since the very origin of families some six thousand years before Nell was born, the mother had remained the center of the household, and the household itself was being diminished during Nell's lifetime. The very word "household," synonymous with agrarian "livlihood," provided the root from whence we have our term "economy": the Greek word for home, ὁικος . As in ancient times, the family in early America still embraced all the servants it could support, who in turn supported it as well. When pioneer couples from the tidewater ventured upriver, however, beyond the fall line to the west, and then further south, those traditional inclusive families emerged as nuclear ones. But the nucleus was still the mother. The young father did the heavy work and protected the family from menace until the boys could relieve him, while the mother nourished, cared for him and maintained the home. We have seen how mothers loved to name the first boy Shadrack, thus promising at least two more reliable men for the plow, the axe and the rifle. But she bent her back to all these tools, too. Mothers in our family typically bore, instructed, and nourished between seven and fifteen children. Thus had it been since time out of mind.

        Industrialization changed all this. Agriculture itself became a great industry in the South, driven by commercial production and processing of cotton. In New England, the economy now shifted from home and field into urban factories. Industry could bring wealth and ease to some, but it marginalized the mothers. In tobacco regions, and even in the larger farming and ranching enterprise, the mother was still responsibile for households including farm hands and cow hands as well as her own large brood. This had been the case both among Mollie's Scots Irish forebears in Virginia and among Tom's rural people in Carolina and Alabama. He came from a family of eight, she from a family of ten. Tom and Mollie had nine children. As Tom was just a schoolteacher, he was prompted to purchase acreage where his boys could bring in a crop. Mollie remained traditional mother of a household.

        But all around them the world was changing. Pearl, their oldest daughter, married late. The only child died in infancy, and her husband shortly thereafter. I had the opportunity to ask Pearl, many years later, why had she waited so long to get married. "I could not go off and leave Mama with all those children to take care of." Pearl became a registered nurse, and continued to look after her adult siblings. Of the other girls, two did marry in time to become mothers.   The other two did not wed at all during their childbearing years, but pursued successful careers. Thus from Mollie's nine offspring there survived six grandchildren. At the birth rate of the previous generations, she might easily have produced sixty.

    Nell had a hard time of it. All the women mentioned in this history shared the traditional burden of providing material subsistence for their husbands and children, but Nell and Frank were the first in each of their families to have to seek work outside the household, the home, their ὁικος. She taught high-school English. We can only conjecture about Nell's idea, when a little girl, of the kind of woman she would grow up to be or, while a teacher in big cities and in little country schools, what her students might become. Fortunately for our understanding, she lived at a time when women were becoming prominent as writers and passing on to us an idea of her world. In so far as I can tell, women are still today subject to the traditional demand that they be good wives and mothers. If the men and their children are to have homes, then it is they, the mothers, who provide it. Eventually, no doubt, the industrial world will develop its own peculiar concept of the family and will probably do so without help from history, or literature. My mother still observed the dictates of an older, agrarian world, while coping as best she could wth the industrial circumstances of the twentieth century.

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