Never Pluck a Persimmon
by
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PREFACE
"Never pluck a persimmon," is a kind of slogan in Greentree, Indiana, but it is an admonition as well.
"Don't you do it!" my brand new landlady, Mrs. Nadine Decklebaum, warned. "A plucked persimmon can pucker up your lips like they wasn't a part of you, --like an extra 'pendage," she continued, pursing her lips into an arrangement that resembled the gill-folds on the underside of a full-grown mushroom.
"You bein' a schoolteacher and all," she added, "could make you look mighty prissy! Fifty dollars a week with breakfast," Mrs. Decklebaum had changed the subject.
"I'll take it," I sealed the bargain, "but I don't quite understand about persimmons. I've never even tasted one." And with these words, I was back on Mrs. Decklebaum's merry-go-round.
For the next hour, then, I was briefed concerning these plumlike oblate spheres around which the entire town of Greentree gyrated. Persimmons, I discovered, were powerful important to the people of this tiny Hoosier community. Because the wild persimmon tree favors the soil and climate of few areas in the United States, Greentree-ers, I learned, considered themselves 'specially blessed.
To make use of these resources, then, Greentree had its own Persimmon Planning Committee which resurrected itself flamboyantly each spring when persimmon trees wore soft yellow flowers like gracious Southern ladies in buttercup chintz. It had its Persimmon Festival in early fall when the town exploded into one magnificent simmon pudding, complete with calliopes, caramel apples and cotton candy, and with hordes of tourists to be reminded, "Never pluck a persimmon. Wait 'til it's soft and orange and falls by isself!" The prize persimmon trees in Greentree put the community on the arboreal map of America and the trees themselves on the front cover of a 1992 House Beautiful magazine. Persimmon trees abounded in the fields and open woods surrounding the town and even flourished in the Town Square itself. But, it was with the particular persimmon trees located on the Centennial School lawn that I had my own eventual grievance.
As a fledgling teacher in the Greentree Community Schools, I found that these graceful trees did much to satisfy the aesthetic yearnings of my third-grade youngsters, but they interfered in great measure with one of their fundamental functions. Because of overcrowding in Greentree schools, I was assigned to teach in a portable classroom that had carpeting and air-conditioning, but no plumbing. Therefore, it was imperative that my classroom be moved smack alongside of Centennial in order to share Centennial's restrooms. But persimmon trees, a minor grove of them, prevented this. Therefore the townspeople, the school board, and the Persimmon Planning Committee thought it best to park us a good thirty feet away to protect their 'simmons, their reputations, and community pride.
Never Pluck a Persimmon then, is the story of a satellite kind of school revolving around the ponderous primary one. It is the story of Union and secession from that Union. It is a multi-focused, unpredictable series of dilemmas that will not dissolve but which do have to do with the fact that a Prize Persimmon, to a Greentree-er, is esoteric enrichment, contemporary culture,--status! And which is all very understandable, except to a lively, lovable group of youngsters and their teacher. But we'd best begin at the beginning . . .
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About the Book
NEVER PLUCK A PERSIMMON
The teacher (as well as her pupils) discover that this forebodes disaster since the portable classroom "Sesqui" is not connected (via plumbing) to the big school since the townspeople are protecting a grove of prize-persimmon trees that are spread all over the Centennial lawn. When the portable classroom therefore secedes from the Union with Centennial, the sides are drawn.
Tiny Sesqui, a miniscule, bubbly rivulet, is about to enter into an all-encompassing maelstrom. The townspeople are betting on the "big" school to swallow up the "little squirt."
About the Author
Virginia Morrow Black, with twenty-four years experience teaching in Hoosier elementary and secondary schools, writes about what she knows best -- teaching children and young adults in Indiana schools. Her latest book, NEVER PLUCK A PERSIMMON, is one such example, although it is a fictionalized account of teaching a third grade class in a portable classroom in the make-believe town of Greentree, Indiana. A graduate of Seton Hill College, Pennsylvania, Mrs. Black hails from Glassport, PA (17 miles from Pittsburgh), but considers herself a Hoosier since she has lived in South Bend, Indiana, since 1951. Her four children, all now parents themselves, hail from Wisconsin and Maryland as well as from Indiana. Twelve grandchildren, one of whom is handicapped, occupy much of her time. Anthony R. Black, a Professor of European history at St. Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana, Mrs. Black’s husband of 47 years, died in 1997. Her writing credits include four plays (all comedies) published in 1989-1990. A previous book, TACKLING NOTRE DAME, a humorous account of how Mrs. Black earned a Ph.T. degree (Put him Through) while her husband earned a Ph.D. in history, was published in 1985 and is still selling in college bookstores. Virginia Morrow Black’s biography can be found in Who’s Who of American Women as well as in Who’s Who in America. She lives in an apartment in South Bend, having recently sold her home of thirty years.