Stories of My Life

“She identified some of them. This one married a minister. That one became a Red Cross worker. Another lost the sight of one eye, but the doctors saved the sight of the other.

“‘Sometimes I get homesick for China,’ Miss Henderson confessed.”

When the reporter asked her to point to her most satisfying memory of those years, she recalled a time when anti-foreign feeling was running high in Shanghai. A Chinese boy approached her outside her door, pointed, and yelled: “She is a foreigner! She is a foreigner!”

But her own children shouted back: “She is no foreigner. She is the grandmother who belongs here.”

And there is a letter she kept. It is undated, but was probably received in 1950.

My dearest Friend,

As I am urging our students to write a note to their mothers away from Shanghai, I think of you as a mother to so many of our Chinese girls. The greatne

ss and depth of your love only God knows how to measure and reward you. Thinking of you has always been an inspiration to me. I love you.

Lovingly yours,

Tszo-Sing Chen

She was proud to have been kissed by Robert E. Lee. I am proud to have been kissed by Maud Henderson.

I can’t resist adding a family story here. After my mother died, my father insisted on moving to a retirement home despite the fact that we had bought a house with a first-floor room and bath so he could live with us. “Then you’d want to go somewhere, and you’d say, ‘What will we do with poor old Pop?’” At the retirement home was a woman who took a great shine to Daddy, but whose dementia made her a bit intimidating to the rest of the residents. So when he died, everyone was afraid to break the news to her. But when someone finally did, she said: “Oh, that Mr. Womeldorf. He was such a gentleman. He’d make Robert E. Lee look like a hobo.” My regret when I heard that story was that I couldn’t share it with my father. He would have gotten such a laugh from it.

Note: Many of Maud Henderson’s letters from China can be found in the Archives of the Library of the University of North Carolina. I am also indebted to The Episcopal Historical Society for other correspondence.

Suzy, Clava, and me at the Lovettsville reunion.

The Teaching Life

The year after that visit from Maud Henderson, I graduated from high school and went on to spend four years getting my degree in English literature from King College in Bristol, Tennessee. I decided during my last year of college to take a year out from studying. I would teach school, thought I. I’d taken an education course or two and done a stint of practice teaching to have something to go with my English major that even then, no one considered practical, but which for me was life changing, thanks to the brilliant, caring professors who introduced me to great ideas and great writers. Gilly Hopkins, more than incidentally, takes her surname from Gerard Manley Hopkins, the subject of my senior thesis.

There were some requests for teachers posted on the bulletin board that were in school districts fairly close to where my parents were living, so I made inquiries. One school in Lovettsville, Virginia, noted that their long-time principal was named Womeldorph. Although Mr. Womeldorph was retiring and spelled his name with a ph rather than an f, it seemed like a sign of sorts, so I applied to become the sixth-grade teacher for the enormous salary of five thousand dollars a year.

The population of Lovettsville was 340 (according to the sign on the edge of town), but students were bused into the elementary school from the rural areas of upper Loudon County. This part of Loudon County became famous a few years later because it was featured in a documentary on hunger in America. The southern part of the county was mostly horse farms for millionaires. Several of the Kennedys owned property there. But people in lower Loudon County didn’t send their children to public schools, and there was no appetite for taxing the rich county southerners to help the less fortunate northerners.

The Lovettsville Elementary School was an old brick building from another era. There was an auditorium of sorts, but no library in the school, no lunchroom, and no gym. Everything except outdoor recess would take place in my classroom. There was no music teacher, no art teacher, no playground aid. I would be in charge of everything those children would get in the way of schooling, indoors or out.

Single teachers, I was told, always boarded with a couple who lived a short distance down the street from the school. The second-grade teacher, who was also just out of college, and I roomed there together. Our landlady was a kind person that both of us got along with. Her husband was another matter. For the only time in my life I would be living with a chain-smoking semi-invalid whose chief point of pride in life was his membership in the Ku Klux Clan. Fortunately, I escaped every weekend and went to Winchester to stay with my folks. Sometimes I would take Eleanor along, just to give her a break from the boarding house environment.

Mr. Myers, the new principal, showed me my classroom. It was in the basement—the only room down there besides the bathrooms and the furnace room. There were windows along one side and, in the hall, a door that opened onto the playground. The classroom was crowded with battered, carved-up desks because there would be thirty-six sixth graders in the class, and they ranged from one who was the age of ten, to three who were sixteen. The long-time third-grade teacher was famous for holding children back for multiple reappearances in her class.

I didn’t know what to expect of such an assortment of kids. It didn’t help that the first introduction I had was a paper listing their IQ scores. I was appalled. How was I with no real experience supposed to teach children with such a difference in their ages, a frightening number of whom had IQ scores in the low 70s? I stopped reading and just stuck the records out of sight in a bottom drawer of my desk, and never thought of them again until the end of the year when I was throwing away the accumulation of papers in my desk. I was furious with those scores. My kids were not dumb! I’ve never trusted standardized tests since.

School opened and they came, the real children, not the ones on paper. By the end of the first week or so I was in love with them all, even Junior, who heartily hated school and was absent as often as he was present, and Godfrey, who was such a creative misbehaviorist, no one could have disliked him.

I don’t know what any of them gained academically from being in that basement room. I know I wasn’t much of a teacher, but we had some great times. What I lacked in pedagogical skill, I made up for by reading aloud—everything from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Huckleberry Finn to Shakespeare. Macbeth was a class favorite—all that gore. I’m sure I skipped and explained our way through several pages of the play, but they had a taste of greatness, anyhow.

On rainy days, we’d push back all the desks and do broad jumping in the cleared space. Mr. Myers poked his head in one day, but just grinned and went on back upstairs.

Even though they lived just over an hour from Washington, DC, most of the class had never visited the capital. I racked my brain to figure out a curriculum-related excuse to take them all there. We were doing ancient world history, which hardly qualified, but then I realized our nation’s capital held a re-creation of early Roman catacombs as well as a European-style cathedral. They would be the educational excuse. My hidden agenda was the National Zoo.

“This is your life, Miss Womeldorf.” Lovettsville School, 1955.

The Lovettsville class reunion crowd.

This was the spring of 1955. Today, not only would such a trip be impossible, any teacher who tried to do what I did that day would be fired on the spot. Other than the bus driver, I was the single adult on the trip. Junior was playing hooky again, so there were thirty-five children. We all hung out the windows staring at the monuments as we crossed the bridge into the city, but there was no time to stop and see them. We visited the fake catacombs and hurried through the cathedral, but by the time we got to the zoo, there was less than an hour left before we’d have to leave. The bus driver had to get back to drive his afternoon route. He told me more than once that the bus was leaving at two p.m. Anyone not on it would be left behind.

There were more wonderful creatures to see in the zoo than there were children to see them. Everyone was excited and eager to head off. How could I make them walk around in lockstep like little Madeleine schoolgirls for fifty minutes? They’d explode. We were standing near a sign with arrows indicating all the various exhibits. There was a large clock nearby. I pointed to it. “You can take your lunch and follow the arrows to anything you want to see, but at ten minutes before two, you have got to be lined up right here, ready to get back on the bus. If you’re late, the driver says he’ll leave you behind.”