by Lois Lenski
“Still as good as new,” said Mama happily. “It shows what good quality it was, a dollar sixty-nine a yard.”
“It makes it feel like home,” said Judy, “just to see that carpet on the floor.”
“Now we can go anywhere,” said Joe Bob, “and take our house with us.”
“I’ll make some curtains for the windows,” said Judy.
They stopped at the next town and bought four yards of pretty red-checked gingham for curtains, and Mama bought a clothes basket for a bed for the baby.
It seemed good to get back into Florida again where the shiny-leaved citrus groves lined the roadsides. After cold nights on the way, it was good to be warm again. Like that first time when they came from Alabama, Florida seemed like Heaven, and Judy didn’t bother about the names of the towns they passed through. So when Papa drove up in front of a two-story farmhouse with a verandah on three sides and huge trees shading it, she was taken by surprise.
It was the Gibsons’ place.
It looked just the same. The yard was full of blooming flowers and the verandah was full of blooming house-plants. Mrs. Gibson and Mary John were coming down the path with outstretched hands. Behind them came Mr. Gibson, on his feet again but limping a little. And after a while, Ollie Peters appeared, as jovial and good-natured as ever, and shook hands all round.
It was like coming home.
The Gibsons exclaimed over the house-on-wheels, and Papa drove it under the same tree where the tent had been blown down. Then they all went into the big house and Mrs. Gibson cooked a delicious supper. Judy sat beside Mary John and they could hardly eat for the joy of being together again. The children were put to bed early, but Judy and Mary John stayed up and listened to the talk of the grown people.
“We’re not crazy about goin’ on to Lake Okeechobee again,” said Papa. “Work in the bean house last winter was very uncertain, and we couldn’t get into the government camp, it was so full.”
“It’s a wonder we didn’t all git typhoid fever living on that drainage canal,” said Mama.
“Why don’t you stay in this section?” asked Mr. Gibson.
“What I want,” said Papa, “is a little piece of land I can call my own. I’ve wanted that all my life.”
“Shore,” said Gibson. “Every man has a right to that.”
“I want to make a crop o’ my own, and keep my young uns in school,” Papa went on. “This thing of gallivantin’ all over the country and puttin’ your young uns in the crops to support you—it goes agin my grain. I git plumb discouraged the way things are. I wisht I was man enough to make a livin’ for my family .…”
“You are,” said Mrs. Gibson. “You stay right here and …”
“I need help mighty bad all winter,” said Mr. Gibson. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Wife, how about that old Stansberry farm I was tellin’ you about?”
“Hit’s just the place,” exclaimed Mrs. Gibson. “Why didn’t we think of it right off? That Yankee feller that inherited it won’t never come down here to live on it. He’ll let it go cheap.”
Papa looked at Mama, and Judy looked at both and clapped her hands. Mary John squeezed Judy’s arm.
“A family from Ohio bought it twenty years ago,” explained Mr. Gibson, “and built the house. They came down here, winters, for a few years. Then the old man died and the wife went to live with the married son, and the place went to rack and ruin—the house fell over in a big blow we had. Lawyer Tibbals in Oleander told me that the old folks have died and the son wants to get rid of the property. He has orders to sell. Hit’s a mess—been neglected for ten years, but if you want to tackle it …”
“How many acres?” asked Papa.
“’Bout ten, I reckon,” said Gibson. “There’s a small grove of neglected orange trees that can be brought back. Five acres will be all you can work alone if you put it in tomatoes and cukes.”
“An acre of beans too,” said Papa. “I won’t put all my eggs in one basket. I remember that hail storm.”
“Joe Bob wants a cow and a mule and a cat,” said Judy. “He’s got a dog.”
“You’ll want a cow and a pig or two, and some chickens,” said Mr. Gibson. “I can lend you my mules.”
“And a vegetable garden and some flowers,” added Mrs. Gibson, smiling at Judy.
“Oleanders,” put in Mary John.
“Is the house worth fixin’?” asked Mama anxiously.
“Hit’s a wreck, but you might could salvage some lumber out of it,” said Gibson.
“We can live in our house-on-wheels,” suggested Judy, her face beaming, “if Papa can get the land and make a crop of his own.”
“You’re mighty right, gal,” said Gibson. “You-all stay right where you are till we git things fixed up. We’ll go see that lawyer tomorrow. You can work for me, Drummond, till you git the place.”
“I ain’t got much cash money left,” said Papa in a low voice. “That truck cost me——”
“I’ll lend you the money you need to get started,” said Gibson. “When a man tries as hard as you do to git a little home for his family, I’ll bet my last penny on him.”
Papa couldn’t find words to express his thanks. He got up and shook Mr. Gibson’s hand.
“I thought we’d be on the go for the rest of our lives, like all those other migrants,” said Mama. “Poor souls—the journey never ends for them.”
Judy jumped to her feet. “We can stay, then? We can all go to school with Mary John in Oleander?”
“Shore can,” said Mr. Gibson.
“Shore can,” said Mrs. Gibson.
Mama said nothing. The tears rolled down her face.
The school bus went right by the Gibsons’ house.
The very next morning the three Drummond children climbed on with Mary John and rode to the big Oleander Consolidated School. It was a new school, filled with new faces, but never again would Judy feel the acute shyness she had felt when she first went with Bessie Harmon to the Bean Town school. She was used to strange faces, strange scenes and strange happenings now. Her vision had been greatly widened. Nothing that could happen would frighten or intimidate or discourage her any more.
I am a part of all that I have met. This thought surged through her heart and mind. As for the new friends she would make, people are what you think they are, Papa had told her. She remembered all the good friends she had made since she left Alabama. She remembered Bessie Harmon and Gloria Rathbone and Tessie Holloway and Mary John Gibson and Orrie Fletcher and Coreena May Dickson and Loretta and Jenny Darnell and Angelina Torresina and Barbara Delmar and Rosa Maria and Miiko and Ramon and Shirley … all the good friends who had loved her and taught her wisdom. Something of each of them was in her now, giving her strength and courage.
I am a part of all that I have met. Armed with her own goodness, she went out to face a world of people whom she believed to be fundamentally good. She entered the new school, determined to be kind to others first. This gave her the comforting assurance that the children she would meet would be kind to her in return, and become her friends.
She carried her beloved Geography under her arm. And one of the first things she did, after Mary John told the teacher of her travels, was to point out on the map the places where she had been and tell what she knew about them.
“It’s a good school, Papa,” she reported at home, “and I’m in the Fifth Grade. I like my teacher and she says I’ll be ready for Sixth soon.”
“I’m in Third, going on Fourth,” said Joe Bob, “and I’m learning my multiplication tables.”
“I’m still in First,” said Cora Jane.
“Pretty soon I go too,” added Lonnie.
Papa was glad. “I want my young uns to know more than I do,” he said.
And so the Drummonds got their home at last.
There was plenty of work to do to get it in shape. Papa worked on the Gibson farm until the deal went through, then they moved over at once. It was only a mile and a half from the Gibsons�
�, and there was a short-cut through the woods, with a lively stream where Joe Bob could fish. While the men were clearing the yard of brush and vines and tearing down the old house to get good cypress boards, the Drummonds lived in the house-on-wheels. Papa put the tent up near by, for a second room. They bought a second-hand cooking range and set it up under a tree out-of-doors. Joe Bob trained Barney to help him haul in loads of fire wood.
Then for a few weeks they slept in the tent again. The men moved the tourist cabin down to the ground, so Papa could have the use of the truck, and the cabin became the first unit of the house-to-be. It was just the right size for a kitchen. Papa put a pipe down into the ground and brought it up inside with a tap on it, from the flowing well beneath, and Mama had running water in her kitchen.
Missy and the kids were installed in a shed of their own and staked out daily to eat off brush. Soon a calf and three pigs joined them, and a wire fence was put up for a flock of chickens. Judy cleared the front yard for flower beds and planted her first oleander grown in Pinky’s blue bottle from Mary John’s slip.
One evening, after the place showed a semblance of order, the Gibsons and Ollie Peters came over for supper. Mama and Mrs. Gibson cooked chicken pilau on the big stove, and they all ate at a table under the trees. They sat and talked until long after the moon came out and threw crisscross patterns over the white tablecloth and the white sand at their feet. The frogs began to peep in a lonely pond and a bob-white called in the distance.
Judy sat still, her heart and mind as peaceful as the scene. Then she moved over and tucked her hand under her father’s elbow.
“Oh Papa! I keep thinkin’ of Madame Rosie and the things she said …”
“Tell me, honey,” said Papa.
“She said I would know hard work and grief and sorrow and dirt,” said Judy, “but I’d have a book with pictures in it—that must have been my Geography—oh, Papa, the school’s got a library just full of books and they all got pictures in ’em! And she said we’d have a little white house set in a garden with a picket fence around it. I never knew what a picket fence was until Barbara Delmar showed me.”
“We’ll paint the house white, honey,” said Papa, “when we git it built. We’ll make a fence too, to remember Madame Rosie by.”
“How nice to have a fortune come true!” cried Mary John, clapping her hands.
“Madame Rosie called me a little scared rabbit,” said Judy. “I’m not any more, am I, Papa?”
“I’ll say you’re not,” laughed Papa, “the way you beat up them movie kids in Delaware! The cop told me it was the best fight he ever saw a girl mixed up in.”
“Hush, Papa,” said Judy. “Don’t tell Mary John about that. I was so ashamed afterwards. I used to think strangers had to be fought. Now I know they want to be friends, just the same as I do.”
“Remember Hiram Adler back in Alabama, Calla?” asked Papa. “First cash I can spare goes to him. He was a real friend—helped me get out of the cotton field by lettin’ me have that jalopy and trailer. And now I got a piece of land to make a crop of my own.”
“I made up a poem,” said Judy. “Would you-all like to hear it?”
“Yes, yes,” they cried.
In a low voice Judy recited:
“No more will we roam,
For we have come home.
A garden and a cow,
Two pigs and a sow,
Twenty-five hens and a rooster—
Now we’ll live better than we used to!”
THE END
A Biography of Lois Lenski
Lois Lenski was born in Springfield, Ohio, on October 14, 1893. The fourth of five children of a Lutheran minister and a schoolteacher, she was raised in the rural town of Anna, Ohio, west of Springfield, where her father was the pastor. Many of the children’s books she wrote and illustrated take place in small, closely knit communities all over the country that are similar to Lenski’s hometown.
After graduating from high school in 1911, Lenski moved with her family to Columbus, where her father joined the faculty at Capital University. Because Capital did not yet allow women to enroll, she attended college at Ohio State University. Lenski took courses in education, planning to become a teacher like her mother, but also studied art, and was especially interested in drawing. In 1915, with a bachelor’s degree and a teaching certificate, she decided to pursue a career in art, and moved to New York City to take classes at the Art Students League of New York.
In an illustration class at the League, Lenski met a muralist named Arthur Covey. She assisted him in painting several murals, and also supported herself by taking on parttime jobs drawing fashion advertisements and lettering greeting cards. In October 1920, she left New York to continue her studies in Italy and London, where the publisher John Lane hired her to illustrate children’s books. When she returned to New York in 1921, she married Covey and became stepmother to his two children, Margaret and Laird.
Early in her career, Lenski dedicated herself to book illustration. When a publisher suggested that she try writing her own stories, she drew upon the happy memories of her childhood. Her first authored book, Skipping Village (1927), is set in a town that closely resembles Anna at the start of the twentieth century. A Little Girl of 1900 (1928) soon followed, also clearly based on Lenski’s early life in rural Ohio.
In 1929, Lenski’s son, Stephen, was born, and the family moved to a farmhouse called Greenacres in Harwinton, Connecticut, which they would call home for the next three decades. Lenski continued to illustrate other authors’ books, including the original version of The Little Engine That Could (1930) by Watty Piper, and the popular Betsy-Tacy series (1940–55) by Maud Hart Lovelace. Lenski also wrote the Mr. Small series (1934–62), ten books based on Stephen’s antics as a toddler.
The house at Greenacres had been built in 1790 and it became another source of inspiration, as Lenski liked to imagine the everyday lives of the people who had previously lived in her home. In Phebe Fairchild, Her Book (1936), for instance, a young girl is sent to live with her father’s family on their farm in northwestern Connecticut in 1830‚ when Greenacres would have been forty years old. For its rich and detailed depiction of family life in rural New England, the book was awarded the Newbery Honor.
Other historical novels followed—including A-Going to the Westward (1937), set in central Ohio; Bound Girl of Cobble Hill (1938); Ocean-Born Mary (1939); Blueberry Corners (1940); and Puritan Adventure (1944)—all set in New England; and Indian Captive (1941), a carefully researched retelling of the true story of Mary Jemison, a Pennsylvania girl captured by a raiding Native American tribe, for which Lenski won a second Newbery Honor.
By 1941, Lenski’s stepdaughter, Margaret, had married and started her own family, and Margaret’s son, David, spent a great deal of time with his grandparents at the farm. Lenski’s Davy series of seven picture books (1941–61) was largely based on David’s visits to Connecticut as a child.
During this period, Lenski experienced bouts of illness, brought on by the harsh Connecticut winters. The family began to spend winters in Florida, where she “saw the real America for the first time,” as she wrote in her autobiography. Noting how few books described the daily life of children in different parts of the country, she began writing the Regional America series, starting with Bayou Suzette (1943). The seventeen books in this series depict children’s lives in every region of the United States, from New England to the Pacific Northwest, in rural and urban settings. Lenski traveled to each region that she would later feature in her books, spending three to six weeks in each locale. She collected stories from children and adults in each area, documenting their dialect, learning about their way of life, and otherwise getting to know the people that would become the characters in her books. The second book in the series, Strawberry Girl, won the Newbery Medal in 1946. The Roundabout America series (1952–66), intended for younger readers, was based on the same theme of daily life all over the country. Lenski was unparalleled in the
diversity of American lifestyles that she documented; the combination of research, interviews, and drawings that she utilized; and the empathy and honesty that she employed in recording people’s lives.
Other popular series for children followed, including four books about the seasons—Spring Is Here (1945), Now It’s Fall (1948), I Like Winter (1950), and On a Summer Day (1953)—and the seven Debbie books (1967–71), based on Lenski’s experiences with her granddaughter. Lenski also published several volumes of songs and poetry, mostly for children.
In early 1960, Lenski’s husband died, and she soon sold the farm in Connecticut to live in Florida year round. There she wrote her autobiography, Journey Into Childhood (1972). Lenski died on September 11, 1974, at her home in Florida. The Lois Lenski Covey Foundation, which she established to promote literacy and reading among at-risk children, continues her mission by providing grants to school and public libraries each year.
Lenski in 1897, at age four, when she lived in Springfield, Ohio. She was born there on October 14, 1893.
Lenski photographed at age seven or eight, when the family lived in Anna, Ohio. The family lived in Anna for twelve years. It was there that Lenski developed her love of country life and began drawing and painting.
Lenski with her family in Anna, Ohio. From left to right: sister Esther; brothers, Oscar and Gerhard; father, Richard; Lois; mother, Marietta; and in front, sister Mariam.
Lenski’s high school graduation photo, taken in 1911. Her English teacher predicted that some day she would “do some form of creative work.”
Lenski in her studio in Pelham Manor, New York, around 1925. She lived there with her husband, Arthur; stepchildren, Margaret and Laird; and later, her son, Stephen.
