Goat Knob Grammar School

Goat Knob Grammar School by James L. Mathis I was an odd hillbilly at one time in my early life, and being odd in the hills is not something I would advise a young boy to be if he had a choice in the matter. I did not have a choice since my parents had taken me to Battle Creek, Michigan a few months after I was born at my mother's old home place in East Tennessee. I was reintroduced to the hills five years later when the Great Depression forced many a migrant from the hills to return because of economic necessity. My father was one of those people who suddenly became jobless. We moved in with my maternal grandmother in the house where I was born, and a few months later I began my formal education at Goat Knob Grammar School. Goat Knob was a one-room school with two teachers for eight grades; four grades on each side of a room which was somewhat divided by a huge pot-bellied stove. If your seat was close to the stove in the wintertime, you roasted, but if you sat in one of the far corners, you froze. That was just part of reality. The shabby, frame school house which had been painted white many years before stood on a rounded hill just off a graveled road. I suppose the "Knob" part ofthe name came from the hill, but I never learned the origin of the "Goat" part. I suspect that someone in the distant past had raised goats on that little hill. Here, on my first day of school at Goat Knob, I learned painfully what it was like to be different among people who had known almost no outsiders for many generations. An outsider always is a little suspect in the hills, but I truly was odd in two specific ways: my dress and my speech. I had come directly from a Yankee city, and as was to be expected, I was dressed in all that I had, Yankee city clothes for a 5-year-old boy. To this day I have not forgiven my parents entirely for letting me in for such misery, even though I know that they had no choice in the mat64 ter. I had to wear whatever clothes I had when we left Michigan, since there was no money to buy new ones, in fact, there was no money to buy anything. What I wore to school on that fateful day was a pullover blouse with a sailor-boy collar, knickers, long stockings, and high shoes. That sounds nice, you say? Lucky boy to be able to dress so well in 1930? Let me tell you how lucky and how nice it was. I was the only boy in that entire school with shoes on his feet, and as I later learned, I probably was one of the few boys that owned a pair of shoes at all. I can hear until this day the horrible drum-like thudding of my shoe heels on the hard, oiled oak boards of that school house floor. That alone would have attracted every eye in that school to me as straight as a bee goes to the hive, but to top it off, the shoes squeaked every time I took a step. If that sounds like a bad beginning to my career in education, wait until you hear the rest ofthe story. Hillbilly boys did not wear long stockings the first week in September, in fact, they did not wear long stockings at any time of the year. Girls did, but boys did not. I was introduced to that bit of very useful information at the same time that I was educated to the fact that boys did not wear bloomers, and you will have to admit that knickers do look a lot like bloomers. I would have been just as well off ifI had shown up in a kilt. A kilt might have been better; at least I would not have been accused ofparading around in girls' underwear. My pretty, blue blouse with the wide, white collar was frosting on the cake, but...