It's good to have delayed this interview until now. As you know, I moved
back to the mountains in July of 1975 and before I left Chapel Hill, I
quoted T.S. Eliot from the last of the Four Quartets,
where he says that "we shall not cease from exploring and when our
exploration has come to an end, we will go back to the place where we
began and know it for the first time." And the months that I have been
back in Haywood County in the western part of the state, I've had an
opportunity to really get to know the place of my roots in a new way and
I'm convinced that Eliot is right. It is only after we go back to the
place where we began that we really get to know it for the first time.
During the last few weeks, I've been engaged in a tutoring program with
a child in the neighborhood and he had to do a paper three weeks ago on
the history of education in Haywood County. I reread and had him read a
book called the Annals of Haywood County and it has
quite a bit of information that I had forgotten about the school system
up in that part of the state. As was true in many parts of the country,
before public education, it was a privilege for those who could afford to have, formal education started with the
academies and my great-uncle was a principal of one of the early
academies. It was called the Bethel Academy. He probably had very little
training for medicine, but he later became a doctor. The academies were
scattered all over the county. The first one was the Greenhill Academy
where the Greenhill Cemetry is now in Waynesville. Rereading this and
trying to help this child understand the history of education in Haywood
County helped me to sort of review or relive my own background. It may
be that from this uncle, this was my mother's uncle who was principal of
this academy, … I also went back to explore the background of my
grandfather who had very little formal education, but he was a man
really thirsting after knowledge and he studied at what was called the
Locust Field Academy and we have now two books which he used at Locust
Field Academy. A Latin book and a law book, although he had, as I said,
very little formal education, he did thirst for knowledge and I think
that I may have gotten my interest in matters of intellectual life from
my grandfather, who was a very curious man, curious about ideas, and
from my mother. During my youth, my father died from influenza in 1920.
The night of his death is one of the most vivid
memories that I have from my childhood. I was the only member of the
family who was up and able to be about. My two younger sisters were in
bed with 'flu, my grandfather was in bed with the 'flu and I remember
that my mother came to my bed and told me that my father had just died.
This was the first consciousness that I had of death and I've been sort
of thinking about that since I've been back and I've had a renewed
interest from that experience and also from some of my theological
studies, in trying to understand a little bit more deeply the meaning of
death. I went to a one-room school. It was called Spring Hill School. My
sister and I, in helping with this young boy, have sort of relived our
early school experiences. It was called the Spring Hill Public School
and then before I graduated from this elementary school, they built a
partition in the school and it was a two-room school. We had, of course,
no indoor plumbing, and actually, we didn't have any outdoor toilets for
[UNCLEAR] We carried our water from a spring and I can
remember that my sister and I carried a little folding drinking cup and
a good many of the children drank from a common dipper, and it had no
theological significance, such as drinking from the Communion cup at the
Chapel of the Cross. As I reflect now on this school
experience, even when comparing it to many of the advantages that the
present public school system has, we had good teachers, the books were
not as adequate as the books we have today, but I don't feel that I was
disadvantaged or unprivileged when I reflect on the educational
experience that I had. After we finished what was the seventh grade, we
went on to what was called the Bethel High School. My sister next to me,
who is thirteen months younger than I am, was bored by staying at home
and she just started going to school with me when she was the age five
and she started participating in the class and she would study with me
at night. At the end of our first year, she was promoted to the second
grade without having ever enrolled in the school. So, we were together
then, throughout our high school experience, except the year that I was
in the seventh grade, I had an illness. It was called St. Vitus Dance.
It is a nervous disorder and was caused by an injured nerve when I had a
fall. My sister then would have been ahead of me, even though she was
younger, except that she was so small that she decided that she was
going to take the seventh grade a second year and so I went back the
next year and caught up with her. Then we went to high school together
and we studied together and I hope that there is not
a note of arrogance in this, but we were both for those times, good
students and we sort of tutored other students in our class. I would
help with the writing of the themes and the compositions in English and
what is now called social studies, geography and history. My sister was
an excellent Latin student. Because I had fallen behind that year due to
my illness, I had to take Latin … well, in a sense, it was a kind of
tutoring experience in Latin, so my sister tutored all the other
students in Latin. We graduated from Bethel High School in 1930. That's
a long time ago, forty-six years ago now. My sister and I were … you
know, that was in the days when they had valedictorians and
salutatorians of the classes and I was the valedictorian and my sister
was the salutatorian. We were talking the other night that we regret
very much that …we wrote our own speeches and we can't find them. We
don't know what happened to them. Well, when I graduated from high
school, I very much wanted to go to college, but it was during the
Depression, as you know, and it was not possible. Our father had died,
our mother worked very hard just to keep soul and body together. She
would take work outside the home. I started cooking when I was …well, I
was born in 1911 and my father died in 1920. I was nine years old when
he died and I sort of took over the running of the
house. I think that my love of cooking goes back to that time. I didn't
look on it as an imposed duty but partially as a privilege to help my
mother. My sister next to me helped with the outside work, she helped to
get wood and to do the gardening and now she is a beautiful gardener. I
can remember the first cake of cornbread that I ever baked. I was too
small to put the pan on the table and my grandfather tutored me in
baking my first cornbread, assisted me by letting me put the pan on the
floor and stirring the pan and then putting the bread in and baking it.
So, that was my first experience in cooking and I sort of took over the
running of the house at age nine and rather than having this as a kind
of bitter experience, I think that it helped me, I love to keep house, I
love to cook. In 1930, jobs were not very available. There was no one in
our family working …