Let the Circle Be Unbroken

by Mildred D. Taylor

  Through these days the boys and I continued to trudge to school and, once there, to scramble for one of the two potbellied stoves which warmed each building. After putting in our eight hours, we trudged home again. Uncle Hammer, Papa’s older brother, came Christmas Eve, but the day after Christmas he was gone again, unable to stay longer. Papa and Mr. Morrison filled their days with winter chores—mending tools and making new ones, and on milder days stringing fences and chopping wood—and talked of spring and the fields. Big Ma, who enjoyed every season, settled down to her winter quilting, spreading out the pieces of her pattern by the fire as soon as breakfast and the morning chores were finished, to sew and talk with other women of the community until it was time to put supper on. As for Mama, she had her students to keep her busy.

  Since the school year had begun in the fall, Little Willie and Clarence had been stopping by afternoons to ask Mama’s help; now the number of students who came by daily after school had grown, and Mama practically ran a school after school. And she loved it. While the weather was still good, she often sat right on the front lawn, her legs folded beneath her, her students gathered around. Now in winter they filled the sitting area in the hour or two they could snatch before attending to their evening chores as Mama patiently explained what they did not understand. On Saturdays she actually taught lessons of her own in addition to reviewing the lessons of other teachers and, frankly, I was somewhat amazed by how many students sacrificed a morning free of school to come.

  As January became February and February mellowed toward March, the boys and I looked forward to the last day of school, which would come at mid-March. School usually ended at this time so that students could return to the fields for spring planting. Had the school year extended any longer, classrooms would have been empty, for cotton sustained life, and no matter how greatly learning was respected, the cotton had to be planted, chopped, weeded, and picked if the family was to survive. Few parents expected their children to do any work other than what they and their parents had done, and education was usually sacrificed if a choice had to be made between it and the fields. Students knew this and understood it, and because they knew nothing else, for the most part did not resent it. But there were some boys and girls, like Moe Turner, who, though they did not know what else they could do outside of farming, knew that they did not want to spend their lives sharecropping, and each year they planned their escape from it.

  “We gonna make it this year all right,” Moe said for the third year in a row as we walked from school. “I mean it this time. Papa and me, we figurin’ on planting ten acres in cotton. Crop come good, we can get off ole man Montier’s place.”

  My comment to that ridiculous statement was: “Boy, you know good and well y’all ain’t hardly gonna—”

  “Cassie, wouldja hush!”

  I cut my eyes at Stacey and grew silent, not out of any resignation to his so-called authority but because I figured if he wanted to let Moe continue to delude himself about this sharecropping business, then that was up to him. Yet he knew as well as I did that there was little chance of Moe’s family going anywhere at the end of cotton picking. The Turners had sharecropped on the Montier plantation since the 1880’s and it was less than likely that one good crop would free them from doing the same for another year.

  As sharecroppers they were tied to the land for as long as Mr. Montier wanted them there. Mr. Montier provided everything for them—their land, their mule, their plow, their seed—in return for a portion of their cotton. When they needed food or other supplies, they bought on credit at a store approved by Mr. Montier where high interest rates upped the price tremendously on everything they bought. At year’s end, when all the cotton had been sold and the accounts were figured by Mr. Montier, the Turners were usually in more debt than they had been at the beginning of the year. And as long as they were in debt, they could not just up and leave the land on their own, not unless they wanted the sheriff after them. And here Moe was talking about earning enough to quit sharecropping. It was pure foolishness, and if I knew it, Stacey had to know it too.

  Nevertheless, a quiet rebuke of me welled from not only Stacey but Christopher-John and Little Man as well for having said anything. Moe, however, continued his trek seemingly unaffected by my words. In deep thought he walked mechanically along the road, taking no notice of me. Then, when I was beginning to think that Moe’s sharecropping hallucinations had been completely dispelled by my remark, he said, “I know y’all think we can’t do it . . .”

  “Now, Moe, I ain’t said that,” objected Stacey, “and you can’t pay no ’tention to Cassie here.”

  I shot a hostile glance Stacey’s way.

  “Anyways, I know it’s hard,” continued Moe. “Times being like they is and all. But I figure times been hard all my life. Now don’t seem so much worse’n any other. Like I told my daddy, we got us as much chance of makin’ it this year as any other I seen.”

  “You ain’t seen but fourteen,” I pointed out.

  “What your daddy say?” Stacey asked.

  Moe waited a moment before he answered. “Said he give up tryin’ to make it. Said he give up long time ago. All he care ’bout now is seeing us younguns growed and off that place.”

  Stacey stooped to avoid the low-hanging branch of a sweet gum tree and, breaking off a twig, stripped it down and chewed on it a moment before turning again to Moe. “I ain’t saying you can’t do it, Moe. Papa say you can do jus’ ’bout anything you set your mind to do, you work hard enough. But you can’t never tell ’bout cotton prices. ’fore the government program we weren’t getting more’n six cents a pound for good long-staple cotton. And even with the government stepping in and we getting some twelve cents a pound last year, you can’t never tell ’bout what’ll happen ’tween planting time and picking. Then, too, you know with the government restrictions you can’t plant much as you wanna.”

  Moe’s gentle features settled into firm lines of determination. “Gotta get out,” he whispered hoarsely. “Gotta.”

  Stacey and I both stared at Moe. Usually such a levelheaded boy, he was totally illogical when it came to the subject of sharecropping.

  “Yeah,” Stacey sympathized. “I know.”

  “No, you don’t,” Moe said quietly. “Y’all got y’all’s own land.” There was no bitterness in his voice; he was only stating the truth.

  Stacey nodded, still chewing on his stick. Then he said: “Look here, Moe, you thought ’bout what if you don’t? I mean, ’sides the low price of cotton, there’s all the deducts to figure, and I understand you can’t never tell ’bout them.”

  Moe sighed heavily as he considered the reality of the “deducts,” the credit charges made by a sharecropper during the year which could wipe out all the money earned before the cotton seed had even hit the ground. “Don’t care ’bout no deducts,” he said impassively. “We gonna get out anyway. I’ll get me some WPA work if I hafta. Maybe even the CCC.”

  “WPA?” I questioned, looking from Moe to Stacey. “What’s WPA??’

  “Don’t know if you get any money on the CCC,” Stacey said.

  “I said what’s WPA?” I knew what the CCC was. Civilian Conservation Corps. Stacey and other boys in the area had certainly talked about it enough. Another one of Mr. Roosevelt’s programs, it trained boys in agricultural and forestry methods, and several boys from the community had gone to join it. Stacey had even wanted to go, but he was too young, and besides, Mama and Papa wouldn’t have let him go anyway. But I didn’t know about this WPA. “Well, what is it?”

  Stacey sighed at my persistence. “Mama say they’re projects or something President Roosevelt’s setting up to give a lot of folks jobs. Works Progress Administration, I think she said. That hospital they’re talkin’ ’bout building on the old Huntington place, that’s one of ’em.” He turned from me and asked of Moe, “You’d leave this place and go off alone? You do that, then what your daddy gonna do?”

  “Leave it?” Moe repeated inc
redulously. “Leave it? You doggone right I’d leave it! Leave it and ole man Montier and that nothin’ son of his too.” A mean scowl burnt across Moe’s usually pleasant face. “You know what that ole man done the other day? Told me I oughta quit being so selfish and leave school and stay home and help my daddy. Said he thought I’d gotten just ’bout all the schooling I needed to be a farmer . . . like I care what he thought.”

  Moe frowned deeply. He had it in his mind that whatever he was going to turn out to be, it wasn’t going to be a farmer. For the last four years, since he had finished the fourth-grade school near Smellings Creek, he, along with a few other boys and girls, had walked the three-and-a-half-hour distance to school each day, leaving their homes before dawn and not returning until after dusk. Most boys and girls who attempted the trek gave it up after a year, but not Moe. Moe was determined to finish twelfth grade and get his high school diploma, and if Mr. Bastion Montier didn’t understand that, then that was just too bad.

  “You tell your papa what Mr. Montier said?” asked Stacey.

  Moe shook his head. “I just told Mr. Montier I wasn’t planning on being no farmer and I needed my schooling.”

  Stacey eyed Moe. “You best watch what you say.”

  Moe gestured wildly. “Ah, I ain’t said nothin’ but the truth. I ain’t gonna go talkin’ outa turn or nothin’—you think I wanna get us all killed? But I tell you this one thing. I’m gonna get us some money and get us off his place any way I hafta. I’m tired of them Montiers and I ain’t ’bout to let these folks down here do me the way they done T.J.—”

  Moe stopped abruptly and glanced around self-consciously. Christopher-John, Stacey, and I avoided his eyes, but Little Man stared directly at Moe in silent accusation before looking away into the forest. Since Mr. Jamison had come a few weeks ago and told us his appeal for a new trial had been rejected, we had spoken very little of T.J. It was too painful.

  Moe, having said too much and knowing it, continued along the road in silence. As we neared the crossroads where he would leave us, he started to speak again, but stopped as a car appeared in the crossing, coming from the north. The driver saw us, waved, and stopped the car.

  “Speak of the devil,” sighed Moe. “Lord, what he want?”

  Driving the car was Joe Billy Montier. His sister, Selma, sat beside him. Joe Billy rolled down his window as we approached. “Hey, Moe,” he said, then nodded toward the rest of us. “How y’all doing?”

  We said we were fine.

  “You on your way home?” Joe Billy asked of Moe.

  “Yessir,” answered Moe, as he was expected to do.

  “I just picked Miz Selma up at Jefferson Davis and we going on home now. You want, you can get in.”

  “Miz” Selma was no more than fourteen. Joe Billy looked to be eighteen or so.

  Moe looked directly at Joe Billy. “I gotta stop somewheres else ’fore I go home, but thank ya kindly anyways.”

  I knew Moe didn’t have anywhere to go but home. I think Joe Billy knew it too, but he only nodded and rolled up his window. Gassing the Ford, he sped away.

  “Least he offered you a ride,” I said.

  “Oh, Joe Billy’s all right most of the time, I guess,” Moe conceded. “It’s mostly his daddy I can’t stand.”

  We said good-bye to Moe, who would follow the Granger Road as far north as Soldiers Road and from there turn westward toward his home, which was just this side of Smellings Creek. It would be dark by the time he got there.

  * * *

  When the boys and I arrived home, we found the county extension agent, Mr. John Farnsworth, talking to Papa in the driveway. Both Papa and Mr. Farnsworth nodded as we came up, then continued their conversation.

  “Now, David,” said Mr. Farnsworth, “I know how things were for y’all in thirty-three when you all signed up, but it was a new program then and a lotta things went wrong. I figured the government should’ve waited until thirty-four to begin their crop-reduction program ’stead of plowing up cotton ready for picking in the middle of thirty-three and leaving it to rot in the fields. Now I ain’t liked that any more than anybody else.”

  The boys and I stopped at the well to get some water, an excuse to listen further.

  “But I ain’t had nothing to do with that. That decision came from Washington.” Mr. Farnsworth sighed and glanced out to the west field, already planted in corn. “And, David, I ain’t had nothing to do with that check business either.”

  Papa only looked at Mr. Farnsworth and said nothing. The boys and I waited, knowing too well how put out Papa was with the government’s crop-reduction program. Although I found the government’s program confusing and understood very little about it, one thing I did understand was that the government had asked us, along with all the other farmers, to plow up nearly half of our cotton two years ago, cotton already planted and blooming in the fields, and they were supposed to pay us for it. Well, they had paid us all right, with a government check. The only problem was that Harlan Granger’s name had been on it.

  Mr. Granger had claimed that he held a first mortgage on our cotton crop, and as Mr. Farnsworth explained it later, the government’s policy was to list first mortgage holders as copayees on the checks so that they would be sure to receive any money owed to them. Of course Mr. Granger had never held a mortgage on our crop, but since it was his word against ours, it seemed useless to fight him. As for the check, there was no way for us to cash it without Mr. Granger’s signature, and if Mr. Granger signed, part of the money would go to him. So Papa, Mama, and Big Ma had decided not to sign the check at all and Harlan Granger hadn’t pressed them to sign; after all, it wasn’t the money he wanted. He just didn’t want us to have it.

  “Now I know what you thinking,” said Mr. Farnsworth. “I’m the one brought you the check to endorse and I’m the one representing the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. Well, that’s both so. But the truth of the matter is, all the people that signed for the program had to list everybody had a lien on their cotton. You remember that?”

  “I remember,” Papa said. “I remember too I ain’t put Harlan Granger’s name on that contract.”

  “Well . . . he come after you signed and said he had a lien. . . . I had to put his name down.”

  Papa was silent.

  Again Mr. Farnsworth glanced away. “Thing is, I had no idea the government was gonna issue the checks like they done, made out to the signer and to anybody had a first mortgage on the signer’s crops. It was my understanding the check was supposed to go to the farmers to give them some relief.”

  “Well,” said Papa, “that ain’t what happened.”

  Mr. Farnsworth nodded before going on. “Now last year you all didn’t join the program and you planted as much cotton as you wanted, but what’d it get you? You lost over a quarter of your crop anyway. If you’d’ve been part of the program, then you would’ve at least had the money the government would’ve paid you for not planting all your cotton acres.

  “I don’t see it that way.”

  “Well, I told you I would’ve made sure Mr. Granger’s name wasn’t on the check this time, even if he made the claim again. Anyway, it’s done with now and nothing we can do ’bout it. Last year’s contract was for thirty-four and thirty-five, so unless you want to sign for this year now, you won’t have to worry ’bout a contract . . . but you are gonna have to worry ’bout the new cotton tax.”

  I glanced over at Stacey; he kept his eyes on Papa and Mr. Farnsworth.

  “The government’s gonna have its way on this thing, David, and there ain’t nothing you or me or anybody else much can do about it.” He turned back to his car. “You’ve got the tax exemption forms there so you can put in, for your bale tags. You’ll need them to show how much you’re allowed to grow when you take your cotton to market.”

  At the car he hesitated and looked again at Papa. “You know, David, I don’t like these restrictions any more’n you or most anybody else. Wish the government had just hired a
gents of their own to do this restricting business, and let us extension agents do what we was hired to do—help you farmers with your crops. Most folks don’t seem to understand that. They blame me for everything’s gone wrong. . . .” He looked at Papa as if wanting his understanding, then got into the car. “See you next week,” he said and backed out of the drive.

  As Mr. Farnsworth headed east on the road, Mr. Granger’s sleek silver Packard came from the other direction and the two cars stopped. Papa watched them a moment, then crossed to the well. “Can I get a little of that too?” he said.

  “Sure thing, Papa,” said Little Man. He filled the dipper with fresh water and handed it to him.

  “Papa, this here cotton tax,” I said. “What that mean?”

  Before Papa could answer, Stacey laid a hand on his shoulder and nodded toward the road. “Look like Mr. Granger’s coming up here.” We all stared at the Packard, keeping our eyes on it.

  Of the four major landowners in the area—the others were the Montiers, the Harrisons, and the Walkers—Harlan Granger had the largest holdings and was the most powerful. He was accustomed to getting what he wanted, when he wanted it, and one thing he had long wanted but had not gotten was our land.

  The Packard sped up the road and slowed at the driveway. Mr. Granger honked his horn, summoning Papa. Papa stared at the car, then finished his water and gave the dipper back to Little Man before going down. The boys and I waited until he was halfway to the road before following him as far as the mulberry bush.

  “David.”

  “Mr. Granger.”

  “Just seen Mr. Farnsworth on the road. Said he’d just been here to see y’all.”

  “That’s right.”

  “He told me he spoke to you ’bout the government’s tax.”

  “He did.”