Planetary Stories Project

"To Act Globally, Think Locally – Through Stories"

Black Earth Institute

Place: Kalona, Iowa, USA

Among School Children
By Mary Swander

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Chink, chink, chink. I awoke one Saturday morning to the sound of sledgehammers driving metal stakes into the ground. Five Amish men, straw hats on their heads, stood in my pasture, a huge blue and white tent unfurled across the grass. As if he were the ringmaster of a circus, Max, the local chicken plucker, directed the men to position and raise the side poles, beginning the celebration. 

It was the day of the Fairview School Reunion, a gathering of all who had taught or attended class in the building that I now call home.  I live near Kalona, Iowa, in the middle of the largest Amish community west of the Mississippi River.  For over a hundred years, my house had been a one-room country school with about thirty "scholars” squeezed inside.  Traditionally, Amish children only go to school through the eighth grade, so for most coming to this reunion, this was the one and only school that they knew.

The Amish have no public buildings but their schoolhouse. They attend church in each other’s houses or barns. They have no church basements where they might meet for wedding receptions or quilting bees. They don’t believe in going to war, so they have no Foreign Legion Hall. They don’t smoke or drink, so they don’t even have a bar or bowling alley where they might congregate. Amish schoolhouses are central to the life of their community. Each neighborhood uses the building not only for school lessons, but for Christmas and Easter pageants, and other social occasions.  If you drive through Amishland near the end of December, you often find three generations of families squeezed together on long wooden benches, singing hymns in German in a one-room schoolhouse.

The Amish and Mennonite families who once attended school in my house return once every five years to reminisce about those Christmas pageants. They come back to tell stories of the baseball games that they played during recess, of practical jokes they experienced, of spelling bees that stumped them with words like “fabricate” and  “fictionalize.” They bring their old songbooks and report cards. Their old teachers travel from Ohio and Indiana and find their way through the gate to sit on a bench under a big tent, sip iced tea, and eat a potluck lunch. When the children take up the softball and bat, the elders’ eyes will drift through the fence toward my garden. Rows of black bonnets will either nod in approval or politely remain still, staring out into the distance.

My schoolhouse sits a top a gently rolling hill that looks down on a valley dotted with white farm houses, red barns and lush, green fields worked with horses and 1940’s vintage tireless tractors. The fields are planted in a rotation of crops: corn, beans, alfalfa and oats. Up and down the road, the Amish and Mennonite women work their own gardens that are both practical and artistic. The clean, straight rows that feed families of ten are ringed with borders of bright red cannas, orange cosmos, and yellow marigolds. Pink roses climb trellises and white clematis winds up around the poles of the purple martin houses.

I bought the schoolhouse in 1988 when it had been standing empty for almost a decade, its door closed to consolidation in the late 1970's.  Although I knocked out the wall that separated the little boys and girls bathrooms and now store my dishes in the cupboard that used to hold the dictionary, the place still has the same feel.  You can still see the outline of the blackboard on the wall and the names “Vera plus Levi” are carved into one of the basement beams. The bank of nine tall windows looks out on the hill where scores of Yoders and Millers once trotted up to class on their ponies, then at recess, sledded down the bank toward Picayune Creek below. 

On the count of three, Max inserted the center pole, and the tent was up and flying in the air, ready for the guests who soon arrived with pots of stew and homegrown sweet corn, trays of freshly picked carrots and cauliflower and tins of custard made from their own hens' eggs.  The adults chatted over plates of fresh sliced tomatoes while their children played on the rusted swing set. Inside, a baby slept on a quilt under my computer desk. 

After lunch, everyone shared their memories of “school marms” and the dialogues recited for a room crammed full of relatives, of Halloween and the older boys grabbing the younger children's legs from under the basement steps, of May Days gathering wild flowers in the grove, of globes and geography lessons, of snakes in the well pit, of the neighbor's hogs wandering up the hill and eating the coal out of the shed, and even of a book on mythology that sent one young mind on an exploration of world cultures.

“Once we had a new teacher,” Ron, the owner of the local “Critter Control” company said. At noon, she told us that we could go down stairs and get our lunch buckets. No one moved. `Go on now,’ she said.  Still no one moved until one of us told her we usually prayed first.  That was a surprise to this teacher. She'd never taught a bunch of Amish kids before.”

"One of us had a little transistor radio,” one woman said. “One of the Mennonites.  It was here that I first heard that President Kennedy had been shot.  Here that I first heard the Beatles."

"I remember whole days when we played Monopoly,” another woman complained.

"You might've learned more,” Max, said.  "At least now you know how to make money."

"The first day I came to school,” a man said,  "I was sent right back home.  Does anybody know why?"

"You probably needed dry pants,” a woman laughed from the other side of the tent.

“I answered an ad in the newspaper,” said one of the former teachers. “The ad said: teacher wanted for grades K-8 in Kalona. I was a third grade teacher so I thought that the Kalona district needed a teacher for every grade. I applied and got the job. When I arrived at the school, I realized that they meant one teacher for grades K-8.”

The adults continued their stories, moving into the genre of “true confession.”  They told of wild crushes that they had on each other, or on the teachers. They told how they dropped their vitamin pills down the heating grates. Ron, the exterminator, told about the cat they kept in the basement of the schoolhouse to catch the mice.

“Well, the cat had kitchens and those kitchens used to scamper all over the place. Once day one was on the cellar steps and it almost tripped me. I kicked it away and killed it. Everyone wondered how that kitten died. Well, I did it.”

Bored with their parents’ guilt, the children of the storytellers slipped inside my house and began to “play school.” One of the older girls quickly took up the role of the teacher, ringing a little bell to call the class to attention. The rest of the group sat at my desk and the kitchen table, picking up books from my shelves. I walked in to find their noses buried in the poetry of W.B. Yeats, John Donne, and Elizabeth Bishop.

The “teacher” called on students and asked them to read aloud.

“Turning and turning in the widening g-g-g.  I don’t know that word, teacher.”

The teacher edged forward and shook her head. She didn’t know the word, either, so she dismissed the class for recess. Twenty children, from five to fourteen raced out into the yard, joined hands, divided into teams and began playing a game of Red Rover.  A ball flew over the roof of my house and cheers went up from the north side team.

Their parents had taken up their songbooks. Down in the valley, they sang. The valley so low.

“Remember that song?” one of the men asked.

“Yup,” replied another. “Just about every day we sang that song. Hang your head over. Let the winds blow. Didn’t that teacher know how to sing anything else?

And so the quips and memories were traded back and forth, the stories of the schoolhouse were told, one generation of scholars to another, all coming together in one place for one purpose—simply to tell stories. These tales healed the tension and differences that I knew existed within the group. For one day, the participants dropped their resentments and joined together to enjoy the common story of a one place that they all hold dear.  In a culture that forbids cameras, videos, paintings and or representations of life events, the story of their schoolhouse helps clarify things in the scholars’ minds. The story helps hold a picture of the place in the scholars’ memories, helps reinvent the moments for their offspring, and attempts to keep those memories from slipping away to the outside world.