Alice Jones just can’t believe she’s got a picture of one-room Thompson School — or that she’s in it.

She didn’t even remember a picture like that was ever made.

But there she was.

And here she is — now 81 years old, and until this unexpected treasure fell into her lap, the earliest picture she had of herself was when she graduated from Price High School.

She can’t stop looking at her new/old picture; and she can’t stop showing it to people; and she can’t stop the screen of memory that floods her with images of riding five miles to school in a horse-drawn buggy with her mama, who was the teacher, and three sisters — and how it took an hour both ways.

Getting that picture was nothing but pure happenstance.

She just happened to work with Gladys Thompson Hawkins years ago, and they discovered they had both gone to Thompson School, “and my mother had been her teacher, too.” They became good friends, and since Gladys Hawkins started ailing some, Alice Jones has been going to see her every week.

One day not long ago they were talking about the old days; and her friend’s daughter, Ruth, showed them some pictures, and one of them was of Thompson School and its students.

Alice Jones didn’t even recognize herself. She didn’t expect to be there, so she didn’t look that carefully. But when Gladys Hawkins pointed her out, well, she had to have a copy for herself, didn’t she? And copies for other people in the family, including her sister, Hannah, in Latta, S.C.

“And my sister showed it to her pastor, and he said, ‘This is you. Right here. And this is your sister.’ ”

So everybody looked a little closer.

And sure ’nuff, there’s her sister, all right, the smallest girl in the picture, standing in front of Bud Thompson, who gave the land for the school. And there she is, over to the right. The next smallest.

“It’s hard to believe,” she says. “The first picture I have of myself was when I graduated from Price High, but now ... ”

Now the memories take over.

“We lived off Goodnight Road, off of 150, and the school was off of Miller’s Road. Mrs. Josie Thompson and her husband, Bud, gave the land for the school, and four of us in our family started the year I was 6 — me and two older sisters and one younger.” The other two were too young.

“We had a stove for the heat. The boys brought in the wood before we left, and Mr. Thompson would go up and build a fire before we got there in the morning.”

All ages, all grades sat on benches in that one room, three students to a bench.

“But we didn’t have anything to write on. We had to write on our laps,” she says. Didn’t matter. “We were happy to go to school. Out in the country you don’t have much to do but feed the cows and the dogs and the chickens and the ducks, so we were happy to go.”

After they picked the family cotton, they picked cotton for other folks to get school clothes.

“I could pick 150 pounds a day, though. I think we made a penny a pound.

“We worked about a month, as long as they had some cotton to pick. Then my mother took us to Salisbury to buy our clothes.

“We bought high-top shoes and dresses and sweaters, and our mother made our book bags.

“We carried our own lunch. Mama used to make patties out of dried peas. Then we had hogs, so we’d have ham sandwiches. She would make egg sandwiches, too, and she baked bread.”

They had their flour and cornmeal ground at Sloan’s Mill.

“The only time we got any light bread was the 30th of May. And we drank school water” from the well and dipped it out of a bucket with a gourd.

Her mother, she says, treated all the children — her own and the others — alike.

“But in that day, teachers didn’t have any trouble. If you got in trouble at school, you got a whipping when you got home.

“We got home about the same time my daddy got home from the Spencer transfer sheds. We had to get our school work done, and then we had to start milking the three cows and feeding the two horses and the pigs. We did it. There wasn’t any question about it.”

She pauses, reliving those days before the family moved to Salisbury, when she was in the sixth grade. Her one-room school days were over. She went to Monroe Street School, which is now part of the Livingstone College campus, and then to Price High School, which now houses Head Start, and then Livingstone.

She followed her mother’s lead when she graduated from Livingstone in 1942 and began teaching at Aggrey Memorial and then in Iredell County and at Morgan and finally Charlotte/Mecklenburg, where she retired after 34 years of teaching.

Her first husband, James Glaspie, died not live long after he came home from World War II, and they had no children. She and her second husband, John Pinckney Jones, were divorced. But her brother, Mack Henry Ellis, who’d had malaria in New Guinea during that war and had health problems from then on, had seven children.

“So I worked three jobs for 25 years to help him and his family. I taught school and during the summers took nursing courses” so she could work in a nursing home and as a private duty nurse at Rowan Memorial Hospital. “Some days I’d work all night and go teach in the morning.”

And when she retired, she volunteered at North Rowan Middle School.

“Now I’m helping children at home with their homework. I’ve never stopped doing homework.”

Or volunteering. She organized Boy Scout troops at black and white churches, handled arts and crafts programs here and there, took the great-nephews to the dentist and the doctor.

“Aunt Alice,” one of them told her once, “a lot of people think you’re my grandmother, and I don’t think you’re any different.”

Neither do the children in the 1100 block of West Bank Street — Angel and Chester and Bria and Kimberly and LaQuinta and Brad and Melissa and Mahogany ....

Every afternoon when the big yellow bus rumbles up and they get off, they head to Miss Alice’s house first.

“My children,” she calls them. “I’m on my porch, and they come to get a hug when they get off the bus, and then they go on home.”

A hug and treats and school supplies and love.

Hugs were her staple in the classroom.

“All my children got a goodbye hug every day,” she says. When schools were integrated in Charlotte, her white children were just as anxious to get that goodbye hug as the blacks were.

“Our children,” she says, “have to know you love them. If children know you love them, they will work hard to do what you ask them to do.”

Seventy-five years of classrooms — beginning with a mother who was her teacher in that one-room school that she now has a picture of — have taught her, she says, that love is the most important weapon to use if you want children to do their homework.