Reminiscences Book Two

By James L. Randolph

Reminiscences examines the growth and life of a young African American boy coming of age in the second half of the twentieth century. Jamarius Russell is the main protagonist, and he informs the reader of events and circumstances that affected him as his family as the years rolled by. As he reflects and looks back on his years and those of his family, his grandparents and his ancestors from a previous time and place. This is an American novel about America and about its history. It is a story about a group of people, over generations, facing critical moments in their lives and their history. Reminiscences has a cinematic quality to it as the years pass by as Jamarius Russell, Lee Somersom Russell and Eloise Sudey, the elderly senior citizen, tell a tale of woe and hope, of aspiration and disappointment and of life and death. Remiscences is a story readers would enjoy because the reader gets to experience and live what the characters live.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9798369406106

Book preview

PART IV

Development 1962-1964

Continuation…

CHAPTER 65

T OBACCO FARMING WAS merely one kind of farming, where people like my grandparents and other sharecroppers worked in an industry helping to meet the enormous needs of consumers who enjoyed cigarettes, cigars, and snuff. But there were also other kinds of farming, the kind generally associated with the big-time Midwestern farmers. They were the farmers who fed the people of America and sometimes even people in the rest of the world. They grew cattle, chickens, and pigs to provide meat for themselves and for people who lived in the city. The sharecroppers also grew their own animals too but not on the scale and magnitude of the Midwesterners. The Midwesterners were commercial farmers. We worked in a commercial business too, the bulk of which was connected to the tobacco industry, not to feeding the rest of the country—only ourselves.

There were many kinds of farms in America and many of them grew several kinds of plants like tobacco. Some raised several different kinds of animals. Some American farmers raised only one main product, such as cotton, corn, wheat, cattle, soybeans, and chickens. Even in other countries, certain farms were noted for the quality of their product. For instance, farms in the Netherlands and Denmark were noted for their fine milk and butter. In Italy and France, farmers grew fruits and grapes to make their famous world-class wines. Waving wheat covered the plains of Southern Russia and German farmers grew potatoes. The farmers in India grew cotton and rice, and in Central America, farmers grew coffee and bananas. Canadian farmers were famous for their wheat. It was while living with my grandparents that I developed a great appreciation for farmers and what they did for us. They grew the wheat that became our bread, they grew the cotton that became our clothing, and they grew the plants that made many things, such as plastics.

As the months went by, I experienced and studied the sights associated with rural life. I watched the cows graze, I watched the hogs eat, and I watched the many chickens and ducks walk across the lot and across my grandfather’s backyard. I watched the beasts of burden, the horses and mules, pull the wagons. I watched the old faded red tractor Mr. Elbert Glover drove and how it seemed to have a face and personality of its own and how sad that face looked. I watched the little calves cling to their mothers’ sides and how they fought to feed. Sometimes I watched Mr. Elbert Glover in a distant corn field, or hay field driving the tractor, plowing and cultivating. I watched him and his tractor bale hay. I watched my mother, my grandmother, and Retta feed the chickens. I watched Johnny Somersom, my grandfather, dig yams and potatoes, and I watched my mother and my grandmother fill mason jars with blackberry, fig, and apricot preserves. We ate watermelon, gathered pumpkins, and one time I watched Mr. Earl Clough take honey from a beehive. But what I really liked was to watch Mr. Elbert Glover drive his tractor close to the edge of my grandfather’s yard as he plowed the corn field. The huge corn field covered many acres and bordered the land near my grandfather’s house, not far from the fig tree. I liked smelling the tractor’s exhaust fumes in the cool air and how the harrows turned and spun as they broke up the dark rich soil. The tractor seemed so sad when I looked at it from the front, and it made such a mournful, straining sound, as though it wanted to be back at the lot where my grandfather worked. Chicken wire covered the tractor’s front end, protecting its engine from high weeds and corn stalks.

Once the tobacco season started and we began work in the fields, my grandfather didn’t press us about bringing the cows home because it was almost dark when we came home from the fields. We only had to round the cows up when we attended school. Speaking of cows, they were a strange lot. When it grew late in the evening, they brought themselves back to the barn! Sometimes we saw them walking in single file, following the same route we drove them. David Alfred said cows were too stupid to bring themselves in, that they only came to the barn to get the salt. When I reminded him that salt had been placed in strategic locations around the pastures, David Alfred didn’t say anything. Not all of the cows came home though, just a few of them. There always remained a few rebels among the group. I suppose in a way that was only natural. The cows proved the age-old adage that retention was often the product of repetition. Sometimes I liked watching the planes swoop through the air, but I didn’t like the sight of tons of DDT inundating the evening air with its dangerous sulfurlike odor. Sometimes I sat on the front porch with my grandfather, listening to the baseball game on the radio and watching hundreds of bats zip through darkened night skies, gobbling up dragonflies and insects.

Sometimes my uncles took rifles and shot guns off the walls in my grandfather’s house and went hunting with them. Sometimes they shot rabbits, squirrels, and raccoons for meat. My grandparents had a deep freezer, so when my uncles brought the animals back home, they cleaned and skinned them. Afterward my grandmother put them in the deep freezer. When the tobacco season ended and we had less money coming into the household because the women and children were no longer working, the meat from the rabbits, squirrels, and raccoons helped us through the winter. Sometimes during the winter, I watched my grandmother ring the necks of chickens. That meant fried chicken night.

One day I went hunting with my uncle Wesley and my uncle William Paul. I thought it was exciting, and I couldn’t wait to get into the woods and watch them catch some woodland creatures in their sight. Years earlier my grandfather had taught them some of the finer points of hunting for game. Sometimes I heard the sound of gunshots from other parts of the woods. This gave me an unsettling thought. With other hunters in the woods, who knew where a missed bullet may decide to lodge itself? I mentioned that interesting possibility to my uncles one time, but they didn’t seem overly concerned about it. They gave me a less-than-convincing explanation about the rules of hunting, waved me off, and dismissed my idea as something that I took much too seriously. I suppose they were right because I never went hunting with them again. Whenever they grabbed the guns and asked me if I wanted to go with them, I always found a ready-made excuse—I had chores to do, my mother wanted me to do something, and so on and so forth. And then there was the creek. The fish always seemed to bite there, so we never went hungry while living with my grandparents, like we sometimes did while living in the city. Johnny Somersom always believed in having a lot to eat. Wild turkeys and wild hogs roamed the woods also. Sometimes my uncles shot them too. When the pecan season arrived, we picked up hundreds of them from the ground in the orchard near the tobacco barns along the local highway. Mr. Trumane told my grandfather it was okay to pick them off the ground. My grandfather loved eating pecans. When it was time to bale hay, my brothers and I sometimes rode the wagons that carried the hay.

Staying with my grandparents turned out to be a grand experience even though our sojourn with them was based more on necessity than a vacation. Sometimes I reflected on that cool spring day back in St. Petersburg and how my mother returned home from a much-needed getaway, a respite from the irritating shenanigans of my father. My mother was accompanied by her mother and my grandmother, Katie Somersom. Also with them was my grandmother’s older brother, my uncle Darius. Like a mother hen gathering her chicks, she scooped us all up and whisked us to Quincy, Florida. So here we were, and here we remained. I had no idea how long we would stay with my grandparents. I did know one thing though. My grandparents loved us dearly, and so did my uncles, even fifteen-year-old David Alfred in his own peculiar way.

During our stay with my grandparents, I never heard them say a harsh word about our being there or about having to help clothe, shelter, and feed us. I never heard them blame my mother for her marrying my father, scold her for choosing a bad man, or berate her for not standing up to him. My mother, like my grandmother before her, belonged to a different generation, a generation where women stayed in the background and allowed their husbands to take the lead, to manifest their headship roles. Women from my mother’s generation and my grandmother’s generation understood this more than anyone, and they respected it. It did not matter if the man was a weak, sniveling, irresponsible clod. Headship in a family was his divine right, granted by the Creator. Women like my mother and grandmother accepted this belief without question. They grew up in a time when duty and devotion were a way of life. They respected the vows they took. They honored and obeyed the laws of the Creator. They knew no other way. That was simply the way it was, and it was not their place to question him. If a man failed to live up to his responsibilities and duties as a husband and a father, well, then that was between him and the Creator. The man would have to answer for his own transgressions and his own failures as a husband and as a father. The Creator always provided. The Creator always took care of everything. And so women like my mother and grandmother observed intently the birds of the air because the birds did not sow seed or reap or gather into storehouses, and still the Creator fed them, the Creator provided a way. And to the Creator, weren’t we worth more to him than them? Women like my mother and grandmother took their lessons from the lilies of the field. The lilies grew, but they did not toil nor did they spin because the Creator provided for their every need. And we believed he would provide for ours. It was an adherent religious belief, deeply ingrained in us and unquestionably accepted on profound faith.

The Creator provided for my mother, my brothers, my sister, and me by touching the hearts of my grandparents, Johnny and Katie Somersom. My grandparents showed us kindness and understanding, and they gave us comfort when our future seemed dark, uncertain, and bleak. My grandparents gladly accepted this responsibility because they loved us, and what greater quality brought us closer to the Creator than love? This quality was divine and it was innate. Like nature’s untamed wonders in the wilderness, our grandparents taught us the importance of family and what family meant. Just as the tigress teaches her young how to hunt, my grandparents taught us the wherefore and the significance of family and why it was important to love one’s family. In nature how often did the lions and lionesses gather to protect their young, the cheetahs, the gazelles, the elephants, the hippopotami, and the zebras? The animals are not blessed with a divine spark of love, only a savage instinct to procreate and perpetuate the species—the law of self-preservation. Humans, on the other hand, are endowed with a unique, divine trait called love—and reason. We rear our young in order to not only perpetuate the species but also because we love them. Unlike the animals who roam the wilderness and abandon their young in critical moments of great danger or trouble, humans struggle valiantly to protect theirs, especially when their young have been victimized by adversity, disease, and infections. Children are the crowning achievement of a marriage, the jewels of such a union, and as such they should be valued and protected, reared with as little physical, emotional, and psychological trauma as possible. In their own God-given way, that was what our grandparents tried to do for us, and I’ve always loved them for it.

People who live in the cities or far away sometimes think that America is a country of independent farmers. It is a noble thought but not entirely true. A large percentage of the people who worked as farmers do not own the land on which they work, as was the case with my grandparents. Once Mr. Trumane sold his uncle’s tobacco operation to Mr. Steinberg, he too became a tenant farmer because he no longer owned the operation or the land. Mr. Trumane believed it was cheaper to simply help farm the land without investing money in it, and besides, in the past thirty-five years he had grown prosperous. My grandparents were tenant farmers too or sharecroppers. They weren’t dirt poor like some sharecroppers, but they weren’t prosperous either. Thousands of farms were owned by large companies which had their offices hundreds of miles away and were little interested in the welfare of the farm community, like Mr. Steinberg who owned the farm Mr. Trumane and my grandparents lived on but who himself lived in Binghamton, New York.

An ill wind blew across the Steinberg tobacco farm in mid-1961, stirring up changes on the farm and in the lives of the sharecroppers. Who would have thought that in another short, seven years my grandparents and all of my uncles and aunts would be living the remainder of their lives in the city of St. Petersburg! Modern invention had a lot to do with this, laborsaving machinery that made it possible to produce more. Just as the automobile changed the pattern of farm life, so did the new equipment, the inevitable but steady encroachment of technology. When we left in 1955 none of the sharecroppers had electricity in their homes, only kerosene lamps, much like the American settlers of the nineteenth century. But now electricity lighted and lightened their lives. Although my grandparents owned no phone, the phone had placed the sharecroppers in close touch with their neighbors.

Tobacco work was greatly influenced by the weather and the changing seasons. In the middle of summer, it rained a lot, showering us almost every afternoon. Nevertheless, it was neither the rain nor the thunder that struck fear and terror in us but the lightning. The lightning was another matter, and it made all the sharecroppers stand up and take notice. True to our African American culture, when electrical charges bolted across the heavens, the tobacco field workers ducked for cover underneath the tobacco stalks until the lightning subsided. Even in the barns, the seamstresses stopped their work and moved away from the open doors, preferring to hide in the shadows and the darkness and remain quiet "while the Lawd was doin’ his work," as the old colored folks used to say. Colored people respected lightning like it was an ancient deity and for good reason. We were all aware of its awesome fury and capabilities, whether it was provoked or not. Mr. Trumane understood colored folks’ need to respect the lightning and the need to respect the One who made the lightning, so he, in turn, respected their need to respect their Creator. After all, Mr. Trumane had been around colored folks all his life, and he had learned to not only love and cherish them, but he had even learned to cherish elements of their culture, one of only a handful of Southern White men who could lay claim to that distinction.

During the winter months, as the lot man, my grandfather kept the animals in their stalls, pens, and houses, where he fed them. When the spring came we watched the sharecroppers make plans for the coming season of planting. They plowed and planted seed, and sometimes they watched over the farm animals as they brought forth their young. When the early summer months arrived they worked hard in the fields, cultivating and working against weeds and insects. In summer and fall, they harvested the tobacco and corn crops. This picture is typical in some parts of the South.

Farming had always been a way of life as well as a way to make money for my grandparents. It offered certain satisfactions. They grew their own food and sometimes my grandmother made the family’s clothing and shoes, like her moccasins. To some extent, my grandfather was basically his own boss although Mr. Trumane was his immediate supervisor. My grandfather set his own working hours, usually decided what needed to be done, and did not work under the constant supervision of an employer.

The biggest difference between the farm and the city was the way the sharecroppers were tied to the land and the tobacco farm. City dwellers were tied less to their jobs. The city worker put in his eight hours and generally went home, except for maybe a few hours of overtime. But the sharecropper, like my grandfather for instance, had to feed the animals at the lot every day, including Saturday and Sunday. During the planting and harvesting seasons, the sharecroppers worked long hours, on average much longer than people who lived in the city. This difference carried over to the man who owned the tobacco farm, Mr. Steinberg. He took certain risks that were alien to people living in the city. Every time he planted a field and bought livestock, he took a gamble. Like any businessman with an investment, he gambled that the weather would be favorable and that the tobacco plants would be ready for market and that the animals would be healthy to engage in their duties, and that the Black Angus cows would be healthy enough to retain good prices on the beef market. And last he gambled that when he sold his tobacco and corn, the prices for them were high enough to make a profit. But making a profit was never a problem on the tobacco farm because the labor was cheap. My grandparents and the other sharecroppers merely shared in producing the tobacco crop, not in the sharing of the profits.

What I really liked about the farm was the opportunity to live in the open air close to nature. In 1961, my grandparents and the rest of the sharecroppers were somewhat isolated from mainstream society. They were able to get only a little education and in spite of their solitary lifestyle, it was on the long and sometimes difficult trips to town that I discovered their passion for recreation and pleasure away from the tobacco farm. One time my grandfather gathered hundreds of pounds of tomatoes, potatoes, mustard greens, okra, green corn, and onions. My uncle Wesley and uncle William Paul hitched a team of mules to a wagon, we placed the vegetables in the wagon, and my grandfather drove it all the way to town and sold the vegetables. We had so much fun laughing and joking. My grandfather entertained us by telling funny stories about Colleyville, Georgia, where he grew up and how he sometimes did mischievous deeds and how he got in trouble with his parents. I watched the mules’ silken-like bodies sweat and maintain a steady pace as they clip-clopped along the hard, grainy asphalt highway.

Johnny Somersom, my grandfather, even found an opportunity to belong to a social organization, the Masons. Of course we never talked about the Masons in front of him because it was supposed to be a secret collection of men with all kinds of little signs and a sworn oath of fraternal allegiance to each other. He never even talked about the Masons to Katie Somersom, my grandmother. My grandfather was more fortunate than some of the sharecroppers. He owned his own automobile, and it took him nearly everywhere. He bought his first automobile back in 1939 when my mother was ten years old. Mr. Trumane helped him get it, and he hasn’t been without one since. My grandfather always stayed close to areas where he and my uncles could hunt and fish.

During the last fifty years, many sons and daughters of sharecroppers had moved to the towns and the cities to make their living, people like my uncle Amos, my aunt Pearl, my aunt Polly, and some of my other aunts and uncles. The face of the tobacco farm was changing. As hired hands, Mr. Nathan Kemp’s two sons preferred to leave the tobacco farm and work in factories in Philadelphia. Mr. Nathan Kemp was my grandfather’s oldest and dearest neighbor.

Fewer and fewer people were remaining on the tobacco farm, and sometimes when they returned, it was out of necessity like us, and my mother because she and my father had domestic problems. Sometimes during a period of economic depression or recession, many people who were no longer able to make a living in the city tried their hand at farming. Some city dwellers turned farmers and even became successful at it. Henry Ford, the great American inventor, and the man responsible for my uncle Amos’s livelihood in Detroit, Michigan, advocated a combination of farm and city life. Henry Ford believed that in this way the individual received the best of both worlds. By these means the farmer was able to raise some crops, grow much of his own food, and rely upon work in the city for the rest of his income.

The trend of leaving the tobacco farm continued, and two main developments accounted for this. One was the increase in the number of large farms. That was also the reason why Mr. Trumane sold the modest size tobacco farm his uncle left him, the one that Mr. Steinberg now owned and had turned into a major operation. There were fewer tobacco farms in the country now than there were twenty years ago, but there were also more acres under cultivation. Modern successful tobacco farming was depending more and more upon the use of machinery to take the place of human strength. The other development was a trend in the increased number of very small farms on which the farmer attempted to grow much of the food needed by himself and his family. At the same time, he tried to work regularly at a job elsewhere. But rural towns and cities presented few such opportunities, and if the farmer had his problems, what about the sharecropper, especially when he lacked certain skills? For him, the opportunities were even fewer.

That left only one solution—a mass migration to the cities.

CHAPTER 66

S OONER OR LATER it was bound to happen. It happened sooner. First me and then Timmy. We got into a fight. Kids get into fights for all different kinds of reasons, and I hadn’t been in one since Ricky Odoms shell-shocked me back in first grade at Immaculate Conception. First, let me tell you about my fight. When confronting any potentially emotional and explosive situation, my mother always recommended one sure thing—counting backward from ten to one. Ever since my first fight with Ricky Odoms, I had adhered religiously to this sound piece of advice even when I had serious disagreements and misunderstandings with Retta, Timmy, Silas, and Juwon.

In this case, however, I could have counted from a million back down to one, and it wouldn’t have prevented what happened. Sometimes in life, we encounter people who simply don’t like us, for whatever reason, even though we may never have met them or done anything to them to merit their dislike. They might not even know you! They take one look at you and instantly see red. They might dislike the way you look or the way you talk or the way you walk, they might dislike you because of who you are, your personality, the things you believe, and the things that make you the very essence of who you are. They might dislike you because of who you’re related to. Meanwhile your mind is preoccupied, engaged in cerebral calisthenics, trying to figure out what in the world you did to offend the person. Have you ever encountered anybody who was that way, someone who disliked you so much that they didn’t have a single, rational reason for hating you?

That was the case with Bubba Breem and me. Bubba was twelve years old, a year older than me and an inch taller, and he outweighed me by ten pounds. Bubba was from Midway, a little rural community on the outskirts of Quincy. He along with sixty other colored folks rode an old green-painted school bus to the tobacco fields every morning. Bubba’s grandfather didn’t like my grandfather. In fact he disliked him so much that he moved away from Quincy years ago. I didn’t know this. I wasn’t even born when this Hatfield and McCoy development took place. Mr. Theotis Breem was sixty years old and remained at home. He didn’t work in the fields anymore. He suffered from rheumatic arthritis, a chronic disease whose cause was unknown. Mr. Theotis suffered from pain, inflammation, and swelling of the joints. Over the years, his joints had grown deformed, and he also suffered from muscle spasms. One time my grandfather went to see Mr. Theotis Breem and drove all the way to his house in Midway, but when my grandfather arrived, Mr. Breem refused to see him. His wife pleaded with him to come to the door, but he wouldn’t. Mrs. Breem apologized to my grandfather, and then my grandfather left. Mr. Theotis Breem and my grandfather had known each other ever since they lived in Colleyville, Georgia, but when they moved to Florida in 1927, the friendship turned sour when Mr. Trumane hired my grandfather as the lot man, a position coveted by Mr. Breem. Mr. Breem was an unforgiving man, and he blamed my grandfather for Mr. Trumane’s decision and for his poor failing health. From that day forward, Mr. Breem hated my grandfather with unabated passion and that hatred passed on and transmitted itself to his offspring because he never let the issue rest. Over the years his children and grandchildren began to actually believe my grandfather had done the old man an injustice.

When twelve-year-old Bubba found out I was Johnny Somersom’s grandson, he immediately measured me for a good dose of revenge. Naturally I never saw it coming. My mother had talked to me about a great many things, but she never talked about this. So one day when I came out of my tobacco row, Bubba sneaked up behind me and tripped me. Before I could hand Silas my armload of tobacco, I tumbled forward and spilled the tobacco. Bubba picked a perfect time. Mr. Horace Bigelow was occupied at that time, checking on one of the mule bridles. The bridle had snapped.

Bubba stepped back and pointed at me. The other kids gathered around and the taunting began in earnest. My granddaddy sez the Somersoms hafta make they own hats ’cause they heads so big, Bubba roared. Then something slowly dawned on me. No apology was forthcoming for that tripping Bubba gave me. It was definitely intentional. Silas offered me a hand, I grabbed it, and I slowly got up from the ground. My face was smeared with mud. I brushed myself off and looked slowly at Bubba. He sneered at me and went on. Meanwhile I counted backward to one like my mother always told me to. That was when Bubba made another wisecrack. The Somersoms ack like they the bosses ’round here, especially Mr. Johnny! By then I had exhausted my counts.

What did you say? I asked him.

You heard me! I said Mr. Johnny’s got the biggest head of all!

That’s what I thought you said! I countered. I plowed my fist directly into his nose as the blood gushed from his face. He staggered against the tobacco stalks, and I lit into him, ramming my head into his abdomen. We crashed into another row and like dominoes, the stalks hit the ground. Mr. Bigelow turned around when he heard the commotion and came running toward us. Bubba managed to get a headlock on me and I continued to pound my fists into his kidneys.

Mr. Bigelow yelled, Hey, you boys cut that out! You’re messin’ up the ’bacco! By the time he reached us, we had destroyed thirty-two tobacco stalks. He gave us a good scolding and sent me to the lot where my grandfather worked. Mr. Bigelow said I needed time to cool off. I rode on the back of a mule-drawn wagon taking fresh tobacco to the barns. If Bubba and I had to pay for the tobacco damages ourselves, it would have taken us a month on our combined salaries! Thank goodness we didn’t have to do that. That was how I spent three weeks at the lot. Working with my grandfather was a much-needed change.

Two days later the McCoys and Hatfields-like feud hit another gear. Timmy joined me at the lot. He ended up having to defend my grandfather’s honor and mine. Timmy had a different problem though. The person he fought was almost twice his size and five years older. Timmy was almost eight. Resourceful and always alert for opportunities, Timmy spotted a wire hanger lying nearby. He picked it up, unraveled it, and used it like a whip. The person fighting Timmy wasn’t as lucky as Bubba Breem, the kid I fought. Timmy turned him into a bloody mess. After our little misunderstandings with the Breems, many of the farm children thought all kids from the city were crazy and dangerous. The kid whose face underwent unexpected surgery by Timmy’s wire hanger was named Reggie Breem. Herman Breem, Bubba Breem’s cousin, never knew what hit him. He bled like a gutted hog and had to be rushed to Mr. Trumane’s doctor in town. When I saw Timmy’s head bobbing in the back seat of Mr. Trumane’s 1960 Chevrolet, I knew instinctively my grandfather and I had company.

Twenty-one years earlier when D. J. Russell was twelve years old and needed a full-time job, Mr. Trumane assigned my grandfather the task of mentor to him. Of course, Johnny Somersom wasn’t our grandfather then because we weren’t even born. That made me reflect on life’s ironies. At that time D. J. Russell, who later married my mother and eventually became our father, was only interested in helping feed his brothers and sisters. He and my mother hardly knew each other when he started to work with my grandfather. Now two decades later, Timmy and I were working with that same man, Johnny Somersom, who was now our grandfather. My grandfather worked hard and he sweated profusely. My grandmother said it was because of his salt intake. He always loaded his food with it. One time my grandmother hid all the salt shakers from him. He didn’t make a big deal about it. He simply bought another one and kept it conveniently tucked away in his pocket. When my grandmother wasn’t around or if she got up from the table to attend to something, he would take the salt out and sprinkle liberal doses of the white substance on his dinner. Ya food’s gotta have some seasonin’ he often said.

When we unexpectedly showed up at the lot it turned out to be a blessing in disguise for my grandfather. Timmy and I assumed a number of his smaller tasks, things like shucking corn and feeding it into the cultivator. We pitched hay into the stalls for the animals. We searched for eggs in the hayloft, and we worked in Mr. Trumane’s private garden where he grew cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, and carrots. This was also a blessing for Timmy and me, too. Working at the lot and inside the barn where the animals were kept helped us escape the oppressive sun and its drenching heat. The only time we didn’t escape it was when we worked in Mr. Trumane’s garden, but that never lasted more than a couple of hours.

My grandfather taught us how to use the rake, the hoe, and the spade in order to turn the soil and remove the weeds from around the vegetables. My grandfather never said anything to us about our fighting perhaps because of his strained relationship with Mr. Theotis Breem. In his many years of living, and with his wisdom, I had the feeling he knew boys would simply be boys, and there was no need to dwell on it. He probably had his own share of fights too while growing up in Colleyville, Georgia. Underneath it all though, I had another feeling too. My grandfather was happy that we stood up and fought for what we believed in, that we didn’t let others push us around and that we believed in the Somersom name. That name was a part of us, and whoever attacked it, attacked us. My grandfather never discussed this with Timmy and me because he didn’t have to. It was innately understood.

***

A few weeks later when our mother and grandparents went to town Timmy, Retta, Silas, Juwon, and I found ourselves alone. Sometimes when boredom set in and we had nothing to do, we skipped down the path that led to the chicken house and gathered eggs. To us the hen house was large, encompassing a fifty-feet-by-sixty-feet rectangular dwelling. It was covered on the top and on the sides with chicken wire. My grandfather and uncles had built wooden compartments where the hens nested and laid their eggs. Sometimes a clucking hen meant a new egg had miraculously materialized in one of the straw nests. When that happened, we immediately relieved the nest of its new occupant unless of course the hen was nesting or setting. That meant she was trying to hatch some baby chicks. You could always tell when that was the case. A saucer-shaped pile of raised feathers around the hen’s neck sent a quick warning. If that wasn’t enough to chase you away, a rooster helped emphasize the point by charging you, an aggressive act instantly understood and accepted. Roosters had sharp piercing spurs on the back of their legs. A wise person always backed away.

I picked up an egg, looked toward the hen house ceiling, and saw something catch my attention. Slick, sleek, and subtle, it moved above our heads along the ceiling. Its movement was smooth, slow, and graceful. It oozed and glided. I only saw a portion of its white underbelly, but right away, I knew what it was. It was legless and it crawled. It was the kind of animal that struck terror and fear into people. It was a reptile, rivaled only in size by its cousin the lizard. A large cotton snake had staked a claim to the hen house, a mere fifteen feet from the hog pen. It chose the hen house because it fed on the eggs laid by the hens. In stunned silence I watched the partially hidden creature jockey for a new position along the ceiling.

My mind drifted back to that day when I was four years old, and my father took me into the woods to look for kindling. I remembered the same kind of slow, graceful movement, the same sliding, gliding-like ease along the ground that first captured my fear years earlier when a smooth, slithering, black legless reptile moved underneath a rug of rotten twigs and leaves. I couldn’t master the fear that gripped me. It engulfed me, then it paralyzed me. Yet an instinctive, innate knowledge, inbred through years of human evolution had somehow been transmitted to me through a world of innocence. A primeval inborn tendency for self-preservation sent me a powerful nonverbal message, warning me of the potential dangers. The slithering black creature chilled my bones. I possessed the presence of mind to take refuge in the wagon. Trembling and frightened, I sat quietly in the wagon and watched my father attack an oak with an ax. I tried to regurgitate my fear of the snake by concentrating on the trees and watching the graceful way they fell toward the ground.

Now seven years later I watched this one, another slippery creature, a white one oozing along the beams of the hen house, spread fear and apprehension. Much like its relative that I saw years earlier, this one too blended well with its environment. I managed to see the snake because its body came into contact with a darkened patch along the ceiling. The contrast was unmistakable. Something else was also unmistakable—I still had not mastered my fear of snakes.

But I wasn’t the only one to catch sight of the legless creature. As I gazed at the ceiling, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Silas staring at it too. Like a laser, he too had honed in on the reptile. That really didn’t surprise me. Things like that always interested Silas because he liked reptiles, creatures like lizards, tortoises, turtles, and frogs. Why shouldn’t snakes fascinate him too? Years later I discovered he had crushes on alligators and crocodiles too! Silas was indeed different from the rest of my brothers and sister—and me. Interestingly Retta, Timmy, and Juwon never noticed the creature. They were too busy gathering eggs.

A pitchfork stood in an upright position along the wall of the hen house near the entrance. I grabbed it and walked underneath the spot where I saw the snake, never taking my eyes off the ceiling. That was when Timmy, Retta, and Juwon took notice. They watched first the pitchfork in my hand, then the ceiling, all the time warily approaching me. Like telepathy, Silas had read my mind and was already parked underneath the ceiling. I gripped the pitchfork tighter and slowly raised it toward the ceiling. Then with all my strength and all my might, I thrust it against the ceiling. I jammed it into the beams, but the ceiling was not sturdy and insecure. The pitchfork ripped through the rotten, termite-infested ceiling like it was paper, and to my great horror, the huge white monster crashed out of its lair, its body long, twisted, and elongated. Our eyes widened. It was much bigger than I ever imagine! In a word, we dipped. On pure instinct, we scattered and we slipped into the wind. We ran like hell! In a millisecond and like Olympian sprinters in a competition, we vacated the hen house in record time, blazing the path back toward the house and never looking back! We raced past the chimney and didn’t stop until we reached the front steps. Breathing hard and nearly out of breath, we skipped up the steps and plopped down, finding refuge on the porch. I lay on my back, closed my eyes, and held my heart. The image of that large pale-white serpent falling from the ceiling in the hen house and twisting its body in the air like some awful demon haunted and tortured me.

I heard a car pull up. I quickly opened my eyes and sat up. It was my grandfather. In the car with him were my grandmother, my mother, William Paul, Wesley, and David Alfred—my three uncles. They had just returned from town, and the car was loaded with bags of groceries. We walked down the steps to give them a hand. My grandfather handed me a can of cane syrup and momentarily stared at me. What’s the matter, Jamarius? he asked me. Nothin’, Granddaddy. Why? I asked. He threw a sack of flour across his broad shoulders and grunted. Then he headed up the front steps. Only then did he answer my question. ’Cause you sweatin’ and breathin’ like you done seen a ghost, he finally said as he lumbered through the front room.

After removing the last item from the car and taking it into the house, I came back outside and sat on the front steps. That was when something slowly dawned on me. In all that excitement, everybody was accounted for except Silas. I jogged my memory. When we reached the front porch Retta, Timmy, Juwon, and I were all there but no Silas! Where was he, I wondered. That was when a terrible thought took hold of me. Perhaps the snake fell on Silas and bit him. After all when it crashed from the ceiling, it fell near Silas. But I would have remembered if the snake fell on Silas because he stood next to me. Why didn’t he run like the rest of us? While my grandparents and my uncles and my mother put away the groceries Retta, Timmy, and Juwon assisted them. Now I was left alone to ponder and wonder whether Silas was okay. That meant only one thing—retracing my steps to the hen house. My heart pounded a hundred times a minute. I couldn’t rid my mind of Silas being bitten and swelling up from the snake’s venom. I began to perspire. I wiped my forehead and just when I mustered up enough courage to walk back to the hen house, Silas appeared. He held an unraveled wire hangar in his hand. That wasn’t what grabbed my attention! Attached to the end of the wire was the long white body of the snake. A shiver shot up my spine. Somehow Silas had managed to kill it, and he had tied the snake’s head to the end of the wire! Now he was dragging it around the yard like it was a trophy. I guess to him it was. To this day I do not know how Silas managed to kill that snake. He was only six years. old! Later I learned the snake was nonpoisonous, so that definitely gave Silas an edge in staying alive, and in case the snake did bite him, we were spared the horror of watching him die a slow agonizing death. Frozen by fear, immobilized by curiosity, and struck by awe, I sat on the edge of those steps and watched Silas drag that large reptile along the edge of the yard. Its long black forked tongue hung out of its mouth. Silas was now in his element, in his own world, and completely oblivious to me. I sat on the steps like I was in a trance and followed his every move. He turned at the edge of the yard and disappeared behind the house, pulling his souvenir behind him.

The book of Genesis states that the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field. Silas was not a beast. I surmised because of that, he was more subtle than the snake and perhaps that was how he managed to kill it. To the rest of us in the family, Silas often remained a mystery, an enigma. My mother said Silas was a strange child because he was born in March. To her, March babies were always a little unusual.

Of all the things I remembered about Silas over the years, that incident remained indelibly etched in my mind, a living memory of his tenacity, a testimony to his resourcefulness, and a symbol of his passionate spirit and zeal for things most people wouldn’t even consider, let alone attempt.

Hunting for eggs was always a welcomed change from the daily grind of farm work. After our fights, Timmy and I discovered a whole new farm world working with our grandfather, and nowhere was this more epitomized than working at the lot. Every day Monday through Friday, and sometimes on Saturday and Sunday, twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, Timmy and I went to the barn, climbed up the ladder to the hayloft, and gathered eggs. Those little bantam hens laid more than their share, more than the New Hampshires and Rhode Island Reds.

Timmy and I liked going to the hayloft in the afternoon because we escaped the stifling heat and boiling hot sun. The temperature in the hayloft was always cool, and a breeze blew south to southwesterly every afternoon directly across the barn’s huge rear opening. It was where we stood that day when we rounded up the cows, and David Alfred showed us around the farm. Timmy and I rarely missed an opportunity to cautiously approach the opening and stand in the breeze. The cool wind blew in our faces, and we breathed in its rich, life-sustaining freshness. It gave us our first idea of what air conditioning must have been like. The breeze lasted a good three minutes and from where we stood it allowed us to take in the breathtaking sights all the more. The rolling green hills, the thick quiet woods, and the grazing Black Angus cows in the distance painted a picture-perfect setting, an idyllic glimpse of rural life’s raw, natural beauty. We looked directly below us and saw the red clay ditch that led to the floor of the barn.

Early one Saturday morning Timmy and I arrived at the barn and raced up the ladder to the hayloft. My grandfather didn’t know we were up there. No one did. We hid in the hay, looked below, and watched the action. We were in for a treat, getting more than we bargained for. The day before a group of the men saddled horses and mules, rounded up a large number of the Black Angus cows, and drove them to the lot to be sold. The men herded them toward the large barn and pinned them inside the fence adjacent to the lot. The cows pushed and fought for space inside the narrow fence. The men used the ditch to funnel the cows into the barn to give them medical shots and then to send them through a man-made narrow path supported and secured by metal beams. The young calves stayed close to the cows and followed them through the metal path. The path led directly to a large opening in the rear of a huge truck attached to a semi-trailer that housed the cattle. The big red trailer was porous, filled with many little openings to allow air to enter the trailer. We watched the frisky, hyperactive black herbivores promenade around the barn. Sometimes the men had to corner the animals inside the barn and chase them through the metal path.

Like lemmings headed toward the precipice or salmon swimming upstream to reclaim their place of birth, the cows flooded the ditch and fought their way toward the barn where the men waited for them. The cows pushed and sloshed in the crevice, the red clay mud thickened and the animals found themselves almost knee-deep in a chalky mire. A soft carpet of peanut shells eased the treacherous pathway and the cows, their heads bobbing up and down, ambled slowly into the barn. They knew the routine. They had done this before when they were calves.

Suddenly a terrible thought ambushed me. These cows were being targeted for death! They were headed for the slaughterhouses. I wondered if my cow was in the group. Weeks had passed since that day. I was greeted by a cow as I sat under a tree in the pasture. My uncle had warned me about the dangers of trying to make pets out of farm animals. But I ignored him. Every chance I got, I climbed into the pasture and walked nonchalantly along the edge of the barbed-wire fence until I was out of sight. I did this because I suspected David Alfred was watching me. Once out of the range of his prying eyes. I raced through the tall grass and settled under a big oak tree in the middle of the pasture not far from the woods. I had to test out a theory I had about herbivores. Day after day, for weeks, I went to the same spot under the tree and waited and waited, waiting for a cow to approach. Occasionally one or two of them would approach me cautiously and curiously inspect me. They stood a respectfully safe distance, chewing their cuds the whole time, watching me, and turning their heads sideways from time to time to better measure the distance between us.

Then after the second week, something unusual happened. One of the cows came so close to me I could reach out and touch her, but I didn’t, because she might flee. So I sat under that tree, remained motionless, and simply watched her as she watched me. The cow swished its tail and chewed its cud. It was an amusing situation. Cautiously she inched closer, curiously lowering her head and sniffing the air near where I sat. She emitted a low-sounding moo, swished her tail again, turned around, and looked at the other cows as though soliciting advice. By then two cows approached, their silent movements animated only by the sound of the high grass. They chewed their cuds and watched me with curiosity. I think they were trying to decide what I was. I surmised the cows probably thought I was some new species that had been recently placed in the pasture, and now they were forced to share their grass with me. After coming to the pasture every day for the past two weeks, the cows finally accepted my presence like I was a tree and like I was a part of the landscape. As the cow stood close to me, I reached behind my back and pulled up a handful of grass. I brought the grass from behind my back slowly and extended my arm toward the cow, offering it grass. The cow pulled its head back and looked suspiciously at me. She continued to chew her cud, her black eyes rolling around in her head. She snorted and then slowly, very slowly leaned her head forward and carefully took the grass from my hand as though she knew exactly where the grass ended and my hand began. I fought my elation and beamed with joy. It was just as I thought! A kinship did exist between man and animals, and I believed that was true of man and any creature. It was simply a question of establishing some common ground, trust, mutual respect for each other, and a need to connect, to establish a rapport of some kind.

After that initial contact every chance I got, I went to the pasture and sat under the tree, and every time I sat there, the cows appeared, more and more of them. Then one day it happened. As I gave the cow the grass, she didn’t move or run away as though she knew I wanted to rub her forehead. She stood there and let my hand slowly touch her hard smooth head. I moved my hand slowly behind her neck and rubbed it. The cow simply stood there, chewing her cud. Admittedly, cows were not wild animals, they were domesticated, but they lived in the pasture. Although they were fenced in, they still retained certain characteristics in common with wild animals. For instance, they ran away from those whom they did not know or trust, and if they felt imminently threatened, they would butt and kick. I did not deceive myself about these animals, and I didn’t ignore everything David Alfred warned me about the animals, about their being potentially dangerous. I had seen the young bulls fight for the right to mate with the young cows, and their skirmishes were anything but friendly. But that was natural, the bulls obeying the laws of nature. That was what they did. They fought to determine who was the stronger so that they could pass on their superior genetic traits. Certainly, animals are dangerous, what animal isn’t? One could say the same about human beings. Aren’t humans potentially dangerous, too? After all, of all the great predators in the animal kingdom, the ones at the very top of the food chain, the greatest of these are not the lions, the tigers, the bears, the wolves, the Komodo dragons, the sharks, or the killer whales of the great oceans but man himself.

So the cows became accustomed to me. Sometimes as I sat under the tree they came and sat down beside me. Gradually even a massive Black Angus bull allowed me to touch his forehead too. Eventually I introduced Timmy, Retta, Silas, and Juwon to my little world in the pasture. They took a liking to the animals and the animals took a liking to them too. Animals and children can often develop unique, successful relationships. I think two things account for this. First, children live in a world of innocence, and sometimes that innocence can be perceived by the animals. Years later when I read about documented accounts of wolves raising children, it didn’t shock me. Just as animals can sense fear in humans, they can also sense innocence. We meant them no harm and through instinct, they were able to perceive that. At heart, we were city children. We never fully accepted the rigid farm law that the animals were really living food. To us they were pets, something that my grandfather often reminded us they were not.

He never really got upset with us because we took a liking to the animals. I think maybe it was because he remembered how Katie Somersom, his wife and our grandmother, was once fond of a Hereford bull, a huge white-faced animal with a beautiful red coat. The bull weighed over one thousand pounds! This happened many, many years ago when my grandmother was a child living in Colleyville, Georgia. To us the animals were no different from a dog or a cat. The cows were simply bigger. My grandfather knew we weren’t really farm children, and he was aware of the dangers associated with this kind of attachment. He tried to protect us from the dangers, but he was unsuccessful. The cow who seemed the friendliest to us, the one we loved the most, we named Daisy.

At any rate, Timmy and I watched the action that morning in the barn as the cows were being sold. We had a perfect view from our perch in the hayloft. We could see everything. Mr. Trumane stood off to the side talking with my grandfather and two White men. Timmy and I couldn’t hear what they were saying. As the sharecroppers herded and separated the herbivores we caught a glimpse of something unusual.

Do you think Daisy’s in there, Jamarius? Timmy asked.

I don’t know. I shrugged. She might.

Maybe she ain’t. They didn’t round up all the cows. Some of ’em still in the woods down by the swamp. Maybe Daisy’s wit ’em.

Maybe. I sure hope so, Timmy. Suddenly something grabbed Timmy’s attention.

Did you see that? Timmy asked.

Yeah, I saw something, I said, but I wutn’t sure what it was.

Look! Timmy said, getting excited.

You better keep your voice down, I said. Granddaddy might hear you.

Normally my grandfather would have called us by now, and he would have given us a list of things to do, but with the cattle buyers in town, keeping us busy was less important now. We heard one of the men shout below, Cut ’er out! The sharecroppers tried to separate her from the rest of the cows. Timmy and I slowly rose up from our bellies and peeped over the edge of the hayloft. Our eyes were focused on a cow making circular movements inside the barn. She seemed agitated and she breathed heavily, trotting aimlessly about the barn. The men cordoned her off in one area of the barn near the south corner. The cow commanded our attention because something protruded from her hind side. At first Timmy and I did a double take, but it was unmistakable. Two little feet stuck out of the cow’s backside. It looked creepy the way the feet stuck out. It was our introduction to nature’s greatest miracle—life and birth. The cow lay slowly down on a carpet of crunchy brown peanut shells and began to give birth. Ten minutes later a little dark four-legged creature squirted out. Timmy and I watched wide-mouthed, our eyes transfixed on the sight of something our minds found difficult to process. Being young boys, naturally we paid close attention to the cow’s body. We couldn’t believe how wide its vagina stretched! That was when we made the connection—when women give birth, they must stretch too. Speechless, frozen, and completely captivated by the phenomenon, we watched the calf slowly descend, its mother straining to push it out—first its two front hooves and legs, then its shiny black head, and finally its weak, thin body. A pale soft membrane, the placenta, and fetal afterbirth covered the calf. The cow licked the calf clean. The remains of its afterbirth hung down along the cow’s rear legs, an umbilical symbol of what had just taken place. The weak, cute little offspring with its eyes partially closed and its feet barely able to support its weight clung close to its mother.

Timmy and I leaned back in the hay and looked at each other. A bad taste developed in our mouths. We couldn’t eat for two whole days! The sight of all that afterbirth ruined our appetites. Worse than that, a swelling tide of saliva slowly surrounded the insides of our mouths and literally destroyed our taste for almost everything.

We couldn’t stop spitting for a week.

***

The reason my grandfather never wanted us to become too closely attached to the animals only became clear to me after Short-Short was killed—painfully clear. We first came into contact with Short-Short the second day we arrived at my grandparents. He was a cute little red-haired, curly-tailed piglet, less than a month old. We named him Short-Short because one of his legs was shorter than the rest. We took an immediate liking to Short-Short because he was the runt of the litter and always had difficulty getting his share of the sow’s milk and later his share of the feed. Fight though he might, he could never quite muster enough strength to get to his favorite nipple or get to his favorite spot along the feed trough. That was when Retta, Timmy, Silas, Juwon, and I started saving some of the choicest table scraps and bits for Short-Short, feeding him separately near the edge of the hog pen. When the other hogs came, we ran them away. We would feed only Short-Short.

So now Short-Short became our new project. We still went to the pasture to visit Daisy the cow and the other Black Angus, but Short-Short stole our hearts. His curly little tail and hindquarters, his little rubbery snout, his floppy little ears, and his shiny little hooves caught our attention. Even as young kids from the city, we had an innate understanding of respect for the sow. We knew she could be dangerous if she suspected we meant harm to her piglet. Like all animals, I supposed she sensed we were children and innocent of any malice. She seemed pleased that we took a liking to Short-Short and his well-being. As though stamping approval for our relationship with Short-Short, whenever we came to the hog pen usually with some table scraps, the huge black-spotted white sow would use her nose to separate the piglets and then push Short-Short toward us where we fed him. When I told my uncle Wesley about it, his first concern was our safety. He warned us about the dangers of