Kissing the Wasp: Mack Bostic's Memories Growing Up in the Cotton Fields of Georgia

By Elysia Fitzpatrick

In her first book, author Elysia Fitzpatrick provides a rare glimpse into the lives of Georgia field workers in the 1940s and 1950s. Kissing the Wasp reveals a life that was taxing yet joyful, just the way it was in Mack Bostic's memory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543935905

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Kissing the Wasp

Copyright © 2017 Elysia G. Fitzpatrick

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Print ISBN 978-1-54393-589-9

eBook ISBN 978-1-54393-590-5

"Don’t be a follower,

Even when you see other folks doing something fine.

Think what your own personal self was put on this earth to do

And get at it."

Big Ma

Table of Contents

Foreword

Bartow

Our Houses

Mr. Kidd’s Fields

Moonshine Man

Getting Ready For Winter

Winter

Christmas

Ma

Treats, Prayers, and Baskets

Fourth of July

Wadley Elementary School

The Fire

Secrets

Louisville High School

Working in Philadelphia

Willie’s Children

The Love of My Life

Daddy

Epilogue

My Family Growing Up In Georgia

Foreword

This book began with an offhand remark, jotted down and quickly forgotten. I was having a dinner party for my newly engaged daughter, a meet the extended family dinner, and Eloise was helping me. As I shook out the embroidered cloth over the table, we both saw it needed ironing. Badly. A big job and not easy.

I wish I still had the ironing board my Daddy made for us down home, Eloise said. He carved it himself out of a fine piece of oak, one end he squared off, the other end was pointed. Then he covered it with a heavy old quilt and overtop of that he put a sheet pulled tight. As she described it, I could see the ironing board plain as day and grabbing one of the kids’ old copy books off the kitchen counter, I copied down everything she said.

Through the 1980s and ‘90s and into the early 2000s Eloise was my right hand. She came to me every Thursday. At that time my husband was a trial lawyer in Philadelphia and we were doing a lot of business and family entertaining. Our six children were growing up and finishing school and getting on with their lives with all the usual rites of passage. There was nothing in my house Eloise couldn’t do better than me. She was a true professional at getting a house in shape, planning a menu, ironing a christening dress and she made the best potato salad in the whole world.

Then one October Thursday she looked out my back window and remarked that if she was still back in Georgia she’d be in the field with her sisters picking the late last bits of cotton - And if I was lucky enough to have a piece of string, she said, squeezing her fingers, I’d have it tied tight around my picking fingers so those sharp bolls didn’t jam up under my cuticles.

That’s when it hit me. I never knew a kid who grew up in the cotton fields. How many thousands of kids grew up in cotton fields? I went out and bought a recorder and that’s when we started talking at the kitchen table. Over the course of a year I asked Eloise every question I could think of. This is what she said.

1

Bartow

My part of Georgia looks different now. I drive south from Augusta to Louisville, past the old slave market I could never make myself look at. Turn right on Route One bypass and there’s Louisville High School that woke up my mind. Then go on to Wadley and turn right again on Route 319 into Bartow. The fields I worked have changed since I left in 1961, gone from endless rows of cotton to weeds and maypop vines. But I see my fields as they used to be, pink and white and yellow flowers all blooming and bobbing, then in a short time the green bolls waving, and soon after that the cotton pops out, ready for picking. Most every family worked the fields. If you lived on the man’s place you worked his fields.

We went with the seasons, very little school for us kids. In March I planted with my father going along in straight rows behind him as he held the bumping hand plow with both strong hands and kept the mule in line with a rein around his own chafed neck.

Picking cotton was the main job for blacks in the town of Bartow. In the short row of stores along the railroad a man could maybe work a rainy day stacking bags in back of Mr. C.D. Lester’s clothes store or Mr. Bryant’s Clothes and Food, at Mr. Wylie Jerden’s food store or Mr. Fred Evans’ Seed, Fertilizer and Farm Tools. Dr. Farris and Dr. Bryant had their office in that row and at the end was the post office. Down the railroad tracks was the station where the Nancy Hanks, our local train with the same name as Lincoln’s mother, stopped every morning at ten. That’s where Mr. Fred Evans hired black men at his cotton gin and corn meal grinder.

In Wadley was a sawmill where men got paid for cutting down and carting in pine and sweet gum logs. A few men went deep in the woods where there were stands of good pine. They slashed a wedge in each tree, nailed a box underneath, and every other day collected the dripped sap and took it to the turpentine still. During World War II when the bombing plant was operating in Savannah, some of the men worked there by the week. But the steady work was in the cotton fields, for men, women and children. Our lives were grinding work and more work but there were some good times, when it rained just enough to settle the dust and the yard smelled sweet and the chickens would gather round and walk along beside us. I can still see my mother’s beautiful long hair blowing in the breeze and hear her laugh as she sat on the edge of the porch swinging her bare legs. What I thought would never change has gone forever, the fields we worked and the places we lived. Stores have closed and the Nancy Hanks train stopped running in 1971. All that’s left of burned down houses are broken brick chimneys and fireplaces surrounded by trees planted a long time ago for food and shade. Ours was the first house that wasn’t rebuilt.

My last visit home I went to look. Our oak and china ball trees have grown huge, and the black walnut, fig, pear and plum trees are bearing yet. When I look at the cedar tree I still check for chunks to cut for resting the iron on and in the way back is that same row of sunflowers marking the line between our yard and Mr. Kidd’s field. I shut my eyes for a few minutes, chewing on a handful of sunflower seeds and know I am home.

2

Our Houses

It’s through a long time haze that I remember our two-room first house. A narrow porch ran across the front and we’d sit out there after supper rocking and fanning, me on Ma’s lap, her arm always wrapped around me. I’d lay my face on her shoulder on one of her braids. Most summer nights Big Ma and Aunt Fanny walked up and they’d sit on the porch and talk about how work in the fields was going and when they got talked out they’d sing our old hymns.

The thing I remember about that house was one hot night Ma laid Roger Bell, she was the baby then, on a pillow just inside the door to catch a breeze if there was one. After a while Rodge got to fussing so bad Ma said Mack, go see what’s wrong. I was always called Mack at home because my father wanted a boy. I looked into the darkish doorway and the next thing I was screaming. A black snake had clamped its jaws on the nipple of Rodge’s bottle and was sucking the milk down. Daddy quick grabbed a stick and beat that snake till it quit twitching and lay dead. To this day I hate a snake.

The day we moved out of that house I was only three and a half years old but I walked down the cement steps copying Ma perfectly, left foot, right foot, left foot, and climbed in the borrowed wagon that held all our possessions: iron beds, chairs, kitchen table, iron stove and pots, pine straw mattresses and cardboard boxes full of clothes and bedding. We rode around the bend and down the straight Bartow road to the house Mr. Kidd was letting us have because he needed big families to work his fields. This second house was big and had already been sitting there a long time when Big Ma came from Washington County as a child.

It was built when they did things right, Daddy said. The pine board roof and walls were smooth dull gray. The wide front porch had six thick posts solid as stone. All along the front were as many zinnias and marigolds and four o’clocks as Ma could find to plant. Inside were ceilings twelve feet high. The windows were glass, not just wood shutters like the first house. Now we had hooks to hold the windows open or closed and on either side hung a six-inch width of flowered plastic curtains bought at Mr. Kidd’s store in Bartow. Clothespins pinched the curtains closed at night and held them open during the day.

The two front bedrooms were separated by a fireplace that opened on two sides like they put in big houses today. Each room held three iron double beds, and one doubled as a company room with rockers and straight chairs taken in from the porch and pulled up to the fire in winter. Ma covered the walls with wallpaper to keep the cold from coming between the boards, huge yellow flowers in one room, red in the other. I’ve never seen flowers like them, north or south. I think the artist made them up in his head.

Daddy and Ma slept in the small bedroom with Daddy’s double-barrel gun propped in the corner and shells in his top bureau drawer. Every house had a shotgun and country boys by the time they were eleven or twelve, all could handle a gun. But it was the men who went hunting for rabbit, possum and squirrel, or shot a snake or a hog to be butchered. Some women could shoot when they had to. The day before Willie was born Ma grabbed the gun and went after a stranger who came across the yard talking drunk. People said that’s why Willie was scared of