When Lynnetta Baker Fields talks about teaching, people listen. Maybe that's because coming from a family of no less than eight teachers, she has carried on a tradition spanning three generations and over a hundred years of combined teaching experiences. Besides herself, she can boast of two grandparents, two uncles, an aunt, and both parents, all who taught school in the area. Now in her early eighties, Ms. Fields remembers many changes in Kinston since those early days.

When her parents married in 1916, her father, James E. Baker, was already a teacher. After their marriage, her mother Hattie also began teaching.

"I remember Mama and Papa getting ready to go to work in the mornings. They traveled to the school in town by mule and wagon. When it was cold, we would heat bricks in the fireplace, and place them in wet sacks. They put these on the floor of the wagon to keep their feet warm on the ride."

Of course, no tale of going to school in the old days would be complete without mention of the distance the children walked. "We children walked four miles to Kinston for school in those days, and four miles back."

The schools Lynnetta and her brothers and sisters attended back then were for black students. Not until 1967 did civil rights give birth to integration in the area. By then a teacher herself, she helped make history in the community when asked to teach integrated classes in Southwood School on Trenton Highway. Never one to shy from challenge, accepting the task seemed natural for her.

"I recalled very vividly the story how James E. Baker, Sr., stood in the courthouse square in Kinston and gave two `emancipation speeches' [in celebration of Emancipation Day]...Around here they called him the "silver tongued orator" because they liked his speeches so much."

"I was the first black teacher at Southwood School. There were three black students in each class and two black teachers in the school." Her position even had a name: "I was `transitional." She pauses only long enough for the irony to sink in. Asked if she experienced any trouble in the role, she responded matter of factly: "No. I didn't. In several cases, I think having the black teachers there made such a difference."

For the most part, Ms. Fields believes the students seemed to take integration in stride, and what took the grown-ups over a century to accomplish, came more naturally to the children.

But being the first African-American teacher during integration days was not the first challenge for Fields. She describes her earlier teaching tasks at "one-teacher schools" as being equally daunting:

"Seventy-four students. Eight grades. One teacher. I was the only teacher, and I taught them all. That was really something!"

Despite her long distinguished teaching career, to regard Lynnetta Baker Fields just as a teacher would be to miss a whole world of experiences she has mastered. When fire destroyed the family home, she casually explained how she "pulled down a partition and made Mama a new bedroom in back of the house."

Shrugging off the magnitude of the job, she laughed, "Oh, I've always been pretty skillful with a hammer."

Need the particulars of the making of real wash tub hominy? Lynnetta can tell you the secrets:

"Corn. Corn only. Mama used to make it in the fireplace, or over a fire outside. She'd make a whole wash tub full of it so there'd be plenty to can. First you prepare the corn in the lye, then you wash the death out of it to get the lye out! Finally, she put it up in glass jars by canning. That way, we could eat it all winter long. That's how you make good hominy. My brother still makes it today."

Some of her favorite memories are of her mother, who only recently died in March. "She was born July 11, 1895. So, she was 103, really nearly 104 when she died. I remember her telling me how Queen Street used to have kerosene street lamps. The men would go up and down, lighting the kerosene lamps at night; then, in the mornings, repeat the process to put them out."

Two of Lynnetta's sisters stopped to visit during the interview. Lynnetta brought out a large portrait of their father in his World War I uniform, and they chuckled at the figure pictured with him. "That's Daddy and his friend Hattie, but that's not Mama. This was the girlfriend he knew before Mama. So, we always say, he dated Hattie and he married Hattie, just not the same one!"

"Tell about riding the goats!," one of the sisters reminds Lynnetta. "We had a nanny goat and a billy we used to hitch up to a little cart. The mailbox was all the way out on Rt. 258, so we'd ride in that cart to go get the mail. And remember the tie swings, and the bicycle with no tires?" Lynnetta just laughs and shakes her head.

Since retiring in 1980, she keeps busy moving flowers around the garden, quilting and entertaining family and friends with a picture perfect recollection of days gone by. These days, sometimes the heat takes her breath a little when she's working in the yard, so if you're ever by her place, you might want to stop and move a few plants around the garden for her. You're sure to be rewarded by a shared memory or two and maybe get a new one of your own.