CHAPTER III SURPRISES OF THE FIRST SESSION

The opening of the day schools to them was first considered, but the day schools were already crowded with children, and anyway, illiterates, more than any other class, are chained to labor by day. Then came the thought of opening the schools at night, but bad roads with innumerable gullies, high hills and unbridged streams were obstacles to overcome. Besides, the county had been, at one time, a feud county and the people were not accustomed to venturing out much after night. It was decided to have the schools on moonlight nights, and let the moon light them on their way to school.

The teachers of the county were called together and the conditions laid before them. They were asked to volunteer to teach at night those whom the schools of the past had left behind. To their everlasting credit be it said that not one of those teachers expressed a doubt or offered an excuse, but each and every one of them, without a single exception, volunteered to teach at night, after she had taught all day, and to canvass her district in advance to inform the people of the purpose of these schools and to urge them all to attend.

This preliminary canvass was made on Labor Day, September 4, 1911. The teachers of Rowan County celebrated the holiday by going out into the highways and byways to gather in to school all who needed to learn. They went into every farm-house and hovel, inviting both educated and uneducated to attend.

On September 5, the brightest moonlight night, it seemed to me, that the world had ever known, the moonlight schools opened for their first session. We had estimated the number that would attend, and an average of three to each school, one hundred and fifty in the entire county was the maximum set.

We waited with anxious hearts. The teachers had volunteered, the schools had been opened, the people had been invited but would they come? They had all the excuses that any toil-worn people ever had. They had rugged roads to travel, streams without bridges to cross, high hills to climb, children to lead and babes to carry, weariness from the hard day’s toil; but they were not seeking excuses, they were seeking knowledge, and so they came. They came singly or hurrying in groups, they came walking for miles, they came carrying babes in arms, they came bent with age and leaning on canes, they came twelve hundred strong!

There were overgrown boys who had dropped out of school at an early age and had been ashamed to re-enter the day school and be classified with the tiny tots. These came to catch up again. There were maidens who had been deprived of education, through isolation, invalidism or some other cause, but who felt that there was something better for them in life than ignorance. There were women who had married in childhood, practically, as is so much the wont of mountain girls--but who all their lives had craved that which they knew to be their inherent right--their mental development. By their sides were their husbands, men who had been humiliated when they had made their mark in the presence of the educated and when forced to ask the election officers to cast a vote for them for the candidates of their choice. There were middle-aged men who had seen a hundred golden opportunities pass them by because of the handicap of illiteracy, whose mineral, timber and material stores, as well as their time and labor, were in the control of the educated men, making them but beggars, as it were, on the bounty of those whom they enriched. There were women whose children had all grown up and vanished from the home, some of them into the far West, and when the spoken word and the hand-clasp had ceased there could be no heart-to-heart communication, for the third person as an interpreter between mother and child is but a poor medium at best. These and other folk--some half educated and some more--made up these schools.

“Just to learn to read my Bible!” was the cry of many a patriarch and many a withered dame.

“Just to write my children with my own hand, and to read their letters with my own eyes!” was the cry of the mother’s heart.

“Just to escape from the shame of making my mark!” was the appeal of the middle-aged man.

“Just to have a chance with the other folk--to be something and to do something in the world!” was the expressed desire of youth and maid.

The youngest student was aged eighteen, the oldest eighty-six. It was a scene to bring tears to the eyes, but surely one to make the heart rejoice, to see those hoary-headed old people and those robust young people seated at their desks studying together, or standing in a row in class to spell, or lined up at the blackboard to solve problems or to write.

Many of them learned to write their names the first evening, and such rejoicing as there was over this event! One old man on the shady side of fifty shouted for joy when he learned to write his name. “Glory to God!” he shouted, “I’ll never have to make my mark any more!”

Some were so intoxicated with joy that they wrote their names in frenzied delight on trees, fences, barns, barrel staves and every available scrap of paper; and those who possessed even meager savings, drew the money out of its hiding place and deposited it in the bank, wrote their checks and signed their names with pride. Soon letters began to go from hands that had never written, before, to loved ones in other counties and in far distant states, and usually the first letter of each student came to the County School Superintendent. In a movement full of romance and heroism, there is no incident more romantic or more delightful to record than the fact that the first three letters that ever came out of the moonlight schools came in this order: the first, from a mother who had children absent in the West; the second, from the man who “would give twenty years of his life if he could read and write”; and the third from the boy who would forget his ballads “before anybody come along to set ’em down.” This answered the anxious question in our hearts as to whether the moonlight schools had met the need of those who had made the appeal.