The Stubborn Life of Jesse Ed McKinney

By Bill Jones, Jr.

Jesse Ed’s was an ordinary entry into the world, but it felt anything but normal. It would prove to be a momentous occasion for the McKinneys: the birth of the child who promised to hold the family together—no matter what—and not even death would stop him.The Stubborn Life of Jesse Ed McKinney is full of laughter, sensuality, surprises, and satire, but is absent the stench of racism and hopelessness.

Jesse Edwin McKinney, III was born stubborn, his birth attended to by fly-buzzed sweat, by low expectations, and by the hovering burdens of a house too full of accounts too small. Jesse Ed’s difficult birth would prove to be Mama’s ultimate joy, however, as he, the youngest of her 11 children, is the glue that holds her large family together. As the African American McKinney family begins to scatter in the face of poverty, adversity, and tragedy, only their love and Jesse Ed’s stubborn refusal to quit can hold them together. He means to be the glue, and nothing, not even the threat of death, will stop him.

The Stubborn Life of Jesse Ed McKinney is full of laughter, sensuality, surprises, and satire, but it is empty of the stench of racism all too common in historical black fiction. Someone needed to re-write history; Jesse Ed is as good a place as any to start.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bill Jones, Jr.
• Release date: Jul 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005672768

Bill Jones, Jr.

Bill Jones, Jr. is an American novelist born in Washington D.C. Initially a published poet, in 2009, after years away from writing, working in the information technology sector, Bill penned his first novel and discovered his true vocation.His work is wide-ranging, including the dystopian future fiction tome Hard as Roxx; the contemporary fantasy fiction trilogy, The Stream; detective stories The Little Burgundy and The Brooklyn Trace; as well as a bit of African American alternate history in The Stubborn Life of Jesse Ed McKinney. Bill has also released three short fiction collections. He believes it’s important to understand that while heroes don’t always win in the end, they sometimes do. As such, his stories always offer some degree of hope.Now, having retired from his former career, Bill spends his time creating fictional worlds, reading, world building, smiling at grandsons, and exploring Earth with his cameras and his artist-photographer wife.

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The Stubborn Life

of Jesse Ed McKinney

BILL JONES JR.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2017 by William E. Jones, Jr.

A

ll rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise – without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews. Published by Panthera Press Company.

Panthera Press™ and the Dread Lion™ logo are trademarks of the Panthera Press Company. Logo by Maria Jones-Phillips.

Book cover design by Panthera Press.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book was inspired, in part, by Mr. W.C.F., who perhaps should have spent more time outside of Mississippi, or at the very least should have used his literary magic to invent better words for the people who lived there. Likewise, I am unreservedly grateful for Ms. T.M., whose writings led me to believe the songs my imagination sings were worth listening to.

And finally, always, a thank you to Maria—my wife, prime reader, editor, graphic designer, and muse. Hey honey, I had some more free time, so I wrote you another book.

This book is dedicated to (but not the story of) my great-grandfather, Mr. Edward Ervin Cain, Jr. of Detroit, Michigan, by way of Rogersville, Tennessee. Be at peace. We know what really happened.

Chapter One

Some folks say Jesse Ed McKinney was born stubborn. His was an ordinary entry into the world—attended to by summer’s flybuzzed sweat, by low expectations, and by the hovering burdens of a house too full of accounts too small—but it felt anything but normal. An August morning cooled by the assurance of a simple birth gave way to a qualmy afternoon abuzz with doubt and finally to a frenetic evening’s electrical storm that did nothing to diffuse the swarming tension. The family sat in the main room, silent except for sporadic swats of nettlesome gnats, Daddy’s spitting tobacco juice, or the low grunts emanating from the mystery beyond the bedroom curtain. Daddy did his part when the contractions started, tearing horse-tongued into town in his rickety carriage to find the midwife nurse. His frenzy seemed foolish by nightfall. Mama did her part as well, holding back when the midwife told her to and filling the incommodious bedroom with sweatsopped screams when told to push. That room had seen more deliveries than some big-city dockyards, but Jesse Ed was running late.

It was he who was the problem, staying put despite being egged by tears and incantations to enter the world. His little ship sat moored in place in perfect sight of Mama’s welcoming port. One couldn’t really blame the boy since the modicum of cramped privacy inside his mother’s womb was to be the last time he had any reasonable amount of space to himself. The midwife, Mrs. Sarah Osceola Barnwell, who insisted on the title of Missionary Nurse despite her charging the ungodly sum of five entire dollars for her one day’s work, sat hunkered down in the small bedroom’s rickety wooden chair, her chin propped up by her left elbow and her right arm slung wearily over the chair’s lyre-shaped back. The crisp whites of her uniform wilted like late-season flowers, but Jesse Ed stayed put. Mama went hoarse from hollering, praying, and cajoling that boy out. He wouldn’t come. Outside, Daddy paced a rut in the old wood floor, but Jesse Ed would have let him walk himself all the way down to the hot place before he’d come out from where it was nice and comfy. At the very least, one could argue that a gentlemanly young feller would have noticed Mrs. Sarah Osceola Barnwell’s furrowed brow and made his entrance when it was due if only to lessen her worry. If Jesse Ed noticed, he didn’t show it.

He was to be the last of his mama’s children, and given she’d easily forced out six sisters and four brothers before him, pretty much everyone, especially Mrs. Sarah Osceola Barnwell, expected Mama to squat and drop her newest load with no more difficulty than she would have had in taking a high-grass poop after a hefty meal of grits and collard greens. Hell, Mama’s youngest girl, little Marguerite, herself no more than three summers born, had entered the world while Mama was on her way home from early Sunday services. By the time the church bell had finished ringing for the eleven o’clock service, Marguerite had been swaddled, cleaned, fed, and introduced to her nine siblings. Jesse Ed wasn’t having any of that hurrying into the world nonsense. For six hours, then twelve, while Mama lay sweating and pushing, her cervix dilated wide enough to spit out a fully grown man, Jesse Ed floated lazily inside with his anchor rooted where it lay. The midwife’s assistant stood by attired in her no-longer-white delivery gown with the round-nearly-white cap and glared down at Mama with black, judging eyes. Her posture was stiff and erect save for her neck craned in Mama’s direction, which, with her folded arms made her look like more like a white-clothed raven than a nurse. Every fifteen minutes or so that adjudicating bird would uncross and re-cross her wings, first right over left and then left over right, she’d then look at Mama and let out a long sigh as though the poor woman lay looking like a fat dark stain in those sodden sheets because she needed the rest and attention. One could suppose that to be true as well, but no one had known Mama to dawdle as long as she had a breath to give and a job to do.

It was Mama who finally coaxed Jesse Ed out into the world. She, by this time desperate enough for tears and wanting her damned baby to be born so she could breathe easily and finally move her bowels, was lying on her back staring at the bare, flickering ceiling light. She said, clear as a bell and with no more ire than a mosquito shows at being swatted at by a drunk’s slow swing, Boy, I swear by Jesus, if you don’t get the holy hell out of me in the next five minutes, whenever you do come out, I’m gonna slam you through that ugly-ass wallpaper your daddy picked out and let him scrape up what’s left of you to raise by his damn self.

Sweet Jesus! crowed the midwife’s assistant, unclenching her arms long enough to flap and clutch at her chest.

Outside of the curtain that liked to pretend it was a bedroom door, three little voices giggled at hearing Mama curse for the first time. Daddy’s deeper voice bade them hush and go back to sleep with enough surety that the three giggled harder thinking it a lark that he believed they could possibly sleep through such excitement. Daddy knew better, of course, but it was up to him to set the tone what with Mama laid up the way she was with that stubborn-ass boy she was about to give birth to. Mama didn’t mean to swear, of course, and she certainly didn’t abide physical abuse, but Jesse Ed thought it might be time to weigh anchor and sail for home anyway, just in case ten kids were her upper limit for tolerance.

There’s his fuzzy little head now, whispered Mrs. Sarah Osceola Barnwell, snatching off what was left of the bedsheet and readying her gloved right hand as though it were a catcher’s mitt with Jesse Ed the Negro League’s official baseball.

After seventy-five frenetic seconds, wherein the midwife’s ravenesque assistant did her night’s work by mopping the missionary nurse’s sweaty brow (but only after a glob of Mrs. Sarah Osceola Barnwell’s perspiration smacked the newborn in the face, startling him into his first screaming breaths of life) Jesse Edwin McKinney, III was born into the world. His birth was recorded in the family bible as being at precisely six minutes and six seconds after midnight on the sixth of August 1902 in Hawkins County, Tennessee, on the family farm located about three miles outside of Rogersville, which was pretty close to being three miles from nowhere. Mama kissed that boy’s crumpled little head for fifteen minutes before she let anyone else touch him. Jesse Ed breathed easier, now knowing for certain that Mama had room in her heart for number eleven after all.

His was a glorious, if impoverished childhood, filled with laughter and the usual sort of tragedies that haunt most families everywhere. Being the youngest and more importantly, the final child of Jesse Edwin Junior McKinney and Annie Mae McKinney, whom Daddy called Queen if he wasn’t calling her Mama, Jesse Ed received more attention than he might have liked. Mama doted over him when she had time, an even rarer commodity in that household than money, but with ten siblings, he never lacked for love. Sisters Reba, Ida, Mary, Hester, and Agnes took turns mothering him until he grew old enough to sour on their kisses and constant affections. Even little Marguerite would take Jesse Ed in her small arms when Mama or Daddy would scold him, comforting him and placing him on her lap though he was nearly her size by the time he was two. The sun rose over Jesse Ed’s wedding day before he owned a shirt no man had worn before, and with that being only the second article of clothing he’d ever worn that held no tatters or tears, his christening cloth being the first. It never mattered. No one but Mama and Daddy knew they were poor even though the dirt under their feet had more financial leverage than anyone in the family. Even their old hunting hound, whom no one had bothered to name, had been sold for six dollars and fifty-five cents to pay the midwife’s fee at Jesse Ed’s birth, a fact that would later grate on Jesse Ed, since he’d been priced at $1.55 less.

How I’m gonna be worth less than some old hound? he would ask whenever his mother would retell the story of his birth.

That’s ‘cause that hound could hunt and you ain’t never caught nothin’ but a cold, Mama would always answer.

The family would laugh at that, Jesse Ed hardest of them all.

His three oldest brothers, William, Royland, and Charlie, had moved away or into homes of their own before Jesse Ed had a bed to himself. But even with the lack of space or material possessions, he had gifts no man could tax or steal. He never went in want of a playmate, never lacked a smile to share or a heart to share it with. The toughest boy he ever met was his sister, Hester, and the gentlest was Joe, the youngest son but him. His brothers all wore their daddy’s face, as did Jesse Ed, which made them good-looking to the ladies, or at least presentable. All of the boys were sufficiently self-possessed in their raggedy bliss to believe the few gifts God graced them put them closer to Glory and ahead of the rich folk who had money to spend, a house whose boards lay mostly parallel to each other, clothes that kept the cold at bay in winter, or a mirror to see what they looked like instead of having to use a brother’s face to tell. What fortune the McKinneys did have, however, besides love, was land, which made them well-off as Negroes went, even if much of it wasn’t worth the dirt that comprised it. It was their Daddy’s land, and that made it paradise.

When Jesse was a year old, the family posed for what was to be the only photograph ever taken of the full group. In the center of the photo, standing by the slanted front door, was Mama, an embarrassed smile on her face like she always had when anyone tried to pay attention to her or notice what an extraordinary thing she’d done by holding such an enormous family together with no more than spit, dirty string, armloads full of love, and a single holiday sweet for each. She was flanked by her two nearly grown children, Reba and William, both taller than she, and surrounded by seven more who stood transfixed by the camera, each mirroring their father’s wary glare. Only seven-year-old Agnes, always a daddy’s girl, smiled, with Daddy’s large hands swallowing her small shoulders. Jesse Ed was there too, of course, sucking on his thumb in Reba’s comforting arms and wondering what all the fuss was about. Not having spent years never seeing a camera before, he was unaware of the eventfulness of the occasion. Daddy anchored the photo, standing to the far right. He stood almost out of the frame, as he did in real life, since he worked long enough hours that at times his sons volunteered to work extra time in the fields just to catch a glimpse of his face. All you could make out of him in that photo was his salted mustache, his good eye squinted in a skeptic’s stare, his red and yellow suspenders—by then sun and sweat bleached to a dim pink and sallow hue, his blue work shirt with the long left sleeve and the right one that ended in tatters at his elbow, and his suavely cocked high-crown slouch hat with the oversized black ribbon. That weather-beaten thing looked as though he’d stolen it from some Civil War dandy, but Daddy never went without it. It was, in fact, Daddy’s father who stole it, but he had to kill a Rebel officer to get it from him. Daddy was born a slave but Granddaddy had been determined he’d not die one.

Daddy left the farm for good four years and six months after that photo was taken, in a pine box. He had a massive coronary on a Tennessee morning wherein he’d spent frigid hours clearing snow and brush from around a dead tree he’d intended to cut down for the wood. He could have gotten William or Royland to do it for him, but it was Sunday and the boys were at church with Mama. Daddy died there kneeling by the