The Autobiography of Earnest Sims

By Earnest "Tex" Sims Sr.

The autobiography of Earnest Sims is about the childhood of Earnest Sims, an African-American rising from the cotton picking era to write.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781468538779

Earnest "Tex" Sims Sr.

Earnest Sims Sr. was born in 1948 in Casscoe, Arkansas and has written 6 books. He is 63 years old and resides in Humphrey, Arkansas.

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©2012 Earnest Sims. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 10/4/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4685-3876-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4685-3875-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4685-3877-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012900029

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

APPRECIATION:

PREFACE

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

CHAPTER 41

CHAPTER 42

CHAPTER 43

CHAPTER 44

CHAPTER 45

CHAPTER 46

CHAPTER 47

CHAPTER 48

CHAPTER 49

CHAPTER 50

CHAPTER 51

CHAPTER 52

CHAPTER 53

CHAPTER 54

CHAPTER 55

CHAPTER 56

CHAPTER 57

CHAPTER 58

CHAPTER 59

CHAPTER 60

CHAPTER 61

CHAPTER 62

CHAPTER 63

CHAPTER 64

CHAPTER 65

CHAPTER 66

CHAPTER 67

CHAPTER 68

CHAPTER 69

CHAPTER 70

CHAPTER 71

CHAPTER 72

CHAPTER 73

CHAPTER 74

CHAPTER 75

CHAPTER 76

CHAPTER 77

CHAPTER 78

CHAPTER 79

CHAPTER 80

CHAPTER 81

CHAPTER 82

CHAPTER 83

CHAPTER 84

CHAPTER 85

CHAPTER 86

CHAPTER 87

CHAPTER 88

CHAPTER 89

CHAPTER 90

CHAPTER 91

CHAPTER 92

CHAPTER 93

CHAPTER 94

CHAPTER 95

CHAPTER 96

CHAPTER 97

CHAPTER 98

CHAPTER 99

CHAPTER 100

CHAPTER 101

CHAPTER 102

CHAPTER 103

CHAPTER 104

CHAPTER 105

CHAPTER 106

CHAPTER 107

CHAPTER 108

CHAPTER 109

CHAPTER 110

CHAPTER 111

CHAPTER 112

CHAPTER 113

CHAPTER 114

CHAPTER 115

CHAPTER 116

CHAPTER 117

CHAPTER 118

CHAPTER 119

CHAPTER 120

CHAPTER 121

CHAPTER 122

CHAPTER 123

CHAPTER 124

CHAPTER 125

CHAPTER 126

CHAPTER 127

CHAPTER 128

CHAPTER 129

CHAPTER 130

CHAPTER 131

CHAPTER 132

CHAPTER 133

CHAPTER 134

EPILOGUE

I Dedicate This Book To

My Mother and Father, MY Sisters and Brothers, Sons and Daughters,

Cousins and Friends ~

My Family

Books by Earnest Tex Sims Sr.

Growing Up On the Creek Bridge

Across the Tracks

Once Upon A Time in the Past

Once Upon A Time in the Past II

Once Upon A Time in the Past III

Th e Autobiography of Earnest Sims

APPRECIATION:

M y greatest appreciation goes out to my mother, the late Mrs. Rosa Lee Humphrey Sims for her good memory and knowledge of the past during the research of Across the Tracks. Had it not been for her courteous understanding, I could not have written The Autobiography of Earnest Sims professionally and accurately. I wanted to thank my father, the late Mr. Willie Mac Tang Sims for the stories he told to my sisters and brothers and I of our family and families abroad that went into my books, Growing Up On the Creek Bridge and Across the Tracks, combined into The Autobiography of Earnest Sims.

I would like to thank my sisters Jackie and Danny, Rose, Angela, Vickie and Janice for their support, good memory and patience to collaborate over the phone and face to face that brought clearer events and pictures to my memory of the past that had merely grown dim through the years. Also, I would like to thank my brothers Larry, Raymond, David Harold, Bernard and Cedric for offering their memories of the past that filled many pages and paragraphs of the book of events happened while I was sleeping or had merely forgotten.

My deepest appreciation goes out to my cousin-in-law, Mrs. Carol Session-Johnson, wife of the late Robert Johnson and mother of their four daughters Tina, Iesha, Tiffany and Iris for information she provided in person and over the telephone lines between Stuttgart, Arkansas and St. Louis, Missouri that went into the book. Also, many thanks goes out to Mrs. Beverly Ross Dunn for valuable information needed of my best friend Tommy Gene Ross’ family out in Santa Ana, California to put into the book.

I wanted to thank Mr. Frank James O’Neal Sr., a very dear friend played many roles in The Autobiography of Earnest Sims for his keen memory of events needed to complete the book. I would like to thank Mrs. Carnette Elise Holloway-Robinson for the birth names of people I had known but only by their nicknames to put into the book.

I wanted to say also that I could not have written the last pages that went into the book had it not been for the cooperation of Robert Wynn Sr., Willie W.C. Boogie Robinson, Eugene Jackie Robinson Jr., Ms. Rena Pannell, Mr. Mack Houston and Mrs. Emma Mays Montgomery-Burlison. I also owe thanks to Brian Engelkes, Mrs. Susie Mae Timmons and Ms. Elaine Timmons for their support. I wanted to thank, too, Roger Hansell, Mr. William Bill Garrison, Mr. Roy O. Bud McCollum III, Denny Garrison, Larry Fortune, Barry Scooter Robinson Sr., Mrs. Billie Swift and Mrs. Susie Samuels for the names of people that went into the writing of the book. I would like to thank Tracy Simmons, Degrant Toad Cole and Mrs. Joyce Marie Hogan Cox for their collaboration that brought the book forward.

I wanted to thank Little Joe Alexander Sr., Ms. Gussie McFarland, Ms. Dianne McCastle, Steven Ray Smith, Fred Williams, Ms. Charlene Bradley, Ricky Dog Cox Sr., Carl Piss Rat Bluefer and Mr. Ulysses Booster Hall for their cooperation during the research of the book. I wanted to thank Mr. Leo Adkins, husband to Mrs. Willie Adkins, for a conversation he and I had one evening as we sat outside on the front porch of his home in Lookout, Arkansas that I learned the birth name of Mr. Wilbert Toney, whose nickname Jive Bo I’d only known and used in my books. I wanted to thank Vernon Stigger, son of Ms. Marsha Stigger and Mr. Hubert Owens for his support.

Last but not least, I wanted to thank Mrs. Rose Owens Powell, wife of Mr. Lemuel Lem Powell and mother of Jocelyn Jar Owens, daughter of the late Gregory Greg Oates for the birth name of a person it seemed no one I talked to knew anything, save his nickname, for her courteous cooperation during the research of Across the Tracks and many others I talked to whose names do not appear here for very important material that went into the making of The Autobiography of Earnest Sims.

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PREFACE

While the books "Growing Up On the Creek Bridge" and Across the Tracks depicted my life story in two novels, The Autobiography of Earnest Sims depicts my life’s story in one epic, tracing my roots from when I was born in 1948 of the Keaton Township in Casscoe, Arkansas up to when my mother and father, former sharecroppers of the cotton-chopping and cotton-picking era of the 1950s and 1960s, parents of eighteen children, eight boys and ten girls, moved the family to Stuttgart, Arkansas in 1967 into the new millennium.

Mama and Daddy were born in the 1920s back before the 1929 depression-era hit the country and made it even harder for poor people to make ends meet. I did not know my great-grandparents on Daddy’s side, except Daddy had said his grandfather had been Caucasian and grandmother had been Indian. But I’d known Mama’s grandparents well at my sisters, brothers, and I had stayed many days and nights at their home and that Mama’s grandfather was of Indian blood and that her grandmother was the daughter of ex-slaves.

I was the oldest boy of Mama and Daddy’s eighteen children: Clara Yvonne, twins Earnestine and Catherine, Rosetta Hellen, Kenneth Matthews, Willie DeWayne, Kelly Bernard, Larry Edward, Raymond Anthony, Mattie Ruth, David Harold, Wanda Kay, Georgia Faye, Janice Rena, Vickie Carol, Angela Debora and Cedric Fitzgerald, born to Willie Mac Sims and Rosa Lee Humphrey Sims. Daddy had another daughter, Leatha Mae Sims. Twelve of my nineteen sisters and brothers and I had grown up in poverty during the cotton-chopping and cotton picking-era days of the 1950s and 1960s. Hot

or cold, Monday to Saturday, sometimes on Sunday, my sisters and brothers and I went to the cotton fields and chopped and picked cotton from sunup to sundown, earning $2.50 a day or less to put bread, beans, meat and other provisions on the kitchen table and secondhand clothes on our backs.

When we weren’t chopping or picking cotton, we pulled coffee beans, cherry weeds and indigo plants from snake infected rice fields. When we weren’t pulling coffee beans, cherry weeds and indigo plants from rice fields we picked wood chunks from new-ground farming fields infected with redhead lizards, eerie eels and poisonous snakes for whatever price the farmers paid us. Some days we skipped school to flag fields for airplane spraying chemicals on rice and soybeans

When chopping cotton lulled we still couldn’t put our hoes away. Sometimes farmers hired us to chop tea weeds, hogs weeds, cocklebur, morning-glory, Bermuda grass, Johnson grass, nut grass and jimson weeds from soybean fields to earn money to help our growing family. Even with Daddy working on a rice and soybean farm, earning $25.00 a week from Monday thru Friday, $35.00 a week if he worked Saturday and Sunday watering rice, soybeans, cotton or driving tractor for Mr. Rea Cooper, Mr. Melvin Landreth or Maximum Trice, we kids still had to do our part.

When the cotton chopping and cotton picking season ended it seemed hard times fell on us even more. There weren’t any money made during the winter months. If not for Daddy’s hunting and trapping and harvesting wild game from the woods and animal fur to sell to hide houses, we wouldn’t have made it through the winter months.

When it seemed we’d fallen into a steep well of poverty we couldn’t climb out, Daddy and Brownie had always pulled us out the hole by harvesting wild game for meat to eat and money the hides made to use toward store-bought provisions. Even then there were times when Daddy swallowed his pride and left the house with a tote sack under his arm or tucked into a pocket of his old well-word hunting coat and asked surrounding neighbors and store merchants of the Keaton Township for handouts to get us through the winter months to spring.

Thank God those days are behind us.

My sisters and brothers and I are all grown now, have children of our own, and holding down steady jobs. None of us balked when it came to work. Work was bred into us during the cotton-chopping and cotton-picking era of hard times back in the 1950s and 1960s.

Thank God for Daddy and Brownie.

Still I get the shivers to even think what would have become of my mother, sisters and brothers and I had it not been for Daddy and Brownie pulling us through the hard times when we lived in dire poverty on the Creek Bridge in Casscoe, Arkansas.

1n 1967, we moved from Casscoe, Arkansas to Stuttgart, Arkansas. We settled in what people called the Rock Island community where the old landfill used to be before black people bought the land and moved from the prairie into Stuttgart to build houses and raise their families on the rich, black soil of its wake.

A long time ago when Daddy was a lil’ boy he used to ride to Stuttgart with Grandpa Willie and Grandma Clara Sims, sitting between them on the seat of a wagon pulled by two mules filled with Grandma Clara’s garden vegetables she sold to white people in town at a street market, riding the wagon into town on a dirt street now is Park Avenue. Daddy said back then everything east of Park Avenue was the dump ground. But when black people bought the land and started building houses that pushed the old dumping ground further east to where it is now.

The River Road and a bunch of other roads back then that are paved now was gravel all the way into Stuttgart, even Main Street, and there were more horse-drawn wagon back then than there were cars. The White people had the cars, mostly the rich ones, but some, the poorer ones, drove wagons and rode saddle horses with or without the saddle, just like most Colored people did back then. Very few black people owned cars back then. Those who did you could count them on your fingers … Vess Clemmons… . Eli Pickett … Walter Walker … Levi Owens … Sam Owens … Mack Skinner … were a few Daddy named.

After moving to Stuttgart in 1967-68, Daddy ran a little juke joint called The Red House in Rock Island that people came to listen to music and shoot craps. But Daddy’s juke joint wasn’t the only juke joint in the neighborhood that people shot dice. Just south of The Red House, Miss Mary Big Mama Dorsey ran a juke joint-house. Northwest across Park Avenue, Mr. Isaac Dunn Sr. ran a store-like, pool-hall juke junk. Straight north of The Red House on East Cleveland Street, Mrs. Katherine Cutts and Mr. Tom Cutts ran an old juke joint that Mr. James Jim Thomas later ran. Further down on East Cleveland Street, Mr. Joe Amos ran a juke joint that teenagers from near and far came to play music on the jukebox and dance on the un-rugged floor.

Another place people came from near and far to have a good time lurked on the wild side of town, a perilous, all-black neighborhood known as Across the Tracks, a juke-joint haven that most of the drinking, gambling, trysting, fighting, and killings took place in Stuttgart, Arkansas—The Rice and Duck Capital of The World—called Sugar Town.

Across the Tracks was a three-block-area on the front and back streets north across the old Rock Island Railroad Depot and railroad tracks running through the center of Stuttgart splitting the town into two sections: The North and The South.

Across the Tracks was a neighborhood constructed of residential houses and juke joints. Across the Tracks was a crossing point for young black teenagers of Rock Island and New Edition to come on weekends to have a good time at such Hot Spots as Bud Holmes’ Place, Phil’s’ Place, The Night Hawk; John L. Scales’ Place, Lula Mae’s Place, The Sugar Town Lounge, The High Chaparral, Our Place, Hip Cat’s Place, Grapes’ Place, The Sugar Town Lounge II and The Ebony Club that people were plenty and calamity shook the streets Across the Tracks of juke joints blasting with music exploding from the speakers of jukeboxes, lifting the spirit of young women and young men having a good time dancing to the lyrics.

I should know this down to the T, because I’d been a regular Across the Tracks hanger-on back in those days when people, young and old, in towers and out-of-towners come to whoop it up on weekends at every Hot Spot Across the Tracks. But Across the Tracks was a place of peril. Yet, in spite the peril, my friends Freddie Gene Green Goodlow, Bobby Eugene Coker, Roland Hill, Terry Gene Loudermilk, Johnny Carroll Ross, Edward Geans, Larry Loudermilk Jr., Frank James O’Neal Sr., Carl McCastle Sr., Willie DeWayne Sims, Floyd Ellis, Immanuel Cox, Kelly Bernard Sims Sr., James Donald Loudermilk, Floyd Ellis, Harvey Robinson, Vernal Sims, Dennis Hill, others and I, Earnest Sims, could stay shy of those juke joints on the wild side of town. Most of the dudes I’d run around with back in those days and I boasted nicknames, B.C., So-Toe, Ping, Ground Hog, Punkin, Duck, Blondie, Kitty Kat, Moby Dick, Teddy Bear, Bald Eagle, Dickey, Cowboy, Fox, Beamon , Cousin, Casanova and Tex.

Sadly many people, young and old, ventured Across the Tracks to have a good time at the juke joints listening to music jamming on the jukeboxes never came back home. More times than once my friends and I lives were threatened. But none of us lost our lives Across the Tracks. Then crack cocaine hit the streets of Stuttgart. And the city shut down Across the Tracks, putting an end to the juke joint haven it once was.

Now Across the Tracks ain’t but a slumbering neighborhood once was wild. Still there’s a couple of Hot Spots Across the Tracks. But not where the old juke joints used to be. Still there are shootings, stabbings, and killings over there. But not as many as when the old juke joints were there. The days of the old jukeboxes are gone too, replaced by DJs playing music downloaded from computers; somewhat out of place to an old Across the Tracks juke joint hanger-on as me, who was used to dropping a coin into the slot of a jukebox to hear music.

Ain’t nothing like the Good Ol’Days anymore.

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The River Road Creek Bridge in Casscoe, Arkansas south of the Old Merle Stigger house down a dirt lane my sisters and brothers and I grew up from 1959 to 1967

PROLOGUE

A in’t nothing like the Good Ol’Days…

This Is My Story

CHAPTER 1

Gray-boarded houses with crimson tin roofs dotted the landscape along the highways and byways, dirt roads, grass lanes, scattered timber, farming fields, sagebrush fields and along the creek banks of Casscoe, Arkansas in all directions of a 10-mile radius.

Keaton Township covered a wide range. It was mostly cotton country back then and consisted of nine major stores: Sims’ Grocery, Walker’s Grocery, Buck Harris’ Store, Jones’ Grocery, Cloud’s Grocery, Shelton’s Grocery, Mitchell’s Grocery, and Three-Way Grocery. These stores played a major roll in the Keaton Township during the cotton-era days of the 1950s and 1960s as they supplied provisions to rice and soybean farmers, cotton framers, cotton choppers and cotton pickers heading to the fields to spend a long day’s toil under the sun of blue skies and gray skies.

Most of these people were poor folks: the sharecroppers, cotton choppers and cotton pickers, colored people that lived in gray-boarded houses with crimson tin-roofs that dotted the landscape, chopped and picked cotton from dawn till dusk in blistering heat and bitter cold, trying to make ends meet in a time was hard back when all African-Americans of the Keaton Township, six to sixty years old, had played a major role.

Daddy, Willie Mac Sims, was born August 4, 1920, the third oldest boy of nine children—Aunt Carrie Christine Warren, Aunt Archie Bell Butler, Uncle Herman Son Sims, Aunt Zelma Hitchcock, Uncle Hugo Buckshot Sims, Uncle Norman Him Sims, Uncle Franklin Joe Sims and Uncle Manuel Man Sims—born to Grandpa Willie Sims and Grandma Clara Sims in the

Keaton Township of Lookout, Arkansas back when a train and ship decorated the reverse of the $20 bill; before the last Morgan Silver Dollars were minted in 1921; back when the legendary Wyatt Earp still was alive.

Daddy had drew up in the Keaton Township to be a rather handsome kid, fare-skinned, mild-mannered, almost shy with a deep dimple splitting his chin and an Indian-shaped nose protruding from his face. In spite his bashfulness, Daddy, Tang, people called him, had had a way with the girls when he was growing up in that era. His brothers and others had often teased him of being a ladies man. In his late teens, he had already fathered a child, a lovely, beautiful little brown-skinned girl named Leatha Mae Sims, called Loamy, born November 26, 1938 to Miss Marsha Walker of Lookout, Arkansas—the first of his loins to bear the Indian-shaped nose. Daddy always wore blue jean overalls and some kind of a long-sleeved shirt. He was tall, slim, sported his soap-waved hair combed to the back, leaving a tall lip of a bonnet-shaped bane in front, a sporting haircut-style of that day. In our day, the styles of wear were the straight-legged pants, the bellbottoms and the baggies. In his day, the styles of wear were hip boots sported with the white insides folded black rubber down.

Daddy loved the outdoors his whole life long. He had started exploring alone the woods roundabout Lookout and Casscoe at a very young age and, at fifteen, had learned the signs of practically every wild creature in the woods before he’d actually begun hunting and trapping them as a means of family support. Daddy very seldom took any weapon to the woods with him; only a long, solid hickory stick used to knock his catch in the head, if one was alive in his traps, was the only weapon he possessed. He had carried no weapon to the woods because he, by far, he was a trapper rather than a hunter. Only on occasions did he slip into the woods or ease along sage grass patches with Grandpa Willie’s old single-shot .22 caliber rifle to hunt rabbit or squirrel, whenever Grandma Clara called for a mess for supper. After he’d ran his traps with modest success, Daddy skinned the hides of his catch, turned the hides in-side-out, scraped them of all fatty deposits, stretched the hides over sharp-pointed boards, and then hung the hides onside the house to let the sun dry. In a few days, he removed the hides, and then sold the hides for a profit at the nearest hide house. Most of the money he gave to Grandpa Willie to help with family support; the rest he kept and bought his first pair of black rubber hip boots and joined the trend of neighborhood youngsters strutting around the schoolyard and churchyard like little bandy roosters flaunting in front of young girls their white insides folded black rubber down, a common scene of that era.

* * *

In 1942, my twenty-two-year-old father, Willie Mac Tang Sims met, courted, and then married on November 24, my sixteen-year-old mother, Rosa Lee Humphrey, a beautiful, mild-mannered young woman with high cheekbones and high-yellow complexion, born November 13, 1926, to Grandmama Frankie Offord and Grandpapa Harrison Humphrey ten days following the November 3, 1926 death of Phoebe Ann Mosey, the legendary female sharpshooter, Annie Oakley. Two years later, my seventeen-year-old mother gave birth to their first child, a beautiful little baby girl named Clara Yvonne, born September 3, 1944, during World War II. On September 18, 1946, Mama gave birth to Earnestine and Catherine, a pair of small, dark-skinned, lovely, identical twin girls. The country’s 33rd president of the United States was Harry S. Truman when she gave birth to their first son, born a Saturday afternoon at 2:30 p.m. on April 8, 1948.

That boy was me. I weighed ten-pounds and a few ounces and named Earnest Herman Sims by Mrs. Mary Jane Clemmons, wife of Mr. Sylvester Vess Clemmons, a man looked like actor Raymond Massey, a midwife of Crocketts Bluff, Arkansas, who’d delivered me into the world. On October 7, 1950, Mama gave birth to Rosetta Helen, a small, beautiful baby girl with a high-yellow complexion. On September 25, 1951, just eleven months after the birth of my sister Rosetta Helen, Mama gave birth to another boy, Kenneth Matthews—the closest Mama and Daddy would ever come again to having another set of twins. Most of us were born in the Old Mel Cow Price house, a little three-roomed, tin-roofed shack that set back up in the woods south of the River Road a half mile west of Cloud’s Grocery Store in Casscoe, Arkansas where Mr. Walter Trice’s father, Mr. Clarence Trice, was killed in a tornado the night of April 10, 1944.

It was at this little three-roomed shack that a Caucasian vagabond appeared and worked a time for Mr. Walter Trice. He stayed a while in the old gray-boarded, ramshackle barn onside the house, sharing quarters with two mules Daddy kept in the barn to pull a plow to work his garden and sometimes a wagon he and Mama used to go to the store. The drifter, a short, stocky white man named Mr. John Woods appeared out of the ‘blue’ one day. No one knew him, nor where he’d come from, but he was a good-natured man. He had grown very fond of the twins, who often visited him in the barn, and sometimes brought him plates of food Mama sent from the kitchen.

One day Mama came to bring him food. She was startled. The vagabond had gone just like that. Before he had moved on though, he had given the twins something that would last them a lifetime: the names Jackie and Danny. And somebody along the way had started calling Clara Wye, Rosetta Rose, and Kenneth Ken. Thirteen years would past before a man dubbed me Tex, a name that would last me a lifetime.

A young black man of poverty during the hardships of the early 1940s and the late 1950s, Daddy supported his family as best as he could, the same way he had helped Grandpa Willie his family during the late1930s following the depression era, trapping and hunting wild animals for meat to eat and fur to sell at hide houses. He had done this mostly in wintertime and worked on a farm in summertime, chalking rice, watering soybeans or picking cotton on Walter Trice’s farms roundabout Casscoe. But Daddy’s true love of life was his wife, his children; his trapping and hunting.

It was hard times back in those days, and isn’t much better today. We often ran low on provisions, sometimes plum out, and had to rely solely on Daddy’s trapping and hunting to keep Mama, him and we kids fed. Sometimes if the winters were vicious, it froze solid. When that happened, Daddy couldn’t set foot out the back door without slipping and breaking his neck, if he wasn’t careful, when he went outside. When it froze over Daddy just sat back in the warm, comfortable house with Mama and us kids until everything thawed. About that time we would be so hungry we wanted to go to the woods with him and hit in the head and kill dead anything fit to eat.

Daddy didn’t always have luck in the woods. Sometimes his traps would be empty, prematurely tripped or under floodwater. He often ran low on ammunition too, and no money to buy any. Sometimes he found a few old .22 caliber cartridges lying in the corners of the pockets of his old tan, well-worn hunting coat. With those, after blowing dust, crash, and spilled tobacco from the cartridges, he went to the woods with fingers crossed in hope those old cartridges didn’t misfire, if he saw any game to shoot. Those old cartridges must have fired true that day, because Daddy came home with the pokes of his old hunting coat bulging with rabbit and squirrel he pulled out the pokes and dropped on the floor, as he always did, for us kids to play with before skinning them for the skillet. That same evening Mama had the whole house fumigated with the stomach-growling, mouth-watering aroma of smothered rabbit and squirrel cooking slowly in brown gravy and onions served with stovetop flour bread and skillet-fried potatoes. Sometimes we enjoyed brown pinto beans and cornbread with our rabbit or squirrel. Sometimes Mama prepared a rice pudding with our supper, proving she had plenty rice, butter, eggs, sugar, and nutmeg.

Sometimes Daddy walked to work. And sometimes he rode astraddle one of Mr. Walter Trice’s horses or bareback on one of the old mules kept in the barn.

I remember one day Daddy plodded into the yard bareback a big red, blaze-faced gelding, a beautiful, high-stepping horse sporting four white stockings that all we kids, Jackie, Danny, Wye and I, wanted to ride.

Can’t we ride ‘im, Daddy? Wye asked.

Aw-right, Rabbit, Daddy promised, calling Wye a nickname he’d given her at birth, I’ll let y’all ride ‘im soon’s I eat my dinner. While Daddy went into the house to eat beans, cornbread and fried squirrel Mama had prepared, we kids stood in the yard watching that big red horse crop grass near the porch, flexing its muscles and swishing its tail to fight flies. Daddy had tied the horse’s reins to a post of the porch. We hardly could wait until he came back outside to let us ride it. Soon Daddy appeared on the porch, Mama with him, holding in his hands a quilt of many colored patches and threw the blanket across the back of the horse, and then, lifting me first, in turn sat us astraddle the gelding’s firm back, me holding the reins; Jackie behind me, Danny behind Jackie, and Wye behind Danny. You have to say ‘giddap’ if you want it to move, Earnest, Daddy instructed from the porch; Mama’s cheekbones raised in a grin.

Getup! I yelled to the horse, bumping my small legs against its ribs, Jackie’s arms around my waist, Danny’s arms around Jackie’s waist, and Wye’s arms around Danny’s waist. The big red horse made one short step and the quilt slid off its back like molasses off butter, sprawling on the ground, us with it, under the horse’s belly. Soon as the quilt and we hit the ground, the well-trained saddle horse halted up. Switching its tails, neck turned, it looked down at us scrambling on the ground. Mama and Daddy stood on the porch laughing at us, thinking it was funny the way that quilt and we kids slid off the back of that horse. I can’t remember what that big red horse name was, but after that day we kids started calling it Slicker.

I liked it best when it was garden-planting time. Daddy would be doing the plowing with the black leather lines draped over his shoulders, his hands gripped on those curved-down wooden handles and one of them old mules at the end of the plow, him yelling Gee! Haw! Hold! while Mama and we kids walked along behind him, the mule and the plow, dropping seeds into holes of the fresh-smelling soil, covering them with our shoeless feet or hands. That was usually around March or April, and the air was always cool blowing on our faces and fluttering our garb. Sometimes the sky was blue as far as the eye could see. Sometimes the sky was full of low-hanging clouds hovering over the Old Mel Cow Price house and moving so slowly it looked as if they weren’t moving at all.

Once and a while we kids would be outside in the yard playing when a little heavyset white boy with a .22 caliber rifle under his arm and two stubby beagle hounds sniffing the ground ahead of him, going to the woods to hunt or coming from the woods, strode by the house. We’d stop our playing to wave at thirteen-year-old Maximum Trice, son and only child of Mr. Walter Trice and Mrs. Mattie Trice, in canvas britches, coat and hat. He’d wave back to Danny, Jackie, Wye, and I, and then disappear down the dirt lane leading to the gate from our house, the little beagle hounds bounding ahead of him. A lot of times, we were outside playing in the yard Mr. Walter Trice came by the house on his way to one of his farming fields. The twins would see him coming up the lane leading to the house in his pickup and Jackie or Danny one would yell, Here comes Mr. Walter Trice! And they then raced to lie in the lane, purposely stopping the pickup, at which the driver honked his horn, but the twins didn’t move, just lay there flat of their backs, looking at the sky, half smiles spreading their little dark cheeks.

Hearing the honking horn, Mama appeared on the porch, her hands white from flour dough, to see the pickup idling in middle of the lane stalled by the twins.

Rosa Lee! Daddy’s boss man yelled inoffensively, his head out the window of the pickup. Will you get these little nappy-headed girls out of the road so I can get by?

Jackie! Mama shouted at the twins, smiling at the fact that that wasn’t the first time they had lain in the lane to block the white man’s way. You and Danny get y’alls’ black asses out of Walter Trice’s way so he can get by! The twins swiftly obeyed, rose to their feet, brushed dust from their little identical dresses and, turning to the pickup, stuck their tongues out at the driver and then, side by side, raced off toward the porch, giggling.

There were two reasons Daddy walked or rode a horse to work: Neither he nor Mama could drive a car that well. Another reason was they didn’t own an automobile, and wouldn’t have had the money to buy one even if they could drive. Automobiles, even back then, were very expensive machines. And very few people, especially blacks, owned one. Daddy, however, had partially owned an automobile at one time or another when he was a boy still at home with Grandpa Willie and Grandma Clara.

He and his brothers had chopped and picked cotton, pulled coffee beans, picked up stumps on Saturday and Sunday for $.50 a day until they saved up enough money to buy an old, cheap, rusty, Model-T Ford. Daddy said he could drive the rickety old car fairly well, but never claimed to drive it as good as his older brothers, Uncle Son and Uncle Buckshot, but had learned to maneuver the old Model-T pretty well … until one day young, pretty girls were over to their house to see his older brothers.

Daddy was under the steering wheel, Uncle Joe on the passenger side, when they, heading up the lane leading to the house, spotted those young girls standing out on the porch. Suddenly, a feeling to showoff in front of the girls came over him, and Daddy pushed the pedal to the metal, stepping on the gas to flaunt in front of the girls his driving. He rested one arm out the window to drive in style, his other hand on the steering wheel, and was so into flaunting in front of the girls that he forgot all about he was even in the automobile, much less driving it.

Next thing Daddy knew, he and Uncle Joe were upon that porch with Uncle Buckshot, Uncle Son and those girls—the old Model-T with them. Well, his brothers and those girls had to vacate the premises to keep from being severely injured or killed. Some of them did get a few scratches or bruises though, not by the Model-T, but from jumping off that porch, which the car demolished. Anyway, that had scared Daddy so bad that day he gave those keys to that old T-Lackey back to Uncle Son and never drove anything again, except nails into boards helping Grandpa Willie rebuild that porch.

Therefore, when Daddy and Mama had traveling to do they usually done it a horseback, walked, or rode upon the seat of an old supply wagon pulled by horse or mule. I remember well a ride of many rides in the wooden bed of that old supply wagon pulled by those mules with the wooden-spoke wheels. Mama, holding Rose and Ken wrapped in blankets on her lap, sat up front on the seat with Daddy. Wye, Jackie, Danny and I set on the floor in the bed of the wagon. Daddy was handling the lines that cloudy, rainy-looking, gray day. We were on our way to Mrs. Ideker’s Store, a silver-haired white woman that reminded me of Mrs. Tucker, woman on a lard can, mother of two boys, Tommy and Ray.

Before we were even in sight of Mrs. Ideker’s Store, it had started to rain. Back then, a lot of those old roads were gravel or dirt. Unfortunately, we had ended up on one that was dirt. And it didn’t take long for that hard, pounding rain to get it sloppy with mud and water that bogged the wagon wheels and the mules couldn’t pull it any further, no matter how hard they tried; and Daddy yelling Gee! Get, mules! at the long-eared beasts didn’t do any good either. As if in apathy of what had happened, the mules gave up all together, and didn’t budge an inch. It was raining even harder by then. And those drops were stinging our faces like thorns pouring down from the sky instead of water.

Mama held Rose and Ken in her lap wrapped in quilts. Mama and Daddy, Wye, Jackie, Danny, and I were soaking wet; the wagon mired in middle of the road. And Daddy was looking somewhere for us to get in out of the rain. His eyes stopped on an old abandoned two-story white house south of the River Road, just as Mama’s patience ebbed: These kids is wet and cold, Tang, Mama fussed impatiently.

Well, baby, said Daddy patiently, I guess we’ll just have to go to that old house over there. No soon as Daddy said that we bailed off that wagon and, Mama carrying Ken and Daddy carrying Rose, hurried to that old two-story house to get in out of the wet, leaving those stubborn mules hitched to the wagon, standing blink-eyed in the rain. The old house was empty on the inside, but dry, a little damp, foul and cold, but out of the rain. It smelled of rodents; rodents’ droppings and urine in the old house. A lot of old newspapers lay scattered over the bare wooden floor; some the rodents had shred to ribbons. Daddy had always been cold natured. And it didn’t take long for Daddy to notice over in a corner one of those big black cast-iron pots folks used back then to boil dirty clothes, make lye soap, or to scald hair off a hog. So Daddy started gathering some of those old newspapers with us kids pitching in to build a fire in that old cast-iron pot. After we kids had warmed some by the fire Daddy made, Wye, Jackie, Danny and I left Daddy, Mama, Rose and Ken at those newspaper flames and went on a rampage to explore every room in the old house, upstairs and downstairs. Mostly, we got our kicks running up and down the stairs.

Hey, Danny, I yelled. Betcha I can beat ya up dem stairs!

I’m Jackie! the twin corrected, and beat me to the top of the stairs.

It finally slacked up raining and Daddy left Mama and us in the old house to go try the stalled team again. Soon Daddy pulled up on the seat of the old supply wagon and jumped down to help Mama carry the younger kids to the wagon. Ken was wailing, wanting Mama to breastfeed him.

Giddap! Daddy yelled to the mules.

There were far-off thunder and lightning in the east. A slight grizzle speckled our faces, but most of the rain had moved on. The mules, wanting to be on their way also, jerked the wagon into motion and pulled it slowly up the muddy road toward Mrs. Ideker’s Store, harnesses tingling.

CHAPTER 2

Around 1952, Wye, Rose and I at the same time had come down with typhoid fever. While my eight-year-old big sister and two-year-old baby sister had a mild case of the fever, I almost died with a more serious case. Mine was so severe the fever burned all my blood and I had to have more. But the fever swiftly consumed that blood too.

My blood had dropped so low the doctors at the University Hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas had difficulty finding veins. And because they need those veins to give me blood, my life was threatened. The doctors searched. But the effort of finding any veins in my arms or legs was long-lived. Finally, in a desperate attempt to save my life, one surgeon suggested cutting into the ankles of my feet to find veins to supply blood to my little feeble, four-year-old frame. It worked. But the fever greedily drank that blood too. And it kept on drinking it, as fast as the physicians could pump it into me.

Rose had gotten better two weeks later and the doctors released her from the hospital to go home, leaving Wye and I still confined to the facility.

Some days I felt better. Some I didn’t. One day I was feeling better, I was on my knees in bed playing with a little black plastic toy horse. The bed had baby-bed-like railings to keep me from falling out asleep or awoke. I was pretending my toy horse was galloping along the sheets when it slipped from my hand and fell to the floor. I looked at it a long time, helpless to retrieve it, but thought that was short-lived when a tall, young black man in a white uniform entered the room with a dusting broom.

I want—my horse, I said, pointing at the toy, as the man started sweeping the floor. I asked for the toy several times, but the orderly neither swept nor picked the toy up, just glanced at me, sweeping around the toy. It was as if he never heard me ask for it. My toy was still lying on the floor when the man left the room with his dusting broom.

Wye, just across the hall from me, often slipped into my room and visited me. She wasn’t suppose too, but Wye removed me from my hospital bed and held me in her arms, rocking me, humming a child’s play song to me, as if I was her baby doll instead of her baby brother.

Finally, Wye, a pretty little girl with a head full of thick, long black hair that ranged pass her waistline, was released from the hospital too, thus leaving me alone and gloomy in critical condition in a place I longed to leave also; but my death-threatening condition kept me there, confined to my hospital bed.

Days later, the fever still consumed my blood. The fever did not burn all the blood I lost. Many times, the nurse entered my room and lifted me from a pool of blood soaking my bed sheets, passed from my bowels.

The doctors continued feeding my veins blood through the slits the surgeons cut above my ankles. But, as little as my body was, the physicians just couldn’t supply enough blood into me to satisfy the appetite of the deadly, hungry typhoid fever. I was fading fast; my life was ebbing right before their eyes. Giving up on me, the doctors reluctantly summoned Mama and Daddy to Little Rock, telling them and all else to hurry, if they wanted to see me alive. The doctors had done all they could do.

The rest was up to God.

With two of her four sisters, Aunt Lucille Hogan and Aunt Georgia Johnson and their husbands, Uncle Elmer Frent Hogan and Uncle George Johnson Sr., accompanying her, Mama arrived in Little Rock as soon as possible. Daddy wasn’t with them; he was at work on the farm in Casscoe.

While Mama, her sisters and brothers-in-law stood over my sickbed, staring at me in near-awe, a lone nurse, old and wrinkled in blue dress, white hood and apron, appeared behind them. Mama, feeling watched, looked around and was the only one in the room to see the old nurse standing there with hands joined before her, seemingly crying, mourning my death. And I wasn’t even dead yet.

That boy has the ‘old-timed’ typhoid fever, the old nurse said softly to Mama, almost whispering it, the kind that killed many, many people an’ soldiers back in the ‘old days’. You tell the doctors that.

Mama turned her eyes away from the nurse for only a second to glance at me, and then put them back on the …

The old nurse had mysteriously vanished.

Did y’all see that nurse? Mama exclaimed to her sisters.

What nurse you talkin’ bout, Rosa Lee? Aunt Lucille asked thoughtfully, looking around the room, not seeing anyone.

The nurse that was just in here, Mama said. Y’all didn’t see her?

Aunt Lucille and Aunt Georgia just looked at Mama, and thinking Mama delirious at my near-death condition, merely shrugged the question off, feeling their sister’s gloominess.

A physician entered the room, a young nurse clad all in white—bonnet, shoes, dress, stockings—behind him; the older nurse who had been in the room earlier had clad differently—in old style garb.

Where’d that nurse go? Mama asked the physician, as he checked my pulse and the nurse checked my temperature. There were two bottles of blood swinging from skinny medal poles beside my hospital bed. Long, clear, skinny tubes with needles at the end stuck in my ankles ran from the bottom of those bottles slowly dripped blood into my thin frame.

What nurse, ma’am? the doctor said, not looking at Mama.

That old nurse, Mama said, "who was in here just while ago in the blue dress and white apron. She told me to tell y’all my baby don’t have that typhoid fever my daughters had. She said what he got is that old-timed typhoid fever."

The physician, nurse, Mama’s sisters and brothers-in-law looked dumbfounded to Mama. The physician knew there was no such nurse in the hospital, but didn’t tell Mama that. Mama’s spirits seemed up. And he just couldn’t bring them down by telling her no nurse on the floor fitted that description. Mama’s word did spark his memories: He had heard of the old-timed typhoid fever that Confederate veterans brought back from the bowels of the Civil War in 1865 that had merely started an epidemic before doctors of that day brought the disease under control.

As Aunt Lucille and Aunt Georgia had done a few minutes ago, the physician looked strangely to Mama, and then, without a word, left the room, his nurse behind him. When he returned a short time later, two more doctors were with him. His nurse, carrying fresh bottles of blood, came in shortly afterwards. The physician kindly asked Mama and her sisters to leave the room, saying it would be best if they just went on home that he would get in

touch with them later about my condition.

* * *

The sun was shining. A light breeze rustled the fall leaves of trees in the near and far distance. Daddy was at work. Jackie, Danny and Wye were elsewhere in the house, perhaps in another room playing. Mama was lying on the couch in the front room with Rose and Ken on a quilt-pallet on the floor. Mama still was worrying on me. It had been two days now since the mysterious nurse visited her in my room at the University Hospital in Little Rock. She still couldn’t figure out where that nurse had disappeared to so quickly that day before Aunt Lucille, Aunt Georgia, and their husbands had even noticed the old nurse was in the room.

While Mama was lying there on the couch, she heard the growl of a vehicle and raised her head to look outside, peeking through the living room window. All she could see at first was a massive cloud of dust. When the wind blew the dust on, a black hearse sat onside the road across the ditch in front of the house. A man in a brown suit got out, went to the back of the hearse, and returned with a brown, child’s casket on his shoulders. With the casket still on his shoulders, the man jumped the slight ditch in front of the house, and then mysteriously disappeared into thin air, the hearse and casket with him.

Mama wasn’t a bit asleep that day when she witnessed that scene; she was wide-awake, and knew what she had seen wasn’t real, but some kind of a sign from God. Mama always had visions like that, which tells her the past, the present and the future. She wasn’t a voodoo woman or anything like that, just had that gift.

That particular sign, however, had frightened Mama more than any sign she had experienced. She didn’t know what to think of such a sign. She had tried to ignore it, but couldn’t relax until she had gotten in touch with Aunt Lucille and Uncle Frent to take her back to Little Rock. Mama feared that was a sign telling her I would soon be dead and buried in a little brown casket so small a man could carry it on his shoulders.

To Mama, that meant I was going to die very young.

That same day, Uncle Frent waited in the lobby of the hospital’s bottom floor while Mama and Aunt Lucille rushed to the stairs and hurried up to my room. Their eyes were wide and their hearts throbbed in their throats, as they expected to see me dead or still in critical condition. To their surprise, I was sitting up in bed, playing with a little black plastic toy horse. No tubes needles were in my ankles anymore. And the bottles of blood that hung from the medal poles beside my bed weren’t there anymore either.

I looked at Mama and Aunt Lucille, my little gray eyes sparkling, as if I hadn’t been sick a day in my life.

The doctor and nurse, who were in the room at the time Mama and Aunt Lucille entered, told them he and a couple of other physicians had taken the old nurse’s advice and changed my medications. Even to their surprise, the fever had mysteriously vanished. My body had suddenly stopped drinking the blood in me and blood the doctors had given me through the tubes of the bottles. And because my fever had fallen tremendously, the doctors were finally relieved from the scare of losing me.

That evening when Aunt Lucille and Uncle Frent went back to Stuttgart, they left Mama at the hospital to spend the night with me. The doctor had told Mama that if my fever still was normal in the morning, I could go home with her tomorrow.

Mama prayed all night that my fever wouldn’t rise.

Next day when Aunt Lucille and Uncle Frent came to Little Rock, Mama took me home.

CHAPTER 3

There was more gloom in the Ol’ Mel Cow Price house other than when we kids were under the weather. Sometimes Daddy moped over Mama, who, like many young women back in those days and these, had gotten angry with him over no more than they had just gotten use to one another and needed some time to their selves.

When that happened, Mama always went to live with our great-grandmamma Emily Pike Offord, taking baby Ken and knee Rose with her, in Stuttgart, Arkansas. Grandmamma Frankie Johnson and Grandpapa Jake Johnson had borne Mama. But Great-grandmamma Emma and Great-grandpapa Robert Rob Offord, parents of Uncle Ned Offord, Uncle John Henry Offord, Uncle Frank Offord, Aunt Annie Offord Carter, Aunt Carrie Offord Johnson, Aunt Adella Offord Sims, Aunt Effie Offord Johnson, Aunt Mae Lessie Offord Sims and Grandmama Frankie Offord Johnson, had reared Mama. Mama, the oldest of Grandmama Frankie and Grandpapa Jake’s six children, Aunt Georgia Wofford Johnson, Aunt Lucille Johnson Hogan, Aunt Emma Jean Johnson, Aunt Erma Jean Johnson and the late Uncle Leon Johnson, had grown up with Grandmama Emma’s younger children, Uncle Frank and Aunt Mae Lessie.

At Mama and Daddy’s brief separations, Daddy always got the blues. He would do nothing when Mama left him, except sit around the house moping, his head hanging, not even going to work, blowing on his harmonica, and singing old blues songs:

You went away and left me a long time ago, And now you come back a knockin’ on my door, I hear you knockin’, but you can’t come in, I hear you knockin’, Go back where you been …

Daddy would pause a long time to blow the harmonica and pat his feet, making that old mouthpiece talk and sound just like the song, and then he would continue. It was sad times when Daddy had the blues. But I loved to hear him blow his harmonica and sing those old blues songs, especially IHear You Knockin by Fats Domino and C.C. Rider by Chuck Willis or Lawdy Miss Clawdy by Lloyd Price.

Mr. Walter Trice would come by the house several times in his pickup to try to get Daddy to come back to work. But Mama hadn’t come home yet. Daddy never went to the door. His boss knew what that meant, because Daddy had done it many times before: Mama had left him. Mr. Walter Trice was a short, stocky man that always wore clean khaki slacks, light colored shirts and gray felt hats. He was addicted to Coca Cola soft drinks and had to have one every morning before starting his day. Daddy had always said if you wanted to get anything out ofWalter Trice, you would come closer to getting it after he had had his Coca Cola.

Mr. Walter Trice turned on his heels, climbed back into his pickup, and drove calmly away from the house. An hour later, he was stopping the truck in front of our great-grandmama’s house in New Edition at Stuttgart, Arkansas. He got out, ambled to the door, and knocked twice. When the door opened, Mr. Walter Trice stared at Grandmamma Emma. She was short, plump, smut-black, and reminded me of Actress Hattie McDaniel, the black woman Mammy in the movie Gone With The Wind. She was born December 28, 1880. She was ten months old in Casscoe, Arkansas when the Earps, Doc Holliday, the Clantons and the McLaurys were shooting each other up in the Gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona on October 26, 1881.

Is Rosa Lee here? Mr. Walter Trice asked my great-grandmamma.

She’s here, Grandmama Emma replied and, shouting to Mama but looking at Mr. Walter Trice, yelled: Rosa Lee! Some white man out here wants to see you! She smiled, looking out at Daddy’s boss man as if she didn’t know Mr. Walter Trice. She knew him though, almost as good as she knew Daddy, because that wasn’t the first time the Casscoe cotton farmer had been to her house looking for Mama for Daddy after one of Mama’s and Daddy’s lovers’ quarrels.

Mama appeared at the door and Grandmamma Emma left then.

Rosa Lee, Mr. Walter Trice began, getting right to it. Will you please come back to Willie, so he can come back to work?

A smile creased Mama’s face, raising her beautiful cheekbones even higher. She was glad Daddy had missed her, as she had missed him.

And Mr. Walter Trice smiled, too.

Next day, Daddy was back to work. He had ridden that day a saddle less Mr. Walter Trice’s horse home for dinner. It was a big gray mare Daddy called Ol’ Laurel that he sometimes used on the job to ride around the farm to check his rice, soybeans, cotton, and lespedeza levees.

After Daddy had eaten his lunch, he emerged from the house, stopping on the porch, me with him. He untied the horse’s reins from a post of the porch, but when he was ready to swing upon its bare back, he reached me the reins.

Here, Earnest, he instructed. Hold Ol’ Laurel’s reins until I come back outta the house and I’ll let you ride ‘er down to the gate.

Alright, I said nervously to Daddy, somewhat afraid of the animal, reluctantly taking the reins he reached to me. I was but five years old, and that little looking up at that gray horse it looked humongous—big head, flaring nostrils, long ears, thick black lips, big black eyes and—the horse blew. When it did, I thought it was going to eat me up for sure. Suddenly frightened out of my little wits, I screamed and let go of the horse’s reins. The horse whinnied and bolted off down the road, just as scared of me as I was it, tail raised to the wind.

Daddy, hearing all the commotion outside, hurried out the house, leaped off the porch, and ran behind the runaway horse, yelling, Hold Laurel! Hold girl! But the horse just kept plodding up the lane until it came to the closed gate. It reared to a sliding halt, was neighing, shaking its mane, pawing at the ground when Daddy trotted up, gathered its reins, swung astraddle its back, reached down, unlocked the gate, and rode on to work. After that day, whenever Daddy rode that old gray horse or another horse home for dinner, he never asked me to hold the reins again.

CHAPTER 4

November 1954. From west of Jones’ Grocery Store, Daddy moved us and a seven-month-old Willie DeWayne, born April 4, 1954, from the Old Mo’ Rice house east of Mrs. Ideker’s Store into a little green house alongside the road south of Cloud’s Grocery Store after it burned to the ground by a faulty chimney. We had lost everything when the Old Mo’ Rice house burned, saving only ourselves. As if someone had thrown fuel on it, the old gray-boarded house burned fast. Daddy, Wye, the twins Jackie and Danny, Ken, Rose and Mama, holding Willie on her hip, concerned neighbors, and I stood in the yard watching the hungry, furious flames eat those boards to ashes.

The flames, popping viciously and sending showers of sparks with boiling black smoke into the sky, produced an unbearably heat I could not comprehend. And as Mama and Daddy and the others continued to stand in the yard and watch the house burn, I moved further back. Afraid of the heath and popping flames, I started backing up and before I knew it, was halfway in the middle of a farming field across the ditch in front of the house. My entire body was like an inferno, burning as the house was burning. And I didn’t shake that feeling until I was well away from the house and everything in it burning to the ground.

The little green house Daddy moved us into south of Cloud’s Grocery Store set across the highway west of Uncle Starlen and Cousin Ida Coker’s house where they lived with their children: six-year-old Starlene, one-year-old Shirley and five-year-old Bobby. Compared to the little green shotgun-shack we’d moved into, Cousin Ida and Uncle Starlen’s house was a nice-looking, white structure with a green-shingled roof owned by Mr. James Leo Cloud and Mrs. Inez Cloud.

Uncle Starlen, a dark-skinned man with big husky hands, in overalls, looked and talked like actor Claude Akins. Cousin Ida was a small-framed, brown-skinned woman in eyeglasses, wearing a blue-jean dress and beige crocheted sweater.

A female cat that was already there when we moved into the little house had sometime or another given birth to a litter of kittens under the porch. She had hid them well. We could hear their meows, but could not see them, no matter us on hands and knees, peeking under the house, trying to spot them.

Daddy had been chopping wood at the woodpile in the yard onside the house day before yesterday and had left the double-blade axe leaning against an un-split block of ash wood to finish splitting later.

Next morning was gray and chilly, it being the month of November. I watched Daddy leave the house that day and go to the woods behind the house across a