Coming of Age in Mississippi (2 page)

“I’m goin’ to burn you two cryin’ fools up. Then I won’t have to come here and keep yo’ asses every day.”

As I looked at that stupid George Lee standing in the kitchen door with that funny grin on his face, I thought that he might really burn us up. He walked over to the wall near the fireplace and began setting fire to the bulging wallpaper. I started crying. I was so scared I was peeing all down my legs. George Lee laughed at me for peeing and put the fire out with his bare hands before it burned very much. Then he carried me and Adline on to the porch and left us there. He went out in the yard to crack nuts and play.

We were on the porch only a short time when I heard a lot of hollering coming from toward the field. The hollering and crying got louder and louder. I could hear Mama’s voice over all the rest. It seemed like all the people in the field were running to our house. I ran to the edge of the porch to watch
them top the hill. Daddy was leading the running crowd and Mama was right behind him.

“Lord have mercy, my children is in that house!” Mama was screaming. “Hurry, Diddly!” she cried to Daddy. I turned around and saw big clouds of smoke booming out of the front door and shooting out of cracks everywhere. “There, Essie Mae is on the porch,” Mama said. “Hurry, Diddly! Get Adline outta that house!” I looked back at Adline. I couldn’t hardly see her for the smoke.

George Lee was standing in the yard like he didn’t know what to do. As Mama them got closer, he ran into the house. My first thought was that he would be burned up. I’d often hoped he would get killed, but I guess I didn’t really want him to die after all. I ran inside after him but he came running out again, knocking me down as he passed and leaving me lying face down in the burning room. I jumped up quickly and scrambled out after him. He had the water bucket in his hands. I thought he was going to try to put out the fire. Instead he placed the bucket on the edge of the porch and picked up Adline in his arms.

Moments later Daddy was on the porch. He ran straight into the burning house with three other men right behind him. They opened the large wooden windows to let some of the smoke out and began ripping the paper from the walls before the wood caught on fire. Mama and two other women raked it into the fireplace with sticks, broom handles, and anything else available. Everyone was coughing because of all the smoke.

Soon it was all over. Nothing had been lost but the paper on the wall, although some of the wood had burned slightly in places. Now that Daddy and Mama had put out the fire, they came onto the porch. George Lee still had Adline in his arms and I was standing with them on the steps.

“Take Essie Mae them out in that yard, George Lee,” Daddy snapped.

George Lee hurried out in the yard with Adline on his hip,
dragging me by the arm. Daddy and the farmers who came to help sat on the edge of the porch taking in the fresh air and coughing. After they had talked for a while, the men and women wanted to help clean up the house but Mama and Daddy refused any more help from them and they soon left.

We were playing, rather pretending to play, because I knew what was next and so did George Lee. Before I could finish thinking it, Daddy called George Lee to the porch.

“Come here, boy,” he said. “What happened?” he asked angrily. George Lee stood before him trembling.

“Ah-ah-ah-went tuh th’ well—tuh get a bucketa water, ’n when ah come back ah seen the house on fire. Essie Mae musta did it.”

As he stood there lying, he pointed to the bucket he had placed on the edge of the porch. That seemed proof enough for Daddy. He glanced at me for a few seconds that seemed like hours. I stood there crying, “I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t,” but Daddy didn’t believe me. He snatched me from the porch into the house.

Inside he looked for something to whip me with, but all the clothes had been taken off the nails of the walls and were piled up on the bed. It would have taken hours for him to find a belt. So he didn’t even try. He felt his waist to discover he was wearing overalls. Nothing was in his reach. He was getting angrier by the second. He looked over at the wood stacked near the fireplace. “Oh my God,” I thought, “he’s goin’ to kill me.” He searched through the wood for a small piece. There was not one to be found. Moving backward, he stumbled over a chair. As it hit the floor a board fell out. He picked it up and I began to cry. He threw me across his lap, pulled down my drawers, and beat me on my naked behind. The licks came hard one after the other.

Screaming, kicking, and yelling, all I could think of was George Lee. I would kill him myself after this, I thought. Daddy must have beaten me a good ten minutes before Mama realized he had lost his senses and came to rescue me.
I was burning like it was on fire back there when he finally let go of me. I tried to sit down once. It was impossible. It was hurting so bad even standing was painful. An hour or so later, it was so knotty and swollen I looked as if I had been stung by a hive of bees.

This was the first time Daddy beat me. But I didn’t speak to him or let him come near me, as long as my behind was sore and hurting. Mama told me that he didn’t mean to beat me that hard and that he wasn’t angry at me for setting the fire. When I kept crying and telling her that George Lee started the fire, she told Daddy that she thought George Lee did it. He didn’t say anything. But the next morning when George Lee came he sent him back home. Mama stayed with us the rest of the week. Then the following week Mama’s twelve-year-old brother Ed came to keep us.

A week or so after the fire, every little thing began to get on Daddy’s nerves. Now he was always yelling at me and snapping at Mama. The crop wasn’t coming along as he had expected. Every evening when he came from the field he was terribly depressed. He was running around the house grumbling all the time.

“Shit, it was justa waste o’ time. Didn’t getta nuff rain for nuthin’. We ain’t gonna even get two bales o’ cotton this year. That corn ain’t no good and them sweet potatoes jus’ burning up in that hard-ass ground. Goddamn, ah’d a did better on a job than this. Ain’t gonna have nuthin’ left when Mr. Carter take out his share.” We had to hear this sermon almost every night and he was always snapping at Mama like it was all her fault.

During the harvest, Daddy’s best friend, Bush, was killed. Bush was driving his wagon when his horses went wild, turning the wagon over in the big ditch alongside the road. It landed on his neck and broke it. His death made Daddy even sadder.

The only times I saw him happy any more were when he was on the floor rolling dice. He used to practice shooting them at home before every big game and I would sit and watch him. He would even play with me then, and every time he won that money he would bring me lots of candy or some kind of present. He was good with a pair of dice and used to win the money all the time. He and most of the other men gambled every Saturday night through Sunday morning. One weekend he came home without a cent. He told Mama that he had lost every penny. He came home broke a few more times. Then one Sunday morning before he got home one of the women on the farm came by the house to tell Mama that he was spending his weekends with Florence, Bush’s beautiful widow. I remember he and Mama had a real knockdown dragout session when he finally did come home. Mama fist-fought him like a man, but this didn’t stop him from going by Florence’s place. He even got bolder about it and soon went as often as he liked.

Florence was a mulatto, high yellow with straight black hair. She was the envy of all the women on the plantation. After Bush’s death they got very particular about where their men were going. And they watched Florence like a bunch of hawks. She couldn’t even go outdoors without some woman peeping at her and reporting that she was now coming out of the house.

Mama had never considered Florence or any of the other women a threat because she was so beautiful herself. She was slim, tall, and tawny-skinned, with high cheekbones and long dark hair. She was by and far the liveliest woman on the plantation and Daddy used to delight in her. When she played with me she was just like a child herself. Daddy used to call her an overgrown wild-child and tease her that she had too much Indian blood in her.

Meantime, Mama had begun to get very fat. Her belly kept getting bigger and bigger. Soon she acted as if she was fat and ugly. Every weekend, when she thought Daddy was with
Florence she didn’t do a thing but cry. Then one of those redhot summer days, she sent me and Adline to one of the neighbors nearest to us. We were there all day. I didn’t like the people so I was glad when we finally went home. When we returned I discovered why Mama had gotten so fat. She called me to the bed and said, “Look what Santa sent you.” I was upset. Santa never brought live dolls before. It was a little baldheaded boy. He was some small and looked as soft as one of our little pigs when it was born.

“His name is Junior,” Mama said. “He was named for your daddy.”

My daddy’s name was Fred so I didn’t understand why she said the baby’s name was Junior. Adline was a year old and walking good. She cried like crazy at the sight of the little baby.

While I stood by the bed looking at Mama, I realized her belly had gone down. I was glad of that. I had often wondered if Daddy was always gone because her belly had gotten so big. But that wasn’t it, because after it went down, he was gone just as much as before, even more.

Next thing I knew, we were being thrown into a wagon with all our things. I really didn’t know what was going on. But I knew something was wrong because Mama and Daddy barely spoke to each other and whenever they did exchange words, they snapped and cursed. Later in the night when we arrived at my Great-Aunt Cindy’s place, all of our things were taken from the wagon and Daddy left.

“Where is Daddy goin’?” I cried to Mama.

“By his business,” she answered.

Aunt Cindy and all the children stood around the porch looking at him drive the wagon away.

“That dog! That no-good dog!” I heard Mama mumble. I knew then that he was gone for good.

“Ain’t he gonna stay with us?” I asked.

“No he ain’t gonna stay with us! Shut up!” she yelled at me with her eyes full of water. She cried all that night.

———

We were allowed to stay with Aunt Cindy until Mama found a job. Aunt Cindy had six children of her own, all in a four-room house. The house was so crowded, the four of us had to share a bed together. Adline and I slept at the foot of the bed and Mama and the baby at the head. Aunt Cindy had a mean husband and our presence made him even meaner. He was always grumbling about us being there. “I ain’t got enough food for my own chillun,” he was always saying. Mama would cry at night after he had said such things.

Mama soon got a job working up the road from Aunt Cindy at the Cooks’ house. Mrs. Cook didn’t pay Mama much money at all, but she would give her the dinner leftovers to bring home for us at night. This was all we had to eat. Mama worked for the Cooks for only two weeks. Then she got a better job at a Negro café in town. She was making twelve dollars a week, more than she had ever earned.

About a week after she got the new job she got a place for us from the Cooks. Mrs. Cook let Mama have the house for four dollars a month on the condition that Mama would continue to help her around the house on her off day from the café.

The Cooks lived right on a long rock road that ran parallel to Highway 24, the major highway for Negroes and whites living between Woodville and Centreville, the nearest towns.

To get to our house from the road you entered a big wooden gate. A little dirt road ran from the gate through the Cooks’ cattle pasture and continued past our house to a big cornfield. The Cooks planted the corn for their cattle. But often when Mama didn’t have enough money for food she would sneak out at night and take enough to last us a week. Once Mrs. Cook came out there and put up a scarecrow. She said that the crows were eating all the corn. When Mama came home from the café that evening and saw the scarecrow, she laughed like crazy. Then she started taking even
more corn. She had a special way of stealing the corn that made it look just like the crows had taken it. She would knock down a few ears and leave them hanging on the stalks. Then she’d drop a few between the rows and pick on a few others. I don’t remember everything she did, but before that season was over, Mrs. Cook had three more scarecrows standing.

Right below the cornfield, at the base of the hill, was a swampy area with lots of trees. The trees were so thick that even during the day the swamp was dark and mysterious looking. It looked like an entirely different world to us, but Mama never let us go near it because she said it was full of big snakes, and people hunted down there and we might get killed.

Our little house had two rooms and a porch. The front room next to the porch was larger than the little boxed-in kitchen you could barely turn around in. Its furniture consisted of two small beds. Adline and I slept in one and Mama and Junior in the other. There was also a bench to sit on and a small tin heater. Our few clothes hung on a nail on the wall. In the kitchen there was a wood stove with lots of wood stacked behind it, and a table. The only chair we had was a large rocking chair that was kept on the porch because there was no room in the house for it. We didn’t have a toilet. Mama would carry us out in back of the house each night before we went to bed to empty us.

Shortly after we moved in I turned five years old and Mama started me at Mount Pleasant School. Now I had to walk four miles each day up and down that long rock road. Mount Pleasant was a big white stone church, the biggest Baptist church in the area.

The school was a little one-room rotten wood building located right next to it. There were about fifteen of us who went there. We sat on big wooden benches just like the ones in the church, pulled up close to the heater. But we were cold all day. That little rotten building had big cracks in it, and the heater was just too small.

Reverend Cason, the minister of the church, taught us in school. He was a tall yellow man with horn-rimmed glasses that sat on the edge of his big nose. He had the largest feet I had ever seen. He was so big, he towered over us in the little classroom like a giant. In church he preached loud and in school he talked loud. We would sit in class with his sounds ringing in our ears. I thought of putting cotton in my ears but a boy had tried that and the Reverend caught him and beat him three times that day with the big switch he kept behind his desk. I remember once he caught a boy lifting up a girl’s dress with his foot. He called him up to his desk and whipped him in his hands with that big switch until the boy cried and peed all over himself. He never did whip me. I was so scared of him I never did anything. I hardly ever opened my mouth. I don’t even remember a word he said in class. I was too scared to listen to him. Instead, I sat there all day and looked out the window at the graveyard and counted the tombstones.