A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety (2 page)

My room was on the northeast corner, far from any stove or fireplace, so my most vivid and unpleasant memories are of cold weather. I remember shivering at night even under blankets, and my bare toes curling up when I stepped out of bed onto the cold floor and made a dash for my parents’ room and the warmth of some still-glowing embers in their fireplace. Strangely, I don’t really recall the discomfort of the hot summer days of South Georgia. This house and the outbuildings are now owned by the National Park Service, and the historic site is preserved as it was in 1937.

Our family meals when Mama was on nursing duty were prepared by one of the African-American women who lived on the farm, and my two sisters related quite intimately to them. Neither my sisters nor my mother ever did field work. When not in school, I spent every spare moment
during workdays around the barn area and in the fields—with my father whenever possible. I was especially close to Jack and Rachel Clark, who lived in the house nearest ours. Jack was in charge of all the livestock, the equipment, and operation of the barn and its environs. He rang the big farm bell every morning at an hour before daylight and was responsible for milking the cows. Jack worked closely with Daddy in assigning different workers to their tasks.

Daddy had multiple talents, and he devoted many of them to becoming as self-sufficient as possible on the farm. He was reluctant to pay anyone else to do jobs that he could learn to do himself, so he became a competent forester, farmer, herdsman, blacksmith, carpenter, and shoemaker. I guess he was still a merchant at heart, and he refined as many of our raw products into retail items as possible. I had to leave home for school sometimes before daybreak, but in the afternoons I helped Jack milk eight cows. We always had plenty of sweet milk, buttermilk, cream, and butter in our house. Some of the excess milk was made into chocolate and vanilla drinks, put in eight-ounce bottles with waxed cardboard tops, and placed in iceboxes in grocery stores and filling stations within a five-mile circle around Plains. Daddy picked up the unsold drinks every Monday and we fed them to our hogs. Other milk was run through a separator on our back porch, and the pure cream was marketed through the Suwanee store in town. We called the remaining skim milk “blue john” and fed it to the hogs. (Now, that’s all we drink.) Wool sheared from our sheep was swapped for blankets that we sold in our farm commissary, and we picked the down from the breasts of about fifty geese and exchanged it for pillows and comforters. The geese also helped by eating worms and other insects from our cotton plants. Each year we converted about twenty-five acres of sugarcane into syrup that Daddy marketed with a “Plains Maid” label, and sometimes he did the same thing with catsup made from homegrown tomatoes. We slaughtered about twenty hogs a few times each year on the coldest days, and Daddy made sausage and rubbed the hams, shoulders, and side meat with preservative spices, then cured the meat in the smokehouse behind our home before selling it in our store.

I was especially close to Jack and Rachel Clark, who lived in the house nearest ours. Except for my parents, Rachel Clark was the person closest to me.

He also believed that everything and everyone on the farm should somehow “earn its keep,” even including my Shetland pony.

Always a Reckoning

There always seemed to be a need

for reckoning in early days.

What came in equaled what went out

like oscillating ocean waves.

On the farm, our wages matched

the work we did in woods and fields,

how many acres plowed and hoed,

how much syrup was distilled,

how many pounds of cotton picked,

how much cordwood cut and stacked.

All things had to balance out.

I had a pony then that lacked

a way to work and pay her way,

except that every year or two

Lady had a colt we sold,

but still for less than what was due

to buy the fodder, hay, and corn

she ate at times she couldn’t be

on pasture. Neither feed nor colts

meant all that much that I could see,

but still there was a thing about

a creature staying on our place

that none of us could eat or plow,

did not give eggs, or even chase

a fox or rabbit, that was sure

to rile my father. We all knew

that Lady’s giving me a ride

paid some on her debt, in lieu

of other ways—but there would be

sometimes I didn’t get around

to riding in my off-work hours.

And I was sure, when Daddy frowned

at some mistake I might’ve made, he

would be asking when he could,

“How long since you rode Lady?”

There were about two hundred people who lived in the unincorporated community of Archery, and except for the Seaboard Airline Railroad section foreman, Mr. Ernest Watson, we were the only white family. The boys with whom I worked or played were African-American, and we learned how to make our own toys. Our favorite was a thick steel hoop from a wooden keg, ten to twelve inches in diameter. We rolled our hoops for miles, even hours at a time, propelling them with a strong, stiff wire that had a loop on one end to provide a handhold and a V-shaped notch on the other to fit behind the hoop. We would have felt undressed without our rubber-banded flips, or slingshots, and a supply of small round rocks in our pockets for ammunition. Other projectiles were also important to us, and they could have been deadly weapons. One of the easiest to make and most enjoyable was a kind of dart made from a large corncob, four or five inches long, with a needle-sharpened nail inserted into the pith of one end and two chicken feathers in the other that were set at precise angles to give the thrown weapon the correct amount of spin before it embedded in a tree or a target on the side of a building.

We used the same sharpened points on dog-fennel spears, and were surprised at how far we could throw them with the help of spear throwers called “atlatls,” which we devised after reading about them in
Boys’ Life
magazine or one of our Indian books. We haunted Daddy’s shop for days as we improved on our basic design of rubber guns. After cutting out shapes of long-barreled pistols, we mounted spring clothespins, wrapped them with rubber bands to increase their grip, and then stretched a cross section of inner tube strips around the end of each barrel. A squeeze on the clothespin released the loop of inner tube as a projectile. We ultimately devised repeaters that would shoot as many as a dozen rubber bands. We would fight wars until everyone on one side or the other had
been “killed” by being hit. We also made popgun barrels by removing the pith from the centers of American elder limbs and used green chinaberries as projectiles. We learned to make kites and competed in designing and flying the smallest one.

When not working, my black playmates and I spent as much time as possible in the woods hunting and fishing, or just exploring. The repair shop and two filling stations in town were good places to search for wheels of different sizes that were being discarded. We used them with homemade wooden bodies to devise wagons and two-wheeled carts. Most of these were pulled or pushed by us, but we made one with two shafts that we hitched to our largest billy goat.

Daddy soon evolved a way for me to create an attractive product and take it to market. With no tractors on the farm and no need for fossil fuels except kerosene for lamps and lanterns, we planted corn as the primary source of fuel and energy, and produced cotton and peanuts as cash crops. It happened that peanuts began to ripen soon after school days ended each summer, and beginning when I was five years old I would go out into the nearby fields each afternoon and pull up the plants, shake the dirt from around the nuts, and haul a load to our yard in a little wagon. There I picked about ten pounds of the more mature peanuts off the vines, washed them thoroughly, and put them in a large pot of salty water to soak overnight. Early in the morning I boiled them for a half hour or so, tasting them for proper saltiness, and then divided them into about twenty paper bags of a half pound each. For Saturdays, when Plains was filled with shoppers from the surrounding farms, I prepared twice as many.

After breakfast, I would walk down the railroad tracks to town, a distance of about two miles, with my boiled peanuts in a wicker basket. I stayed in Plains until all the peanuts were sold, and usually this was done before dinnertime. At five cents a bag, my earnings were a dollar a day, as much as a grown and skilled laborer earned in the fields. I had about ten dependable customers, and would go from store to store up and down our only street to find shoppers, traveling salesmen, and other transients to buy the additional peanuts. My only expenses were the bags and the salt.
I kept a careful notebook record of my sales and deposited earnings in my uncle Alton Carter’s mercantile store, which served as the town’s bank.

A few years later, when cotton reached its lowest price in history (five cents a pound), Daddy suggested that I use my savings to buy five bales, of five hundred pounds each. These were kept in one of our storehouses on the farm, and I sold them for eighteen cents a pound when the market recovered. With this income I bought five houses from the deceased undertaker’s estate and rented two for $2.00 each, two for $5.00, and one for $2.50, for a total of $16.50 per month. Whether I worked or not, my houses were earning fifty-five cents a day! Each month I rode my bicycle from house to house until I finally cornered every renter. They always seemed to be elusive unless a windowpane was missing, the roof leaked, a door didn’t close properly, or one of the steps was broken. These were all repairs that I could do myself. After I left home for college, my father struggled to collect the rent for a few months before deciding it was best to sell the houses.

Daddy was a strict disciplinarian, but he resorted to physical punishment only rarely. I still remember vividly the five times that he whipped me, with either his belt or a switch from a wild peach tree in the yard. In every case, the process was like an orderly trial, with a full understanding between him and me about what I had done wrong, his explanation of the reason for the penalty, and my promise not to repeat my misbehavior. If I had any feelings of resentment, they were soon put aside. I never considered disobeying an order or even a request from Daddy. I loved and admired him, and one of my preeminent goals in life was to earn his approbation. I learned to expect his criticisms, always constructive, but his accolades were rare.

My most memorable criticism from my father occurred when I was about ten years old. While trying to kill one of our white leghorn broilers for supper, I struck down, and a sharp stem of stiff weed stuck between the bones of my right wrist. Dr. Bowman Wise attempted unsuccessfully to probe for it, and my wrist began to swell during the next week and was increasingly painful when I bent it. One day after a noonday break, I was
lying across a stool reading a book, when Daddy came through the room and I heard him say to Mama, “I reckon that boy’s enjoying his books while the rest of us go to the field.” I got up in a few minutes, went into the backyard, and used my belt to tie the palm of my hand, fingers up, tightly onto a fence post. Then I raised my arm, bending my wrist more and more until the pus-enclosed piece of stick popped out of the sore. Mama wrapped it in a bandage, and I ran to the field to be with my daddy.

Much later, I wrote a poem that expressed my feelings:

I Wanted to Share My Father’s World

This is a pain I mostly hide,

but ties of blood, or seed, endure,

and even now I feel inside

the hunger for his outstretched hand,

a man’s embrace to take me in,

the need for just a word of praise.

I despised the discipline

he used to shape what I should be,

not owning up that he might feel

his own pain when he punished me.

I didn’t show my need to him,

since his response to an appeal

would not have meant as much to me,

or been as real.

From those rare times when we did cross

the bridge between us, the pure joy

survives. I never put aside

the past resentments of the boy

until, with my own sons, I shared

his final hours, and came to see

what he’d become, or always was—