The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: A Southern Story Told by Three Sisters

By S. Saidah Bey

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is a story told by three sisters that takes place in a small community in Ellisville, Mississippi, in the Jones County--also known as the Free State of Jones. It begins with the birth of their mother and her siblings through their adulthood and departure from Mississippi. The center of the story was their mother and the life and time of being her children. She married at the age of seventeen. After finishing the eighth grade, she contemplated becoming a teacher, which was the requirement at that time for being an educator, but she decided that she would teach her own children. And that she did.

It has taken almost four years to write this book including the time that they took thinking and talking about it. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly reveals the joys, the tragedies, heartaches, family miracles, disappointments, pains and tears, and southern racism. It spans almost one hundred years, and for them, from what they've heard, seen, and experienced, they were worth putting into words.

A lot of this information came from their mother as they would sit and talk. Along with the conversations that the sisters had with everyday life, it was out of these situations that they decided to write this book. Every family has a story, and this is theirs.

This book is meant to be a dedication as well as a salutation to each and every member of their family along with close friends and in memory of all those loved ones who had gone before them. Because without them, there would be no good, no bad, and no ugly. It is a southern story.

Although a lot of things happened, the coolest and greatest thing besides knowing all of these special people is that they are their family.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9781636920030

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Chapter 1: Coming of Age

Chapter 2: Racism in the South

Chapter 3: Big Mama's Place

Chapter 4: Break and Run

Chapter 5: City Life

Chapter 6: The Seven-Year Trip

Chapter 7: On the Move

Chapter 8: Second Time Around

Chapter 9: The House of Smutt

Chapter 10: Home Is Where the Heart Is

Chapter 11: Family Ties

Chapter 12: The Calm before the Storm

Chapter 13: Family Woes

Chapter 14: End of the Line

Class of 1965/1966

Sources

About the Author

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The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

A Southern Story Told by Three Sisters

S. Saidah Bey

Copyright © 2020 S. Saidah Bey

All rights reserved

First Edition

NEWMAN SPRINGS PUBLISHING

320 Broad Street

Red Bank, NJ 07701

First originally published by Newman Springs Publishing 2020

ISBN 978-1-63692-002-3 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63692-003-0 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

First, special thanks and much love go out to my wonderful sisters: Mary Lynn, Taylor Smith, and Wanda Jean Gaines, or Mrs. Gaines as we sometimes call her. Thanks so much for allowing me to tell your story.

To my uncle Cleveland Payne (writer and author) for being my guide in writing this book.

And last to Oprah Winfrey because hearing her story helped my sisters to free themselves and open up about their own experiences.

To Brother Akil Talib Bey (Sheik) and the Moors of the Moorish Science Temple of America (Temple 10-B) for teaching me about my nationality and inherited birthrights.

To Rev Henry McCullum for your words of encouragement and support to our family.

To authors, directors, screenwriters, producers, book club members, actors/actresses, and anyone else who wants to take a break, sit back, and enjoy a good book. It is our wishes and prayers that this book somehow makes it to the big screen.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is a story told by three sisters that takes place in a small community in Ellisville, Mississippi, in the Jones County—also known as the Free State of Jones. It begins with the birth of their mother and her siblings through their adulthood and departure from Mississippi. The center of the story was their mother and the life and time of being her children. She married at the age of seventeen. After finishing the eighth grade, she contemplated becoming a teacher, which was the requirement at that time for being an educator, but she decided that she would teach her own children. And that she did.

It has taken almost four years to write this book including the time that they took thinking and talking about it. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly reveals the joys, the tragedies, heartaches, family miracles, disappointments, pains and tears, and southern racisms and triumphs. It spans almost one hundred years, and for them, from what they've heard, seen, and experienced, they were worth putting into words.

A lot of this information came from their mother as they would sit and talk. Along with the conversations that the sisters had with everyday life, it was out of these situations that they decided to write this book. Every family has a story, and this is theirs.

This book is meant to be a dedication as well as a salutation to each and every member of their family along with close friends and in memory of all those loved ones who had gone before them. Because without them, there would be no good, no bad, and no ugly. It is a southern story.

Although a lot of things happened, the coolest and greatest thing besides knowing all of these special people is that they are family.

There were seven of us at home. With John in the army, Lynn, Jean, Bobby, Jake, and Dianne worked the fields belonging to the White people. Carlos and I were the babies, about three and five.

Back then, children could miss so many days of school as long as they did not fall behind in their grades. Plus, parents and students worked together. And it was a world where when the adult or teacher said that you did something, whether you did it or not, Mother handled her business and anybody else's that crossed her.

Anyway, at the end of our workday, we also had chores at home, but it was still work to us. When we finished for the day, we ate, and then we got ready for baths.

Guess what we had to bathe in? A washtub. We had a well in the backyard—our only source of water. In the summer, the water was cool (almost cold). And in the winter, it was like room temperature. If we wanted hot water, we would pour up a tub of water and let it sit outside, and then we'd have a nice warm bath.

At times, when we were not in the fields, mother was gone. Lynn recalls that she spent most of the time in the woods, hiding from John because he was mean and very abusive. She recalls walking through the woods with Bobby as they climbed trees and played with snakes.

Lynn would find a tree with a few forked limbs that was high enough to either see Mother when she came home or hear her when she called. It was one of the first things Mother would do when she made it home. She would call all of us by name if she did not see us.

Sometimes Lynn would fall asleep in the tree, but when Mother called, she was happy to know it, and down the tree she came running to the house.

Before we went to bed, mother would cut a watermelon or two, and that was the wind-down of the evening. Mother would cut long slices, and we would sit at the edge of the porch with our feet hanging off while Mother would be in her chair. Lynn says that we looked like a bunch of monkeys lined up across the porch.

Yet out of bad times, we were blessed with some very good ones. Mother bought a jukebox for her customers, but when it was just us and no customers, we could go in the backyard and trip a switch, and we could play music and dance as much and as long as we wanted to. Everybody in the family danced, even Mother. Daddy could also tap-dance. He could neither read nor write, but he played the piano, organ, guitar, harmonica, and accordion.

He and Mother taught us spirituals, and Daddy taught us some of the songs that his quartet sang and songs that we heard on the radio.

On Sundays, Mother and Daddy would live us, and we would all do spirituals. It sounded like we were in church. Again, Mother would take her big ceramic bowl and wooden long-handled spoon and whip up what she called sweet bread.

She would bake it in a big deep-dish pan, and she never waited for it to cool. Once she took it out of the oven, she would quickly cut it into big slices and put it on our plates. With cold milk, it was so good.

Chapter 1

Coming of Age

They have been called by some the roaring 1920s.

It was the time of gangsters, baseball, and silent movies. Al Capone was shaking things up and people down, Babe Ruth was hitting home runs, Charlie Chaplin was making movies with no voices, and a city has even vanished into the sea.

The 1920s came in with the violence, destruction, and discrimination that resulted from the 1800s when some people of the United States enjoyed a life of superiority and others endured a life of slavery.

The northern half of the States was against slavery, and the southern half wanted to be able to own slaves and prosper from the free labor. The slave owners wanted to live the life of servants and field-workers and inflict harmful punishment without fear of the law.

As a result, the civil war was started between the North and South. In 1865, a man by the name of Abraham Lincoln who had been elected US president was somewhat in favor of slavery, but he was forced to sign a document to end slavery. And he drafted a document called the Emancipation Proclamation.

This document abolished slavery and freed the slaves from the involuntary servitude that they were being subjected to. Soon, after the document was drafted, President Lincoln was shot and killed by John Wilkes Booth.

So, the people of the 1920s would be the recipients of hate in the highest form. The so-called freed slaves were tortured, raped, murdered, or badly wounded, and their property was either damaged or destroyed. Parents and children lost their lives, and some parents even killed their own children in order to keep farther harm from coming to them. Some children were thrown against trees, some were left in the woods to die, and some were left on the side of the roads.

These times were described by our mother, who was born as one of a set of twins among six children: Leona shows, Robert Shows (Buster), Joe Henry Shows, twins Velma and Melvin Shows, and Marzella Shows. All were born to Robert Lafate and Hattie Dace Shows in a small community in the free state of Jones County in Mississippi called Jenkins settlement. As with most settlements, practically everyone was related either by blood or by marriage.

In addition to racial despair, the American people would face a serious shortage of food and farm supplies, money, and clothes. Jobs were also hard to find especially for the freed slaves because the ex-slaveholders and those that were against the so-called Black people did not want to pay them for their work. This era of time became known as the Great Depression of the 1930s. Mother said that the poor people were already catching hell and the children were not spared from life's turmoil. She said that they had to work the fields, do their chores around the house, and keep up with their schooling. She said that it was hard because they literally were busy from the time that they woke up to the time that they went to bed.

After a certain age, they became responsible for taking care of and mending their own clothes. She added that shoes were the hardest to protect because the roads were dirt but there were also big rocks in the dirt. So, a lot of heels were broken, and sometimes, the rocks would tear holes in them.

She recalled the roads were equally hard on people, horses, and horse-drawn carriages. She said, when the buggies moved down the road, it looked as though they would fall apart at any time and the people looked like they were going to be shaken off. The horses lost their shoes too.

According to some of the elders, it was a common scene to walk along the road and find horseshoes. For the ones that had no transportation, walking was their only mode of getting from place to place. Whether it was to the town of Ellisville about three miles away or to the school that was located in the community church, it was a long way.

Papa Fate and Mama Hattie were unwavering about their six children getting their education, and they all graduated. At the time, the eighth grade was the requirement to graduate and the requirement to be a teacher. Still, they had to survive the Great Depression.

People had to rely on one another and share what little they had with each other. Most of life was farm life. They raised and killed their own animals for food. They grew crops and fruit trees, but they had started to live a life of independence. There were not very many people sharecropping from the slave masters; most of the freed slaves were managing their own crops on their own land using their children and relatives to work the land. Mother said, in a way, things were better but by the 1940s, racial wars started again and continued as she and her siblings were coming of age. The United States would turn into a war zone for equal rights. Some of the freed slaves were seeking to reclaim some of those things that they had not had the opportunity to enjoy while in slavery. Some were seeking to reclaim those things that had been taking away from them as a result of slavery—at least in the North—for instance, name and nationality. In the South, they just wanted to get away from the slave master and buy their own property so that they could work their own land.

But it was clear that they all wanted freedom along with equal rights and fair treatment. By this time, mother had met the man of her dreams. He was a tall dark and handsome music man by the name of Sammy Taylor. He sang with a quartet for the church, and on this day, he visited the church in the Jenkins community Oak Grove Baptist Church. He was from a small community called Rosehill about thirty miles south of Meridian, Mississippi, and he had two sisters named Emma and Vinnie.

It was just one year, and as her siblings were preparing to leave Mississippi with plans of never returning, mother was making plans to marry Sammy. After they were married, Papa Fate gave her an old house that sat on a portion of his 125-acre estate. Mother said that the house was an old unpainted house with some boards missing in some places and holes in the wood in other places. But it sat high on blocks on a hill, and the spot was beautiful. She said that they patched that old house for a while, and soon, she was expecting her first child. By 1940, she had one son—John Wesley. Shortly after giving birth to John, she got the news that her sister-in-law Emma had married a man from the navy and they were expecting a baby also. When it was time for the baby to come, she sent for mother to come to help her. George Odom was Emma's husband, and he was a sort of White-looking man. Mother said that when the little girl was