Chapter 3: Karen’s Story

I turned fourteen in nineteen thirty seven, I grew up on my family farm just like the two of you are. But in many ways it was much different! We didn’t have a phone, there weren’t any buses to take us to school. In fact I and my brothers and sisters walked just over a mile to our one room schoolhouse!

That’s where I met Grace in first grade. Our teacher was Miss Finkston, she was in her third year of teaching at our school. She lived in the back of the schoolhouse as part of her salary. The building itself was only ten years old and had been renovated just before she was hired, a full bathroom with running water had been added to the back of the building and a septic system installed.

Rules for teachers back then were very strict, they couldn’t smoke cigarettes, they couldn’t drink alcohol, they couldn’t even date men! She did get a phone two years after I started there. She had an old Model A Ford that she would drive to town to buy groceries and other supplies. But often she would go with my family when we went to town Saturday morning.

Because she taught grades one through nine, we were grouped by grade level and she would move from one group to another every day, showing us our grade level work and making sure we stayed on task completing the day’s assignments.

In first grade there were only four of us, Grace, Bobby Joe, Malcom, and me. Bobby Joe was dumber than a box of rocks, Malcom wasn’t much smarter. But Grace and I were pretty smart! So Miss Finkston paid more attention to us. She was always touching us, especially when we did something good! Nothing overtly sexual at all, but certainly more than she probably should have been doing.

We made good grades and advanced through the grades year after year. As lonely as she was, she kept teaching us. Grace and I were two of the main reasons why! We both turned fourteen just before Christmas in 1937, Grace’s came first on December first. Mine came thirteen days later on the fourteenth. On the fifteenth Miss Finkston caught us in the bathroom together kissing and with our hands inside each other’s panties under our dresses!

We thought we were gonna get a whipping for sure! But she didn’t get mad at all! She said,

“Girls I’ve been watching you since you were in first grade. The two of you have always been touchy feely with one another. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen you touch each other or kiss either. So now that you are fourteen, I feel like you are old enough to make decisions on your own, maybe not as adults, but old enough to decide for yourselves what is right for you. What I propose is for the two of you to stay after school two or three times a week for extra instruction. Not because you are failing or anything, but to give you more knowledge than the other kids are getting so that you both could get scholarships to go to college! But that is not all we will be doing! I want to teach you the sapphic arts too!”