Mrs. Easter Barnes

I was born January 3, 1905, and I have lived all my life in Carrsville.  School was right good, but I tell you, I never got to go to school a whole week in my life.  If I go in the morning, I would have to come home in the evening.  See, I was the oldest one of eight children, and my mother went off and washed, and everybody was there, and then I had to stay home with the babies.  Then, after I got big enough, I went and helped her wash. My school was right here by Pulaski Baptist Church located on Highway 58. It was just a straight building, you know, with no partitions in it, and it had one door at the front where you come in. Grades one through seven were taught there to 75 to 100 children. Some of the classes had 18 or 20 of us there, and they couldn’t get around to every class everyday. Students were likely to have arithmetic ‘bout twice a week, or maybe reading ‘bout twice a week and then spelling. Sometimes we’d have spelling more often than we do the reading.

I remember Reverend S. M. Daughtrey, (affectionately called Cousin Sollie) as one of our teachers. He was a teacher and a preacher, and he was dead set on rules.  He made the children walk the chalk line. And then we had one lady from Suffolk, Hattie Williams I believe, who taught us. Cousin Sollie—one day one of the boys did something, and he got after that boy, and he ran out of the room, and he went down behind him—ran pat the store (Knight’s Store) and in the woods back there. Cousin Sollie came back just humming to the top of his voice. I said, “I reckon he was so mad, he couldn’t talk.  He was just humming.”  He came in the school and hit the heater pipe and knocked the heater over and then knocked it back.  All the children could say was that he was hot.  A cousin down the road tried to catch that boy but never did.  Everybody thought something of Cousin Sollie.
I remember that Mrs. Georgie Tyler (Jeanes Supervisor) used to come from Windsor to school every Tuesday, and I learned how to make hairpin lace from her.  I was ‘bout in the third grade.  We made white aprons with ruffles around them with the lace on them, and I brought mine home. I later made Margaret’s and George’s (daughter and son) baby dresses, and I still have them now. Little boys wore dresses with ruffles on them, then.

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.