lives. We can reinhabit our rural farmlands.
At the rear of the school grounds I found the market garden and school orchard, rows of apples and pears, planted so that students, who paid themselves for their work and then deposited the profits into a scholarship fund, could sell produce to the local grocer. The strawberries needed picking.
By the time Silas and I arrived home, the signatures for the referendum had been assembled. I don’t like to remember the next couple of months—how busy they were and how scared I was that we would lose. I volunteered at the school on Fridays, teaching art to third graders. The children drew posters that said, “Keep Our Schools Open. Please Vote Nov. 4.” We hung them in businesses downtown. Sometimes we would return to stores where we had obtained permission to post signs and find the merchants had removed them. The owner of the tractor company wouldn’t let us erect a sign at the edge of his land, saying the issue was too controversial, that he had customers on both sides. People here are seldom vocal about their leanings, and it was hard to tell which direction political winds were blowing.
A group calling themselves Concerned Taxpayers organized to fight for school closure. Their arguments—that consolidation meant progress, that country schoolchildren were getting special treatment not afforded town children, and that keeping the schools open would cost taxpayers more money, especially for facility repairs—appeared in the weekly newspaper. The owner of the radio station was one of the concerned taxpayers, and he frequently aired his editorial views, couched as unbiased facts: “What You Should Know,” he called his editorials, then proceeded to list reasons to close the rural schools.
To make matters worse, the wording that would appear on the ballot had purposely been made confusing. The ballot read: “Do you agree to the school board’s decision to close the two rural schools?” People would have to vote “no” to keep the schools open, opposing the school board’s decision to close them.
We used Parent-Teacher Organization money to print bumper stickers. We bought full-page ads in the paper, and radio ads. We set up a save-our-schools booth at school carnivals. One night I manned the booth at the county fair. I stood in the flow of people wearing a VOTE NO button, clutching a sign that asked people to favor rural schools: VOTE NO TO ABANDONED FACILITIES. VOTE NO TO TEACHER LAYOFFS. VOTE NO TO CROWDED CLASSROOMS.
I had come back home to be part of a community, and I didn’t want, at this crucial time, to lose a vital element of it. Sending Silas to town school was contrary to every reason I had for being in that place at all.
We divvied up voter registration rolls and began calling people to ask them to keep the schools open. As many people seemed to be for as against. We had a chance, but it was only because—and this is the glory of it—a group of us were meeting and working together, having fun. One evening a week we met in Neil Eunice’s crop insurance office, small groups of seven or eight, hashing things over, planning. We decided to throw a party on election night whether we won or lost.
Election day found me stuffing fliers under windshield wipers in parking lots. About noon, I spoke to an elderly woman walking to her car.
“Did you vote today?” I asked her. She leaned tiredly against the car and said she was sick, that she wanted to vote but that she’d been to the doctor and was going home.
“I’m trying to keep the schools open,” I said.
“That’s the way I planned on voting,” she said. “If we close those schools we’ll have to build a new one in town.”
“We need your vote badly,” I said to her. We had seven hours to go until the polling doors closed. “I’ll drive you to the polls.”
“I just don’t feel like it,” she said. I pointed out my truck and said I’d bring her back to her car if she would vote.
“OK,” she said, and I ran to bring the truck around.
The voting precinct was located in the rear of the chamber of commerce, and it was empty except for five polltakers, who sat inside the small room gossiping, one crocheting a white afghan. They helped Mrs. Dixon through the protocol and into the booth, where she vanished behind a gray curtain. “There’s only one thing to vote on?” she called.
“That’s right,” one of the women said.
“I’m eighty-seven years old,” Mrs. Dixon told me on the drive back. Her mind was excellent, no part of it flaccid; only her body was failing. “I hope to be able to stay out of a nursing home.”
I was posted at one of the town precincts, in the Jaycee Building, at seven that evening, when the door was locked. Ten minutes later I had the precinct’s results in hand: yes beat no nearly two to one: 247 to 141. Close the schools.
When I came out the door, bad news in hand, it was dark, the sun an orange stain in the sky above the shadowy fairgrounds. I’d never been able to go to the fair as a child, and not two months before, Silas and I had gone for the first time. By now the carnival had packed up and departed for another town, but I remembered its excitement—lights, candy apples, rides, music you could hear at the courthouse. People carried big stuffed tigers and a woman in battered heels guessed weights and ages. I was a girl again that night, screaming at the top of the ferris wheel, eating cotton candy. We took Silas’s friend Caleb with us, and he ran ahead and got on the roller coaster alone. When we caught up, we stood at the picket fence watching him ride, a frightened wonder on his face as he held on, a look that left Silas and me doubled over the waist-high fence laughing.
That evening flashed through my mind as I stepped outside the Jaycee Building. I craved a candy apple. Double against. How could we win, even if this was only one precinct? I stood by the car and took a deep breath, looking up at a newborn moon in the sky, the stars following Venus out. Suddenly I was weary.
If Silas has to go to town school, we’ll make it work, I thought. I’ll volunteer a lot. We’ll make it work.
I folded into the truck and headed back to Eunice Crop Insurance. We’d tacked a huge chart on the wall for recording precinct reports, and I made the first mark on it: 247 to 141. Another parent, Rod, had the other town precinct, and he rushed in. “Double against,” he said. Surely we’d lost.
When results from the outlying precincts began to arrive, the number of noes began to creep toward the number of yeses, then to equal it, and then to pass it, and by the time our reporters in all voting districts had called in, the figures had reversed, unbelievably double in favor of keeping the schools open.
We had won!
People began to arrive at the insurance company, hugging and slapping each other on the back. We brought out homemade cookies, chips and dip, sausages, punch. Teachers drove up. Children ran around gobbling chocolate chip cookies. The two principals whose jobs had been in question walked in. I called the Savannah paper and the television station.
Because we live in a community that is, with few exceptions, Christian and highly devout, Neil, whose wife teaches at Fourth District, asked everyone to squeeze close and form a circle. The ring was two or three people thick. “We have fought hard to keep our schools open, and we have won,” he said. “It is time to thank God for hearing our prayers.”
The next day we paid the owner of the radio station to air our gratitude. “Yesterday was a great day for Appling County. Together we decided that our children and their education are important to us and that we will do the best thing possible to preserve the quality of education throughout the county. Today, Friends of Altamaha and Fourth District Schools want to thank you sincerely for your support and your vote. Without the attention and concern voters across the county gave this matter, a bad decision might have quietly been made, and our children would have been the ones to suffer. With that in mind, we have, for a minute, to appreciate the democratic process in this country—that it still works, that we still have a voice, a say, a vote. . . .”
When