Until a year ago my son’s Cub Scout pack held its monthly meetings in the basement gymnasium of the old elementary school. This past fall our new school was opened and the pack now meets in the new cafeteria, a much more cheerful and better-lighted place for the meetings. In fact, there is only one thing I miss about the old basement, and I would like very much to find out what has become of it.
Along one side of its pine-paneled walls there was hung a long row of old school pictures, some dating back to the late 1800s. Sometimes during the entertainment portions of the meetings (which were geared for the boys and not for their parents), I would amuse myself by drifting over to these pictures and examining them, taking each one down in turn in its funny, old-fashioned frame, and then replacing it carefully on its nail.
My favorite picture was the oldest one, dated 1888, of ‘District School No. 5,’ located in the southern part of our town. It showed a small, simple, woodframe building, gable-fronted, standing in the middle of a flat, treeless plain. In front of the building a small group of perhaps fifteen children was lined up with their teacher. Their heights varied from barely three to over five feet. They all looked uncomfortable, in clothes either too big or too small for them, the girls in heavy calico dresses, the boys in tight-fitting pants and jackets buttoned to the neck.
The smallest child of all was a tiny thing on the left end, whose features were shadowed by a large sunbonnet (like the old, faceless Dutch Cleanser girl). Her name was listed as Bernice Small.
The teacher, only slightly taller than the tallest boy, was identified as a Miss Palmer. She looked young and fairly hand some, and was shown staring firmly off to one side. Virtually all the names inked in underneath the picture were old ones to the area: Ellis, Howe, Baker, Small. There were others – Maker, Briggs, Bearse – which have not survived so well down to the present day, except in some of the newer subdivision and street names.
These old pictures grabbed me so, I could not account for it. It was not just the quaintness of dress and the radically different landscape. These little figures looked so vulnerable, so fragile out on that barren windswept plain, with only the firm jaw of their teacher to sustain them. Today we are apt to think of our relationship to this planet in terms of a technological death grip, but these children suggested the real isolation of the human spirit in the cosmos and made me feel that no advantage they might have managed to scrape up against it would have seemed unfair (even though, in this case, the visual wilderness was of their own, or rather, their fathers’ making). I loved them, among other things, for their total, incomprehensible unawareness of me.
By 1895, some of the ‘new-old’ names began to appear in the pictures: Gage, Tubman, Dugan, Alexander – many of whose descendants still live in the town. Most of the pictures over the next three decades were taken at the old school in the center of town, now a plastics factory. The earliest names I know personally appeared in 1909, those of two women who still live near me. A 1916 picture shows both of them sitting in adjacent rows at their dark, wooden desks, bows in their flat, straight hair. I looked hard to see the older women in the schoolgirl faces, and it seemed that already their basic outlooks on the world had formed: one already somewhat dour, apprehensive and resentful of the world, and tending to plumpness; the other, thinner and with a less determined face, not as strong in character but more hopeful and trusting of the world.
As children they played together in the cemetery next door where my children sometimes play now. Both later married, one to a local boy shown in the school pictures with her, the other to an off-Cape man. Now they both live as widows, a half-mile apart, in the old family homes they grew up in, divested of husbands and other external trappings, returned to home. Although I have lived here only a few years and my own parents had not yet been born when these women went to grade school, their pictures made me feel strangely old, for I realized that I was one of a small number of the present townspeople who still knew them.
Only in the late twenties and thirties did many faces begin to appear that I know now, men still in their prime, some of whom hold town positions or are prominent tradesmen, who went to school here in that period when all boys seemed to be very gangly and had curly hair.
From about 1938 to 1955 there was a gap, when no pictures appeared. When they began again, in the late fifties, they were no longer of entire schools, but of individual grades. A daughter of my neighbor appeared briefly, in 1958, showing her father’s lineaments. From then on, the names of the students began to change and diversify much more rapidly, as though a slow-motion film were accelerating to time-lapse speed. Still, as late as the graduating class of 1971 (the last eighth grade to go to school in our local grade school), fully a third of the twenty-four names were still those of old families.
A friend of mine once told me that he had outgrown his interest in local history during his years here. I find my own tendency just the reverse: the longer I live here the more I find myself preoccupied with things that were. Part of it is that, the more closely I look at the natural landscape, the more it seems involved with our human past. Part of it is also, I know, the desire we all have to rescue temporal things from oblivion. In the lists of names below the older pictures there were frequently blank spaces between commas. These struck me painfully, for I could not even give the corresponding anonymous faces an identity.
But I think I valued these pictures not just as symbols of a lost past, or as factors in our land-use history, but as a perspective on the present. The children in them are largely invisible now, covered up like the timbers in old houses that have passed into new hands and been remodeled. In recent decades a pattern of new names (mine among them) has pasted itself across the face of this town. Yet in time the glue of our opportunism will loosen and we will peel off like cheap wallpaper.
In the old pictures the foreign names of the teachers – Palmer, Le Fort, Dunn – come and pass away with each new photograph, but the small children remain like kingposts. Today we still travel their roads, walk their beaches and endure their seasons. We have ‘conquered’ space and mistake it for time, while in their guileless, unguarded faces I read the intent to strike roots deep into the void.
(Behind me, I heard the voices of the Cub Scouts sitting on the old gymnasium floor, and my attention was drawn away from the pictures. They were laughing at an old film of Lindbergh’s epic flight, already comic in its antiquity.)