Do More Than What Others Expect You to Do

by Rebecca Erbschloe

“Times were different back then than they are now,” were the words my grandmother muttered as she drifted off into an old memory that was recalled when I asked her what things were like in the South when she was growing up. “A lot different, but that’s expected, I guess; times change so fast.” My grandmother, Evelyn Ballenger, grew up in the then-small town of Greenwood, South Carolina. I was fascinated to learn of all the determination and hard work that she put forth to change from an extremely sheltered small town southern girl to an educated, successful, well-informed, southern woman.

My grandmother was born in a house on land that my great-grandfather had bought during the Great Depression. This purchase was possible because he had a strong distaste for banks and believed that putting money in them was a bad idea. When the Great Depression hit, he lost nothing because he kept all of his money in an old tin box under his bed. “There were no ‘easy’ ways to make money back then. The only way was with hard work and long hours.” My grandmother explained to me that in her younger days it was very taboo for a woman to hold a job or even to attend higher education because “women were supposed work at home.” However, her mother was beyond her years even then and attended a business college to become a secretary. Hard work was something that was instilled in her from the time that she was born. Starting in the early morning her father, mother, brother, and she would wake and start the chores that were required to maintain the farm where they lived. Starting when she was about five, it was my grandmother’s job to feed the pigs and bring in the cows. She told me that she was taught by her father that to find the cows in the pasture so that she could bring them in she had to “touch the leg of a granddaddy long-leg and the insect would point to the direction where the cows could be found.” I found it quite interesting that this simple, hard-working farm family depended on the instinct of an insect to do some of their work. This is all they knew. This is where they came from and they were proud of it.

School was not required at this time. In fact, “you attended school only if your family could afford to lose a set of hands on the farm.” However, with the encouragement of her mother and much persuasion of her father, my grandmother began going to the only school in Greenwood. She continued in this “one room school, no bigger than a nice bathroom these days,” until she was in the ninth grade. When it was time for the ninth grade, because they lived in such a rural place, she began taking a school bus into town everyday to attend high school. Although this was not something that many girls got the opportunity to do, my great-grandmother always encouraged her to “do more than what people expect you to do.” Wow! Who would have known that a line that my own mother has said to me a thousand times had been passed down through four generations of Southern women? High school was quite a bit of culture shock to my grandmother. She was an extremely shy southern farm girl who had been suddenly tossed into a world where things were a bit different than what she was used to. When she was in high school, she was sent by her teacher to the office to make a phone call to one of the businesses in the area, which seems pretty normal, except that this was the “first time I’d ever seen something like that; I had no idea what to do.” She was shown secretly by a teacher how to use the telephone, and it was like “there was no stopping me after that.” So much so that she graduated as valedictorian of her senior class. This was a class of only twenty. She went on to attend college, get her first job, and earn a degree in English. The year 1960 was a big one for my grandmother. She became an English teacher and also got indoor plumbing for the first time.

My grandmother, like women in many southern families, has been such an inspiration to our family. She has shown us that even a farmer’s daughter from the small town of Greenwood, South Carolina, can do great things despite what society might expect. She has also instilled in us the value of hard work, culture, and the knowledge that makes us proud to be from the South.

Work Cited

Ballenger, Evelyn. Personal interview. 10 Sept. 2010.



Note: Rebecca Erbschloe, who lives in Aberdeen, is majoring in radiography at Sandhills Community College.