Pecans and Homeschooling
Whether the lessons are intended or not, homeschooling has always been an unavoidable phenomenon. If we’re lucky, the lessons we learn from our families are useful and the information spills back out into the universe in good ways. Many years ago, I was a counselor at a Girl Scout national event hosted by my home council. The event was called “Y’all Come.” It centered around the arts and crafts of the Appalachian mountains and piedmont areas of North Carolina where I grew up. After the first couple of days we had done a lot with the girls—everything from cabin cookery to making lap dulcimers with the two drone strings used to mock the sound of the traditional Scottish bagpipe. I think I was answering a question about beekeeping or native plants—or maybe it was about bees and native plants. Anyway, one of the girls asked me what my major in college was. I don’t recall what my major was at that time—or whether I even had one. It didn’t matter, what I said didn’t satisfy her. She pressed me further, “You know so much about everything—where did you learn all of it?” For a moment, I thought about the things I’d shared with the girls over the course of the event, the questions I’d answered. Finally I gave her the only response that felt right to me: “my parents.” She seemed a little disappointed, but it was the truth. My parents were interested in all kinds of things. From them I learned about what we explored together and how to keep exploring.
I also learned from my extended family, especially my dad’s, because they lived nearby and we visited them often. I was in and out of his sister’s houses nearly every weekend when I was growing up. They fed me food, sewed my clothes, cleaned red mud off my shoes and let me play unsupervised in their huge yards. When my brother-in-law had his first child and I realized I would be an aunt, I wondered what to do. For a moment I was stymied, I told my father’s sister Mary, but then I it occurred to me that I had role models—I had this job covered I told her. Mary grinned.
One of my father’s sisters married a farmer. From my experiences at the farm I learned about the sweetness of cantaloupe in the summer and how to clean a “mess” of collard greens. A “mess” of collard greens, by the way, will overflow a huge double sink by more than half and then some. I learned that hogs are bigger than anyone could ever imagine and their piglets smaller than seem possible to survive, especially with such steamroller moms. White-feathered turkeys aren’t very smart in large masses. A cucumber just picked from the garden tastes much better than one that’s been sitting around for a while. You can always find one more pecan under the tree. Steamed summer squash melts in you mouth whether you put butter on it or not, and you can run hot water over fresh sweet corn and eat it without cooking it. Plus some dogs, well, you just had to admit it—Sandy was the best dog on the farm—ever.
Sandy was hard to get close to. My dad said it was because of her puppies — and she had puppies every year. The first years they looked mostly like her, a light-colored, slightly-bulit, long-haired collie mix, but in subsequent years they changed. One year they came out looking like Airedale terriers and I think her last litter, or perhaps the litter of one of her pups emerged as huge, shy chow dogs. The two my cousin kept were named Hoover (because he ate so much) and, I believe, Four ( because at first my cousin numbered the puppies and this one never received a proper name—I may not be remembering that much-loved dog’s correct number and I apologize to him).
You could tell Sandy was the best dog on the farm because she had the puppies and because she went everywhere in the truck. She greeted my uncle and my cousins when they came back to the main house and barn from anywhere she did not travel, and she led the barking. Sandy was it—the kind of dog authors wrote whole books about and that starred in Disney movies. I wasn’t part of her sacred circle because I was a city girl, but I could admire her from afar and knew that she was the very one. I longed to pet her, but she growled at me and kept her distance.
Through the years, on my aunt and uncle’s farm, were also a variety of farm hands. During the final years, before I moved away to start my own life, were a pair of high school girls that my uncle swore were more dependable and worked harder than any of the young men he ever hired. The young women continued to work for him during the summers they were in college. I never asked my uncle whether he paid them the same amount as the lazy young men he complained about.
Earlier on, there was also one young, African American man, and this is where we come to the things your family teaches you things that they don’t intend to teach you. This is one of the ways I learned that black lives matter
Sadly I don’t remember the young farm hand’s name. I believe I was a teenager then, or just starting college and fairly self-absorbed, so for the purpose of this tale, I’m going to call him “John.” That’s what it seems his name was to me—John— but I don’t know that for a fact. In any case, one summer evening, when my parents and I were having dinner with my aunt and uncle and one of their sons, my uncle was extolling his young black farmhand’s virtues, which included a litany of behaviors illustrating how John “knew his place.” Basically, my uncle was recounting slave-like behaviors: “John knows never to set foot in this house, he says yes sir and no sir,” etc, etc. Everyone at the table was silent—except for my aunt. She was squirming in her seat, saying “now” and shaking her head. She clearly wanted my uncle to stop. She was not comfortable with what her husband was espousing. This made me hopeful. I was self-absorbed, but not so much that I didn’t know equal rights for all actually meant equal rights for all, but I wasn’t strong or skilled enough to confront my family in a gentle but firm manner. I stayed quiet and hoped I didn’t chew a hole through the inside of my cheek or stare one through the dish of mashed potatoes right into the table top.
Mercifully the phone rang. My cousin hopped up to answer it and my uncle stopped his zealous recitation of the ways John acknowledged his lower status on the farm. The oldest of my aunt and uncle’s children had called to tell them that her daughter had driven her car into a ditch and was stuck on the side of the highway. Quickly my uncle sent my cousin to get one of the farmhands to take a truck and pull his granddaughter’s car out of the ditch. The screen door slammed shut behind my cousin as he ran down the steps and toward the two young men lounging outside the barn.
My uncle, who never could sit still, rose up from his seat at the table. He was huge. As a child, I thought the muscles in his arms were the size of watermelons. He leaned out the screen door and hollered at his son, “No, not those idiots!” He waved one of those watermelon-muscled arms in the opposite direction my cousin had headed, “Go get John!”
If John acted in the way my uncle expected hm to act on the farm, as if he “knew his place,” I learned that day that my uncle was also very well aware of John’s place on the farm. And it was smack dab at the head of the class, taking care of what my uncle treasured most in the world, his granddaughter. My uncle’s actions transcended his dinner time speech and positioned John well ahead of those idiot white boys who were useless and whose work habits were soon to be far surpassed by a couple of high school girls, whether the girls were compensated fairly or not.
That day I saw my uncle knew competency and trustworthiness have nothing to do with the tint of one’s skin. His rearing simply left him no way to praise John, so my uncle’s admiration came out crooked, but, for me, his actions shattered his words and they fell to the earth as just that much more debris to shift to the side when we dug around for pecans.
The man my father’s sister married was tall and strong, warm and generous. Everyone who passed through his yard received food. He knew that girls—his granddaughter and those two young, very competent farm hands—were important and that John mattered. I carry with me these lessons I learned from him and the excitement in his face when he showed us each new strain of cantaloupe he grew and the joy he exuded when he filled our trunk with produce. I have one niece and one nephew, my brother-in-law’s kids. During the course of their lives, I hope they know at least one dog like Sandy and when I speak they find the pecans and leave the rest under the tree to rot.