The Jesse James Scrapbook

Autumn 1856

Autumn 1856Ophelia Helms

Missouri Schoolteacher

At the end of the school year in 1856 I was let go from my teaching position in Gallatin, Missouri. But that did not surprise me one bit for teaching, in those days, was something of a nomadic profession. School districts, for reasons I never agreed with, preferred bringing in new teachers every few years to keeping the old ones. I was twenty-four years old and, having begun teaching when I was sixteen, I had already held five different positions.

I applied for employment in Clay County, Missouri. A horrible guerrilla war was raging nearby on the Kansas border, but I don’t suppose anyone ever considers that the sweep of history will have the slightest effect on them. I was trying to get work to keep body and soul together and in that there was difficulty enough.

As is well known, the respectable occupations for women in those days were teaching school or teaching music, but even so, male teachers were preferred. The big boys, it was feared, would run wild with nothing but a woman—and especially a diminutive one—between them and the devil. Thus, both my gender and small size counted against me as did the fact that I had reached such an advanced age and had yet to marry.

So I lied to the school board.

I told them I was engaged and that my intended was surveying a railroad route to California. He was to return in two years, I said, and then we would be married. This tale quelled their fears and impressed them, too, as railroading was quite the thing in those days, and I was given the job.

The schoolhouse where I was to both teach and live was a lovely, white, clapboard building standing in a secluded grove near Kearney. It was a one-room school of the type our poets and politicians are fond of romanticizing about. I, however, knew what to expect. I brought with me the four McGuffy’s Readers I owned, a roll of maps, a dictionary, my precious globe of the world, and an old alarm clock.

Let the poets dwell on the merits of the one-room school, I shall not. That fall I had seventy students and not a single, proper desk. The students sat on benches so high that the younger children’s legs could not touch the floor and, so, dangled in space, all day. The school’s library consisted of a Bible and a Farmer’s Almanac, and many of the children did not have the money to buy slates and writing tablets.

We did not have grades in those days, the students, instead, being placed according to the reader they were using. My seventy scholars were spread out over eight readers, first through eighth. One lone teacher, man or woman—and doubling as janitor, nurse, and handyman, besides—could not cope with such circumstances, and it was necessary, then, for the older students to help the younger ones.

Frank James was one of the helpers, Jesse one of the helped.

I do not mean to imply that Jesse James was a poor student or dull in any way. He was nine or so, and in the fourth reader just as he should have been. Frank was about twelve or thirteen and very advanced. He did, upon occasion, become overwrought when his performance was less than perfect but, by and large, he was my prize pupil.

I do not believe I ever met their stepfather. If I did he made no lasting impression on me, but I remember the boy’s mother, Mrs. Samuel—a mule of a woman, as all we western women had to be. Still, she was more educated than most men, and her library was much more extensive than any of the other parent’s. She had strong political views, and, though we disagreed on Abolition, it gladdened my heart to meet a woman who did not shrink from such discussions.

“We paid good money for our darkies,” she once told me. “If the Yankees want to free ‘em so bad, they can buy ‘em from us. And how would we grow our hemp and corn? Read Ephesians VI, 5, if you want to know the word of God.”

She did seem to dote a bit on Frank—or Mr. Frank, as she called him—and, in truth, I remember him much better than I do Jesse. Jesse I remember as being very fond of horses but not much different from the other boys. He was a regular boy I should say. In the years since he became famous, I’ve read tales that he, as a child, tortured small animals and did hideous things to his classmates. But those stories are untrue, of course, being nothing more than the imaginings of the authors of cheap, paperback books.

If anything, the childhoods of Frank and Jesse, and of all the children who attended that lonely school near Kearney, were much more frightening than anything a dime novelist could ever invent. I think I would have been better able to cope with a lone boy killing a cat, let us say, than with what actually transpired.

I recall standing at a window during first recess one spring day, and I can hear, even now, that old alarm clock ticking behind me. In the yard the boys were involved in play, but it was not their usual game of run and chase. They were beginning a game I had not witnessed before. I, of course, studied my charges, wondering what was afoot.

They drew lots. The winners were grouped as Southern Men. The losers were forced to play the part of Kansas Jayhawkers. As the game progressed, the Jayhawkers, led by a boy portraying the notorious John Brown, were routed by the Southern Men, Frank and Jesse among them, then chased into the brush. At last, the Southern Men captured the boy portraying John Brown, and he, without the slightest complaint, was led towards a tree in the yard.

“Hang John Brown,” the boys chanted. “Hang John Brown from a sour apple tree.”

One end of a rope was tied under the boy’s arms and the other was tossed over the limb of the tree. As the boy was strung up he contorted his face into a gruesome shape, mimicking the death throes of a man strangling. And it struck me that the boy being “hanged” must have actually witnessed such an event to have played his part in so convincing a manner.

John Brown’s agonies increased and the Southern Men soon began cheering and singing songs. Horrified by the cold brutality of this spectacle, I cut recess short and went to the door.

“Come children,” I called. “It’s time for geography.”

I was somewhat shaken in attempting to teach my lessons after that recess, but as the day progressed the children’s horrible game passed from my mind. When the clock read noon, the children went outside with their lunch buckets, and I went to the window again, expecting that the boys would be involved in some more usual passtime. Darebase, an antecedent of our modern bat and ball games, was one of their favorites.

But again lots were drawn and the sides assembled. Another boy was chosen to play John Brown. Again he was captured and hanged to the cheers of the others. I suppose it’s faulty memory that causes me to believe that all the children, boys and girls alike, were gathered around that tree when Brown was hanged this second time. At the very most, there were eight or ten of them watching, and the vision I now hold, of all seventy of my charges dancing and singing at the base of that tree, is something conjured in the more reptilian reaches of my soul.

In the following days, I assumed the children would tire of this game, but they did not. It became an obsession with them. At lunch, at every recess, they dashed to the yard and drew lots. It was cold and calculated and horrible. Every player knew their part down to the slightest gesture, and the game did not vary.

As the real violence going on along the border grew and the mock violence outside my schoolroom window continued, a sense of despair overcame me. It is well known that we were strong on the three R’s in those days, but the school also functioned as an adjunct to church and family. We taught the children morality and their relation to society. Our McGuffy’s Readers may seem almost humorous today, but they served to instill in generations the values which pervade our society even now.

Our Readers extolled the virtues of village life. They taught equality and egalitarianism. They taught that hard work would be rewarded and evil punished. Our Reader’s lessons were filled with hope and an unwavering belief in man’s progress and perfectibility.

The children read McGuffey and understood. The children believed that the hand of God could be seen in every act of man on earth, and there, in that weed-infested schoolyard, God’s work was the hanging of John Brown.

Every day, I watched as the golden rule was twisted into some divine prescription for vengeance. Every day, I, a nomad, began thinking it might be wise to move on at the end of term. Yet, every time I resolved to give notice, McGuffey’s admonition to “try, try again” prevented me.

I suppose it is nothing more than my own romanticism that causes me to believe I was clutching another book, more arcane than McGuffey, to my bosom on the day I arrived at my decision. Perhaps it was not “The Tell Tale Heart” or “The Masque of the Red Death” I was holding as I watched those children carry out their mock murders. But that old alarm clock was ticking behind me, I remember that, and John Brown’s face was contorting in front of me.

“Hang John Brown,” the children chanted. “Hang John Brown. Hang John Brown from a sour apple tree.”

Then a child, unseen, came up behind me, and when she spoke I was so startled I dropped the book.

“Are you for slavery, Miss Helms?” the child asked.

Perhaps I was not even holding a book at the time. If I was it would have been McGuffey not Poe. I doubt I would have brought Poe into schoolroom for fear a member of the board might find it, but I had been reading his tales of tormented souls late at night, in bed, and when that child spoke all my cherished illusions about my duties as a teacher vanished.

“Are you ‘slave,’ Miss Helms, or are you ‘free?’”

My own young mind was inundated by a vision of horror. These children were cursed. Death stalked the land. I lived in a schoolhouse in a secluded wood, and, above all, I was a woman and alone.