A Jesse Stuart Harvest [antikvár]

Introduction from the day my father took me to plum grove, a one-room school on a hilltop in Greenup County, Kentucky, I have been trying to write. I was six years old then and didn't know a letter in the alphabet or a word, only by memory. I wouldn't have known a word I had learned from my parents if I had seen it written down. Here, my first teacher was Calvin Clarke, age 18, weight 110 pounds, high school graduate, and he had no teaching experience. But the letters on the old chart that I studied fascinated me. I liked the sounds of them and I liked putting them together to make a word. And I liked putting words together to make sentences. Now, I was learning the construction of the words and sentences I had been speaking. The first thing I remember learning to write was, Jesse Stuart, my name. I was so elated that I could do this that I hurried home one day after school, and I hadn't more than reached the house until I said to my father: "Pa, I can do something you can't do." And when he asked me what that was, I replied: "Write my name." And I showed him on an old slate that I could write my name. My father, a coal miner who couldn't read and write, got my mother to teach him to write his name, which was a memorized signature my father used all his life. My mother could do it. She had finished second grade. I had approximately 22 months of schooling at Plum Grove before I quit school to help my father make a living for our family. But while at Plum Grove I learned that words had power. I loved to go to school, where we had only school books to read, but this was better than at home, where we didn't have any books, not even a newspaper or a magazine to read. I liked to read the little stories and memorize the poems in my textbooks. Going to school was exciting. Our school was a wonderful and fascinating place. I had three miles to walk to school but I was always the first one there and the last one to leave. We didn't have much composition but we were assigned