Q: Good morning, this is Otelia Crawley-Hendricks, a member of the Schoolhouse Museum Committee and I’m here to interview Mrs. Louise Bailey. Tell me how old are you?
A: As I tell everybody my age is 12/20/15.
Q: 12/20/15, all right, so that was the year when you were born?
A: 15
Q: You’re 15?
A: 12/20/15- 12, then the day, 20---15 is the year, that’s why I tell everybody I was born 12/20/15.
Q: Now where do you live?
A: I’ve been a member of Main Street nearly 60 years.
Q: What area of Isle of Wight did you grow up in?
A: Isle of Wight County.
Q: But what areas?
A: Between Battery Park and Rushmere.
Q: Do you have sisters or brothers?
A: Nobody now. I had 6 sisters and 5 brothers. 6 and 5 is 12 with me that’s 12.
Q: 12. Yeah. There were 12 of you at one time?
A: Yeah!
Q: What school, 2 or 3 room school did you attend? What elementary school did you start out in?
A: ____Arthur’s Hall down at Rising Star Church, on the ground of Rising Star Baptist Church, which is on Battery Park Road.
Q: What was the name of it?
A: Was the Rising Star School.
Q. Did your other brothers and sisters also attend that school too?
A: Yeah. They attended but they were older, lot older that me. I had two brothers younger than me, they attended also. All the children went to the same school. But I was the only one that, 2 of us that went to high school, my youngest brother and myself.
Q. What grades were taught there at that school?
A. Went to the 7th grade. We graduated then you came to Smithfield, Isle of Wight Training School in the 8th grade, 8th 9th 10th and 11th. They didn’t have the 12th grade when I was there.
Q. How many classrooms or teachers were there? How many classrooms did you have at the school? How many classrooms, at your elementary school?
A. 1 teacher. They had to teach everybody. She had about 30 children and she had to teach everybody of them. She had to come up after the 7th grade, one in the 6th, one in the 5th.
Q. How did she do that? How did she arrange it?
A. She sat us in groups in that one little room. Then she would start us to do our work at ____ She would start the little ones. They had their little things to do. All of the children had to keep quiet while she was doing the other classes. We didn’t have but one little room and that was downstairs and Arthur was upstairs and had another room on the back where we would use to hang our coats and keep our lunch.
Q. What was the name of some of your teachers? Can you recall any of their names?
A. Yeah. Let me see, I can start out with the lady name Denise Crawley from Smithfield. Her husband had a furniture business…Mr. Edward Crawley. Mrs. Edward Crawley was our teacher for a while. Sometime we only had a teacher from October to May.
Q: Ah, what happened during the other times then?
A: We didn’t have a teacher. In September the farmer were getting up the crops. See therefore they didn’t send their children to school and they didn’t open up the schools until late. And then if the weather got bad, you didn’t go to school cause everybody got to walk. We didn’t go cause we had to walk to school…and if the weather was bad we had to stay home.
Q. Do you have any other information about the history of your school, when it started or when did it stop?
A. No, I don’t have the history. See all my sisters, they were much older and they had done gone through school. They had gone and got married by that time, by the time I was in school. I think what they really started was in the church itself, in Rising Star Church.
Q. Do you have any idea what year this might have been?
A. That would have been 19…that was 10 years before 1920 that would have been 1910. I can’t tell you, I don’t know. You know when you are little like that you don’t pay that much attention. And all those old people have gone.
Q. Did you have any special jobs to do before you went to school at your home in the morning?
A. Yeah. We had to get up, straighten up the room before you go. We walked 2 ½ miles from the house. We walked 2 ½ miles everyday to go to school. So you didn’t have much time to do much. But you had to do work when you got back home from school.
Q. What sort of chores did you have to do?
A. Like get in wood. Get water in the house. And finish straightening up, cleaning up. Then you had to go in the kitchen to help your mama out. You know, help her get the dinner ready or something.
Q. What about at school, once you arrived?
A. At the school?
Q. Yeah. Did you have a special job or assignment that the girls had to do or the boys had to do?
A. Na. Because see many schools got there before 9 o’clock…and it was cold when they got there at 9. Sometimes you got to school you had to make the fire. Nobody had to make no coffee.
Q. So who make the fire?
A. The first one to git there.
Q. Was student you mean?
A. Yeah?
Q. First child?
A. Yeah!
Q. So where was the teacher then?
A. She coming to school. She lived way up the road or lived in the neighborhood in some house, about a ½ mile or a mile from the school. She had to come to school
Q. So what was the name of some of the other teachers?
A: We had the Bowman girl and when she finished the 7th grade she came down here and taught us for a while. Marie, her name was Marie. I remember her. She was a young girl. The state didn’t pay any teachers for us. The people had to get their own teachers. And they would get the girls that finished the 7th grade. Well they could teach us how to read and write and spell. See.
Q. Did anyone pay, give them something?
A. Well they were hiring. So the community, the parents, pulled in to feed them. But then later on then the county started hiring teachers. They paid them $50 a month. They had to leave the community and they lived with some of these peoples in their homes would take them and I think they would charge bout $10. You know they didn’t have but 50, so they just gave them $10. Well the one that really stand out real good was the last one I had was Evangeline Burdette. Well anyway she married, married Early Blount. She had been with for a couple several years before she married him…and she stayed with Mrs. Whitley. She had a daughter name Margaret. She was Mrs. Margaret’s people. She was Blount first then she married this Mr. Whitley. And they lived back in the woods from the church. There was farm back there and that’s where she stayed. She would walk through there to school. She stayed there for a time. The teachers did not have no, what they called them--certificates. They had no four years of college. Nobody did had four years of college.
Q. How did they get their certificate; did they have to go away?
A. They’d go to summer school or to Petersburg or somewhere like that. I don’t think Norfolk State had started. They could go to Hampton, but see that was a private school. So they couldn’t, didn’t have the money to go to Hampton. That was a college school. Once in a while they would have enough money to go to Hampton? But they’d go to Petersburg as the most essential place to go to school.
Q. Do you recall how long the people had to go to school?
A: Sometimes it took them, when you go in the summer, after the school closed. See you went 2 years before you could get a job.
Q: Okay.
A: And then they would give you a certificate and you would go get a job. And then in the summer you go back up there and work so many weeks. Sometimes they’d be teaching 3-4 years before you got your degree.
Q: What kind of subjects?
A: We had reading, writing and arithmetic. Some of the children did have no books period.
Q: Do you recall the names of some of the books?
A: No. I know there was an arithmetic book. Sometimes we had 4-5 subjects. We did not have any extra amount at no school. We had a lady to come in the middle of the week. I had a teacher; Mrs. Georgia Tyler would come down there. She had a job and she would come and show us how to cut out soap and teach the boys how to take a piece of wood and make butter paddles for school, rolling pins. They had to crave them out with their hands with a knife. Then the League taught them how to weave baskets with honeysuckle vines…and the girls were taught how to embroidery. We would go to Ben Franklin, not Ben Franklin but the Five and Dime store and get these scarves and stamps or either you would buy a pack of the embroidery stamps. You’d carry them home. You’d iron and pick out the pattern you want to iron it on the pillowcases and things that your momma had done taught you how to make. We did not bought nothing. We didn’t have store brought nothing. Some of them had shoes that there the only thing we brought. People made most of their clothes. My mother did I mean.
Q: What was your favorite subject?
A: I don’t know, I had to learn them all. I had to get a passing grade on them. I couldn’t do much with the history because we were not around with the people that you read about in history, like presidents and things, other than Jesus Christ. We never saw Jesus Christ but we could remember what other people told us about Jesus Christ.
Q: Did you all have any primer books to learn about Dick and Jane?
A: Yes. There was Jack and Jill in the primer. The first book we had. Jack and Jill went up the hill. How about the…
Q: What about Spot, the cat or dog?
A: Yeah. How about the chicken with the rain and the cloud or the hen and the rain or something like that?
Q: Tell me about a typical school day. Start from the very first moment you stepped on that property. Reminisce about the things you all would do.
A: When we 5 years old, the teachers would let back then anybody who had 30% of the time send their child to school they let them come in. There was no ruling. But you could not get up in a class; it had to be the superintendent to put you up there.
Q. Did you all have devotions when you first come in?
A. Yeah! We had to pray and sing. And we use to have to say the Pledge Allegiance. That was the teacher’s idea; she brought that in. They did not have a meeting like they do now, meetings where everybody had to this and that. They brought in what they had been taught what they learned when they were in college.
Q: How many recesses did you have in school?
A: One, 12 o’clock. Everybody was supposed to each their lunch then, but those kids, some of those boys ate their lunch before they got to school. 2 ½ miles, they ate that lunch.
Q: So what did they do when it became lunchtime?
A: They would beg their sisters or whoever kept their lunch. So what their parents used to do: the oldest child was responsible for the lunch for the younger ones. That was the only reason the little ones got anything to eat. We was rushing in the morning and did not have time to eat what you were ought to eat. And a lot of time you did have anything period. So by the time you get to school, you just go on and eat it.
Q: Tell me about the classroom, what did they look like? Did you have anything on the walls? Was it just plain or ABCs?
A: Yeah. We learned to do our arithmetic with cards. You had to put the 3 and the 5 underneath it and then you would draw and then you had to do it again. She would hold it up and say 3 and 2 are 5. You’d hold your hand up and tell the teacher.
Q: Did the teacher make the cards?
A: Yes, she made them.
Q: Now days they are already made.
A: All the books and everything! We had to buy our books. Even through high school we did not get no books free. See, I graduated from high school in 1935.
Q: So the parents had to pay for the books?
A: Yes. We went to the courthouse, I think, to order the books…. and they would sell us the books the white children had used the year before.
Q: So they were not new books?
A: Not all the time. Once in a while you’d be lucky enough to get some know ones. Then what the parents would do if they knew a family that had a child that had passed to the 6th grade, the Negro children had gone through the 6th grade, we bought their books. The blacks brought their books. Everybody had to by their books but see Mr. Hall and them at the courthouse…some of the blacks had enough money to buy new books for their children. They would try to make sure the people who had the books before had not done a lot of writing in the books.
Q: Could the black people sell the books back to the county?
A: No, sell them back to the county, ain’t nobody going to buy nothing. First place the black people would, if they got them they would pass them on to other children in that neighborhood, in that school. The black people had a way of helping each other with the little bit that they had. If they had a piece of bread they would give you a piece of it.
Q: How long did the school year last, you all went to school from what period of time?
A: Sometime they would start earlier, maybe in September, but in October--the pigs, see they had to feed the pigs, especially all the boys, the farmers had to keep the children home.... and if they had girls, because the farmers weren’t able to hire people, nobody was hiring. They used their own family to do it, pick cotton or whatever was going on.
Q: Tell me about the heating system in your schoolhouse.
A: Well that’s a laugh! The heating system was a little tiny heater, a heater, sitting in the middle of the floor or middle of the building where the chimney was.
Q: You had two heaters?
A: No. One, and sometimes that didn’t work. You know what? The peoples at Rising Star, now I’m talking about Rising Star now, cause I don’t know about other Black schools, had some woods back of us, beside it. We were allowed to go out there and cut some wood out of those trees with axes. Not any big tree but if the limbs fall, we were allowed to take the axes and cut them and put them in the stove.
Q: You used mostly wood no coal?
A: No, not in a tin heater! You don’t put coal in a tin heater.
Q: Tell me about a tin heater.
A: You ain’t never seen one? Well it looked like a tin heater with 4 legs on it and a top. You turn the top up and put the wood in the top of the stove. And you had a little cut off in the chimney to cut the heat back and there was a little weight or something down in the front you would open to regulate the heat. I’ll tell you about the elementary stuff but someone else had to tell you about the high school stuff. I walked from Battery Park to Smithfield High School five days a week. I’ll take that back, on Mondays I would walk. But my sister had gotten married and she lived out near Pow3ell’s Corner, Battery Park Corner. Mama would let me go stay with her all the week and come home Saturday morning. Then I would walk from Battery Park Road, up Church Street and walk up Main Street and walk up wherever was the Training School.
Q: Tell me about what kind of light did you all have in the school? Lamps or...?
A: Lanterns. We used to have what I would call a meeting at night, we called that entertainment. That is something like trying to have something to raise money: cake sales and games you’d play like the girls would make an apron and she’d make a tie and the boy would pick that tie and go and match that apron and she would be his girl, his date, for the night. He could dance with her…and then with lunch boxes, the girl would have lunch boxes and would fix lunches in a box, and the boy would eat lunch with that girl. And she would tell him what color her box was going to be. This was at Rising Star but when I got to Smithfield I don’t remember doing that.
Q: Were the desks arranged so that the light would come through the window? Or were there lots of windows in your classroom?
A: No there were no lots there, about two.
Q: How did you get water?
A: From a well from the church.
Q: Did you have a coatroom?
A: I told you we had that room back there where we put our coats on the table when we came in with you lunch. And that’s when you got there somebody would eat your lunch, steal your lunch.
Q: In your classroom, were there any decorations on the wall or ABC’s or numbers or anything like that?
A: The teacher would find or come cross something like a picture of somebody like the president. She would put that on the wall to show us about the president. That is how we were introduced to different people.
Q: What about ABCs?
A: We had them across the board. They won’t printed now. They were in long hand.
Q: Longhand? What they call that, cursive writing?
A: We used to call it block writing.
Q: What did you all write on mostly in the classroom, paper?
A: Finally give you a board. Somebody worked at legal.
Q: Before you got the board what did you have to write on?
A: I don’t know. By the time I got there they had got the blackboard, an eraser and crayon.
Q: What is you most favorable, positive memory of your school days?
A: My favorite memory was when the school closing. You had to learn a part to do on the stage, recite a poem or something like that. Poor me, I would forget mine. I would get up there and get nervous and I would forget it and I never did remember it after that.
Q: When you say the stage, tell me about the stage.
A: You had to go in the church. All the activities were done in the church.
Q: Is there anything funny or positive that you remember about a teacher? How did the teacher get to school?
A: She walked, I told you. Back there in 1931 that was when I was in high school. Down there in the country, she walked from Smithfield even after she got married she walked from the drug store to Battery Park unless here husband happened to get off and go and drive her down in the car or truck or something. Borrowed her daddy’s truck or something and bring her back. But she walked.
Q: Is there any other childhood memories that you can recall that was not connected with your school?
A: Going to Sunday school. Go to see some of my friends on Sunday. We did not visit during the week. See they had church every other Sunday, not every Sunday. But we had Sunday school every Sunday. And the Sunday we did not have church we could go and stop or one of the children would go home with me. We did not have many friends, there was not many down there. I had one or two.
Q: Was there anything special in your life that you would like the committee members to know about? Did you get married or have children? Do you have grandchildren?
A: Yeah. I did not get married until I finished high school. Two years after I finished high school I got married. No, I did not have any children but I looked after my niece and the neighborhood children. When I got married and I lived in a little house right off the street where Mr. Tynes is right now. Then my husband and I went to Richmond and stayed a year and a half or so. Cause he went up there to chauffer for this family. Then we came back home. And then we bought this place where I live at now.
Q: I’d like to thank you very much for coming by and sharing some of your schoolhouse memory days with the Schoolhouse Museum Committee. Thank you.