Mountain Man

Jesse Stuart's sister was "a beautiful, blue-eyed girl of 19" when she took over the job of teaching the one-room school at a place he chooses to call Lonesome Valley, Ky. She came home shortly after that a nervous wreck. Among other things, one of her gangling first-graders, a teen-ager named Guy Hawkins, had blacked her eyes and "whipped her before the Lonesome Valley pupils."

That was the main reason 16-year-old Jesse Stuart decided to be a schoolteacher. He asked for, and got, his sister's old job. In time, he became county school superintendent, later quit to concentrate on farming and writing short stories and poetry (Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow). This week, burly Jesse Stuart, now 42, published a new book (The Thread That Runs So True, Scribners; $3) to tell what life as a Kentucky mountain teacher was like.

Backless Books. His first students numbered 35--girls in pigtails and fresh cotton dresses, boys in faded, shabby shirts. They had come with their dinner baskets in their hands and battered, backless books under their arms. Not one wore shoes. There were 19-year-olds in the first grade, 14-year-olds in the second, and a twelve-year-old girl in the eighth.

Among the 19-year-olds was Guy Hawkins, who had been in the first grade for eight years. One evening, when Teacher Stuart was working late at the school, Guy came back. "I aim to whip you," he said. "It's the same place where I whipped your sister." The two men fought, but this time it was Guy who took the beating.

For Jesse, that was a triumph, but his troubles had just begun. When he let his boys.& girls sit together, instead of keeping them on separate sides of the room, the bearded farmers of the valley grumbled that he was running "a courting school." When he went to call on the lady teacher in the next town ("pretty as a speckled pup," people had told him), the men & boys of her town ambushed him and bombarded him with rotten eggs.

Frozen Feet. In the summer, the sun beat down on the school's tin roof, the pine boards sweated resin, and the smaller pupils dropped off to sleep. In winter "after the white frosts had fallen and blanketed the frozen land . . . many times I saw the red spots . . . from the bleeding little bare feet of those who came to school regardless of shoes." Jesse had to cure pretty 14-year-old Vaida Conway of spitting tobacco juice on the schoolhouse walls, and furtive Alvin Purdy of scribbling obscenities in the privy.

Jesse found that if he cut up his big calendar and pasted the numbers on bits of cardboard, he could teach beginners to read and count while pretending to be playing a game. He taught them "how to measure a field and figure the number of acres, how to figure the number of bushels in a wagon bed [or a] corn bin." Soon farmers from all over the valley, and from Chicken Creek and Unknown, too, began asking his pupils to measure their fields and count their bushels for them.

Belled Brides. At Jesse's next school--Winston High--his problems were different. He went there full of confidence, after getting a degree at Lincoln Memorial University. But in that back-country district, cut off by muddy roads, Jesse found it hard to keep ahead of his pupils. One of them, a pimply-faced boy named Budge Waters, had learned his textbooks by heart before school even opened. He could recite all the Pharaohs of Egypt, and "when we had disagreed on dates," recalls Jesse, "Budge was always right."

Jesse would walk as much as 20 miles to fill his bag with books to bring back to his pupils. "I went with [them] to cornhuskings, apple-peelings, bean stringings, square dances, and to the belling of the bride when there was a wedding . . . I never missed a party at the mill when they made sorghum molasses ... I went to all the churches ... I went to parties where we played post office and where we danced Skip to my Lou . . . There was somewhere to go every night."

Later, when Jesse became a superintendent, he found things less pleasant. Educationally, Kentucky was near the bottom of the nation's list ("Thank God for Arkansas," people used to say). The schools were often under the thumb of dictatorial trustees "who couldn't write their names, who would not know their own names if they had been printed on road signs."

But the teachers Jesse met, with their ramshackle schools and pitiful salaries, won his respect. There were old Ethel Henthorne who worked for years in her spare time to get a college degree and finally got it at 70; poor Ann Bush who was forever getting a beating from her pupil Tom Anderson; and the hundreds of other teachers who had worked for nothing during the depression. "I thought [of] these things," writes Jesse Stuart, "and I believed deep in my heart that I was a member of the greatest profession of mankind."

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