Riding the School Bus in Jaw-juh

Our former home on Bartley Road, LaGrange, Georgia. We lived here in 1973–74.

Author’s Note: This essay is absolutely not intended as a condemnation of all people who live in Georgia, of all people who live in LaGrange, or of anyone living there today. This is how things were for me fifty years ago. Although I don’t speak of them here, we met many wonderful people and made great friends back then. And I am sure that today the good people of LaGrange, like the rest of us, are very different from those I knew so long ago.

It was 1973, and I was riding the bus home after my first day at Troup Junior High School in LaGrange, Georgia.

Two boys about my age were a couple of seats behind me. “Hey!” one of them said. “Hey you!”

I turned and looked at them hopefully. Maybe they would be friendly. “Where you from?” they asked.

“Ohio.”

They looked at each other and said, “Oh-Hi!” and laughed.

“I bet you like Sherman, don’t ya?” one of them added.

Now, the only “Sherman” I knew was a minor character in the Peanuts comic strip; I had no idea whom they were talking about. Of course, they meant General William Tecumseh Sherman, who led the Union troops from Atlanta to Savannah back in 1864. 1864! Almost 110 years ago!

Confused, I smiled and turned to face front again. I was fixin’ to learn a very important lesson about the people of LaGrange.

They hated Yankees. They hated Yankees. They hated us because they were still fighting the Civil War.

This kind of thinking was unfathomable to me. Our whole family saw it displayed almost daily. Most of the people of that community were the most provincial, narrow-minded, prejudiced, backward humans we had ever met. They were stuck in the past, still bitter over events that even their grandparents couldn’t remember. To me it was the same as if I were to meet a person from England and immediately challenge him with, “Bet you like George III, don’t ya?”

Because of that hatred, riding that school bus back and forth each day was a traumatic experience that gave me a sick stomach every time I had to do it.

A Roadside Stop

Our bus driver—I have forgotten her name—was one of those wiry, tough, no-nonsense country women, Southern to the core. Her sunken, wrinkled face and dyed hair (with gray roots) and stringy arms spoke to me of a hard life. I remember that her daughter—probably a teenager, older than me—and her son—a cute little kid with ears that stuck out like Dumbo’s—often rode along with us.

Once one of the high schoolers poked fun at the little boy’s looks. “Hey, be sure to keep your head in the bus when we git to goin’ fast! Otherwise your ears will get to flappin’, and you’ll beat yourself to death!”

Because I was tormented mercilessly on the bus ride (more of that later), I wanted it to be over as quickly as possible each day. Yet the driver would stop almost every afternoon at a little roadside store and let all the kids off to get food and drinks. And cigarettes (more of that later too).

I hated that stop. First of all, it was against the rules. Second of all, it just prolonged the trip. And third of all, I never had any money to spend anyway.

I told my mom about it, and she responded, “Well, I’m going to call the school! Those kids could be getting drugs there!”

“I don’t think anybody is getting drugs there, Mom.”

“But they could be! You don’t know! And, anyway, it’s against the rules for her to stop there. She’s just supposed to get you kids home.” So she called the school about it. I didn’t even care. I wanted the stops to stop.

The day after Mom called the school, the driver pulled into the store parking lot once again. She set the brake and turned around and looked at us. The bus grew quiet for a change.

“Listen, y’all. Somebody has told on us. Somebody has told we been stoppin’ here, and I’m not sposta do it any more. I don’t know who it was.”

There was a long silence during which my heart was beating like crazy, because I was sure that my culpability was obvious on my glowing red face.

Then, from the back of the bus, “We like stoppin’ here! We wanna keep doin’ it!”

This met with a general hubbub of approval from nearly all the other students. I don’t think anyone did a Rebel Yell, but it’s not beyond the realm of possibility.

Another voice: “Yeah! Who don’t wanna stop? Raise your hand!”

Oddly enough, there were no raised hands. Score one for democracy.

Another long silence as the driver looked us over. Then she said, “Well,” and opened the door.

And we continued stopping at the store every day thereafter.

A Dark Secret

Every day I was subjected to some sort of harassment—a nasty word, a shove, mockery—and I always sat alone. There was a sort of strategy to finding the seat where I would be most invisible. Yes, there was a sort of strategy about it—but I never learned what it was.

Other things happened on that bus that I’ve never told anyone except my mom.

There were two boys on the bus, older than me, both in high school, who would sit behind me and whisper perverse things in my ear—things they wanted me to do to them, dirty things, things I had never even heard of before. It was so horrible and humiliating that sometimes, in spite of my determination not to do so, I would cry as I stared out the window, pretending not to hear them.

I still really don’t understand why they did it. I don’t think they were serious. I suppose they were trying to be funny. But why would they even think such things? Why would they say such things—and to me, a little seventh grader who just wanted to go home in peace?

I don’t remember how long this went on or how often. I wouldn’t let Mom call the school about it. (Little good that would do anyway!) Those boys held the power that bullies always hold: their victims are afraid to tell on them, because if they do, the bullying might get worse. So you just put up with it and look out the window and try not to cry.

Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette!

Speaking of the high school kids, our route started each day at the junior high and took us first to the high school, where we would pick up more kids. It seems unfathomable today, but what I’m about to tell you is true.

At Troup High School back then teens were permitted to smoke cigarettes on school grounds.

It seemed that all of them, every last one of them—and there were hundreds of them—were smoking. A huge grayish cloud would hover over the masses, and when any of them walked by, you could tell that every inch of their clothing, every strand of hair, every crease in their bodies was completely infused with the smell of burning tobacco.

And as they clambered onto the bus, each kid—some as young as fourteen—would take one last draw and flick the butt onto the ground.

I look back today and can barely believe it myself, but that’s the way it was. Of course, I shouldn’t have been surprised. When they went to church on Sundays, their daddies would spend the few minutes between Sunday school and the morning service standing outside the front entrance puffing away.

I guess they wanted to give a good impression to any potential visitors.

Tragedies

That bus driver and her family were in for a lot of tragedy. I remember hearing that her husband was working on some job up high—maybe working on phone or power lines or on scaffolding at a construction site—and he fell. He survived, but he was in bad shape—in a coma in the hospital.

And one day when his wife, our bus driver, sat by his side, she suffered a stroke and passed away.

We must have had other bus drivers after she passed, but I don’t remember any of them. But she always stuck in my memory.

A short time after she passed away, I saw her daughter back on the bus. She was looking through a casket catalog.

I thought that was a pretty weird thing to do on a bus ride.

Clyde

That bus route took us all over the county, it seemed, on paved roads and unpaved roads that made you bounce and jounce so high that your teeth would clap together when you landed.

One teen lived way out in a holler, and we had to pick him up and do a U-turn and then go back the way we came. One time, while turning the bus around, the driver backed roughly into a barbed-wire fence, and with a screech of metal against metal, we jounced to a sudden stop.

I remember the bus driver’s exact words: “That ain’t my fault. I didn’t put that fence there!” We pulled away, and that was the end of it.

I felt sorry for the kid from U-Turn Holler. His name was Clyde. He was tall and gangly, pimply faced, with a hank of greasy hair hanging over his forehead. Like me, he was persecuted by the other kids—not because he was a Yankee, because he wasn’t—but because he was dirt poor. I mean, dirt poor.

I remember his ramshackle house with an old wooden porch that sagged on both ends and was higher in the middle. His momma was sometimes on the porch wearing a faded housedress, her brown hair carelessly pulled back into a ponytail, a baby on one hip and a little kid clinging to her other hand. She stared at the bus with no expression.

When Clyde got on, rude comments would start from the back seats—comments about how he stunk and how ugly he was. He would take it as long as he could, and then he would turn around and cuss ’em out. The kids in the back responded with wild glee—this was just what they had been hoping for.

One day Clyde got on the bus barefoot—he hadn’t had time to put his shoes on, so he carried them under his arm. He sat down across the aisle from me to put them on (no socks), and I couldn’t believe how his feet looked. His toenails were overgrown and yellow, and his feet were filthy.

My heart always went out to Clyde, but I never spoke to him. I didn’t want to give the back-of-the-bus kids another reason to harass me.

One morning, as usual, we drove way out to Clyde’s house. I remember the bus was cold, the windows were foggy, and nature had that brittle, unfriendly look it gets when you are firmly in winter’s stark grip.

The bus driver pulled up. The front door was shut. No activity. She turned the bus around, sat in front of the house—just a few feet from his front door—and blared on the horn. No response. None at all. No smoke from the chimney, no kids peeking through the windows, nothing. It was apparent that the house had been abandoned. We drove away, and I never saw Clyde again.

I wonder what happened to him. I hope he was able to better himself and rise above everything that was stacked against him, but that’s not likely. And if he grew up to be a criminal, I hope God holds those hate-filled back-of-the-bus kids responsible for at least some of the blame.

Copyright 2023 by Steven Nyle Skaggs