Hallie is a little boy eight years old with skin that's as black as the ace of spades. He lives in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he goes to school (non-segregated). He is in the third grade and has two teachers, one white and one of color. He can spell apple but he can't spell pear.
Hallie is spending the summer with his grandfather, Jesse Griffin, a farmer who lives facing the Y & M V railroad track just west and a little south of Metcalfe. Jesse is an old friend of many years standing who mends fences, pumps water, and retrieves errant Peacedale livestock when he isn't busy in his own field.
The little boy accompanied Jesse to Old Stuff's cowlot a few afternoons ago, and that was how and when we acquired the vital statistics mentioned in our opening paragraph. Hallie wasn't what you'd call enthusiastic about the interview. Like most boys his age, he was much more interested in the calves (which he called "bulls"), the cows, the pony, and the mule, than he was in conversation.
So he answered us mostly in monosyllable, such as "Yep" and "Nope", interspersed with "Uh- huh" and "Umph-umph", but with never once a "sir 1.” Not that Hallie was pointedly impertinent or contemptuous. It was just that the note of deference, which us old folks have long thought was due us from the very young, was sadly missing.
Now Old Stuff belongs in the old school which associates this deference, inseparably, with good manners, and so does Jesse Griffin. The latter apologized for his grandboy's failure to add "sir" to his ayes and nays, and explained, quote:- ,.
"Up there where he lives, they tell him not to say it."
"Who is 'they', Jesse? "we asked.
"His teachers, I reckon", replied Jesse, who then turned to Hallie and. told him, quote:-:
"Down here you must say 'yes sir' and 'no sir' to folks, especially to Mister Brodie".
We interrupted this lesson in cowlot etiquette long enough to remind Jesse and his grandson that there ought not to be any geographical limitations on good manners. At Jesse's prompting, the little boy tried a few halfhearted
“yes-sirs" and "no-sirs", then changed the subject, quote:
"Look Grandpaw," he said, "the cow is nodding her head, just the some as you is pumpin'."
Sure enough, old Kitty May was keeping time to Jesse's downstrokes and upstrokes, while he filled the trough with water from the pump. So Hallie, though short on manners, is already long on rhythm. Maybe that is just as well, since there's probably a lot more future in being another Bill Robinson or a second Cab Calloway than there is in aiming for Lord Chesterfield.
Apparently, they put no more emphasis on spelling than they do on manners in the Indianapolis school system. For as stated above, the little boy can spell apple but he can't spell pear. Yet in our earliest schooling, the apple was as inseparably associated with the pear as was deference and good manners.
And that reminds us of a fine old friend now long gone, Mrs. Lizzie Coleman, for whom the new segregated black high school here is named. Lizzie was to black students what Miss Susie Trlgg was to Whites. And like that great educator, who also has a school to bear her name, Lizzie taught three R's plus a fourth. The extra R was for RESPECT!
B.C.
