Coming of Age in Mississippi (11 page)

“I baptize you in the name of the Father, in the name of the Son, and in the name of the Holy Ghost,
Amen
,” Reverend Tyson said, drawing out the last syllable as he ducked her quickly under the water. She came up coughing and sputtering, her white dress was now dark brown. Her hair was dripping
with mud. All the other candidates stared at her as the deacons helped her back to the edge of the pond. She was shaking and she looked like she wanted to cry so bad. All the candidates were aware of the saying that if you coughed when you were being baptized, it meant the Devil was coming out of you. I knew she was embarrassed because she had coughed.

“All dressed in white! Washed clean! Look at that!” I thought, looking at her.

As the girl ahead of me was being led out, Jack leaned close and whispered, “ ’Member, Moody, betta not cough out there. Sister Jones gonna say you were a
sinner
. Hee-hee-hee.”

“You got a lot more to cough about than me,” I said. I saw two deacons coming for me. As I waded into the water, I could feel the mud sticking to my legs. I was mad as hell, and I heard Sister Jones’s voice singing “Nothing but the righteous …” along with the rest. I thought, “Nothing but the
righteous
. Some shit!”

I was so mad I barely heard Reverend Tyson shouting, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, in the name of the Son, and in the name of the Holy Ghost, A-men!” Suddenly a wet hand was slapped over my face and I felt the mud folding over me, sucking me down. Just as I began to feel the heaviness of the mud, I was lifted out of the water. I tried to open my eyes but mud was stuck to my lashes, so I just left them closed. I felt shitty all over. As they were leading me out of the water, I could hear the cows mooing, Jack laughing, and everyone singing, “Take Me to the Waters.” Everything sounded far away. It took me a minute to realize that my ears were stuffed full of mud.

After the last candidate was baptized, we were all rushed up to Miss Rose’s where we washed off and changed. Even then, I still smelled like wet mud, and the smell lingered for weeks.

All that second winter in the new house, Raymond sat around talking about becoming a big-time farmer, raising lots of kids, making plenty of money, and being his own man. So in early March he went out scouting for a mule and a piece of land. Within a week he had found both, as cheap as he could get them. He bought a used-up old mule from a friend for twenty-five dollars, hoping that it could last at least one season. He rented a strip of cheap virgin land in the old army camp area. It was on a hill slanting down to the edge of some woods. Since there was only one little tree and not much grass, Raymond thought that plowing would be easy and that he had gotten a real bargain. For the first few days of plowing he went around grinning and boasting and even saying how nice Mr. Pickett was for letting him have the land so cheap. He enjoyed the plowing and he stayed in the field from sunup to sundown. He’d come in all sweaty and tired, dragging the poor old mule behind him.

One evening he came in a little early, all disgusted, cursing up a storm. He slammed into the kitchen with his lunch basket held in front of him.

“Looka this! Looka
this!
That goddamn mothafucka! I shoulda
known
he wasn’t givin’ me that land for nothin’. That whole damn bottom is just like plowin’ into steel. Looka this shit!” he said, dumping the contents of his lunch bucket onto the table.

We all stood around the table looking. Mama picked up a big round rock, covered with dirt.

“What in the shit
is
this?” Mama asked, scraping the dirt from the rock.

“Don’t you drop that thing! It may be
live!”
Raymond shouted.

“Live?” Mama screamed, throwing up both hands, dropping the object to the floor. It hit with a loud thud and rolled under the stove. Raymond tiptoed after it, with his arms out, like he was reaching for a baby. He got down on his knees, reached under the stove, and carefully picked the thing up.

“What you doin’ bringin’ stuff like that in this house! What you mean it’s
live
?” Mama said, staring at the object in Raymond’s trembling hands.

“Live? Shit! This is a goddamned
hand grenade!
That whole bottom is full of them! Some of ’em look like they ain’t
never
been touched.”

“Hand grenade!
You mean a
bomb?”
Mama said.

“Sure, the bottom of that hill musta been a practice ground or something. Looka here,” he said, picking up a big bullet. “If that steel plow hit this thing the right way, it’d kill the shit outta me.”

“If them things been out there since the war they ain’t hardly no good now,” Mama said, looking at the pile of grenades and bullets on the table. “Take your hands off that stuff, boy!” she screamed at Junior, who was just about to pick up one of the grenades. “Ray, get that shit outta here.”

From then on Raymond plowed very carefully. Every time he went out to the fields after that, he would act as if it might be his last day on earth. Even though Mama insisted that the old bullets and things weren’t “live,” she stopped fixing lunch
for Raymond and had him come home at twelve. And every evening she’d pace around the kitchen worrying until he got home. After a few days of plowing with no explosions, Raymond and Mama began to relax a little.

“Next year I won’t have to plow through all that shit,” Raymond said to Mama.

“Shit, next year, Mr. Pickett will plant his own damn cotton out there,” Mama said.

School wasn’t out yet and I was still working for Mrs. Claiborne. She was teaching me so much and she was so good to me that I didn’t want to stop working for her. But I knew as soon as school was over, I’d have to work in the field all day. I was scared to death. I never could take much sun without getting a headache, and I had heard that a lot of people had died in the field from sunstroke and different things.

One evening I came in from work and saw Mama, Raymond, and all of them standing around out under the pecan tree. I walked up to them. The mule was stretched out on the ground with foam bubbling out of his mouth, and Raymond was cursing.

“Why didn’t that mothafucka die
next
week! Bring some water, Junior! Get that hose pipe and hook it up! Put some water in that tub! Goddamn, hurry up! This son of a bitch! Just got one more week of good plowing and this fucka gonna die now! Shit!”

“You’re workin’ him too hard, Ray. Why don’t you take it easy? You ain’t got but a little more plowing to do. You gotta give that mule some rest. You don’t plow no old mule that much! Besides, Jim them prob’ly worked the hell outta this mule before you got him!” Mama said as Junior filled the tub up full of water.

“That damned cotton gotta be planted, though. That ground’s gotta be broke. Soon everybody else’s cotton gonna be comin’ up!” Raymond shouted, as he helped Junior drag
the tub of water up to the mule. Then he grabbed the mule by the head and tried to make it drink from the tub, but its head was limp and its eyes were walling back. It looked like it didn’t know where it was. When Raymond couldn’t get it to drink any water, he slammed its head down on the ground some hard. I stood there feeling sorry for the poor old mule, but in the back of my mind I was saying, “I hope it die, I hope it die, I hope it die!” I went to bed that night praying that the mule would die, because I didn’t want to quit working for Mrs. Claiborne to go out and get a sunstroke. But when I got up the next morning, that damned mule was up kicking and ready to go back to the field again.

Raymond finally finished his plowing and eventually got the cotton planted. It needed lots of rain to take root, so every day Mama and Raymond went around praying for rain. They prayed and prayed but the rain just didn’t come. Raymond walked around grumbling and cursing and acting like he was mad with the whole world. Every day he would go out to look at the cotton. When he came in he’d start shouting, “That ground so hard out there, the sun is crackin’ the ground up! Them damned cotton seed burnin’ up in the ground! Fuck this shit! A man can’t make a living, I don’t care how hard he try!
Everythin’s
against him, even the goddamn sun!”

And every time I’d hear Raymond cursing, I’d think, “
Please
burn up in the ground! Oh,
please
burn up in the ground!”

Mama would sit on the porch rocking all day, watching the sky. Every time a little cloud would get in the sky, she’d start hollering, “It’s comin’, it’s comin’! Look like we’re gonna get some rain tonight!”

So then I started praying that it wouldn’t rain. Often I went to bed and had dreams that there were big floods and water was just gushing everywhere, washing away mountains and trees and all the cotton.

But eventually it did rain and the cotton started to come up. Every other day or so, Raymond would take us out to see
the cotton. He wouldn’t take us into the field when the cotton was just coming out of the ground because he was superstitious. He thought that we might interfere with “the works of Nature.” So instead he parked the car alongside the road and we all sat looking out at the cotton field.

“Boy, looka there, Toosweet. It sure is growing,” Raymond said, grinning like a wild man.

I thought he had lost his mind. I couldn’t see
any
cotton. All I saw was a big empty field.

School ended and I sadly said good-bye to Mrs. Claiborne. Raymond had said that on Monday morning, my first week out of school, we would start chopping cotton. I was angry because I didn’t expect to quit Mrs. Claiborne until it was time to
pick
the cotton. I didn’t even know anything about chopping. All I thought you had to do to cotton once it was up was pick it.

That weekend Mama and Raymond both prepared for the chopping. Mama went into town and bought a whole lot of food and a straw hat for each of us, and Raymond stocked up on hoes. All day Sunday he sat out under the pecan tree sharpening the hoes. He called me and Adline out and had us make believe we were hoeing so he could cut handles the right length for us. As I watched Adline pretend to hoe, I thought, “Lord have mercy! Little Adline hoeing!”

That night as I went to bed, I thought of how hot it had been all day. I was sure the temperature was over a hundred degrees. I knew that it would be just as hot the next day and I could see myself standing out there sweating over a hoe. I fell asleep worrying about hoeing in that boiling hot sun, and I had a terrible dream.

In my dream a whole group of us were out in the cotton field, up on the hill where there was only that one tree that Raymond had left for shade. We were hoeing slowly down the hill when the sun came up so big that it seemed to fill up the
whole sky. It came so close to us, it looked like a big mouth about to swallow us. The whole sky and everything around us was red. I was getting terribly hot and great big drops of sweat were dripping all over me. I looked at that little tree that was up on the hill and it was drying, bending, wizzling up to nothing. I looked around in the far distance and the trees were on fire, the whole forest was burning, the trees were just flapping down. I looked around for everybody else in the cotton field, for Raymond and all of them, and they were all dead, lying between the rows. I was leaning on my hoe and I was rocking and the sun came down even closer. I was the last one standing and I knew it was coming for me. I quickly glanced at all the dead bodies evaporating around me. And I felt myself crumbling under the heat of the sun. And then I woke up.

When I got out of bed that morning I was sweating and shaking like someone with palsy. I couldn’t touch my breakfast. Mama kept asking me what was wrong, but I was too scared to tell her about the dream, so I just mumbled that I wasn’t feeling well. I hoped that she would tell me to stay home but instead she handed me a couple of aspirins and sent me off to the cotton field with the rest.

Raymond took along Adline, Alberta, and me for the chopping and Junior and James as waterboys. When Raymond stopped the car in front of Miss Pearl’s and Cherie and Darlene came running out in blue jeans, long-sleeved shirts, and straw hats, dressed just like we were, I was surprised. I didn’t think Raymond could talk Miss Pearl into letting precious little Darlene and Cherie hoe cotton. I guessed he must have told her that if he made it big from the cotton he’d do something nice for her.

When Cherie and Darlene got into the car, I forgot my dream for a while. But as Raymond drove up the hill to the cotton field it all came back. I looked around at everybody in the car and thought to myself, “We’re all gonna die this morning.” It was about six-thirty and the sun was not up yet, but I could tell from the pink clouds and brightening sky that it was
on its way. Raymond drove up to the gate and stopped the car. When Junior jumped out to open the gate, I felt like jumping out too and running away. I had a feeling that if I went through that gate, I’d be trapped in the cotton field forever. But I couldn’t move. It was just like the time Mama had killed a hog and we had eaten a whole lot of fresh hog meat. I had gone to sleep and awakened just before daylight. Then, too, I couldn’t move. I’d felt the need to call for help but I couldn’t even open my mouth. I was calling and calling but no words came out. I tried to wiggle my toe or move my arm but I couldn’t move anything. I couldn’t even bat an eye. After a while, it passed away. When I told Mama about it, she said that I had eaten too much hog meat and that “the witch was riding” me. “The witch” was the evil in the hog meat that had stopped my blood from running.

As Raymond drove through the gate, I sat there screaming for help. But I knew no sound came because nobody looked at me. When he parked the car under the little tree, right by the cotton field and everybody got out, I was still sitting there screaming. I could hear Raymond calling me but I couldn’t even answer. At last I saw him walking back to get me.

“Gal, what’s wrong with you? You act like you’re losin’ your mind this morning!” Raymond shouted.

I jumped out of the car and ran right past him toward Alberta them walking to the cotton field. For a moment as Raymond shouted at me, I forgot my dream. Then suddenly it struck me that we were about to start hoeing on
that
hill and the whole dream came back. I stopped short and waited for Raymond. As he came up, I said, “Why don’t we start hoeing in the bottom?”