We were living in Charlotte, North Carolina, the year that I turned six. Six was a big deal, because you got to go to school. But I didn’t turn six until mid-October. If we had been in Georgia, I would have started school in September, but in North Carolina you couldn’t start school until you were actually six.
Mamma didn’t want me to have to wait a whole year to go to school, so she marched up to the school to talk with them about it. They didn’t want to budge – I couldn’t go to school until I was six – so she worked out an interesting arrangement. Every day when school let out, my brother, Frank, went by the First Grade classroom on his way out of school and picked up the assignments for the day. My mother worked with me on these assignments, and Frank turned them in the next day. On my birthday, I got to go to school and join the First Grade class already in progress.
Since we moved twice each year, we had to change schools twice each year. People didn’t move around as much in those days, and the general policy was that if you changed schools you dropped back a grade. If we did that, I would still be in First Grade! So every time we moved, Mamma would march up to the school with us and fight to get us put into the grade she thought we should be in. One time they put me at the blackboard in front of a whole class full of kids, and started asking me questions. I was too scared to open my mouth, whether I knew the answers or not. “Just let her try it,” Mamma would say. I was a shy child, and it didn’t help to always be the new kid in town.
In one class, the teacher sent us all to the board to do math problems. There was this long column of numbers, but no indication of what to do with them. I was too timid to ask, so I just made up a number to put at the bottom. When the test came, I got all of the problems right except the ones with this long column of numbers. Nobody bothered to explain to me that you were supposed to add them.