Mostly about me part 1

I always thought I had grown up in a manner typical of anyone fortunate enough to live in the mountains of Western North Carolina. I’d even gotten my debut over with by the time I was one year old, when I won a prize for being the “most perfect baby” in a local contest, and a lady who had attended the show had been forgiven by my doting aunt to whom she’d said, “There was that beautiful Hobbs child and the judges gave the prize to that fat slob of Dr. Howe’s.”

It was when I went away to college and began swapping reminiscences with new friends that I found out people were not always believing what I said. My friends talked of dancing school and piano recitals. I told of camping in the Okefenokee Swamp, where we fished in daytime and at night we lay in our tents on a canal bank and listened to bears growling and alligators bellowing. I told my friends we had eaten grits cooked in canal water that was home to snakes and alligators and turtles and was turned the color of strong tea by decaying underwater vegetation. I said we’d drunk coffee brewed from the brown canal water.

My friends remembered the latest fashions they had worn to proms and parties. I remembered bib overalls and a campground on Whiteside Mountain where icicles hung from above our tents. While the men hunted, the women, with my sister and me in tow, walked over mountain trails, and in spite of chattering teeth and freezing fingers, I dutifully tried to do my first-grade reading, writing and arithmetic lessons taught me by a cousin who always went along.

After supper we sat by a roaring campfire and heard the mountain men and women who camped with us tell stories they had heard from their grandparents and great-grandparents who had been pioneer settlers in what we now know as Henderson County.

Fassifern School for Girls

From the third grade through high school I attended Fassifern School for Girls in Hendersonville, which, I’m sure it was hoped, would smooth some of my rough edges. One thing it really did was generate in me a thorough aversion to history that might have followed me through life if I had chosen the four years of history and two of Latin instead of the alternative four of Latin and two of history. “Pussyfoot,” as we referred to the teacher who appeared to us as having lived through most of her subject matter, didn’t actually walk back and forth across the classroom. She slunk, as quietly as though on tiptoes. Besides that, she always wore black or gray dresses. Talk about depressing.

I had entered Fassifern while Miss Kate Shipp, the school’s founder, was still in charge. I graduated while Dr. Joseph Sevier, a former Presbyterian minister, was owner. Of all the beautiful hymns he must have sung in the course of his career, it remains a mystery to me why, at our graduation ceremony, he had us march into the auditorium singing:

“Ten thousand times ten thousand

In sparkling raiment bright

The armies of the ransomed saints

Throng up the steps of light.

‘Tis finished, all is finished,

Their fight with death and sin,

Fling open wide the golden gates

And let the victors in.”

Then, with our diplomas in our hands and joy in our hearts, we marched out into the world singing:

“Jerusalem; my happy home,

When shall I come to thee?

When shall my sorrows have an end,

Thy joys when shall I see?”

High school graduates, mind you.

This column was copied from “Remembering Henderson County: A Legacy of Lore” by Louise Howe Bailey. Her regular column will resume soon.