Important Part of My Life

by Nancy Colene Beedle Hollingsworth

No matter how far I go in this life, Bayou Meto School was a wonderful place to start.

Nancy Beedle Hollingsworth, Donna Faye Rodgers, Jimmy Green, and Roger Orman.

Nancy Beedle

I entered Mrs. Myrtle Ragdale’s class when I was 6, and would spend the next three years learning under her care and guidance. Starting in the fourth grade, I was in Mrs. Maxie (Wilma) Ruffin’s class. I attended school the entire six years without an absence.

Besides learning our A-B-Cs and the Pledge of Allegiance starting every day, we spent countless hours outside, playing on the merry-go-round and slide and oh, the fun we had playing Red Rover.

Back then, I lived to play hopscotch.

No one had ever heard of a school lunchroom. Instead, we carried bologna — the meat came from the Harvey Riley Store at Bayou Meto — sandwiches in sacks or lard buckets. Some students even spread blankets in the schoolyard like on holiday.

My dresses were often made from flour or feed sacks, and the boys rolled their jeans up several times. New jeans were expensive, so parents bought them long so the boys had plenty of room to grow.

We elected kings, queens, princes, and princesses. We held cakewalks, hoping that special person would buy the cake you’d brought.

All of my at least dozen classmates became fast and close friends. There was no “I’m better than you” or rich or poor. We saw each other as individuals, as full of life and possibilities.

Life wasn’t as easy back then, but we didn’t know that. For instance, the school had no indoor plumbing and we had to trek to and fro each day to the outdoor toilet, which was basically a round hole cut in a wooden board that sat over a pit.

I remember one such visit when Linda Brown and I made the trip together. Linda entered, started to take a seat, but stopped when she saw two large eyes staring up at her from the depths of the hole. She rushed out, yelling, “Someone’s looking at me!” Our teacher asked Harvey Riley and Lloyd Brown to take a look. Well, much to everyone’s surprise and delight, it was a hoot owl looking back at the two men. They managed to catch it and give the bird a good cleaning before setting him free. This was cause for much laughter and celebration at our tiny school.

Of course not every day was filled with only laughter. Let’s just say, David Garrison was always up to something. Like the morning he put a frog in Mrs. Ragsdale’s desk. We all thought it was funny when she opened her desk and out jumped that frog. We all shared a good laugh, as well as a not-so-pleasant spanking with a paddle from Mrs. Ragsdale who didn’t find one bit of humor in the frog’s great escape.

Then there was the time my friends and I roasted marshmallows on the little electric heater that was stored in our unused cloakroom. It didn’t end well, with a big gooey mess and spankings all around. But it’s sure a favorite memory of mine now.

My mother, Ruth Beedle, drove the Bayou Meto school bus. Really, it was a pickup truck with a shell (think camper shell) that covered the bed, with a rear door, two windows, and wooden boards around the edges of the bed that served as seats.

Ironically, my siblings and I didn’t ride the bus because there wasn’t enough room for all the students. Instead, we walked, taking a shortcut through the woods and a graveyard to get to school. I have to admit I was a little afraid of the cemetery. I could almost feel the ghosts watching me, and would often walk around it instead of cutting through with my brothers.

Years later and to my immense joy, my two daughters Becky Simpson Knoll and Donna Simpson Miller rode the more modern bus for the DeWitt School District that my mother still drove. She retired after 20 years.

I was so happy back then. It was an important part of my life. To this day, I feel a special closeness and bond with all my classmates, no matter where life has taken them and who they’ve become. And I feel very blessed to have gone to Bayou Meto School.

This story was included in the Bayou Meto School Reunion book for that event on October 5, 2013.