Mrs. Dara H. Owens

School days were much different from now.  I went to one room school called Ebenezer, and Mrs. Amy L. Davis was my first teacher.  Miss Irene Davis, her daughter, also taught me.  I remember Miss Lottie… she learned me how to work buttonholes and how to sew. Classes I had in school were history, ‘rithmetic, reading and geography.  The classes didn’t go no further than the seventh grade.  If you wanted to go farther in school, we had to go to a city.  Didn’t have no high school ‘round here.  My mother and brothers wanted me to go to Norfolk, but I got married.  We went to school for seven months a year; four months at first ‘cause they want the black children to stay at home and work. We had little parties at school, and we had nights for exercises when we closed the school.  The white children would ride a wagon with a top on it to school, and we children would stop the horse or mule and put grass in its mouth for meanness.  The children on the wagon would be scared of us.  All of my school days, I walked, but toward the last, if it was a rainy day, my daddy used to come and get us. 

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In early days, my mother did not ‘low me to go to dances unless the school give ‘em.  I couldn’t go to no other; we didn’t have no hall, nothing like that.  But we could go when they have somethin’ at school, and she always go ‘long with us, and we didn’t dance like they dance now.  We would have set dances… catching on hands, going ‘round and ‘round, and I enjoyed it very much at that time.  We danced to music played on a guitar by somebody in the community.  That was our music.  We didn’t have no harps, nothin’ like that. 

The book Many Voices was published in 1986 as part of a project of the Interview Committee appointed in 1984 for the Isle of Wight County 350th Sesquitricentennial Celebration. The Oral History project taped the recollections of our older citizens and developed their stories from the transcriptions. Many Voices gave a permanent record of the previously unrecorded family life and history in Isle of Wight County. These excerpts take only the discussions dealing with the education memories of some of those citizens.