The First Day of the First Grade
The kindest thing someone outside of the family had ever done for me.
The following piece, updated here, was published as “The First Day of the First Grade” on “Old Ones Dream” January 24, 2013, and as a piece of my “Magnolia Elegy: Place In the Edisto Fork” published April 14, 2022.
On the first day of the first grade—we were about a dozen—all sitting in the grass in the September sunshine under the big Hackberry tree outside the Cope School gymnasium door. Jackie shared her lunch with me, the kindest thing someone outside of the family had ever done for me.
We all arrived there under the Hackberry tree that day in 1947, by different modes of transportation. Some rode the one school bus; a vintage orange Studebaker driven by Hoot, with lightly padded benches, one on each side running the length of the bus, and two back-to-back benches running down the middle with occasional vertical poles to hold on to. I, however, travelled there that day on top of a load of handpicked cotton on the back of a 1941 Ford staked-body truck driven by Thomas. We delivered the cotton to the gin and Thomas dropped me off at the Cope School. Libba had never sent anyone off to the first day of school before, and so I arrived without lunch; and that is how Jackie became someone I will never forget.