Papa's Bell
Jeanne Little
Fairhope, Ala.
Papa's school bell rests on a high shelf in my library. The smooth worn wooden handle tilts slightly, its screw stripped. The bell cup is now obviously tarnished black.
A lanky, 19-year-old country school teacher must have raised plenty of attention with this brassy clang in a rural Mississippi schoolyard in the late 1890s. Papa, my maternal grandfather, gave it to me when I became a teacher some 50 years ago.
A formal wedding photograph, taken in October of 1899, shows that young country schoolmaster Harry Black seated, his slender bride, my grandmother, standing at his left shoulder. Papa sits stiff in his wedding clothes, stovepipe trousers and a frock coat, one bony knee crossed over the other. I remember him in a much later snapshot with his head thrown back, a straw hat pushed to the back of his high forehead, mouth wide open, laughing.
source : cottonfarming
Jeanne Little
Fairhope, Ala.
Papa's school bell rests on a high shelf in my library. The smooth worn wooden handle tilts slightly, its screw stripped. The bell cup is now obviously tarnished black.
A lanky, 19-year-old country school teacher must have raised plenty of attention with this brassy clang in a rural Mississippi schoolyard in the late 1890s. Papa, my maternal grandfather, gave it to me when I became a teacher some 50 years ago.
A formal wedding photograph, taken in October of 1899, shows that young country schoolmaster Harry Black seated, his slender bride, my grandmother, standing at his left shoulder. Papa sits stiff in his wedding clothes, stovepipe trousers and a frock coat, one bony knee crossed over the other. I remember him in a much later snapshot with his head thrown back, a straw hat pushed to the back of his high forehead, mouth wide open, laughing.
source : cottonfarming
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