The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life

by Rod Dreher

  “All the kids would be playing outside, and nobody would care,” Hannah says. “It was a carefree life. Nothing but good times and good friends.” The sisters remembered too how affectionate their mother and father were with each other. When Mike would work an overnight shift at the fire station, Ruthie would stay up late talking to him by phone. “Like a couple of teenagers!” says Hannah. “I would be like, ‘Mom, come on!’

  “They were so silly and sweet,” Hannah says. “It was cool to me that they always seemed to fall more in love with each other each day. Some married couples, you can tell that they just get to this point where they’re done with love. It wasn’t that way with them. And their love radiated to us. What they loved they wanted us to love too.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Sweet Babies

  When Shannon Nixon Morell met my sister, she was eleven years old and one of eight African American children living in a troubled home. Her father was an alcoholic. Her mother worked three, sometimes four, jobs to keep the family fed. There was intense poverty, and chaos. Shannon never told her new sixth-grade teacher about what was going on in her house, but Ruthie knew. Shannon was ashamed of her circumstances, and felt trapped and angry.

  Ruthie smiled at her and said her name. That was enough for Shannon, who came from a home where nobody smiled, or seemed to care what happened to her. Ruthie saw promise in Shannon, and would sometimes spend their lunch hour in a field next to Bains Elementary, trying out strategies to help the struggling girl master her schoolwork.

  “Shannon,” Ruthie would say, “your life is hard, but you can do better than this. I can’t let you feel sorry for yourself. If you feel sorry for yourself, you’re going to give up.”

  Shannon liked that. It made her believe that she had within her the power to change her life.

  One day she said to Ruthie, “Mrs. Leming, I want to be a psychologist when I grow up.”

  “Why not?” Ruthie said. “If that’s what you want to be, go for it! You can do it, baby. Just put your mind to it, and don’t let go of your dream.”

  After finishing sixth grade Shannon moved up to the nearby high school building, but she kept in touch with Ruthie. When she was old enough for the cheerleading squad, she told Ruthie she wanted to try out, but wasn’t sure that she was good enough.

  “Shannon, you’re awesome at this,” said Ruthie, who had been on the pep squad in high school. “You have the talent. I know you can do it. Believe in yourself. Don’t ever settle for being just okay when you know you have it in you to do better.”

  Because Ruthie believed in her, Shannon started to believe in herself. She tried out for cheerleader, and made the squad. This caused some of her black girlfriends who hadn’t made the cut to turn on Shannon, accusing her of trying to be white. Shannon couldn’t talk about this with her family, who shared those racist views. So she went to Ruthie.

  “Don’t listen to them, Shannon,” Ruthie said. “You know what you’re really worth. They’re just trying to tear you down. Be strong, sweet baby, and keep on going.”

  Shannon left West Feliciana after graduation and joined the Navy. Today Shannon is a married mom who lives in southern California and works in, yes, psychology, at UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. She lives with her husband and children far away from her hometown, and, given her difficult relationship with her Louisiana family, she doubts that she will ever return. She is thriving in California, both personally and professionally, and thinks of Ruthie as the woman who midwifed this beautiful life—a gift she tries to share with others.

  “People say when your life is constantly miserable you either keep fighting or you give up and fall into the misery around you,” Shannon says. “Ruthie was a source of strength to me to get me through all that. In the work I do, it’s always my goal to make people feel like they’re important, that they’re worthy. That’s how she treated me.

  “I came from a place where I didn’t feel important, and nobody missed you when you were gone,” she continues. “I always felt like I was important to Ruthie. She gave so much to us kids from a small town.”

  During my sporadic visits home from Washington, I was struck by my sister’s deep empathy for her students. One night, sitting at her kitchen table, I helped Ruthie grade papers. The kids in her class seemed to miss easy questions. As we sat at her kitchen table, I asked my sister what was wrong with them.

  “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with them,” she said. “See this worksheet? This little boy’s mother dropped him off one Christmas Eve on his grandmother’s doorstep, and disappeared. Pick out a bad worksheet, and I can tell you something terrible going on. You can hardly imagine how hard some of these kids have it.”

  The hard cases among her students held a special place in her heart. It became a running joke among her fellow teachers that when they would get together to confront a student with a disciplinary problem that Ruthie would always take the student’s side. Her fellow teachers would be ready to come down hard on the errant kid, when my sister, by no means a bleeding heart, would chime in, “Sweet baby, what can we do to help you?” She always called them “sweet baby.”

  And then when the team meeting was over she would ask the chastened child, “Now, how’s your mama and them? Is your baby sister feeling better?”

  Ruthie’s teaching day consisted mostly of standing in front of twenty or more students and lecturing at a blackboard, the old-fashioned way. At first she taught her classes nearly all their subjects. Later in her career, when she was moved to the newly built West Feliciana Middle School, she specialized in math. One of her techniques became something of a signature. When a student had trouble with a math concept, Ruthie would go to the student, kneel by his desk, and, side by side, help the child work through his difficulty. The emotional intimacy and humility of that physical gesture touched them.

  There was little Ruthie wouldn’t endure to fulfill her duty to the kids in her classroom. Early in her teaching career, she had intense pain in her abdomen. She ignored it for days, but the pain only got worse. Finally Mike forced her to go to the doctor, who sent her straight to the hospital for emergency surgery. Ruthie had an ectopic pregnancy, which caused one of her Fallopian tubes to burst. She could have died from internal bleeding. Ruthie’s doctor told Mike he had no idea how Ruthie even stood at the chalkboard.

  That was Ruthie, though. She never thought of herself, only of others, and what she could do for them. Many of Ruthie’s former students have stories of how Ruthie made them better students and better people. Given the widespread poverty and chaotic family life among some communities in West Feliciana, no small number of Ruthie’s students came to school undisciplined and unprepared to learn, to put it charitably.

  And yet Ruthie abided with them. Her former students remember her as calm and soft-spoken, the kind of teacher who did not have to threaten, or even raise her voice, to establish authority.

  “Children had a love and respect for her because we knew she loved and respected us,” says Ashley Jones, who was a student in one of Ruthie’s first classes. “Ruthie wasn’t there for the paycheck. She was there because she saw this as her calling in life. That is why she had the effect she had on us kids.”

  Years later Ashley spent time as a substitute teacher at West Feliciana Middle School where Ruthie was then teaching. She was astonished to see that Ruthie was the same patient, tender teacher that she had known as a child.

  “I’m thinking, twenty years she’s been in this school system, and they’ve never gotten to her,” Ashley says. “They’re wild and disruptive, and ADD, and ADHD, and everything else they diagnose kids with these days. And this tiny lady came in with the softest voice, and put them all in line. It was the craziest thing to see.”

  Kendrick Mitchell, another of Ruthie’s early students, came from a strong home and made good grades. His problem was bullying. A self-described nerd, Kendrick loved Greek mythology and Sherlock Holmes mysteries—unusual tastes for Wes
t Feliciana sixth-grade boys, especially so for African American kids. Kendrick took loads of taunting from classmates for his love of reading. Ruthie phoned me one night in Washington to tell me about this kid in her class who was smart and bookish, but whose spirit was being broken by bullying. This was the first time she had a student like this, and she wanted my advice.

  “The thing he can’t see now is that the rest of his life is not going to be like the sixth grade,” I said. “You need to let him know that there’s nothing wrong with him for liking books. You need to let him know that he shouldn’t give up, and that once he gets out of school, life is going to be great.”

  “Would you write him a letter?” Ruthie asked. “I think it would mean a lot.”

  I told her I would. I sent it off the following week.

  For her part Ruthie took Kendrick aside and told him he reminded her of her brother when he was younger.

  “My brother is a reporter for a newspaper in Washington, DC, now,” Ruthie told him. “You can do anything you want to do if you put your mind to it. Don’t let these kids get you down.”

  Today, working in human resources for a Fortune 500 company in Houston, Kendrick says that the patience and encouragement Ruthie gave him—“She always, always had time for you, no matter what,” he says—was even more important than the knowledge she imparted.

  “Mrs. Leming taught me that it was okay that I didn’t want to be on the football field or in the streets doing bad things,” he says. “She would even go as far as recommending books to me. She watched the type of books that I liked to read, and when we would go on library trips, she would hand-pick books from the shelf and say, ‘I think you might like this one.’ That’s how she was. We weren’t just names and faces to her. She saw us.”

  I didn’t see my sister let her hair down as much as I would have liked. That side came out when she was with her girlfriends. Many were her fellow teachers in West Feliciana schools. Ashley Harvey, Jennifer Bickham (no relation to John), Karen Barron, Jodi Knight, and Rae Lynne Thomas were her running buddies. Leading the pack was Abby Temple, who had become Ruthie’s closest friend not long after she arrived as a teacher in 2002.

  In high school Abby was a freckle-faced beanpole a year behind Ruthie. They didn’t know each other well. Abby left St. Francisville, but came home after a painful divorce. When a job teaching sixth grade opened up, Abby took it—and became best friends with Ruthie.

  Because Abby was the temperamental opposite of Ruthie, theirs was a somewhat improbable friendship. Abby was tempestuous; Ruthie was serene. Abby was restless and questioning; Ruthie was content and accepting. Faith came hard to Abby; believing was easy for Ruthie. Abby loved the exotic and wanted to travel the world; Ruthie craved the rustic and the familiar. Abby was always in a hurry; Ruthie had time for everyone. Abby loved to argue; Ruthie sought harmony above all.

  They adored each other.

  What Abby loved most about Ruthie was her genuine nature. Ruthie wasn’t the kind of Southern woman who would tell you something honey-dripping to your face, then wield the stiletto when you weren’t looking. And Ruthie was wise. She had strong convictions, but if you went to her for advice, she listened, really listened, and withheld judgment until she had thought hard about your problem. Abby took her pain and confusion over her divorce, her loneliness, her dating life, and her anxiety about the future to Ruthie. Whatever the particulars of her advice, Ruthie never told Abby to write somebody off.

  “A lot of people would say, ‘You shouldn’t be around that person,’ ” says Abby. “That wasn’t Ruthie. She was always, ‘Let’s think about this, let’s see how we can make this work.’ Her advice was always so wise. You don’t find that often.”

  At the beginning of their friendship, Abby and Ruthie spent most of their time together at Ruthie’s house in Starhill. They sat in Ruthie’s kitchen for hours, drinking wine, with Ruthie cooking. The rest of her house was a mess, but Ruthie let it go. Her friend Abby was there, and Ruthie never put anything ahead of spending time with someone dear.

  They talked about God a lot. In the wake of her divorce at thirty, Abby was angry at Him. Other people got second chances at love; why not her? She wanted to have children; why wouldn’t He want that for her too?

  Theology was not Ruthie’s strong suit. She rarely if ever read spiritual books, did not attend adult Sunday school classes, and shunned systematic inquiry into the ways of the Lord. What she had to offer was a sympathetic ear and simple faith: Ruthie believed God existed, and loved us, and wanted the best life for us, though not necessarily the easiest life. That was all Ruthie knew about God, and all she wanted to know.

  “Abby,” Ruthie would say, “I pray for you every night, and I know God is going to help you find someone.”

  Abby got that a lot, and she usually hated it. It was the kind of thing women who already had husbands and children said. But Abby knew that those words were not cheap, feel-good clichés when they came from Ruthie. Abby could see how troubled Ruthie was by her sorrow and fear, how much Ruthie ached for her best friend’s sadness, how much she wanted Abby to be at peace.

  “Abby, I just trust,” she would tenderly say. “I just believe.”

  It wasn’t all merlot and misery for Abby and Ruthie, not by any stretch. It was hard to coax Ruthie out of the house—she preferred to be at home with Mike and the kids, maintaining her nest—but sometimes Ruthie could be talked into taking a night, or at least an afternoon, on the town.

  One Sunday after lunch Mike, Abby, and Ruthie took a drive across the Atchafalaya Swamp to hit Angelle’s Whiskey River Landing. Angelle’s is a Cajun dance hall on the riverbank that holds a big zydeco dance on Sunday afternoons. Abby and Ruthie ended up dancing atop the bar that afternoon.

  More often Abby and the girls from school would convince Ruthie to join them at Que Pasa, a Mexican cantina on the outskirts of St. Francisville, for Friday afternoon margaritas on the porch. Sometimes the teachers would go to Baton Rouge to cut loose. After her divorce, Abby met another man and became engaged, but the suitor lost his nerve. When her fiancé canceled their wedding at the last minute, Ruthie and the teacher crew took Abby to the city for a therapeutic night of beer, karaoke, and derring-do. These excursions usually ended up with everyone back in Ruthie’s Starhill kitchen, with Ruthie making breakfast for the gang.

  Ruthie, as always, had a knack for making friendships easily. Take the way she met Ashley Harvey. Ashley’s parents owned a pharmacy in St. Francisville, where she grew up, but Ashley lived and taught school in a town across the river from Baton Rouge. She was thinking about transferring to West Feliciana Middle School, but she wasn’t sure it was a good move. One day she ran into Ruthie at Rebekah’s day care.

  “Here she was, just running in to pick up her daughter, and she spent twenty minutes talking to me about how this was the best place in the world, this was such a great school, that we’d be working together, and how she would look forward to teaching with me,” Ashley recalls. “I thought, ‘Okay, it’s done, I’m going now.’ She’s the reason I live and teach here.”

  One year at homecoming Ashley rode with Ruthie from school to downtown St. Francisville for the parade. Ruthie had Mike’s truck that day. When they parked on a side street, Ashley struggled to change out of her work clothes into something more comfortable for parade watching. She told Ruthie it felt weird to get undressed in a pickup truck.

  Ruthie cocked an eyebrow at her and smirked, “You think yours is the first naked body to be in this truck?”

  On a road trip with the gang to a beach in Florida, Ruthie gave them another glimpse of her saucy side. One night Ruthie drank beer a bit past the point of cheerfulness, then slyly announced to the ladies, “I love me some Mike Leming. I love me some Mike Leming in the shower.”

  “We were like, Lord!” Abby snorted. “After that we would all say, ‘We love us some Ruthie Leming.’ ”

  Until a few years ago you had to take a car ferry to cross the Mississippi Ri
ver between St. Francisville and the town of New Roads. Once Jennifer Bickham complained to Ruthie that she had missed the ferry returning to St. Francisville and had to wait for it to slowpoke back across the river.

  “Ruthie said that if she had been delayed like that, she would have used that time to make out with her husband,” Jennifer says, laughing. “That changed my perspective on being delayed.”

  Even though she was a stickler for rules—she once chastised Ashley for opening a beer in the car within sight of their Florida beach hotel—there was one phrase that could make Ruthie, as long as she was with Abby, defy convention: I double-dog dare you.

  Down on the Starhill Riviera a sixty-foot sand bluff overlooks the water and the sandbars of Thompson Creek. At the top big trees with exposed roots from erosion perch precariously on the edge, one heavy rainstorm away from losing their grip and plunging into the bottom below.

  “I threatened all the kids, and the parents too, that I damn sure didn’t want to see anybody climbing that bluff. It was just sand,” says Ronnie Morgan, the host of those creek party weekends.

  “I went to the camp to get some more beer, and when I got back, there’s Ruthie and Abby about twenty feet from the top. Somebody had made the mistake of double-dog daring them to climb up and touch the roots. I told them to get their asses on down, or I’d whip ’em both,” he recalls, laughing. “You get Ruthie and Abby together, no telling what would happen.”