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"I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant."
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"Don't you think I'm great?!
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A mother that made me: Honey Privileges
Prologue
Honey privileges is a metaphor for the generosity and abundance someone experiences from the people around them. When someone says, "I've got more honey than I can use, feel free to come by anytime," it signifies that they have plenty to share and are offering it freely. This kind of privilege refers to being in a position where you benefit from the kindness and resources of others without needing to ask, almost as if you have unlimited access to something sweet or desirable—like honey—from others' generosity. It reflects a sense of community, trust, and goodwill.
Recently, I began revisiting all the family letters and documents we’ve exchanged over the decades, going back to the 1950s. I've insisted on keeping them with me since 1999, carrying them from California to Tokyo, then to Shanghai, and on to Kunming, China. After a year in Bogotá, Colombia, they traveled with me to my current home in Da Nang, Vietnam. Among these letters, I discovered my mother's unpublished "autobiography," which she aptly titled Honey Privileges.
It didn’t take me long to realize that other kids didn’t have a mother like mine—unique not just in the way we’re all unique, but in a way that, had she become famous, she would have stood out among the greatest women in history.
Sometimes, as an adult, I would talk about how special my mother was to my friends. I think they humored me a bit until they finally met my mother. They would exclaim, "Oh my God, your right! I want your mother to be my mother."
I believe my mother wrote Honey Privileges with the intention of publishing it, though she may not have known how to go about it. Without making any apologies for its informal format or knowing how many people will eventually read and appreciate it, I’m sharing it posthumously. She passed away at the age of 90 in 2012. I’ve pieced together what I could find of her writing so far, though I’m uncertain I'll find all of what she wrote.
My mother had an extraordinary eye for detail, despite her tendency to be judgmental when she deemed it warranted. With her remarkable memory for dates, names, and connections, her love for literature, her gift for language, and her deep passion for life, I believe she wrote a captivating autobiography—perhaps more akin to memoirs. But I'll let you be the judge.
I have used ChatGPT to read the images of her letters and provide the transcription, amazed at how flawlessly it has been able to do that.
This will be published page by page, as I found it numbered by her. On occasion, I will provide my own perspective in footnote form, page by page.
For more about my mother, see Will it die with you?
Honey Privileges
(page 1)
Just now it dawned on me how little I know about the year I was born, 1922. How much a loaf of bread cost; what one paid for a car, the population of the United States, what particular problems our country faced, what percentage of the populace was homeowners.
Always I have thought March 20 as being the perfect birthday, the ultimate in being a Spring Baby. My parents’ first child, I came into the world healthy, energetic, and eager to live. My mother told me when I was born I announced, “la la la la.” The attending doctor clipped the frenulum, freeing my tongue, whereupon I hollered, “LA LA” with gusto. A home delivery with my Aunt Ruth, my mother’s sister, an RN, in attendance.
My father was teaching high school algebra in a little border town in Arizona barely north of Mexico. Hot. Arid. Pretty much treeless. I don’t think my mother ever really liked Arizona. She told me of walking from one blistering side of the sidewalk to the other to be able to walk under the shade of a lamppost. It seemed to me that was slim pickin’s for a slice of shade.
My parents did not have a name picked out for me as my mother told me later, “Dorothy, I had no idea I could have a girl. It just never occurred to me and so we didn’t have a girl’s name chosen.” I always felt slightly superior when she told me this as if I had fooled my mother, put one over on her. My father said he went out on the sidewalk after my birth to see three youngsters skating up the concrete. “What is your name, little girl?” “I’m Dorothy Dalton, and these are Ruthie and Jimmy Crockett.” My father returned to the house and suggested Dorothy as my name; they added Alice which was my maternal grandmother’s name. Some sixty years later I read that Dorothy was the second most common name for little girls born in that year. Four decades later I was living in western North Carolina and received a newspaper clipping from my mother. It told of Dorothy Dalton and her husband, a major, living at a military base close to Cherry Point, North Carolina.
The story was told to me as a child. My folks took me to Aqua Prieta on May 5, the Mexican national holiday. My mother had dressed me up in the finery I had received from my parents’ friends on the occasion of my birth. As hot as one can imagine in a little Mexican town in mid-spring. I screamed and turned red and wiggled and fussed and cried. My mother removed my bonnet. My jacket. My dress, booties, socks. Finally my undershirt. I began to coo and returned to my normal shade of pink. My mother never attempted to dress me up again.^1
My mother contended that if she put a tiny pair of glasses on me I would have looked exactly like my father. Of this I felt inordinately proud as I adored my father and wanted to emulate him in any possible way. It had to be the following winter, early January, when my parents took off for the Grand Canyon for six weeks, leaving me with Auntie Foster, a friend of the family’s. My mother said when they returned from their trip and took me back to our own house I could walk and kept going around and around a low, coffee table-like table in the living room, patting it and cooing — glad to be home and saying so.
My mother declared I did not say words, that the first time I really talked it was a full-blown sentence. We three were out hiking somewhere in the desert. I stepped on a worm, squashing it. I commiserated with it, exclaiming “Poor worm. Dosie step-a-a mur. Hurt ed da murm. Poor murm.”
Whenever possible, my folks went up into the Chiricahua Mountains in southeastern Arizona, taking me with them. They told me if I ever got lost to stay in the road, they would find me. I got lost, at least, they thought so. They found me. In relief, my mother rushed to me and I indignantly pointed to the road with the affirmation, “Dere’s de woad.”
The only “big” picture of me, that is say 6x8, shows me sitting barefoot on a tiny footstool, my ankles crossed in front of me. I look bright, inquisitive, alive; the kind of little girl anyone would be proud and happy to have. My parents were. Several small black-and-white pictures: in a white dress atop a burro with my father holding onto me; my father lying on the ground with one ankle atop the opposite knee and I propped up on his knee; a picture of me in my “kiddie koop” in what looks to be a long, white nightgown; a snapshot of me as a toddler in below-the-knees plaid pants and matching shirt complete with bobbed hair.
^1 My mother was a tomboy, often playing baseball with the boys in grammar school and even getting into fights, sometimes beating them up. As an adult, I’ve realized that I’m frequently drawn to women who were tomboys themselves.
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Honey Privileges
(page 2)
My father had taught at Sewanee Military Academy in Sewanee, Tennessee, prior to his marriage on June 1, 1921. There was no married housing at SMA at that time and the powers-that-be expected the teachers to live on campus to keep an eye on the boys. This my father did not want to do — he wanted to live with his wife. He cast about for another teaching position, finding one in Douglas, Arizona. I never asked how they traveled from here atop the Cumberland Plateau to Arizona, railroad, I would think. My parents did not have a car, had very little money, no help from relatives, and I doubt if Greyhound or Trailways was yet in existence.
My mother told me some years later, “Ray (my father) said he would rather not have a child right now. He’d like to get on his feet first, accumulate a bit of capital. But then I discovered I was pregnant with you.” I felt a tiny spasm of thrill when she told me that; as if I had the power to come, wanted or not. Probably a totally illogical feeling but I remember feeling it. I arrived in due course, nine months and 19 days after the marriage. ^1
My father had a loved brother, Dave, who had married a school teacher, Victoria Yeager. I think Dave was teaching in Minnesota after World War I when he and Vickie had a son, David, 11 months older than I, born a cripple. Dave contended his son’s lameness was due to the excessive use of forceps during the birth process. I met David for the first time, except in very early childhood, when he was 24. He seemed to me to be average in intelligence. This from a boy with exceptionally bright parents. He resented his parents, an immaturely earned resentment. I hope Dave and Vickie never knew what I sensed.
When David started to walk he was put in braces in an effort to strengthen his bum leg. He fell numerous times but, since he was in braces, his body did not have the resiliency to shield himself when he fell; my mother said he often fell flat, frequently hitting his head full force. Did this have anything to do with his 100 IQ? My father liked teaching in Arizona and suggested to Dave and Vickie they come out west. They did. My mother and Vickie became best friends.
My paternal grandfather was a Baptist minister, well-educated in Greek, Latin, the humanities, co-founder of a Baptist College in Bolivar, Missouri, producing three daughters and three sons. My father was what I view as a co-dependent family as most families are, it seems to me. Louanna taught school, married, one child who died about age 30. Rumor had it that Louanna wanted to marry some second cousin but Granddad frowned mightily on the prospective husband, “No. You can’t marry him. All he’ll ever do for you is give you a passel of children.” Who knows?
Louanna married relatively late, just soon enough to produce the one child, Margaret Lee. Laura was petite (I have her graduation dress and I couldn’t begin to fit into it), graduated from Brown University and died of nephritis. Decades later a round of sulfanilamide would have cured her. Her mother, my grandmother, died of the same disease.
Mary was the tall, angular spinster. She was strict, unrelenting. With herself more than others. Her God was a Baptist God and he kept an eagle eye on one. She was good to us but our feelings toward her were pretty well summed up by my eldest son, Dwight, when she died in Hawaii in her 90s. “I am sorry that she’s dead because I can not feel sad.” ^2
Then Dave. Then my father. Then Mutt, given his father’s name, Abner Smith Ingman. I have wondered for years if the appellation, Mutt, was consciously or unconsciously given. He went to Vanderbilt, became a dentist, was of small stature. My mother spent her teenage years in the same little town as the Ingman family said, “As a teenager Mutt was my favorite of the three boys.” Mutt became an addict. Morphine. He blamed a nurse. Sure. Why not? An addict has to have someone to blame.
He went to the government hospital in Louisville, Kentucky, for drug rehabilitation. Years later I read that the recidivism rate for addicts in this institution was 97%. Sometime in late ’24 or early ’25 the Ingmans got together by letter and made the decision that my parents and I would return to the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee, to the property my father had bought in 1920 and given to my mother as a wedding present. They reasoned if Mutt came to live with them, got away from his “evil” companions, got away from the drug culture, had fresh air to breathe, mountains to hike, good, fresh vegetables to eat, he would be cured and no longer would be a morphine addict. Fat chance. ^3
^1 This is a example of how the power of interpretation (one that most people would not normally make), rather than the facts, can be in shaping one's approach to life.
^2 I don't remember saying this. Yet it seems like something I might have said at the time.
^3 My mother criticized her parents for trying to help Mutt overcome his drug addiction—a failed effort that only made their lives more difficult at the time. Yet, in a similar way, she spent decades unsuccessfully trying to rescue my father from his negative self-image and mental illness, causing significant harm to her own life in the process.
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Honey Privileges
(page 3)
Arizona to Tennessee: Of course, I remember nothing of the cross-country trip. While in Douglas they had bought a car and a piano as my mother had learned to play the instrument. The piano proved to be of benefit to us and to friends. The property we owned was a hundred acres with a line of bluff on the south overlooking Bridal Veil Cove and then Bridal Veil Creek and Falls on the east. It was a beautiful piece of land set in the middle of other lovely territory. Falls, creeks, caves, trees, wild life, fresh air, little pollution, few people. It was Eden personified. My mother knew it; I didn’t. Not until I was almost fifty years of age.
The homestead: The house, built in the 1880s, was set in the middle of the clearing, facing south. Two large white oaks to the front and beyond them the stagecoach road coming up the mountain north of Monteagle, skirting south of Summerfield, around the head of Monteagle Falls, past our house, over past the Wooten’s property two miles to the east, then south toward Pigeon Springs, dropping off the mountain toward Chattanooga. Two black walnut trees to the east. Round about apple trees in various stages of gnarliness and worm damage. A spring to the south touted as “everlasting.” If someone tells you this, you should beware as he’s probably lying as most “everlasting” springs aren’t, but it’s a good selling point.
Tearing down the house: The house was two-story, gray, unpainted, uninsulated, and leaking. Four rooms downstairs, two rooms up, with a fireplace in the southeast room. A narrow porch on the south which was in past-saving decay. My father tore it down, planting along the front of the house six privet bushes, an exotic and now common shrub from Italy. Privet “takes over” and has spread to the edges of the woods, wherever there is some sunshine and it is not mowed or chopped down. A pale creamy, composite blossom which the bees savor and has a heavenly fragrance. A big barn to the east-southeast. Four stalls with a manger in each and long sheds on the north, east, and south of the mangers. One gained access to the loft by a ladder just inside the southwest stall.
Snakes: Looking back on that barn I could shudder if I really thought about it. Cleaning out the barn was a regular chore as we had a horse, a mule and a few hogs. I was about ten years old when our friend, John Clark, needed some manure for his garden. He asked my father could he have some stable manure if he’d clean out the barn. John killed 15 poisonous snakes that day, piling them in a heap by the side of the barn.
Beware of snakes: I have always been afraid of snakes and with good reason; my parents taught me to be afraid of them. I was told never to put my hands or feet where I could not see. If I ever was bitten by a snake to stay calm, don’t run, to put a tourniquet several inches above the bite, releasing it every ten minutes. We had a snake-bite kit. The tourniquet, a razor, and potassium permanganate crystals. I was taught how to make a criss-cross cut at the site of the bite and sprinkle the KMnO₄ in the wound. As a little kid I wondered if I would have the courage to adequately cut. At that time, almost seventy years ago, that was the accepted treatment for snakebite. ^1
Our play barn: Anyway, I played all over that barn. If I had a friend out to spend the night we’d often play chase-through-the-barn: climbing up the ladder, bounding over the hay bales, jumping into the carriage below in the south shed, racing through the soft, feathery dirt to the south shed which was my father’s workshop where he re-soled shoes, put screens on windows, built chicken nests. Outside the building and into the dry, dusty area we kept the singletrees and work wagon and bridles and harness and the big case that the piano had come in across the country. Scrambled back through an open window to the loft. Can you imagine how many snakes we startled?
Killing the cat: My very earliest memories are few. A kitten. I stuffed it down a hole in the floor in the living room. It returned. I repeated it. It returned. I wrapped it in a used sheet of flypaper. The papers were about 8x10 and covered with sweet, sticky stuff. Flies lit and stuck. There were also fly strips, three for a nickel. Tubes about three inches long and two inches in diameter. One pulled off the top which held a thumb tack, unrolled the strip, and tacked the end to the ceiling. The flies came. My mother retrieved the kitten, washed it off. We did not have a range at the time and my mother had built up the fire in the fireplace to cook lunch. I threw the cat in the flames. My mother grabbed the little animal as it leapt screeching from the fire. It was in pain. She whacked it on the skull with the fireplace shovel. An act of kindness. I am thankful.
^1 By the time I began spending time on my grandparents' farm, snakes weren’t as common as they once were. Though I wasn’t as thoroughly trained as my mother, I was given similar instructions in case of a bite. The mountain was home to two types of venomous snakes: copperheads and rattlesnakes. Despite my carefree nature and habit of running barefoot throughout the summer on my grandparents' land, I was never bitten. Years later, my cousin Barbara wasn’t so lucky; a copperhead bit her. My uncle treated her immediately as we were taught (and took her to a doctor). She recovered quickly. My mother always believed copperheads were more dangerous because, unlike rattlesnakes, they wouldn’t give a warning.
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Honey Privileges
(page 4)
Beauty and the limb: I rode Beauty and I just barely remember this. Beauty was our horse and over the years I loved her. A rich russet coat with dusty black mane and tail. She had a sweet disposition and loved her. A thick russet coat with dusty black mane and tail. Astride her bareback when I reached up with my limb down I don’t think she really liked me. Astride her bareback when I reached overhead to pull a limb down from the black walnut. The limb did not break, I held on, Beauty continued to amble. I plopped to the ground. I remember feeling astonished. Not hurt at all, just astonished.
Grandmother, friendship at first sight: My grandmother, my mother’s mother, I adored. Gentle and bright. The late summer of 1925 and Granny and I had been down in the Lower Field to harvest a pumpkin and pick nasturtiums. It was the first time I had met her and it was friendship at first sight. Juanita was my dog, a warm, shaggy creature, who had gone to the Field with us. When we had picked our flowers and prepared to go home we could not find our pumpkin. Granny and I searched high and low around the hollow we could not find the pumpkin in the sandy hollow we always called the Persimmon Patch. Granny and I figured Juanita had picked up the tough stem in her mouth and carried it that far. We laughed about how ’Nita had really helped us.
Granddad, a horrible guy: Granny was married to my grandfather whom I did not like. He was cross, cranky, crabby. Insecure. A male chauvinist. Reasonably bright but could not touch my grandmother in intelligence. Horrible disposition, therefore, he could not keep a job for any length of time. He worked for the railroad, what they called a station master, in Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri. When he made himself unwelcome in one little railroad station along the Mississippi the head honcho would transfer him onto the next little town.
Granddad, a penny pincher and spendthrift: Granddad doled his paycheck out to my Grandmother parsimoniously, almost a nickel at a time, making her beg for grocery money. And it was my Grandmother who had the money sense in the family. Granddad had none. Before World War I he decided he was going to Florida and raise cucumbers and make lots of money. So he took off, leaving his wife, my mother, and his second daughter, Ruthie, to fend for themselves. My mother went to work on the local newspaper. Only woman there. My grandmother and Ruthie sewed buttons on cards for some local button manufacturer. They sent the money to Granddad. Granddad discovered that it freezes in Florida and there went the cucumber crop.
Skeletons in the family: My Uncle Byron, 17 months my mother’s senior, had already left home, I think, at age 14. Rumor has it that Byron had “some trouble” with a girl and had to leave town. What kind of trouble? I have no idea. And neither does his son. Granny, my mother, and Ruthie never mentioned it and certainly not my Uncle Byron as by the time I knew him he was the epitome of Puritanism. Couple years after Granddad went to Florida he sent his wife and two daughters railroad tickets to Jacksonville. They went. My mother got a job on a newspaper there and Ruthie finished high school.
Feeling superior with 40 acres: Wintertime of 1926/27 my mother and I rode the train to Jacksonville. I did not particularly like it. Granny took me out to the Park with tiny ponds and white swans and little girls in what my grandmother called “frocks” but looked like riding dresses to me and had black women with little white caps perched atop their heads taking care of them. I remember feeling rather superior and smug about all this. After all, I had forty acres I could roam over all by myself; I didn’t have to have any lady with a white cap atop her head to watch over me.
Aloof and meeting the jellyfish: My mother and I went to the beach with another lady and her little girl. The little girl and I stared at each other, not knowing how to get along with one another and so we didn’t. I remained aloof. On the beach I saw something that looked like a blob of June-apple jelly. I moved it with my foot and my foot stung the rest of the afternoon, not bad, just enough for me to be acutely aware of the discomfort.
A marriage of sorts: My mother and I rode the streetcar to the Kurtz’s home. Louisa was a lawyer friend of my father’s while Lucile was his unhappy wife. They had a marriage of sorts but my sympathies, even at that age, were with Louis. Lucile was prone to gossip at great length and was constantly downing Louis.
Missing the rag doll: There were a number of people at the Kurtz’s. My mother was playing the piano. Lucile asked her could I have iced tea or milk. My mother said, “Tea.” How I begged her to let me have iced tea as I had never had any before. The answer remained no. When we arrived Granny gave me the doll she had made. A rag doll. How I wish I had it now. With seven different outfits for seven different days. Granny was a painstaking seamstress.
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Honey Privileges
(page 5)
Granddad spoiled the doll for me: The doll was dressed in her Sunday clothes. I took them off and put on the Monday clothes, the dress was a black and white striped with a black bow. I liked that. I took it off and planned to put on the Tuesday dress. Granddad had to go and put in as he always did and eternally had to butt in. “No. No. No! You must wait until tomorrow to put another dress on the doll.” What in heck difference did it make? I put the doll down and I don’t think I ever picked it back up.
The Merry-Go-Round: Poor Granny. Granddad took me to the Fair. Granddad said we were going to ride on the Ferris Wheel. I did not want to. He said we had to. I wanted to ride the merry-go-round. No, he didn’t want to do that. I wanted an ice cream cone, I don’t think I had ever had one but I had had ice cream and liked that, but Granddad insisted I have a soda. I liked the ice cream part of the soda but the fizzy tasted sour. I really didn’t care for the Fair. I went to the Fair again in about 1932. I had a dime to spend. My friend, Edna, and I each rode the merry-go-round. Fun. In 1939 I had a boy friend, Ben. We were double-dating with Ethel and Ralph. The boys did not want to ride the merry-go-round. Ethel and I did. And it was wonderful.
The hole in my father's shoe: Back on the Mountain after Florida and my grandparents, my father met the train at the tiny stop in Summerfield. He was in the wagon with the horse and mule, Beauty and Jack. The world was cold with old snow around and a cold wind and I noticed my father had a hole in the sole of his shoe. I knew that was the only pair of shoes he had. I wished we had not gone to Florida even though I understood the need for my mother to go see her mother.
My fifth birthday party: That Spring I was five. My mother had bought some dark green wool and a tiny swatch of material of soft gray with red and green leaves and black stems printed on it in Jacksonville. She made a dress, one of my favorites, out of the material. The soft gray leafy material was the collar. The first dress I ever remember really thinking of, liking. For the most part I wore overalls and chambray shirts and when younger, beige coveralls with red trim. Clothes were low on my priority system. I wore the dress to my fifth birthday party, the first one I remember having. We had it down in Hemlock Hollow, just north of the Thompson Ford which was about a thousand feet of stream before it fell over Bridal Veil Falls. The Glovers came, Mont and Tiny, and their four children, Jo, Miriam, Malcolm, and Douglas. I have no idea what we had to eat or what the cake was like. All I remember is: I absolutely loved it.
The only place to play baseball: The next year I went to school on my birthday and felt overwhelmed. So many people and all of a sudden. I had been accustomed to my parents and that was it. There were all sorts of big people there: second grade and third grade and even eighth grade. At that place and time there were actually boys there who were 16 years old. They came rather intermittently and I suspect the real reason they came as much as they did was to play baseball. It was the only place in the entire community of Summerfield where one could play. There was little or no play in the homes and certainly not in the church as both churches in the community frowned upon play, contended it was “of the devil,” the Methodist and Seventh Day Adventist.
She has bells on her toes: Some of the “big” girls took a “shine” to me as we rarely had anyone new in the community and I had come in at almost the end of the school year, ergo, I was a novelty. The “big” girls would ride me on their ankles and chant, “She shall have rings on her fingers and bells on her toes and she shall have music wherever she goes.” The teachers at the school had taught them this jingle: Mary Justus, Vera McCampbell, and Mary B. Thompson.
"No fence" law: I was enthralled. First graders got out at noon and at twelve I was dismissed. Started for home and about half a mile from the school as I entered the woods I ran into about a hundred cows. I was not afraid of cows. Or I wasn’t then. But all those cows. I literally turned tail and ran back to the school. At that time there was no “no fence” law. The Valleyites could and did come up to the Mountain in early spring, set fire to our woodlands (no matter who held the deed) to supposedly increase the growing of grass later in the season. They would bring their cattle up in droves. The mountaineers had to fence in their homes, their fields, their gardens to protect them from the Valleyites’ cattle. My father voted, wrote letters, did what he could, all to no avail. Not until 1947 did Tennessee get a “no fence” law and only then because the motorist got rather upset whenever he hit a cow or horse as it increased his insurance premiums and also did damage to his car.
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Honey Privileges
(page 6)
Bud Kilgore was my savior: When I got back to school Miss McCampbell was coming up the walk. She looked at me sternly over her glasses, “Dorothy, what are you doing here? Why aren’t you on your way home?” I was afraid of her — she was so tall and stern. Bud Kilgore, one of the “big” boys, picked me up, settled me astride his neck, “Come on, Little Ray. I’ll take you home.” My hero. My savior. My little six-year-old heart fell in love. Across the eastern schoolyard, over the stile, and here came my mother on Beauty to take me home.
Naming my parents Beebee: It was before I went to school that I named my parents. I have no memory of what I called them up until the time I called them Beebee and Boog. I do remember my father and I were licking the batter from the cake pan. We both especially liked batter and my mother always left a lot in the pan for us. I happened to exclaim, “My mother’s as sweet as a honeybee.” My father responded, “No, she’s as sweet as two honeybees.” “Oh, let’s do call her Bee Bee.” And so it stuck. Everybody knew my mother as Beebee, one syllable. Of course, she was still called Grace by her parents, in-laws, husband, sister, and brother. But I and my gang called her Beebee.
Naming my father Boog: Beebee said she thinks I named my father Boog because she would call him in from wherever when it was time for lunch. She’d call him Snug, short for Sugar, and she decided I did not understand her and thought she was saying Boog and so I named my father Boog. It also stuck.
Dr. Lillian Johnson founds a school in the boondocks:^1 There was a Dr. Lillian Johnson from Memphis who came to the mountain. I don’t know why. She was a librarian at Vassar before or after I first met her and also taught law at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. A woman of small stature with mounds of snow white hair. She bought property in Summerfield next door to the Glovers and decided what Summerfield needed was a good school. I am sure she was so right as I have heard that the teacher before she came was a pedantic, ill-humored person who knew he was always right. Dr. Johnson went to the Grundy County School Board and told them in effect, “I will build a school in Summerfield and I will pay the teachers but I want full rein as to whom the teachers will be.” Of course, the School Board was only too happy as they undoubtedly considered Summerfield a waif and they were delighted to be rid of the financial and otherwise responsibility.
May Justus and Verna McCambell run the school: Dr. Johnson knew a couple Presbyterian missionaries up in the hills of eastern Kentucky. Asked them to come here and teach in this school. May Justus and Vera McCampbell. OK. Two years. May Justus wrote 66 books, mostly children’s books and taught school from 1925 to 1938. The world did beat a path to her door. I think we all totally adored her and she became well known in literary circles.
May Justus made all the difference: Vera McCampbell was a hanger-on but she never knew it. She always thought she was Miss Justus’s equal. Never. Never. She couldn’t begin to touch Miss Justus as a teacher or as a friend. Vera McCampbell had a stroke, lingered three months in the Sewanee Hospital with Miss Justus at her side every day and died in the early ’70s.
Regrets: I went to see May Justus one Sunday afternoon in ’89 or ’90. A pleasant time. I got up to go. “Oh, please stay a little longer. We’re having such a good time talking.” I replied, "Miss Justus, I can’t. I have to get home and feed Beebee her supper and tuck her in for the night.” Miss Justus went into the Franklin County Hospital the next morning for a mastectomy. Two days later she threw a blood clot. Instant death. I do wish I had stayed a little longer.
Bootstraping in the backwoods: Miss Justus bought plywood, a jigsaw, and paint. The boys cut out lawn ornaments and painted them. She got good quality rags from whomever she could, the girls cut them into strips, and made round or oval rugs out of the rags. Misses Justus and McCampbell had a bank covered with honeysuckle vines and we would go pull the vines from the ground making not a dent in the abundance of the hillside. Boiled the long honeysuckle in a lye solution, washed the stems, then made honeysuckle vases of the vines. The girls brought whatever jars the classes from their homes that could be spared to use as vases to put into the decorative honeysuckle. Miss Justus used the money thus made — she sent the articles made in the Summerfield School to friends she had met through her books — for a soup bone from Mr. Francis’ grocery store in Monteagle. For the most part the vegetables were provided by her.
^1 It’s not an exaggeration to say that I owe my life to Dr. Lillian Johnson—something I never would have known until reading this page. What I did know was the profound impact May Justus had on my mother, and by extension, on me. My mother spoke often of how much May Justus influenced her and the other children in her classroom. She loved her time in elementary school, contrasting it sharply with her struggles in high school, where she felt surrounded by inadequate teachers.
In contrast, my uncle, who is nine years younger than my mother, never had May Justus as a teacher. By the time he started school, she was no longer teaching, and he despised the whole experience. My uncle led an unhappy life and raised three children who were similarly discontent. Perhaps it wouldn’t have mattered if he’d had May Justus, or perhaps it would have made all the difference. We’ll never know.
...to be continued...
