Just the Beginning

M ary Lou Walker arranges her cap and tassel and remembers the 7-year-old girl who walked the cotton fields barefoot while her friends

walked to school.

"I couldn't go because I had to work," she says, looking down at her newly acquired General Educational Development diploma (GED). "My father died, so it was just me and my mother."

The 73-year-old firecracker has made up for lost time.

After raising a daughter, seven sons and too many grands and great-grands to count, Miss Mary Lou walked right onto Augusta Technical College's Waynesboro campus and threw herself into a yearlong study.

She not only got her GED - she became the oldest person to do so in Augusta Technical College's history.

"It's something I always wanted, so I went back to fight for it," she says as her little dog Chocolate rolls on her back for a belly rub. Miss Mary Lou obliges as she dredges up memories of a childhood shaped by the seasons on the Burke County farm where she was reared.

"I started working in the fields when I was seven," she says, remembering the home she shared with her mother on the Cates Place Farm and later on Steiner Place.

School was a luxury that came in short clips between gathering and planting, and usually in the cold of winter. It was three miles to the one-room schoolhouse at Hickson Grove but that didn't stop young Mary Lou, even when she had no shoes. "By the time I got there, my feet would feel like they were dead," she says, remembering the sting that prickled through them as they came back to life by the fire.

She committed each new lesson to memory, and practiced in her mind while she worked in the fields.

But by age 15 she was doing the work of a man and could no longer be spared for school. "I was picking five hundred pounds of cotton a day and could hoe seven acres of cotton," Miss Mary Lou says, looking down at her small hands.

Still, she could never quite leave learning alone. She poured herself into any book she could get her hands on, and took to studying history and math as life allowed her.

It tied her over, but that old longing for the classroom never left. As a grown woman, it kicked in hard every time she heard teenagers complaining about having to go.

"I thought maybe if I went back it would encourage young people and help them see that if something is benefiting them, they shouldn't quit, but strive for that thing," Miss Mary Lou explains. She hopes to serve as an example of sorts - as a person her grandchildren and great-grandchildren will remember for having grabbed life by the forelocks and shaken out what was hers.

"If I'd had opportunities like them, I'd have all kind of degrees by now," she laughs while straightening a stack of loose-leaf paper filled with algebraic formulas copied in careful script. Her oversized calculator sits nearby, along with a pencil worn dull from word problems and fractions.

"It might seem funny, but things like this keep your mind focused," Miss Mary Lou points out as her attention turns to the tomatoes and cucumbers she's just picked from her garden.

The plants are loaded heavy with the fruits of her labor, and the rows are clean as whistles. "I don't half do anything," she pronounces as if anyone could doubt her. "If I don't have time to do it right, I don't bother to do it at all."

She returns her cap and gown to its box and files away her diploma. But it's all a new chapter, not a closed book, Miss Mary Lou contends as she lists off studies that still await her. "There's trigonometry, calculus, history …,"she says, uncurling a finger for each class. "I'm nowhere near through yet."