Other Voices, Other Towns: The Traveler's Story. Caleb Pirtle III
man in the white stained apron behind the bar was already opening another round of beer. Everyone leaned forward in the damp darkness to watch Neil Armstrong make his small step for man and giant leap for mankind.
The beer bottles were sweating. So were the men of Chatsworth.
A farmer sat alone on the far end of the bar. He had been withered by time, cold rains, a famine or two, and hard work. He wore bib-overalls and an old straw hat. He had not bothered to remove it. No need to. No ladies were in the joint. The wrinkles in his face were not unlike the plowed furrows in a field. His blue-checked shirt was clean but patched.
He had been sipping on the same beer for most of the afternoon. He knew all about the advances of technology in a world grown far too modern for him. He had broken new ground behind a mule, then astride a tractor. He had strung up a hog in a smokehouse, knew how to cook everything but the squeal, and finally settled down to buying bacon wrapped with plastic in a grocery store. He had watched the world around him slowly change, mostly against his will, but this was too much.
The beer had grown hot in his throat. He had watched the moon a lot of nights down the sight of his shotgun. Wasn’t like the sun. Move around a lot.. Couldn’t stay still. Bright as the eyes of a coon dog sometimes. Looked like a hangnail at other times, dangling from the limbs of a dead oak
Couldn’t trust the moon, he said.
Sure as hell couldn’t walk on it.
He said his name was Virgil.
Probably was.
Said his last name didn’t matter.
Probably didn’t.
He nodded toward the television. “That’s not happening,” he said.
The cheering stopped.
“Somebody’s lying to you,” he said.
Every eye turned toward him.
“Ain’t nothing but a hoax,” he said.
The men of Chatsworth frowned.
“Probably just one of them moving pictures,” he said.
“How do you figure that?” I asked.
The old man took a long draw on his beer bottle, wiped the froth from his mouth, and studied the blurry black and white screen one last time. He leaned forward on the counter, took a deep, labored breath, and spoke with the deep, growling voice of a mountain oracle:
“We can’t get pictures from the moon,” he said. “Hell, we can’t even get pictures from Atlanta.”
The heads nodded. Somebody ordered another beer.
The man wearing the stained white apron behind the bar turned off the television.
Might as well, he thought.
Couldn’t argue with common sense.
Tattered Dreams Don’t Fade
Somewhere on the outskirts of
Rome, Georgia
Pop: 34,980
The Scene: Rome, not unlike its namesake in Italy, was built on seven hills. No interstate highways interrupt its tranquility, and it finds a measure of peace and solitude within the tall country of Appalachia, perched near the confluence of the Etowah and Oostanaula Rivers.
The Sights: The cornerstone of Rome is Berry College, one of the largest academic settings in the world, sprawling across thirty thousand acres. The story of its early years – tempered with sweat and prayers – can be found on campus in the Martha Berry Museum and Art Gallery. It is a poignant tribute to the strength and tenacity of the woman who made it all possible.
The Story: Martha Berry saw the future in a pair of ragged overalls. It was early on a Sunday morning, with a gray haze slowly lifting from the folds of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and she was sitting in a small log cabin on the grounds of her father’s estate, playing an organ. The music of old, hand-me-down hymns was drifting through the thick forest surrounding her when she her ears caught the scattered words of voices outside the cabin’s window. She stopped. She was no longer alone.
Martha Berry glanced over the shoulder of her gingham dress and saw three small boys standing awkwardly in a clearing, their faces shadowed by low hanging branches. Their fists were jammed into the pockets of their overalls.
She smiled.
They looked away.
Martha Berry walked out of the cabin, handed each of them an apple, and said softly, “Have you boys been to Sunday School this morning?”
“No, ma ‘am,” one of them answered. “We were just out running through the woods and heard that pretty noise coming from that queer box. Didn’t know what it was. Came to get a closer look.”
The boys sat around her for hours while Martha Berry told them Bible stories. She could tell that their young minds thirsted for knowledge, but any schooling for them was beyond all hope. At the turn of the twentieth century, education had not yet wormed its way into the remote and fragmented farming communities that lay on the far side of the timbered ridges. There were only five public schools in all of Georgia.
The rich learned. The poor did without, and the boys would forever be trapped by their own ignorance. Maybe a mother would teach them to read. Probably not. She would have to learn to read first.
It was a time when learning to plow new ground and hard ground was far more important to a boy than learning to string together words in a book. It was a time when a plow was easier to find than a book.
Martha Berry would write: “As I rode my pony over the hills and saw the boys and girls without any opportunities – no churches, no schools – I began thinking they must be given some chance in life.” She would give them one. At first, she taught Sunday School at her small log cabin in the wildwoods, then in an old church at Possum Trot, climbing a ladder to write scriptures and the ABCs on faded and weathered walls. In 1901, with a thousand dollars and eighty-three acres of land she had inherited from her father, Miss Berry built a whitewashed schoolhouse, persuading the men and boys who came out of the hills to attend her Sunday school classes to hammer the walls together and thatch a roof. A year later, she added a dormitory and opened a boarding school, an industrial school, for boys. When she opened the doors, five boys were in their seats.
Five years later, Martha Berry included a school for girls, and fourteen of them found their way out of the mountains, looking lost and out of place, quite pleased to be lost and out of place in a schoolhouse that had long been beyond the most secret of their hopes.
Her goal was admirable. However, the conflict she faced sometimes seemed to be insurmountable. She had a little money. No one else in Appalachia did. Soon she would confront the prospect of being broke as well. Her heart was bigger than her bank account.
But Martha Berry remained undaunted. She desperately wanted to help those rural mountain children who could not afford to pay their tuition, and she did not turn anyone away.
For tuition, some brought jars of jam, a quilt, a spare chicken or two, and even a family milk cow.
Others chopped wood, cleaned the classrooms, gathered the eggs, cooked the meals, and scrubbed the wooden floors. Most of her students met their expenses by working in the fields and gardens of her school. They grew what they ate or there was an empty table before them at supper time.
Inez Henry walked onto the campus with a heifer tied to a rope, the family’s last forty cents dangling loose in her pocket, frightened, and unsure of herself.
“I