Coming of Age in Mississippi (12 page)

“You ain’t got a bit of sense, huh, gal? Don’t you know it’s harder to come up a hill than to go down it? Now why should we start hoeing at the bottom of the hill and hoe uphill?”

“It’s cooler down there,” I said meekly, looking up at the sky.

He shook his head as if I was crazy and walked away. I followed reluctantly.

Raymond and Alberta were the only ones who knew how to chop cotton, so they walked up and down the rows and showed us how to do it. The cotton was heavily planted. We had to thin it out so it would have enough earth and air to grow freely. Darlene and I caught on fast and we were soon hoeing by ourselves. Raymond and Alberta lagged behind, helping Adline and Cherie. I got all wrapped up in trying to outhoe Darlene. I finished three or four rows quickly, way ahead of her. Every now and then I looked back to see how far she was behind me. When she was one whole row behind, I stopped to shake my arms out. I could feel the sweat running down under them.

I was scared to look up at the sky because I knew the sun had come up. My heart began to beat like a loud drum. I shook all over. I could almost feel the sun rising in the sky. I stood there for a while, giving Darlene a chance to catch up with me. Then I hoed along slowly for a couple of hours pretending that the sun didn’t even exist. Every now and then James or Junior brought someone water. I didn’t want to look at them because I knew it was getting hotter and each trip they made reminded me of the sun.

Along about ten-thirty or eleven I could feel my shirt clinging to my body, like a big, wet crab. I was soaked to my waist. I didn’t look up, but I knew that sun was up there just like it had been in my dream. Water was running down my face from under my hat. And big drops of sweat were dripping off my arms. It was getting harder and harder for me to hoe. Every time I reached out to chop some cotton, the row seemed to move away from me, like a big wiggling snake. I looked around at everybody else in the field and they were wiggling like the row in front of me. They looked like they were falling, just like in my dream. I didn’t want to look at them. I looked up at the sun and for a moment I was completely blinded. Then I knew the others were dead. I could see the sun again. My eyes got fixed on it. I felt myself reeling and rocking on my hoe.

“Hey, Junior! Come over here, boy! Bring that water! This gal out here ’bout to
faint
or somethin’!” Raymond yelled.

Next thing I knew I was sitting on the ground and Raymond was trying to force me to drink some water. Everybody else had stopped hoeing and now they were all standing around me.

Raymond told me to rest awhile under the little tree. Thinking about how that tree shriveled up in the sun, I was afraid to go near it. I thought if I did, I would really die. When Raymond told me that we would be going home for lunch in about half an hour, I rested for a few minutes, picked up my hoe, and went back to hoeing with the rest of them. After eating lunch I felt much better, and when we went back to the field, the sun didn’t seem very hot.

After a couple of days and didn’t anybody die, my dream began to fade. Soon I even began to like the work. I’d pull off my shoes and let the hot earth fall over my feet as I was hoeing. It sent a warm feeling over my whole body. Even the burning of the hot sun no longer frightened me, but seemed to give me energy. Then when I went home there were those good hot meals Mama made. During the first few days of chopping cotton, we ate better than we had in our whole life. Mama was doing everything she could to keep us going. That first day she made a feast. She cooked at least five chickens, two big pones of bread, lots of rice and string beans, and even a couple of big coconut cakes. When we came in from the field, we found the picnic table out under the pecan tree loaded down with food.

I had never seen Raymond so happy as when he was sitting up at that table running over with food, surrounded by all his “workers,” laughing and eating and listening to Mama’s nasty jokes. While we sat at the table we didn’t even think about the field. And when we went back, we felt like we were just beginning the day. It went on like that for days, until all the money was gone from the little loan Raymond had made from the bank. After that we went back to our usual beans and bread.

Finally we finished chopping the cotton for Raymond. Then Alberta, Darlene, and I took our hoes and went to chop cotton at two dollars a day for big-time farmers in the area, including some who were Raymond’s relatives. They were among the few Negroes who had worked over the years to build up successful farms. When it came time to scrape the cotton a couple of weeks later, we returned to our field. We had to remove the weeds that had grown up among the cotton stalks. Then the cotton could grow freely until picking time.

In addition to the cotton for market, Raymond planted corn and potatoes for our own use. Within a couple of months I could really handle a hoe. When I wasn’t chopping or scraping cotton, I was chopping corn or helping Mama in the garden. I had learned a lot about farming, but the more I learned, the surer I was that I would never become a farmer. I couldn’t see myself becoming totally dependent upon the rain, sun, and earth like most farmers. I used to look at Raymond and Mama running around the house praying all the time and think that they were crazy. Farming was a fever they couldn’t get rid of. When they first planted the cotton they prayed for rain. Once the cotton came up they didn’t need rain anymore, so they prayed for sun, so the cotton bolls would open. Then after the bolls opened, they worried about the boll weevils, and spent a lot of money on poison to kill them. When the poison didn’t work, they started praying again. It was always something.

Mama and Raymond had been hooked to the soil since they were children, and I got the feeling, especially from Mama, that they were now trying to hook me. Sometimes I’d help Mama hoe in the garden and she’d be telling me how she used to pick so much cotton and how she used to do this and used to do that. Then she’d be pitty pattin’ around in the soil, barefooted, bragging about her collard greens and how “old Mother Nature” took care of things. “Looka these mustard greens here! Gol-lee, wasn’t nothin’ but a seed a few weeks ago. Now they ready to eat.” She would kick her foot into the
soil and say, “Boy, you c’n put
any
kinda seed in this garden—’fore you know it you got somethin’ to eat.” I saw how happy she was in her garden and most of what she said was true. She did have the most beautiful garden I’d ever seen. The whole thing fascinated me—planting seeds, growing your own food, using the rain and the sun and the earth, and even the idea of making a living from it. But it was the hardest way I knew of making a living.

So whenever Mama started one of her long lectures on the pleasures of farming, I would drown her out with my thoughts of Mrs. Claiborne and all the traveling she had done and the people she had met. Mrs. Claiborne had told me how smart I was and how much I could do if I just had a chance. I knew if I got involved in farming, I’d be just like Mama and the rest of them, and that I would never have that chance.

After the cotton season was over I was surer than ever that I would never be a farmer. Out of all that work we had put into the cotton, we didn’t even make enough money to buy school clothes. We had one good picking and that was it. The land was just no good. If Raymond hadn’t planted corn and sweet potatoes, and Mama’s garden hadn’t been so good, we would have starved to death that winter.

We started to school in our same old school clothes and broken-down shoes. I ran around looking for a job for a week or so but I couldn’t find anything. I went back to Mrs. Claiborne but she had someone else working for her. She said she’d ask her friends if any of them needed help. I checked every day, and none of them did. Then one day we came in from school and Mama had a stack of croker sacks out on the porch.

As I walked into the house she said, “Essie Mae, y’all hurry up and eat. Shit, Mr. Wheeler came by here today. He want us to pick up pecans. He say that ground is just loaded with ’em. We could make enough money to buy all y’all school clothes.”

As soon as we finished eating we grabbed the croker sacks and ran all the way to Mr. Wheeler’s house. He lived right on the other side of the project from us, in a big white house. He was a rancher and he owned lots of land in the area. Right down the hill from his house he had a big pecan orchard. As we walked up the gravel driveway, we could see him out in his backyard playing with his children.

“I sure hope he ain’t let nobody else pick ’em up,” Mama said. “I told him we’d be up there as soon as y’all got outta school. He look like he don’t even know we’re comin’.”

“Elmira, where you carryin’ that baby to? She’ll get fulla ticks out there in that grass,” Mr. Wheeler said as we approached.

I was so excited about going to pick up pecans, I hadn’t even noticed that Mama was carrying Jennie Ann.

“My little boy here gonna keep her while we pick up pecans. I didn’t want to leave her in the house by herself,” Mama answered.

“Oh, I see you brought your own sacks too. Good! C’mon, I’ll drive y’all down in the bottom. I want y’all to pick them up next to the road first ’cause them little boys keep runnin’ in there pickin’ them up.” Mr. Wheeler put his two little boys in front of the pickup truck and we all piled into the back—Mama, me, Adline, Junior, James, and the baby. As Mr. Wheeler drove past his cattle, Mama said, “Boy, looka that milk in them cows’ titties. Shit, if I had all them cows, I would never get through eatin’ steaks and drinkin’ milk.” As he drove through the pecan orchard, we could see pecans piled on the ground about two inches thick. “Look at ’im how he’s drivin’ the truck through them pecans! He coulda let us walk down here,” Mama said, looking like she wanted to jump right out and get started. She was the first one off the truck when we got to the bottom.

It had rained heavily the day before and just about all the pecans on the trees had fallen. We all had gallon buckets and we could almost fill them just by raking them around on the ground. Even little Jennie Ann, who wasn’t a year old, was stumbling around on the ground picking up pecans. “C’mon, Jennie Ann! Looka here! Help your mama make some money,” Mama laughed every time Jennie Ann dropped some pecans in her bucket.

It was almost dark when Mama sent Junior up to the house to say we were ready to knock off. When Mr. Wheeler
came down, we were all standing out there with muddy hands and knees. Jennie Ann was muddy all over. We looked like a bunch of clowns standing there behind four full croker sacks.

“Boy, y’all look like y’all had fun down here today. My land, I ain’t never had anybody work that fast! Look at all them pecans!” Mr. Wheeler said. The croker sacks were so heavy that all of us had to help him put them in the truck.

We had picked the pecans up on half. Since we had four sacks, I had expected Mr. Wheeler to give us two of them. But instead he measured them out, gallon for gallon, to make sure we didn’t have an ounce more than he did. He kept us there for two hours measuring the pecans. We got home about eight that night. Next evening after school we went back and finished them up. That Saturday morning Mama and Raymond drove the pecans to Woodville, where they could get eighteen cents a pound instead of the fifteen cents they got paid in Centreville. In all we had picked up a hundred and twenty dollars’ worth. Mama used the money to buy school clothes for us—shoes, dresses, and pants.

We picked up pecans the following week for Miss Minnie, an old lady who was living across the road from Mr. Wheeler. After we’d finished, Miss Minnie asked me to sweep her porch, then she asked if I would help her some evenings, so I began working for her. I had to burn her trash and then sweep her porches and halls. She paid me three dollars a week and also let me pick up the few pecans that were left after the first big picking. I sold them and made as much as six dollars a week during the season. Then when the pecans were all gone I started baby-sitting for Mr. and Mrs. Jenkins, a young couple who rented rooms next door from Miss Minnie. They had one child, a little girl named Donna who had just started walking, and another child on the way.

Since Mrs. Jenkins had had trouble giving birth to Donna, she was extremely nervous about her second pregnancy. She
was expecting in two months and she had gotten so big that everybody thought she’d have twins. They couldn’t really afford help, but little Donna was getting to be too much for Mrs. Jenkins, so they hired me to keep the child out of her way. I took her for walks, read her stories, and made up games for her to play. We would spend hours under Miss Minnie’s pecan tree, playing and picking up pecans.

I used to feel funny calling Mrs. Jenkins “Mrs. Jenkins” because she didn’t look too much older than me. When she saw that it bothered me, she told me that her first name was Linda Jean and that when I called her Mrs. Jenkins it reminded her too much of her mother, who demanded that everyone, especially Negroes, call her “Mrs.” I began to really like Linda Jean after that. She treated me just like I was one of her friends and I never thought about our color difference when I was with her, except when she paid me. Only then was I reminded that I was her maid. When I told Linda Jean I was the oldest of five and that my mother was also expecting, she said, “Boy, you should know more about children than me.” Sometimes, when she would get one of her sick spells, she would even ask me what to do, like I was an authority on having babies.

She was so nice to me that when I saw her struggling with the housework, I started helping her even though I was only paid to take care of Donna. A few weeks before she was about to get down they began paying me to do
all
the housework and take care of Donna too. Altogether they paid me twelve dollars a week, the most I had ever earned. I felt a little guilty about taking that much money from them because I knew they couldn’t afford it, but things were so bad at home that I had to.

One day I was in the kitchen washing dishes for Linda Jean while she was up front talking to the lady who lived in the big white frame house next door. She was a good-looking, tall slim woman with mingled gray and black hair. I had just
finished washing the cake mixer and I didn’t know where to put it.