Free Littlejohn by Howard Owen Page B

was supposed to go, I would make it as hard to read as I could, hoping Miss Bullard wouldn’t be able to tell if it was right or wrong.
    The worst was my name. To me, all the letters looked just alike, and when I would see it wrote out for me, it was like everything was spinning and out of order. One day, I might write LILTTJNOH, and the next it might be LTTIJHN, or LITIEJON. Miss Bullard would make us write our names on the blackboard, just to torment me, I thought. Oh, how I wished I’d of been a Tom or a Ed, although I even spelled Tom “Tow” sometimes. But standing up there at that board, with them other young-uns sniggering behind me and me feeling the heat from Miss Bullard’s eyes on me from the side, my brain would just ache trying to see it right in my mind.
    “Littlejohn cain’t write his own name,” I heard my hateful cousin Flossie half whispering behind me more than once.
    Miss Bullard sent a note home to Momma and Daddy, and Momma took extra time in the evening, when she might of been praying, to work with me. But Momma couldn’t read and write real good either, and when I would keep on getting it wrong, she would get mad at me, and I would cry. Finally, she turned me over to Century and Lafe. The worst, though, was when we’d have prayer together after supper and she would ask Jesus to please forgive me for being so willful and to show me the light so I might follow it and learn.Understand, East Geddie in 1913 wasn’t hardly a hotbed of learning. Most folks, like their mommas and daddies before them, would stick with it long enough to be able to read and write and cipher. Some went through all eleven grades, like Century and Lafe, but it was mostly the girls. The point was to get enough learning so that somebody else wouldn’t be able to cheat you.
    Century and Lafe would take turns working with me, and they’d get right hot with me, too, when it looked like I wasn’t ever going to learn how to do the stuff that come easy to them. I failed the second grade, which wasn’t easy to do back then. The only thing I am thankful for, looking back on it, is that there wasn’t as much school to go to then as there is now, only about a hundred days a year.
    It was Lafe that got me through the second grade second time around, and the third and fourth, for that matter. He’d teach me to memorize things. He might of been the only one in the family that didn’t think I wasn’t quite right, because he knew I could memorize whole pages of books. Since the same books got used from year to year, I could learn enough from what Lafe read to me to be able to stand up in class and, long as the teacher didn’t change anything, pretend to read. It got so, after a while, that I really thought I was reading. I learned the multiplication tables, and teachers got so they knew that something wasn’t quite right with me, but that if they asked me, “Littlejohn, what is six times seven?” instead of writing the problem on the board, I could get it.
    But the plain, hard truth is that after the fourth grade, and five years of school, I couldn’t write my own name. Of course, my spelling was awful, too, and somebody’d have to read the stuff off the blackboard to me, so I would try andsit next to somebody I could trust not to make fun of me or make me feel more stupid than I already felt by telling me the wrong thing. Momma was always on me about the bad grades I got, but, like anything else, if you live with it long enough, it gets to seem normal. I got so I hated books because they made me look so dumb and feel so bad, and whenever there was a chance to help Daddy in the fields instead of going to school, school didn’t stand a chance. When I could get Lafe to write me a note, I’d skip altogether, but this was risky business, because half of the teachers went to Geddie Presbyterian like we did, and they was just as like as not to come up to Momma or Daddy on Sunday and ask if Littlejohn was feeling better. Lafe got