Hogs, Mules, and Yellow Dogs: Growing Up on a Mississippi Subsistence Farm

The Avera I Knew

39 The Avera I Knew Stately and taciturn he stood there, whistle in hand, watching them. Facing the wood-frame Mutual Rights schoolhouse from the front, they formed two lines according to class, waiting to march in when he gave the signal. A young man, already gray, his face reflected not only worries of being principal but of being community leader, caretaker of his parents, and father of four. The Great Depression had set in, and the children of Avera’s jobless mill workers bore down on his conscience. He felt an unusual responsibility to lead, to educate, and to give hope. Sensitive to the cold, on this raw February day in 1932, he was appropriately dressed: union suit, wool shirt and trousers, sweater and appropriate jacket, and a tie. Underneath it all was a tar plaster, worn to ward off colds and the flu. Before appearing at school he had already milked the cow, slopped the hogs at the little barn across the road from the teacher’s home, a hundred yards diagonally distant from the schoolhouse. Breakfast and coffee were routine before starting the day’s work. Standing there his thoughts must have flashed back to his own youth. Education was a rare commodity in Old Washington when he began school in the 1890s. Still a teenager, he was driving oxen and snaking logs from the Leaf River swamp when his father suddenly announced one day that his son must go to college. He hadn’t been prepared for what apparently was a desultory decision. Resisting, he said that he preferred to remain at home, help on the farm, and continue in the timber business. Charles Hillman, not to be disputed, replied, “You’re going to Clarke College at Newton. When you’re finished, if you want to return here, you’ll be a better ox driver.” What insight from an uneducated old man. That’s the way I got into this business, and by the Lord’s calling, he thought to himself. Blame Beginnings 40 it on the Lord. A thin smile crossed his face as he often related that story to us at home; and I, who was in the school line that morning, could read his mind by his countenance when he raised the whistle to his lips. This was my father, Joseph Levi Jefferson Hillman, “Mister Hillman,” to the schoolchildren across Greene County. His wife herded the children into class lines, cheerfully calling each by name with “Line up, line up.” Still thin in her thirties, she was strong, energetic, and determined, and had that morning dressed three of her own children, fed and hustled them uphill to the schoolhouse , and directed them to the appropriate line. She wore a self-made gingham dress, and a heavy wool sweater covered her broad shoulders before falling to her hips. The cold was Joseph Levi Hillman at age twenty-two. The Avera I Knew 41 no problem for her warm-natured physiology. Always the first out of bed at the teacher’s home, she built fires in kitchen and fireplace, directed the dressing of the children, “got herself together” for the school day, ate breakfast, and then picked up from a side table school materials she had prepared the night before. Barely twenty, she had received her teaching certificate at Georgia State Normal, and was enchanted by escaping the family’s small peach farm, having heard her two brothers talk of Paris, where they spent time during the Great War. Responding to a job notice in a Mississippi teachers’ magazine, she was surprised and delighted that she had landed the position. It was now more than a decade since she had met Mr. Hillman at Pineville. I was seven years old when my parents moved to Avera, a village crossroads in northern Greene County. We occupied the teacher’s home at Mutual Rights School where Father became principal in 1930. Avera had been a boomtown prior to and during World War I, but was fading fast from its glory days. The crash of 1929 accelerated its decline, sounding the town’s death knell. Like many sawmill villages, Avera was on the way to becoming a ghost town. In the early 1900s Mutual Rights, a grade school, was built on a hill near Avera Methodist church, south and east of the emerging village. The school quickly evolved to service the community, and buildings were constructed...