Going to School on Tobacco Road

This story is true as well as I can remember. We moved to Fleming Heights in Augusta, Georgia in 1953. I had attended about fifteen schools before I entered the one on Tobacco Road in the fifth grade. I was toughened up by always being the new kid in the class. You might say I knew the ropes. It was a new school and new schools were badly needed after World War II. Old schools were running on double shifts and classrooms were often crowded. New schools were being built like crazy.

Ours was a new school and where we were living was growing faster than mold on light bread. The new families were often the first to leave the family farm, the first to live in a city and the first to live in a “housing development” or subdivision. There is irony in the fact that it was located on Tobacco Road, also the title of a raunchy novel by Erskine Caldwell. He was known to my parents’ generation as the “King of the Paperbacks.” Millions of GI’s, far from wives and girlfriends, had at least read the underlined passages handed down in worn paperbacks by other GI’s. Our mothers were horrified when the movie version hit the downtown theater.

Our teacher was a wonder and even the boys liked her. In a twist of fate, Mrs. Eason, who was recently married, was pregnant by Christmas. This was against the school system’s rules. Confusing, right? Did the committee that made this rule think all their pupils were the result of immaculate conception? Or, that none of us had lived with pregnant mothers who bore our brothers and sisters. So, Mrs. Eason had to resign at Christmas. In a desperate move, the school hired our school bus driver, Mr. Williford, to fill in until a college graduate could be found to become our teacher.

This worked out pretty well. Mr. Williford was kind and patient and loved the children and much to our satisfaction had little interest in imparting any knowledge. Just when things were going so well, he died. The rumor went around that an especially nasty child who was denied recess for a couple of days took revenge by giving Mr. Williford a cake iced with Ex-Lax. We all went to Mr. Williford’s funeral. He really looked wonderful in the casket. You know, contented and all.

Into the breech came Mr. Bartlett, recruited right out of divinity school. Mr. Bartlett was well spoken. He pronouced every word like it began with a capital letter. To us boys he seemed irritatingly neat. He was always dressed in a suit and tie; and, he was proud of the fact that his mother sewed his clothes. Not unusual for a male teacher I supposed, but in fact he was the only male teacher any of us had ever seen, other than Mr. Williford who was nearly eighty years old. We had heard from older brothers and sisters that there were men teachers and coaches in the nearby high school, and of course shop teachers were almost—no, make that always—men.  This guy was no shop teacher.

The boys in the fifth grade, being shrewd at avoiding homework, listened very closely to Mr. Bartlett’s plan of instruction, waiting for the “homework” bomb to go off. Now, people who grew up in the north could do alright with homework. It was too cold to go outside most of the school year. In Augusta we had summer almost year round.  

Being a minister (actually, he did not have a church yet and so we were to be his first congregation), Mr. Bartlett was big on two things, memorization and the scriptures. Every day began with the Lord’s Prayer of course. That was pretty much universal at the time. But he announced on the first day that each of us was to learn a Bible verse each day, repeating all we had recited on previous days until we could say 100 verses. We glanced sideways back and forth at each other, conveying alarm.  At recess, we came up with a plan. Actually, it was Roy Wilkerson, no novice at shirking, who suggested it. He said the shortest verse in the Bible was “Jesus wept” and we should all use that one on the first day until we could come up with a long-term strategy.

Next day, Mr. Bartlett, after leading us in the Pledge of Allegiance and the Lord’s Prayer, rearranged our seating so all the girls sat on one side of the classroom and the boys on the other. Both were assigned seats in alphabetical order so attendance could be checked at a glance.  Mr. Bartlett was making enemies faster than a dog catcher.

Then he said, “Johnny Adamson, you can start us off by reciting the Bible verse you have chosen for the day.” When Johnny jumped to his feet and blurted out “Jesus wept” everybody sniggered under their breath. I knew our plan was about to backfire. By the time the third boy recited “Jesus wept,” Mr. Bartlett was turning red and his eyes were bulging out. To his credit, he managed to say this through clinched teeth:  “Boys, we will start over tomorrow and each of you will recite Romans12:22-31.” Confident in his response, he turned to the girls whose recitations-those of all 17  girls-  began with “For God so loved the world that….” So, the same would apply to the girls, Romans 12:22-31.

As the weeks rolled by the recitations grew longer. Also, the number of memorable verses available slowly diminished because the Baptists are all about St. Paul and his incessant letter writing with only a few Old Testament passages seeming to figure prominently in the Baptist vocabulary.

The old testament is where most of the really good stuff can be found like David killing Goliath with a slingshot, the torments of Hell, Moses parting the Red Sea—you know, that kind of stuff.  Unwillingly compliant, most of us learned or struggled with learning 100 verses in all, and so to keep the process going and avoid actually having to do the work of teaching, Mr. Bartlett added to our daily recitation. We were to name the books of the Bible before starting in on our scripture recitals. Next came a sequence of the shorter Psalms. Gloomy January and February seemed endless. Warmer weather in March percolated schemes in the minds of us boys, tired of being regimented.

I am not one to argue that this curriculum was inferior to the state- approved study materials. By the fifth grade, I knew that our history classes would all end abruptly with the Confederate surrender at Appomatox, that our fifth-grade “readers” might never make it to the best southern writers like Erskine Caldwell (most boys my age at least knew that author’s name)  and, sometimes,  the scriptures I learned by heart have come in handy, much more so than doing fractions or long division. For example, in response to my mother’s comments about my inevitable adolescent sins I was equipped with the response “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” 

Still, something had to be done to derail all this memorizing. An idea began to bloom in my imagination. Recall that this was still the early 1950’s and that the theory of evolution remained only that –a theory- especially among some Baptists, especially the branch of Baptists to which Mr. Bartlett belonged. Mention of Darwin or his theory really yanked Mr. Bartlett’s chain. When I mentioned this to my mother one night at supper, she offered some sage advice: “You don’t have to know the age of rocks to know the rock of ages.” I had no idea what that meant, but thought it might come in handy.

Another thing that could trigger a fit by Mr. Bartlett was alcohol being served in the communion at the Episcopal Church. In those days, the Episcopal Church was more Methodist than today. Or maybe its just the reverse, I forget ; and, at many Sunday services everybody knew the Morning Prayer services from the Book of Common Prayer by heart. Golfers resisted the longer Communion service where the bread and wine are taken at the altar. So most Episcopal ministers coasted along on Morning Prayer. I liked to visit the Episcopal Church for a change, but it occurred to me that it might inspire Mr. Bartlett into some kind of fit if he thought I was an Episcopalian, even a wine drinking one.

Mr. Bartlett did not know any of this stuff about Episcopalians and by dropping little hints about the preacher wearing a robe and how we were always making the sign of the cross at church, I had him pretty primed and set up for what was coming. He never neglected an opportunity to denounce alcohol as an abomination . Jesus had , in Mr. Bartlett’s reading of the Bible, at the wedding feast in Galilee, turned the water into more water that only looked like wine.  

When given the opportunity, I let slip that mine was a family of Episcopalians. Mr. Bartlett grimaced as expected and offered the comment, “How could you drink after each other from the same cup. What all might you catch by way of diseases.”

Where the next inspiration came from, I do not know. I replied, “Oh no. When we are confirmed and can take the communion like grown- ups, the Bishop gives each of us a tiny silver straw which we keep for life. We just sip the wine from the cup with the straw.”

Mr. Bartlett looked crest fallen. I could just read his thoughts. He was asking himself why he had not learned this in seminary when the professors were denouncing the practices of  the competing denominations. Thankfully, with that, his attention to my misguided spelling and lazy memory went unnoticed. I became his project child, and my urgent salvation became his mission in life. Soon, this attention became annoying, even though it did consume some class time that otherwise would have been spent reciting Bible verses.

To create a diversion away from my first diversion, I began clipping articles out of the Augusta Chronicle or Life Magazine and slipping them in among homework and test papers. They all dealt with the great controversy still raging in the south: EVOLUTION.

I had help in this. Other boys willingly accepted the assignment of passing an article or two along with the homework papers from their rows. These invariably inspired a heated discourse by Mr. Bartlett, who, though he had never read Darwin -or even a biology book for that matter- was an expert at refuting the claim that men were descended from monkeys. This ploy was working like a charm. Hours of every day went by with Bible verses neglected, recitations suspended and all of us entertained by Mr. Bartlett’s tirades against wine, Episcopalians and Darwin. He seemed unaware that the boys had gotten the upper hand.

As the school year wound down at last, it was time for the annual parent-teacher conferences required by the county school board. My dad was working out of town as usual, so my mother came alone. It must have seemed a treat for the Reverend Mr. Bartlett. My mom was a looker. But, the conference with Mr. Bartlett led to an explosion when Mr. Bartlett mildly reproached her wine drinking and Papist habits as an Episcopalian. She  lit up like a roman candle and told Mr. Bartlett in a tightly restrained, expressionless voice : “Mr. Bartlett, we are Baptists. My parents are Baptists and their parents were Baptists. And, our son is Baptist. Where did you get the idea that we were Episcopalians? And what damned business is it of yours.”

It was Mr. Bartlett’s last year of teaching. He was called at last to a church in South Dakota and we never heard from him again. My parents’ anger cooled over the course of the summer as they put together what had happened. The walls were thin in our house and I knew my dad got a kick out of my mother’s surmises that somehow, I had set Mr. Bartlet up for a dressing down. And, at last, the mystery was solved as to why so many of the  magazines stacked in the hall closet had been cut up.