Conrad and the Ink Well The town of South Hill is one of three small centers of population in Mecklenburg County, Virginia. In 1934, the year in which this story took place, South Hill was noted as a prominent market for cigarette tobacco, serving both south-central Virginia and the northern part of North Carolina. Buyers and sellers gathered here each fall in large numbers to listen to chanting auctioneers, who by their unique and fascinating skills would stimulate bidding and help determine the purchase price of the tobacco being sold. "Sold to American," was a familiar announcement at these sales.
Screen 1 of 4After traveling with the Barter Theatre Company as a professional actor and living in New York City for several months on a very meager income, I moved to South Hill in January of 1934, having accepted a position there as the teacher of a combined fifth and sixth grade in the public schools. At that time, unemployment throughout the country was extremely high, jobs were difficult to get and hold, and wages were very low. For example, during the fall of 1933 I had worked as an usher in a movie theatre in New York forty-eight hours a week for $15.00. I was grateful, therefore, to have the teaching position in South Hill and was not at all dissatisfied with the $80 monthly salary to be paid to me there. Without a family to support, I could live comfortably though modestly on that income. For I did not own a car, and I paid only $45.00 each month for board and room at a boarding house near the school.
During that first spring term, I taught all the usual elementary school subjects to about thirty-five boys and girls-- some classified as fifth graders, the remainder one grade higher, but all housed in the same school room.
My outside activities included teaching a Sunday school class, playing basketball on a local independent team, and going to see some second and third-run movies at the town's only "picture show." Occasionally I would take the public bus to Richmond--about eighty miles away--to see and hear some special entertainment, such as a performance by a ballet group or a symphony orchestra. But these trips were infrequent, because of their high cost--high, that is, for the depression years.
Also living at the boarding house where I stayed were several very interesting people: a state policeman whose wife felt quite sure he was "seeing other women" all the time he was away; a spinster school teacher who apparently wanted a man--any man, whatever the cost; and a local shoe salesman who enjoyed his recently earned freedom from marriage by getting drunk--very drunk--every Saturday night and whose answer to any inquiry about his condition or state of health at such times was always an emphatic "hunard percent, hunard percent."
But my story is not about these fellow boarders, even though rare stories could be told about each of them. Instead, I want to tell about two brothers--one a fifth grader; the other, two years older, but no better qualified academically, was listed on the sixth-grade roll in my room.
Conrad Binford, the fifth grader, and his brother, Carl, were two of the brightest pupils I had--so smart, some said, that they saw much sooner than others how irrelevant and in- effective the school program really was. One of them (it must have been Conrad because he was always quick to say what he thought) was heard telling a friend on the play ground one day that "school is just plain stupid!" When that report came back to me, I realized but of course did not admit it to anyone that the Binfords might very well have been right. Who was to say, for sure?
The title of this story, "Conrad and the Inkwell," suggests a schoolroom incident about ink and writing, and in fact it is just that. It happened like this.
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