Cabbage Patches in Our Past

The following is another interesting and thought-provoking article by my friend, Tom Fiske:

Did you ever read the story or see the movie, Mrs Wiggs and the Cabbage Patch? It was an interesting but sad story about poverty-bound people that was produced in the 1930’s. The junior high school I attended drew some of its students from the Cabbage Patch in Louisville, Kentucky. That is where the real Cabbage Patch was situated.

One day in a math class, a girl from the Patch area had had enough of this education stuff. She was two years older than the rest of us because she had flunked out of everything at least twice. Now Frances was sixteen years old and very uncomfortable among us little kids.

Our math teacher, Mr. Holland, was a nice man. I had been able to determine that because I attended other classes he taught. He was not a career teacher, either. After school each day he attended the very large Southern Baptist Theological Seminary that was within a few miles of the school. He was destined to be either a Baptist preacher or missionary. I never knew which. But I did know that he had to temper his statements because he was very evangelistic and did not want to turn anyone away from God. So he couldn’t say what he really thought, sometimes. The day I have in mind, during the cooler part of the year 1945 (we wore coats), he got a real test of his emotional stability.

Mr. Holland asked Frances for her homework. She stood, looked him right in the eye, and began, “Mr. Holland . . .” and those were the last words I can repeat here. I had two older brothers so I knew most of the words she was saying and most of their meanings, too. But I never had heard a female say them. I still haven’t, some sixty-five years later.

Frances called this preacher-in-training everything in the book. And I mean her book, which was considerably thicker than mine. He stood there, taking it all in. When Frances finished and the class was in a state of shock, Mr. Holland said evenly, “Frances I am sorry you feel that way.” He continued with a few more conciliatory words as he took out of his desk a document that today would be known as a referral slip. Soon Frances was gone from the classroom and we found out later, the school. No doubt she found her way to a job in a hamburger joint or a factory or some other institution that did not require much in the way of an intellectual background.

It is a sad story. But not many wept for poor Frances and her situation. She was just one kid out of many whose destiny was predetermined by the sixth grade. Mr. Holland was concerned and did not take Frances’s words lightly. Not because of the words themselves, but because of what the words said about the girl and her future.

As we look back into our genealogies we probably do not see many Frances types hidden among the generations. What was it that constructed the path that led to us and not to some fugitive from the Cabbage Patch in your home town? (I am not willing to concede that President Lincoln outgrew his own cabbage patch. That is because his parents were poor only financially and not poor socially or spiritually.)
Somehow our parents and their parents and so on managed to instill in us certain principles that we may not be aware of. Perhaps we tend to forget about these principles as we collect data. It may be that we are too interested in a person’s college degrees or big bank accounts or some kind of notoriety to take notice of the things that made them useful human beings, part of a huge tapestry that formed the most productive and generous nations the world has ever seen.

One hidden part of this nation’s success was beyond our control. Yet, it worked in our favor. Our extreme democratic notions led to a diverse population and intermarriage among various groups that would not have gotten together in some other country or in this country, if it were less democratic and more rigidly structured socially. It was this nation’s huge gene pool. Mixing of our genetic materials for ten to fifteen generations led to a large, intelligent and productive population. Biologists have told me that “hybrid vigor,” a term used to describe special strengths in a corn crop that result from mixing genes, also applies to human beings. They said that hybrid vigor was in American genetic makeup.

Aside from hybrid vigor, then, how did we get to be us? We are a group of people who have leisure time and extra resources to devote to a study of our ancestors. That is, we are able to read and write, stay out of jail, analyze documents and do detective work until we find out who our ancestors were (and we often find they were a lot like us). How did our families and their families pass on the wisdom it took to be fairly successful in life and to acquire the tools we needed to be able to put together a story of those who came before us?

Some will tell me that I am talking about a special category of attributes—perhaps a subset found in sociology or anthropology, but I am not convinced that is true. Besides, academics can ruin any subject by draining every bit of joy out of it. Also, a study of principles handed down from generation to generation is probably more limited and less convoluted than academics want to deal with. They need large, important-sounding subjects that will get them congressional grants so they can write important sounding books.

I wish that on our genealogical forms there was a place to list for each individual, favorite philosophers, favorite books, favorite heroes in history, favorite music and art that the individual enjoyed. But that is asking a lot. I know some of these things about my father, but not about his father.

Long before my father, in the Christian West the only book people had was one or another version of the Bible, which was handed down complete with personal family records. But there was a period when Bibles were not available and Bible stories were told and retold with delightful inaccuracies. (Some Christian groups were not encouraged to read Bibles.) We can be sure that Bibles and Bible stories had quite an effect on our ancestors. But there had to be more.

Outside of Christian groups the Torah and the Koran were two other holy books that influenced people. There were philosophers such as Kahlil Gibran and psychologists such as Freud who were favored by the modernists of their time. Every recent generation since Guttenberg probably had its favorites.

It just seems that the likes and dislikes of our ancestors in the “humanities world” would shed light on and provide clues to influences that led us to be the way we are. And how we avoided the Cabbage Patches that are always around us.