Answering the Bell
In the mid-1890's a teenaged girl named Minnie Tines went to work as a school teacher in rural south Mississippi. She was in charge of a one room school that served farming families out where cotton and sweet potatoes and turnip greens and butter beans were the cash crops. After they finished their morning chores, children would make their way through the fields to Miss Tines school. Studies commenced when the teacher picked up the bell on her desk and rang it to call the students to their assigned seats.
It wasn't long before Miss Tines married Mr. Beaman, a gentleman in town who was from a teaching family. Minnie retired the school bell and began to run the home that they shared for the rest of their lives. Although she never knew it, Minnie was to become my great-grandmother.
Her teaching of children in the rural school may have ended when she settled in town, but the process of education continued for many years. Her two daughters became the object of her tutoring, learning domestic arts as well as the refinements that distinguished culturally astute young ladies from the ordinary. Painting in oil was considered one such refinement, and some of the paintings of magnolia blossoms done by her older daughter still exist somewhere. The upright piano in the parlor was the object of study as well.
There was no life of ease in south Mississippi in those days, at least not for former school teachers raising daughters. The town, McComb, fared well thanks to the Illinois Central Rail Road yards that provided employment for many. With an economic engine like the rail road, the town and the surrounding area survived when other towns did not. Minnie's home, in fact, had originally been built to house four rail road families in tiny apartments that consisted of only a couple of rooms each. Mr. Beaman had converted the place to a single family dwelling with a rental apartment, so there was plenty of room for the family and sometimes a little income, too. But a life of ease, if it ever truly existed, was to be seen somewhere else, like Hattiesburg or New Orleans.
Even though her own children and grand-children answered the bells of public schools in town, the old bell that had done duty on the desk in the rural school endured. I don't know where it rested over the years, perhaps tucked away in a drawer or a box. But it was never lost. It was always seen as a treasure, as valuable as gems and precious metals.
Treasure: the very word excites visions of grand wooden chests filled with jewels and gold doubloons glistening in rapturous sunlight. Treasure signifies great value and worth, the concentrated wealth of a multitude in a single, compact cache. One who has treasure has assurance, facing the challenges of life with quiet confidence. No matter how uncertain life and circumstance may seem to be, there is always the certain worth of the treasure on which to rely.
Most often, though, treasure is intangible. It may be represented in an object, an icon that evokes thoughts, prompts memories or encourages loyal devotion. Yet, the icon is not itself the treasure. Thoughts, memories, encouragements - these are the treasure!
This, it seems, is what the bell is for me. It has an intrinsic value of nearly nothing. The handle shows wear and the bell is tarnished and pitted. Though it still rings, every ear that heard it in that old school house has been laid to rest. But the sound of it stirs the imagination in me and opens my minds' eye to the discipline and order of the classroom. I can nearly hear the voices of teacher and student reciting together. The tapping and scraping of chalk on slate punctuates the quiet breezes from the open windows of my idyllic fantasy. The love for her students that would prompt a young lady to pursue such an endeavor seems somewhat less mysterious and somehow more to be expected when I hear the sound of that bell.
The school bell has been handed down to me. It is only mine for a little while, of course, because a treasure like this is never owned. I am just the custodian until the next teacher arises in the family. For now it rests on my desk in rural Texas.
