1925: A Visit to the "Big House"

By Grace Cash © 1991

Issue: September, 1991

Editor's Note... The following is one of a series of articles written by Grace Cash. She lives in Flowery Branch, Georgia. Watch for more of her stories in future issues.

I was ten years old the April of 1925. That was enough reward for me - I was growing up! But when the elementary teachers took the fourth and fifth grade girls, who were to sing at the Commencement, to the "Big House" for rehearsal, I wished I was at home, helping Papa plant cotton. The teachers filled us with such fear of visiting the splendid white house, setting on a green, grassy knoll, that we almost lost our speaking voices.

We had been assigned to sing little songs between the 3-Act Play the higher grades would present. Chestnut Mountain School didn't have a piano, and the teachers arranged for Miss Pauline Morrow - who lived with her parents in this house - to play the songs for us on her piano. She was a talented student of piano, studying for a diploma in music at Brenau College at the county seat. Her teachers had such names as "Zach Zahara." We thought it was a treat just to see her, and hear her play.

When we got to the house the teachers clamped their fingers across their mouths, warning us to be quiet and not to touch anything, and above all, not to worry the mother who sat in her chair, silently watching all that went on. We were cautioned to act mannerly in this house as though manners hadn't been ingrained in all of us at our own houses. We were quiet as we could be, and the house was quiet, so that it was like entering a house of death. We went through a wide circular porch, through the dining room, resplendent with polished mahogany furniture, on through a corridor where heavy wooden-framed pictures of ancestors - bearded men and straight-backed women in white blouses discretely fastened with cameo broaches- hung on the wall.

Pauline opened wide the door, invited us to come in, and she went straightway to the piano. She sat down on the round stool, and moved her sheets of classic compositions aside to give place to the music book the teachers brought with them. She ran her long slender hands across the keyboard, at home with the black-and-white keys, ready to play anything we requested.

The girls couldn't sing, and we couldn't hardly make any kind of sound. The teachers joined us, attempting to sing the songs along with us, but they didn't know the words. We knew the words - it was just that we were scared of all the "finery," so different from our own farmhouses, and burdened with the admonition to "set mannerly in this house." Pauline was too kind to notice. She pointed out when we should sing softly and when we should raise our voices but nothing helped. We couldn't sing as we did in the fields and at play, and be quiet and mannerly to fit this house at the same time.

I remember the red rug matching the divan and the straight chairs, and the exquisite vases on the mantel and the mother with her felt cloche hat shading her eyes as she sat motionless in her straight upholstered chair. A heavy sorrow hung over this house, never spoken about in the community above a whisper, and never mentioned to the family. Pauline was a little girl when her little brother died. Added to their grief, the parents couldn't agree on a burial place, whether in the Presbyterian graveyard or at the mother's Baptist church graveyard across the road. They had him buried on a little knoll, beside a country store. His little angel-tomb stood there, hovering over the child's grave, through all the years and was still there when we went to the big house to practice our songs. When we moved from Macedonia in 1924 and I first saw the boy's grave and the angel-tomb, I thought I had never seen anything more convincing of God's perpetual care.

Pauline's father was a drummer, a traveling salesman, a big man who looked like Theodore Roosevelt. He stayed dressed up all the time, looking every day of the week as he looked on Sunday when he walked a few hundred yards to the Presbyterian Church. There was another brother, younger than Pauline, a quiet young man who became a school principal. Here was the typical show of wealth, of old things restored since Sherman's fiery march through Georgia. This house made you think everything was back in place as though there had never been a War Between The States. It also marked the vast difference between halves-farmers and the Southern planters, which a Civil War (1860-1865) and World War I (1914- 1918) had left virtually unchanged.

I still regret that sometimes during all the years I knew Pauline I didn't apologize for the way we disappointed her and the teachers that day of rehearsal. I wish I had told her that she played the piano perfectly, that actually it was our own limitation - and lack of knowledge. We knew so little in those days about anything except the farm and our own houses so barren of furniture, the owners of pianos and red rugs and matching chairs impressed us as Aristocrats.

During the last years of her life, Pauline lived with her widowed mother in an old farmhouse across the road form the four-horse farm Papa rented (1928-1941). She had reached middle-age and times had turned around for her, from riches to poverty, but she hadn't changed. She played the piano and sang songs for the children who visited the family-owned unpainted house. By this time we had become borrowing-and-lending neighbors. She died after a lengthy illness while I was working at the Silk Mill, and we were never again to hear her delightful music, her hands roving masterfully over the keyboard.

A come-down to the dilapidated hundred year old farmhouse hadn't changed Pauline. Her talent at the piano had survived, and even back in 1925 when the school girls were groping and trying to sing, she probably thought the time would come when our own talents would shine through. If this was the case, it would be gratifying to know that our talents survived whatever changes the years had wrought - from wealth-to-poverty or from poverty-to-wealth - as Pauline's did.