This passage is adapted from Mary Helen Stefaniak,The
Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia, ©2010 by Mary Helen Stefaniak.
Narrator Gladys Cailiff is eleven years old in 1938 when a
new, well-traveled young schoolteacher, Miss Grace Spivey,
turns a small Georgia town upside down.
Miss Grace Spivey arrived in Treestep, Georgia,
in August 1938. She stepped off the train wearing a
pair of thick-soled boots suitable for hiking, a navy
blue dress, and a little white tam that rode the waves
of her red hair at a gravity-defying angle. August was
a hellish month to step off the train in Georgia,
although it was nothing, she said, compared to the
119 degrees that greeted her when she arrived one
time in Timbuktu, which, she assured us, was a real
place in Africa. I believe her remark irritated some
of the people gathered to welcome her on the burned
grass alongside the tracks. When folks are sweating
through their shorts, they don’t like to hear that this
is nothing compared to someplace else. Irritated or
not, the majority of those present were inclined to see
the arrival of the new schoolteacher in a positive light.
Hard times were still upon us in 1938, but, like my
momma said, “We weren’t no poorer than we’d ever
been,” and the citizens of Treestep were in the mood
for a little excitement.
Miss Spivey looked like just the right person to
give it to them. She was, by almost anyone’s standards,
a woman of the world. She’d gone to boarding schools
since she was six years old; she’d studied French in
Paris and drama in London; and during what she
called a “fruitful intermission” in her formal education,
she had traveled extensively in the Near East and Africa
with a friend of her grandmother’s, one Janet Miller,
who was a medical doctor from Nashville, Tennessee.
Afer her travels with Dr. Miller, Miss Spivey continued
her education by attending Barnard College in New
York City. She told us all that at school the frst day.
When my little brother Ralphord asked what did she
study at Barnyard College, Miss Spivey explained that
Barnard, which she wrote on the blackboard, was the
sister school of Columbia University, of which, she
expected, we all had heard.
It was there, she told us, in the midst of trying to
fnd her true mission in life, that she wandered one
afernoon into a lecture by the famous John Dewey,
who was talking about his famous book, Democracy
and Education. Professor Dewey was in his seventies
by then, Miss Spivey said, but he still liked to chat with
students afer a lecture—especially female students, she
added—sometimes over coffee, and see in their eyes
the fre his words could kindle. It was afer this lecture
and subsequent coffee that Miss Spivey had marched
to the Teacher’s College and signed up, all afame. Two
years later, she told a cheery blue-suited woman from
the WPA1
that she wanted to bring democracy and
education to the poorest, darkest, most remote and
forgotten corner of America.
Tey sent her to Treestep, Georgia.
Miss Spivey paused there for questions, avoiding my
brother Ralphord’s eye.
What we really wanted to know about—all twenty-
six of us across seven grade levels in the one room—
was the pearly white button hanging on a string in front
of the blackboard behind the teacher’s desk up front.
Tat button on a string was something new. When
Mavis Davis (the only bona fde seventh grader, at age
thirteen) asked what it was for, Miss Spivey gave the
string a tug, and to our astonishment, the whole world
—or at least a wrinkled map of it—unfolded before
our eyes. Her predecessor, Miss Chandler, had never
once made use of that map, which was older than our
fathers, and until that moment, not a one of us knew
it was there.
Miss Spivey showed us on the map how she and
Dr. Janet Miller had sailed across the Atlantic Ocean
and past the Rock of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean
Sea. Using the end of a ruler, she gently tapped such
places as Morocco and Tunis and Algiers to mark their
route along the top of Africa. Tey spent twenty hours
on the train to Baghdad, she said, swathed in veils
against the sand that crept in every crack and crevice.
“And can you guess what we saw from the train?”
Miss Spivey asked. We could not. “Camels!” she said.
“We saw a whole caravan of camels.” She looked
around the room, waiting for us to be amazed and
delighted at the thought.
We all hung there for a minute, thinking hard, until
Mavis Davis spoke up.
“She means like the three kings rode to Bethlehem,”
Mavis said, and she folded her hands smugly on her
seventh-grade desk in the back of the room.
Miss Spivey made a mistake right then. Instead of
beaming upon Mavis the kind of congratulatory smile
that old Miss Chandler would have bestowed on her
for having enlightened the rest of us, Miss Spivey
simply said, “Tat’s right.”
1 The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was a central part of President
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal.” It was established in 1935 as a means
of creating government jobs for some of the nation’s many unemployed.
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