Coming of Age in Mississippi (3 page)

One day he caught me.

“Moody, gal! If you don’t stop lookin’ out that window, I’ll make you go out in that graveyard and sit on the biggest tombstone out there all day.” Nobody laughed because they were all as scared of him as I was.

We used the toilets in back of the church. The boys’ toilet was on one side and girls’ on the other. The day after Reverend Cason yelled at me, I asked to be excused. While in the toilet I thought to myself, “I can stay out here all day and he won’t even know I’m out here.” I began to spend three and four hours a day in the toilet and he didn’t even miss me, until a lot of other kids caught on and started doing the same thing. About three weeks or so later about five of us girls were in the toilet at the same time. We had been out there almost an hour. We were standing behind the partition in front of the toilet giggling and making fun of Reverend Cason when all of a sudden we heard him right outside.

“If y’all don’t come outta that toilet right this second, I’ll come in there and drown you!”

We peeped from behind the partition and saw Reverend Cason standing there with that big switch in his hand.

“Didn’t I say come outta there! If I have to come in there and getcha, I’m goin’ to beat yo’ brains out!”

“Reverend Cason, I ain’t finished yet,” I said in a trembling voice.

“You ain’t finished? You been in there over three hours! If y’all don’t get outta there—” Then he was silent. I peeped out again. He was coming toward the door.

I ran out and headed for the classroom, followed by the rest of the girls. When we got around in front of the church we met up with a bunch of boys running from the boys’ toilet. We all scrambled in the door. There were only two students sitting in class. I sat in my seat and didn’t even breathe until I heard Reverend Cason’s big feet hit the bottom step. He came through the door puffing and shouting, but he was so tired from yelling and chasing us that he didn’t even beat us. After that he wouldn’t excuse us until recess. And then he would have to round us up and bring us back to class.

Every morning before Mama left for the café, she would take us across the road to Grandfather Moody. I would leave for school from there and he would keep Adline and Junior until I came home. My grandfather lived with one of my aunts. He was a very old man and he was sick all the time. I don’t ever remember seeing him out of his bed. My aunt them would leave for the field at daybreak, so whenever we were there, my grandfather was alone.

He really cared a lot for us and he liked Mama very much too, because Mama was real good to him. Sometimes my aunt them would go off and wouldn’t even fix food for him. Mama would always look to see if there was any food left for him in the kitchen. If there wasn’t, she would fix some batty cakes or something for him and he would eat them with syrup.

Often when Mama didn’t have money for food, he gave her
some. I think he felt guilty for what his son, my daddy, had done to us. He kept his money in a little sack tied around his waist. I think that was his life savings because he never took it off.

Some mornings when Mama would bring us over she would be looking real depressed.

“Toosweet, what’s wrong with you?” Grandfather would ask in a weak voice. “You need a little money or something? Do Diddly ever send you any money to help you with these children? It’s a shame the way that boy run around gambling and spending all his money on women.”

“Uncle Moody, I ain’t heard nothin’ from him and I don’t want to. The Lord’ll help me take care o’ my children.”

“I sure wish he’d do right by these chaps,” Grandfather would mumble to himself.

Soon after school was over for the year, Grandfather got a lot sicker than he was before. Mama stopped carrying us by his place. She left us at home alone, and she would bake a pone of bread to last us the whole day.

One evening she came in from work looking real sad.

“Essie Mae, put yo’ shoes on. I want you to come go say good-bye to Uncle Moody. He’s real sick. Adline, I’m gonna leave you and Junior by Miss Cook. I’m gonna come right back and y’all better mind Miss Cook, you hear?”

“Mama, why I gotta say good-bye to Uncle Moody? Where he’s goin’?” I asked her.

“He’s goin’ somewhere he’s gonna be treated much better than he’s treated now. And he won’t ever be sick again,” she answered sadly.

I didn’t understand why Mama was so sad if Uncle Moody wasn’t going to be sick anymore. I wanted to ask her but I didn’t. All the way to see Uncle Moody, I kept wondering where he was going.

It was almost dark when we walked up in my aunt’s yard. A whole bunch of people were standing around on the porch and in the yard. Some of them looked even sadder than
Mama. I had never seen that many people there before and everything seemed so strange to me. I looked around at the faces to see if I knew anyone. Suddenly I recognized Daddy, squatting in the yard in front of the house. He had a knife in his hand. As Mama and I walked toward him, he began to pick in the dirt. He glanced up at Mama and he had that funny funny look in his eyes. I had seen it before. He looked like he wanted us back so bad, but Mama was mean. She had vowed that she would never see him again. As they stood there staring at each other, I was reminded of the first time I saw him after he left us, when we lived with my Great-Aunt Cindy. It was Easter Sunday morning. Mama, Aunt Cindy, and all the children were sitting on the porch. We were all having a beautiful time. It was just after the Easter egg hunt and we were eating the eggs we had found in the grass. Mama was playing with us. She had found more eggs than all of us and she was teasing and throwing eggshells at us.

As I was dodging eggshells and giggling at Mama, I saw Daddy coming down the road. I jumped off the porch and ran to meet him, followed by the rest of the children. He gave me lots of candy in a big bag and told me to share it with the others. As we walked back to the porch, I could see Mama’s changing expression. Daddy was grinning broadly. He had something for Mama in a big bag he carried with care in his arms.

I don’t remember what they said to each other after that. But I remember what was in the big bag for Mama. It was a hat, a big beautiful hat made out of flowers of all colors. When she saw the hat, Mama got real mad. She took the hat and picked every flower from it, petal by petal. She threw them out in the yard and watched the wind blow them away. Daddy looked at her as if he hated her, but there was more than hate in it all. This was just how he looked out in the yard now as he sat picking in the dirt.

I was very frightened. I thought at first he would kill Mama with the knife. Mama stared at him for a while, then went
straight past him into the house, leaving me in the yard with him.

“Come here, Essie Mae,” he said sadly. I walked to him, shaking. “They say you is in school now. Do you need anything?” he asked. I was so afraid I couldn’t answer him. He felt in his pocket. Out of it came a roll of money. He gave it to me, smiling. I took it and was about to smile back when I saw Mama. She came out of the house and snatched the money from me and threw it at him. Then Daddy got up. This time I was sure he would hit Mama. But he didn’t. He only walked away with that hurt look in his eyes. Mama grabbed me by the arm and headed out of the yard, pulling me behind her.

“Ain’t ah’m gonna say good-bye to Uncle Moody?” I whined.

“He told me to tell you good-bye,” she snapped. “He’s sleeping now.”

That night we had beans for supper, as usual. And all night I wondered why Mama threw back the money Daddy gave me. I was mad with her because we ate beans all the time. Had she taken the money, I thought, we could have meat too.

Now that school was out and there was no one for us to stay with, we would sit on the porch and rock in the rocking chair most of the day. We were scared to go out and play because of the snakes. Often as we sat on the porch we saw them coming up the hill from the swamp. Sometimes they would just go to the other side of the swamp. But other times they went under the house and we didn’t see them come out. When this happened, we wouldn’t eat all day because we were scared to go inside. The snakes often came into the house. Once as I was putting wood in the stove for Mama, I almost put my hands on one curled up under the wood. I never touched the woodpile again.

One day we heard Mrs. Cook’s dog barking down beside the swamp at the base of the cornfield. We ran out to see what had happened. When we got there, the dog was standing still with his tail straight up in the air barking hysterically. There, lying beside a log, was a big old snake with fishy scales all over his body. Adline, Junior, and I stood there in a trance looking at it, too scared to move. We had never seen one like this. It was so big it didn’t even look like a snake. It looked like
it was big enough to swallow us whole. Finally the snake slowly made its way back into the swamp, leaving a trail of mashed-down grass behind it.

When Mama came home that evening from the café, we told her all about the snake. At first, she didn’t believe us, but we were shaking so that she had us go out back and show her where we had seen it. After she saw the place next to the log where it had been lying and the trail it left going to the swamp, she went and got Mr. Cook. For days Mr. Cook and some other men looked in the swamp for that snake, but they never did find it. After that Mama was scared for us to stay at home alone, and she began looking for a house in town closer to where she worked. “Shit, snakes that damn big might come up here and eat y’all up while I’m at work,” she said.

In the meantime, she got our Uncle Ed, whom we liked so much, to come over and look after us every day. Sometimes he would take us hunting. Then we wouldn’t have to sit on the porch and watch those snakes in that boiling hot summer sun. Ed made us a “niggershooter” each. This was a little slingshot made out of a piece of leather connected to a forked stick by a thin slab of rubber. We would take rocks and shoot them at birds and anything else we saw. Ed was the only one who ever killed anything. He always carried salt and matches in his pockets and whenever he’d kill a bird he’d pick and roast it right there in the woods. Sometimes Ed took us fishing too. He knew every creek in the whole area and we’d roam for miles. Whenever we caught fish we’d scrape and cook them right on the bank of the creek. On those days we didn’t have to eat that hard cold pone of bread Mama left for us.

Sometimes Ed would keep us in the woods all day, and we wouldn’t hunt birds or fish or anything. We just walked, listening to the birds and watching the squirrels leap from tree to tree and the rabbits jumping behind the little stumps. Ed had a way of making you feel so much a part of everything about the woods. He used to point out all the trees to us, telling us which was an oak, and which was a pine and which
bore fruit. He’d even give us quizzes to see if we could remember one tree from another. I thought he was the smartest person in the whole world.

One day Ed was late coming and we had resigned ourselves to spending the whole day on the porch. We rocked for hours in the sun and finally fell asleep. Eventually Ed came. He locked the house up immediately and rushed us off the porch. He told us he was going to surprise us. I thought we were going to a new creek or something so I begged him to tell me. He saw that I was upset so finally he told me that he was taking us home with him.

As we were walking down the rock road, it occurred to me that I had never been home with Ed and I was dying to see where he lived. I could only remember seeing Grandma Winnie once, when she came to our house just after Junior was born. Mama never visited Grandma because they didn’t get along that well. Grandma had talked Mama into marrying my daddy when Mama wanted to marry someone else. Now that Mama and Daddy had separated, she didn’t want anything to do with Grandma, especially when she learned that her old boyfriend was married and living in Chicago.

Ed told us that he didn’t live very far from us, but walking barefooted on the rock road in the boiling hot sun, I began to wonder how far was “not very far.”

“Ed, how much more longer we gotta go? These rocks is burning my foots,” I said.

“Ain’t much further. Just right around that bend,” Ed yelled back at me. “Why didn’t you put them shoes on? I told you them rocks was hot.” He waited on me now. “Oughter make you go all the way back to that house and put them shoes on. You gonna be laggin’ behind comin’ back and we ain’t never gonna make it ’fore Toosweet get off o’ work!”

“Mama told us we ain’t supposed to wear our shoes out
round the house. You know we ain’t got but one pair and them my school shoes.”

“Here it is, right here,” Ed said at last. “Essie Mae, run up front and open that gate.” By this time he was carrying Junior on his back and Adline half asleep on his hip.

I ran to the gate and opened it and rode on it as it swung open. We entered a green pasture with lots of cows.

“Is that where you stay?” I asked Ed as I pointed to an old wooden house on the side of a hill.

“Is any more houses down there?” Ed said, laughing at me. “See that pond over there, Essie Mae!” he called as I ran down the hill. “I’m gonna bring y’all fishing over here one day. Boy, they got some big fishes in there! You shoulda seen what Sam and Walter caught yesterday.”

I glanced at the pond but ran right past it. I didn’t have my mind on fishing at all. I was dying to see Grandma Winnie’s house and Sam and Walter, Ed’s younger brothers, and his sister Alberta whom I had never met. Ed had told me that George Lee was now living with his daddy and stepmother. I was glad because I didn’t want to run into him there.

Alberta was standing in the yard at the side of the house feeding the big fire around the washpot with kindling. Two white boys about my size stood at her side. I looked around for Sam and Walter. But I didn’t see them.

“Ed, what took you so long? I oughta made you tote that water fo’ you left here,” Alberta shouted at Ed as she turned and saw us.

“I had to tote Adline and Junior all the way here. You must think um superman or something,” Ed answered angrily.