I Dreamed That I Lived

By Larry Griggs

This book is the story of the life and times of a young black man growing up in the Mississippi Delta, the struggles he endures and the accomplishments made as a result of those struggles. It takes you through the early years of his life and the challenges experience within his family as well as outside the family. It takes you, the reader, on a winding ride through the prejudices within families, and how the family continued to hold on to doing things a certain way because of lack of understanding that in this case would cause a child to suffer unnecessarily. It gives you a bird's-eye view of how people can be mistreated simply because they have been deemed to be different, sometimes even by those who are responsible for rearing them. Inside the covers, you will walk with Larry in his early years as he is thought to be slow or mentally disabled and through the years of desegregation as well as the process itself. You will also travel with him as loved ones exit his life one by one, and how he would house the memories of these loved ones to push him through the hard times. Inside is also an accounting of near-death experiences that will push him to the limit yet bring out a will in him that would complete the process in making him the man he is today. This is an intriguing story that will have the reader wondering what's next and how all of what happens between these pages is happening to just one person.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9781644241028

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I Dreamed That I Lived

Larry Griggs

Copyright © 2018 Larry Griggs

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc. 2018

ISBN 978-1-64424-100-4 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64424-102-8 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

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 1

The Fall

It was late in the evening just at the beginning of nightfall when my brother, sister, and some relatives were bringing kindling into the house for the tin heater that sat almost in the middle of the floor. I believe I may have been the youngest at three and a half as I was being shown how to keep the house warm because at that time there was no other way of heating the house except with that tin heater. I remember following the bigger kids up the wooden steps with an armload of kindling when something caused me to slip and fall from the porch.

All I can remember from this point was that when the other kids saw me, they began yelling for the adults in the house. My mom and other adult relatives came rushing out of the house and saw me on the ground with a piece of the kindling that I was carrying sticking out of my jaw. It had gone in through the left side of my jaw, across my tongue, and about to come out of the right side. I don’t remember going to the hospital or a doctor, but I do remember smelling like coal oil and having a jaw that was sore for a long time. It wasn’t very long after that incident that my stepfather’s first son was born, Emmitt Jr. (October 1962).

We soon moved to a place called Three Forks. This was simply a farming community where a community store sat in the fork of two roads. My grandfather on my mother’s side worked in this store. Elmus Latimore Griggs. My granddad was a small in stature thin man, who when sitting or standing still would always keep his left leg moving in a bouncing kind of way. An older black man, who we called Uncle Joe, lived in the very back of this store. I remember living here very vividly because it was when we were living here when we got our very first television. The television in the year 1963 was prevalent because I remember watching the news people reporting the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. We were living just south of Three Forks Store when he was killed.

My stepfather was a farm laborer and a tractor driver. He was a hard worker and could easily get a farming job because of his reputation of being a hard worker who could do practically anything on a farm. We moved a lot from one farm to another back then. The owner of these farms would allow the laborer and his family to live in houses that they owned on these plantations for as long as the laborer worked for them. It seemed that every time we would move, and we moved a lot, we would move in the middle of or edge of some sort of field. It was either a cotton field or bean field. When we were living at Three Forks, the front of the house was on the edge of a bean field. There was this wooden bench that sat in the front of the dirt yard where we would sit in the cool of the day. Cars would periodically drive by and the front porch of our three-room shotgun house would always be dusty from the cars passing by on the gravel road in front of the house. Every now and then, we would see this strange tractor looking machine that had a long front with a blade almost in the middle turned at an angle. It was called a road grader. I loved watching it because it would go up on one side of the road, and because the blade would always be turned at an angle, it would leave a pile of gravel in the middle of the road. It would then come back down the road in the opposite direction and grade the pile of gravel out of the middle of the road.

I remember one evening just before dark, I was sitting on this same bench with some other family members, I don’t remember exactly who. I do remember though that this bench sat under a weeping willow tree. It had to be in the late spring or early summer because the tree was really green and hanging really low. We were just sitting there laughing and talking when someone yelled that something was moving in the tree. Almost as soon as