The Little House essays are just one of series of essays that collectively tell my personal story. I introduced the whole life story in an introduction to the entire series that include the series on the Shorter School, Huntingdon College, Marriage and Family, Law School, Law Practice, Work as a Judge, Judicial Education, Return to Law Practice, Alabama Politics, Church Work, Civic Work, and Retirement ant Gardening.
The earliest years are some of most formative. I lived the first eight years of my life at the Little House. They were good years. Some of my fondest memories take me back to that simple life in a very rural setting. We were very poor, but almost everyone that we knew was poor. It was a very different way of life. It deserves recollection.
I will describe the Little House in some detail in the second essay that tells of my birth there. In this introduction, I am more interested in pointing to the way of life that it involved, and that I will try to describe, both directly and indirectly in these essays. These essays are but one part of my story, but in many ways, it is the most important part. As I said in the main introduction to these essays, I will present my evidence of a way of life that I feel was important in short essays, descriptions and anecdotes. The path that I have followed in life has led through fascinating landscape, and has always been interesting. The essays, descriptions and anecdotes are snapshots depicting the view from the path. The landscape may be familiar to some, but I believe that my particular vantage points will create new and different impressions. and it starts at the Little House.
On this website, I also tell the story of Mary Christine DeBardeleben, who was also born in Macon County. She was a remarkable person, in the first graduating class from the University of Alabama that included females who lived on campus. She was truly a missionary, trained as a missionary and chose to do missionary work to Blacks in the south. Her career with Methodist missionary work continued until her retirement years, when she returned to Macon County to teach at the Shorter Public School that I attended. I now realize that she was still engaged in missionary work to her own home area. The way of life described in these Little House essays is the exact way of life that she returned to minister to in 1945, when I was three years old.
The saga that I want to describe continues with the Shorter Public School essays. It was a very small white school in an overwhelmingly Black county. The need that the school was meeting, the circumstances with which it was dealing, may shed a new and different light on events that occurred. There needs to be a description from a different point of view than any that is currently available. And the understanding starts with the way of life with which the school was dealing very successfully. And I present that way of life in these essays.
As indicated in the general introduction, the essays, descriptions and anecdotes will be presented as free-standing entities. They can be read separately from each other, with meaning. But like a collection of snapshots, they collectively portray a larger reality. They will be factual, and facts always give rise to multiple epiphanies. The descriptions, anecdotes and essays will point to a larger reality. But I will just tell the stories in anecdotes, and present the ideas in essays, and largely leave to the reader the application or selection of the appropriate epiphanies and concepts.
The essays in this Little House series are not presented in any particular order. They all have to do with descriptions of events that occurred and things related to the Little House during the eight years that I lived there. However, I have used the linking capability of the website so that you will have many opportunities to jump from one post to related posts that are not sequential. Also, at the end of each essay is the opportunity to link quickly to the next essay in the sequence that I have presented them. To the extent there is any pattern of organization of it is geographic. I started at the Little House and gradually spread out in the presentations of descriptions. There are a few essays that deal with multiple topics, but for the most part, there is only one “point” to each essay. As for as organization is concerned, you might say that, remembering them from seventy years later, I presented them as they came to mind!
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