A young Negro farm laborer and his wife and three children had lived on a cotton plantation four miles from the nearest Yazoo Basin town for several years. The dwelling, for which he was charged ten dollars a month rent, was a sagging, slab-sided, weather-warped, two-room tenant house more than twenty years old. The glass panes of two of the four windows had been broken for many years and were covered with sheets of rusty tin that had been ripped from the roof by a windstorm.
The white owner of the land and dwelling had furnished no material for repairs and the tenant and his wife had chosen to protect the children and themselves from wind and rain by covering the broken windows with the tin roofing and to endure the leaking roof. The building was similar in size and condition to several other inhabited tenant houses spaced twenty feet apart in a row beside the muddy farm road. Behind each shack was a doorless lean-to back-house privy screened with burlap sacking. There was one pump-well to supply water for all who lived in the settlement.
Unlike the cautious and suspicious older Negroes in the settlement who were fearful of the consequences of complaining about anything and risking the white landowner’s wrath and vengeance, the young Negro talked freely and boldly about his life.
I haven’t worked none for seven months since last September and I’m five months behind in rent already. And me and my family are a heap more behind in eating than that. We’re empty-belly people most of the time.
The white man promised me two months of cotton chopping and two months of picking this year and I’m going to stay around here for that. Then I’ll leave for sure. My mind’s made up good and plenty about that. I’ll make me about five dollars a day for those four months and pay the white man the back rent I owe him for living in this shack and then keep up with the new rent till the picking’s all finished.
Me and my wife don’t want no more of this—working all summer to pay the white man a year’s rent and going hungry-belly in this old house all winter long. That don’t make sense. And it wouldn’t do no good to move to town, neither. Rent’s just as much in town and there’s no more work there than there is here.
I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to New Jersey. I sure am. You can count on that. From then on I’ll be through working for the white man for only four months a year and paying him rent twelve months to live in this shack and go hungry half the time, too. I’m going off to New Jersey and stay there. That’s where I’m going to do my living—and not here no more.
I went up there to New Jersey once before. That was about two years ago. But I had to come back down here when my father took sick and I was sent for just when he was dying. I had a fine job in New Jersey working in a zipper-making factory and making two dollars an hour all the time I stayed there and not just half that much working for the white man down here for only four months the year.
My brother’s up there in New Jersey and he got me that job I had. He stays, too. He don’t come back down here none at all. He says he’s a Northern man now and don’t want nothing to do with things down here in Mississippi. I don’t blame him none. He almost got killed to death once down here when a white man got mad at him about a little nothing and shot him twice with a shotgun. He was lying in ditch water all night and the next day where the white man thought he was dead and left him. But he crawled out and drug himself a whole half-mile to somebody’s house to help him. That’s why he won’t come down here to Mississippi no more.
When I finish up working for the white man four months and paying off the rent, my brother’s going to send me the money so me and my family can move to New Jersey and stay there like he does. That’ll be the big day. My brother lives in a fine place up there that has a real bathroom and inside running water and plenty of heat for cold weather. He wouldn’t live in a shack like this one here is. And I won’t no more, neither. Not after I finish up working for the white man this time and paying off the back rent I owe.
The white man said to me he’ll get the sheriff after me if I move off the place and don’t pay up all I owe him before I go. But he don’t need to worry none about that. I’ll pay up before I go off. You won’t see me getting trapped like that and put in jail and kept from going to New Jersey. I’ve got that too much on my mind.
I’d gone to New Jersey last year after finishing up working the crop for the white man and paying up the rent I owed then, but my mother’s been ailing pretty bad and I’ve got to do something about looking after her first. She’s got the insurance for the undertaker all paid up, but she don’t have no insurance for a place in the graveyard. She lives with her sister in town and can’t work no more to get money.
A heap of folks fail to think about that graveyard insurance before it’s too late. I reckon that’s because they’ve been on top of the ground all their life and fail to think about providing for where they’ll have to be put in the ground when they’re dead.
That’s the only reason I’m still here now and not already up in New Jersey. But I’m going just as soon as I can get that graveyard insurance fixed up for my mother. Won’t nothing stop me this time to going up there to stay and work at the good job my brother’s going to get me and make real money enough to eat and buy clothes for my family.
I don’t have nothing much against the white man, except he won’t fix up this old house and wouldn’t let me dig a grave on his land to bury my father in when he died without the graveyard insurance.
I told the white man I’d do every bit the work myself fixing up the house and it wouldn’t cost him nothing except for a little roofing and boards and a few nails. But he said he couldn’t spend no money on no old house like this here that was going to fall down soon, anyhow. After he argued like that, I told him all he’d have to do was let me take some old roofing and boards off another old house of his that wasn’t fit for nobody to live in. He wouldn’t do that, neither.
I don’t know if the white man’s just naturally stingy or mean or don’t care none what happens to the colored who work for him. But there’s something like that bout it because he sure don’t act right dealing with the colored. I said to him once the colored who work for him and pay him ten dollars a month rent ought to have a place to live in that don’t leak through the roof when it rained and have busted windows where the field rats can get in and crawl all over you in the night.
But saying that to him didn’t help none at all. It just made him mad. Spitting mad. He told me I’d better shut my mouth and stay quiet if I wanted to stay out of trouble. Looks like it don’t never do a bit of good for the colored trying to talk to the white man about nothing. There’s some fine white people in the country but he sure aint one of them.
My father lived down the road yonder in that fourth house and he’d worked for the white man and the white man’s daddy most of his life right here on this plantation. He was better off than some of the colored who died on the place, because he’d paid the undertaker’s insurance up. But he didn’t have a dime’s worth of the graveyard insurance.
That’s why I asked the white man if he’d loan me twenty-five dollars to pay the graveyard for a place to bury my father in. The white man’s daddy used to let the colored be buried somewhere on the place when they died, but the young white man wouldn’t do that.
I promised the white man I’d work it out just as soon as the cotton was ready to chop and he’d be sure to get the money back that way. But he just wouldn’t do it. There wasn’t enough time to write a letter to my brother in New Jersey for the money to pay the graveyard. My father’d already been dead two days then and the undertaker said it was the law that he had to be taken somewhere and buried in the ground before the third day was up.
My father had that fifty dollars’ undertakers’ insurance all paid up, but none of the graveyard insurance. That was the big trouble. The undertaker collected the fifty dollars of money to pay for the box and there wasn’t none left for the graveyard. You don’t know how poor poor can be till you get too poor to be buried in the ground.
> When I couldn’t get nowhere trying to make the undertaker let some of the money he’d collected pay the graveyard, that’s when I came back out here from town and tried to get the white man to loan me the twenty-five dollars for the graveyard.
And that’s when the white man said he wouldn’t do it. I told him how the undertaker said the burying had to be done right away that same day like the law said and that I had to get rid of my father in the box by sundown or he’d put them both out the back door in the alley and leave them there. The white man said it was my business to bury my father and none of his.
Maybe not many other folks know it, but that’s how I found out there’s no way of being poorer than when you’re trying to bury somebody and can’t find the money to pay for a place in the ground to put him in. You might think there’d be a free graveyard somewhere for people like my father, but there wasn’t. They told me there’s a graveyard in town where poor city people can be buried free, but none for the country people who die poor.
The neighbors along the road here wanted to help me out, but they couldn’t raise that much cash money between them all. It was getting late in the day by that time and it wouldn’t be long before sundown. That’s when I went back to the white man one more time and asked him please if I could dig a grave and bury my father right here in the yard behind the house.
I reckon you might know what he said. The white man said if I dug a hole in the ground anywhere on his land and buried my father in it he’d bulldoze over it with a tractor so quick nobody’d never know where it was after that. I tried to tell him my father’s grave wouldn’t take up none of his farm land if he’d let me dig it sort of under the porch or at the underside of the house, but he wouldn’t hear to that, neither. He said he didn’t want no niggers buried on his land and rotting the ground.
Something had to be done about it quick after that. Time was getting real short. The sun was only about treetop high then and sinking fast. Three neighbors and me went down the road to the paved highway where the colored-man storekeeper had a little truck and he let us borrow it and go to town and get my father in the undertaker’s box.
It was past sundown before we could get to town and sure enough the box was out there in the alley just like the undertaker said it’d be by that time. We loaded it in the truck and got started back out this way. The four of us got to talking about what to do and the way it ended up was there wasn’t but one thing in the world about it to do.
By then it was a long time after dark with only a little moonlight showing down and it looked like it was getting ready to cloud up and rain some pretty soon. We drove the truck off the paved highway over to the side of it where it was widest and found the highest place on the bank where it was dry above the ditch and the standing water. That’s where we started digging with the shovels we’d brought along and dug the grave deep and wide enough to put the box down in it.
Nobody was a preacher or deacon in the church and all we could do about it was stand there and take off our hats and sing some of the songs. We didn’t sing too loud—just enough to make the songs sound right—because some white people who lived in a house not far off might get curious and want to come down there and find out what was happening alongside the state highway in the nighttime. Then we shoveled in the dirt and covered the box good and tamped the sod back on top of it to keep it looking natural so the highway people or nobody else would be apt to notice it.
The only way to mark the place to remember where it was was with a rusty old Holsum bread company sign that fell off a post and we laid that on top of it. That bread company sign made it look just like a natural part of the state highway.
When you go from here back down to the paved road and turn toward town, you can find the place about half-a-mile that way. Look on the right hand side close to the wire fence where there’s a scaly-bark tree and you’ll see that Holsum bread company sign flat on the ground and right beside it a little bitty fruit jar with some flowers in it.
My wife goes down there every Sunday and puts some fresh flowers in the fruit jar because my mother can’t get up out of bed to come out here to do it. What I’m doing now is paying a quarter-a-week graveyard insurance for my mother so when she dies she’ll have a place in the graveyard to be buried in. She’s already got the undertaker’s insurance all paid for.
I just wouldn’t feel right going off to New Jersey to stay and leave my mother here with no paid-for place in the graveyard. It wouldn’t be right to put her down in a grave by the state highway after dark when nobody was looking.
They keep the sides of the state highway nice and grassy and the weeds chopped down, and they pick up all the beer cans people throw away, but I’ve made up my mind for her to have the kind of burying my father couldn’t get. I want my mother put in the graveyard in the daytime with the preacher on hand and out-loud singing the way folks want it done when they have to die and be buried.
I don’t know nothing about any colored man from Georgia or Alabama ever coming to this part of Mississippi. If he knows what I know, he’d stayed where he was or else kept on going to Arkansas. It might not be a bit better over there for the colored, but it sure can’t be worse than right here.
If that fellow named Bisco asked me, I’d tell him to haul himself off to New Jersey like I’m going to do. I don’t mind being born in the Big South, but I don’t aim to be pushed to death in it.
12
FOR A LONG TIME the old Memphis road has been a narrow trace, occasionally dusty but usually muddy and rutted, that lies straight and flat on the soft dark earth of the Delta and goes alongside the railway tracks between Clarksdale and Coahoma in Northern Mississippi.
It was a busy thoroughfare for carriages and wagons long before the Civil War—and a profitable one for highwaymen, too—but nowadays it is no more than a back-country farm road between cotton fields. It has been unmarked for travelers and little used by automobiles since the construction of a paved highway several miles eastward.
Just the same, now in the nineteen-sixties, the old Memphis road is still as muddy and slippery and treacherous in rainy weather as I remember it being forty-some years ago when it was the only thoroughfare for cotton-wagon teamsters and an occasional automobile being driven from Clarksdale to Memphis.
In the summer of 1918 during the last year of World War I, I was fifteen years old and for two months I had been driving the YMCA staff car at the military training camp at Millington, Tennessee, about eighteen miles north of Memphis.
Being the only staff-car driver and on twenty-four-hour call, I was often sent to the Millington railway station to meet a lecturer or musician traveling the YMCA’s war-time circuit. More frequently, however, I was awakened between midnight and dawn and sent to bring a stranded soldier back to camp from a Millington speakeasy bar or a madam’s place so he would not be absent-without-leave at morning roll call. Once in a while a staff member wanted to go to church on Sunday and I took him to town and waited until the services ended.
However, my consistently regular duty that summer was to drive the secretary or some other member of the YMCA staff to Memphis for the week end when he wanted to visit friends or spend his leave in one of the hotels.
After two months on the job my driving record was still good, having neither been charged with speeding nor involved in an accident, and the YMCA secretary said he was so confident of my driving ability that he wanted me to take the train to Clarksdale and drive his own Ford touring car the whole distance of a hundred miles from his home back to Millington.
It was shortly after noon when I got off the train in Clarksdale on a Saturday in the heat of August. Within half an hour I had found the secretary’s home at the address he had given me and I knocked on the door of the small white bungalow to tell his wife that I had come to drive the car to Millington.
The secretary’s wife, who was slender and dark-haired and in her early twenties, opened the screen-door immediately as though she had been waiting for me to come.
Then she said she had heard from her husband about my coming and had a dinner of fried chicken, field peas, sliced tomatoes, and spoon-bread waiting for me. She insisted that I would have to eat the meal she had cooked for me before I could start on the long trip back to Tennessee.
While I was sitting at the table, the girl ate nothing herself, and, while nervously fingering a knife and fork, she asked so many questions about her husband that it was an hour longer before I could finish eating. She wanted to know why he would need their automobile in Millington when he had the use of the YMCA staff car; she wanted to know how often he was in the habit of spending the week end in Memphis; and she asked several times if he often left the YMCA in the evening and spent the night somewhere else instead of sleeping in the YMCA dormitory. I told her that I was always so busy with my duties of washing, polishing, greasing, and driving the staff car that I had no opportunity to know where her husband went or what he did when he was away from the YMCA hall and dormitory.
When I got up from the table, she said it was very-late in the day and there might be an afternoon thunderstorm and that I could spend the night right there and leave early the next morning. She took me to a room where she said I could sleep and carefully smoothed the gleaming white counterpane on the wide bed. After a few moments she said that she and her husband had no children and that she was miserable being there alone all the time. When she looked up from the bed, there were tears in her eyes.
It was nearly four o’clock in the afternoon when I backed the Ford touring car from the chicken-house shed at the rear of the bungalow and waved good-by to the girl as she followed me to the street. When I looked back at her the last time, she had put her hands over her face as if crying again.