The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life Read Online Free Page B
Author: Rod Dreher
Tags: General, Biography & Autobiography, Women
boarding school for Louisiana gifted and talented students. An escape! Only two could be accepted from West Feliciana; three of us wanted to go. Nora helped us all take the tests and gather our transcripts and recommendations. As exciting as the academics were, I wanted more than anything to leave, to get out, to put as much distance between my hometown and myself as I could.
One day, near the end of the spring semester, I stopped by the post office in my old blue Chevy pickup before heading to my after-school job at the grocery store. I went in, opened the box, and there it was: a fat letter from the Louisiana School. I took it back outside, sat in my truck, and trembling, opened the envelope to learn my fate.
I was in.
Paw was against my going. I had no business leaving home atsixteen, he thought, and God knows what kind of nonsense I could get into up there. There was nothing wrong with me that more effective discipline couldn’t fix. Mam did not want me to go away so early either. But she could also see how broken I was, how lost, and how miserable. She fought with Paw for his permission to let me go. She finally got it.
And so, in August, the day finally came for me to leave home. With our pickup full of my worldly goods, we met my old friend Jason McCrory, the other kid from our school to win a slot in the inaugural LSMSA class, and boarded the car ferry across the Mississippi together. Jason and I stood on the bow of the boat, saying nothing. I thought about what I was leaving behind. The intolerance, the social conformity, the cliquishness, the bullying. At sixteen this is what I thought small-town life was and always would be. There, on the far side of the river, was the rest of my life, straight ahead. I had no intention of looking back.
CHAPTER TWO
“Forever and a Day”
When I set out for Natchitoches, I left my little sister behind in St. Francisville. This was the fork in the road for us, the moment in our lives in which we diverged. Neither of us could have known it then, because each of us had begun a joyful new chapter of change that would determine the courses of our lives. I was finally among my tribe now in Natchitoches, and gaining the confidence that comes with knowing that one has a place in the world. For Ruthie the world brightened because of a boy from Texas they called Blue Eyes.
Mike Leming moved to town in 1980, when he was twelve. Ruthie, then a fifth grader, came home from school one day to say there was a new boy in school. Mike was a year older than Ruthie, which meant they didn’t see a lot of each other until they were in high school together. When we were growing up, kids in the first through sixth grades attended Bains Elementary, a flat-roofed, one-story red brick building on the Bains Road, three miles north of St. Francisville. It was one of those desultory 1970s modern schoolhouses that might have been designed by the architect dad on The Brady Bunch , and which looked like 1966’s idea of the future. Mike came to town the year West Feliciana High School opened just up the low, sloping hill from Bains. It too was a flat-roofed modern building, but it was builtinto the side of a hill, and after Bains, this shiny new school imparted the approximate euphoria of new car smell. What’s more every single classroom was air-conditioned. Every one! No more scheming to get assigned to the desk that was closest to the classroom wall fan. In the West Feliciana school universe, this was what it meant to move up in the world.
We children didn’t understand this at the time, but ours was a poor parish; the fancy-pants new school came courtesy of tax receipts from the River Bend Nuclear Generating Station, construction on which began in the mid-1970s. There were few rich kids in West Feliciana schools. The student body was evenly divided between black and white, but the white kids—almost all middle or working class—were generally much better off than the black kids, most of whom were
One day, near the end of the spring semester, I stopped by the post office in my old blue Chevy pickup before heading to my after-school job at the grocery store. I went in, opened the box, and there it was: a fat letter from the Louisiana School. I took it back outside, sat in my truck, and trembling, opened the envelope to learn my fate.
I was in.
Paw was against my going. I had no business leaving home atsixteen, he thought, and God knows what kind of nonsense I could get into up there. There was nothing wrong with me that more effective discipline couldn’t fix. Mam did not want me to go away so early either. But she could also see how broken I was, how lost, and how miserable. She fought with Paw for his permission to let me go. She finally got it.
And so, in August, the day finally came for me to leave home. With our pickup full of my worldly goods, we met my old friend Jason McCrory, the other kid from our school to win a slot in the inaugural LSMSA class, and boarded the car ferry across the Mississippi together. Jason and I stood on the bow of the boat, saying nothing. I thought about what I was leaving behind. The intolerance, the social conformity, the cliquishness, the bullying. At sixteen this is what I thought small-town life was and always would be. There, on the far side of the river, was the rest of my life, straight ahead. I had no intention of looking back.
CHAPTER TWO
“Forever and a Day”
When I set out for Natchitoches, I left my little sister behind in St. Francisville. This was the fork in the road for us, the moment in our lives in which we diverged. Neither of us could have known it then, because each of us had begun a joyful new chapter of change that would determine the courses of our lives. I was finally among my tribe now in Natchitoches, and gaining the confidence that comes with knowing that one has a place in the world. For Ruthie the world brightened because of a boy from Texas they called Blue Eyes.
Mike Leming moved to town in 1980, when he was twelve. Ruthie, then a fifth grader, came home from school one day to say there was a new boy in school. Mike was a year older than Ruthie, which meant they didn’t see a lot of each other until they were in high school together. When we were growing up, kids in the first through sixth grades attended Bains Elementary, a flat-roofed, one-story red brick building on the Bains Road, three miles north of St. Francisville. It was one of those desultory 1970s modern schoolhouses that might have been designed by the architect dad on The Brady Bunch , and which looked like 1966’s idea of the future. Mike came to town the year West Feliciana High School opened just up the low, sloping hill from Bains. It too was a flat-roofed modern building, but it was builtinto the side of a hill, and after Bains, this shiny new school imparted the approximate euphoria of new car smell. What’s more every single classroom was air-conditioned. Every one! No more scheming to get assigned to the desk that was closest to the classroom wall fan. In the West Feliciana school universe, this was what it meant to move up in the world.
We children didn’t understand this at the time, but ours was a poor parish; the fancy-pants new school came courtesy of tax receipts from the River Bend Nuclear Generating Station, construction on which began in the mid-1970s. There were few rich kids in West Feliciana schools. The student body was evenly divided between black and white, but the white kids—almost all middle or working class—were generally much better off than the black kids, most of whom were
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