Mississippi Cotton

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Mississippi Cotton Page 14

by Paul H. Yarbrough


  He leaned back against the trunk of the tree and took a big bite of his sandwich. “The colored people wanted to be free, but kinda like Mr. Booker T. said, it was one thing to be free, something else to know how to survive. So in their free condition, Yankee carpetbaggers and Southern scalawags used them, and it ended up with most whites in the South bein’ real bitter against the colored people.”

  “Why were they bitter, BB?” Taylor asked.

  “Well, the Southern people and the Yankee people, too, always thought that God had made the colored folks somewhat underneath them. But the Southern people saw it as kinda like a parent taking care of their children. So when the carpetbaggers and scalawags looted and stole and gave it to the free black men, the Southern white folks felt betrayed.

  “And I thought that was pretty bad. I mean the Southern white people always treated the colored people better than the Yankees treated them; at least that’s what I found out from being in the Army.”

  “Even though they’d been slaves?” Casey asked.

  BB wadded up his wax paper and put it in his sack. He picked up the egg shells and put them in, too. “Well, the truth is, the Yankee slave traders was the ones that brought them over here in the first place. But they didn’t see nothin’ wrong with it. They were jus’ buyin’ people from Africa that had been made slaves by other colored people in Africa. Lots of them got sold to North and South at first, but pretty soon the North didn’t have no more use for them and they sold most of them to South America and Cuba and other places way, way south. The South bought a lot of ’em for work in the fields. Better to have been a slave in the South than in Brazil or somewhere down there. Down there nobody cared, and they would jus’ get worked to death.”

  “Why didn’t the North have any use for them?” Casey asked.

  “Well, they didn’t have rich land that us Southerners did. And they saw themselves as traders and industry folks. Any farms they had were small and weren’t goin’ to have much future for them. So they sold them to Southern folks who needed the help.”

  “You learned all this after you got in the army, BB?” I asked.

  “Well, mostly. I guess I found out in the army that it didn’t matter whether white boys North or South wanted to be with me. I found out I was fightin’ for my home. And my home was Mississippi. And I wanted to be with some Mississippi boys, Southern boys. And it made me think about Johnny Vaught and how he tried to get as many Mississippi boys as he could for his teams. His Rebel teams. His University Grays.”

  “But you said none of the white boys North or South wanted to be with you,” Casey blurted.

  “That’s right, Mr. Casey. But white Southern boys didn’t want to be with me cause their mommas and daddies had told them about how the scalawags and carpetbaggers had used black folk to beat down the white folks. Northern white boys didn’t wanna be with me ‘cause they just didn’t like black folks.”

  Taylor handed me his and Casey’s garbage, and I wadded it up and put it in my sack. “You’ve sure read a lot, BB,” I said. “You should’ve gone to college instead of war.”

  “Well, I jus’ wanted the white folks to know I could fight for my land, too. And my land is Mississippi, my land is the South. I’m Southern and that’s not black or white, that’s gray. Robert E. Lee wore gray. And so did Stonewall Jackson. And both of those men prayed with colored folks, in church and out. And Jeff Davis sure didn’t fight no war ‘cause he hated blacks. He had an adopted black son.” He winked at us. “Most folks don’t know that.”

  “Well—” I started.

  “I’ve prob’y said enough now. I need to get back to work anyway. You boys gonna keep swimmin’?” He looked at the sun, and smiled white.

  The three of us were sitting Indian style. We were still caught up in BB’s history lesson. We wanted to hear more. I had known colored people since I could remember, and I don’t remember any of them ever being mean. They were just there, and if you knew them, you knew them, if you didn’t, you didn’t. Some were hard working and some were lazy, my daddy said. But I had heard him say that about white people, too.

  I had once heard some man at my daddy’s warehouse call a colored man a lazy nigger. I was shuffled along into the office while my daddy said something to the man. Daddy later told me that a lot of people used that word, but it was wrong to say it to a colored person. It was kind of a bullying thing, and the colored person would be hurt and could not really respond. He had said it was an unkindness to say it.

  I wanted to ask BB if he had ever been called a nigger. But I didn’t. I knew one thing—he’d never been called a lazy nigger—except maybe by a liar. He was what Cousin Trek had said—the hardest working man you ever saw, white or colored. And he was real smart.

  CHAPTER 14

  The week passed in a blink. We worked in the field Friday morning; it seemed like the hottest day of the summer. Cousin Trek said it was a hundred and three. We saw The Man from Planet X Friday night and the next chapter of Radar Men from the Moon.

  As usual Commando Cody had been about to die and we’d have to wait to see how he would survive. He had been trapped in a cave with a lava flow, caused by the Moon Men melting the mountain. Taylor guessed that he would turn invisible; I guessed he would find an escape cave. Casey said he was going to die.

  The Friday night picture show never got too old for us. It was almost an adventure, being somewhere where all your friends were, and everybody wanting to be there. Talking about things that weren’t real, like Commando Cody or Flash Gordon, but we acted like they were. It was like a ball game, and you weren’t positive how it was going to end.

  Saturday we worked until noon. Late in the afternoon, we ate watermelon out on the screen porch and sang songs. Big Trek tried to accompany us with his harmonica, but he hit a lot of bad notes—except when we sang Dixie. He knew it well.

  That night the grownups tried to show us how to play a new card game called Canasta. But it was hard to catch on, and Casey kept spraying the cards all over the floor when he tried to shuffle. We finally switched to Chinese Checkers.

  Sunday we got to church on time, a cardinal rule, and heard the Sunday School lesson about David and Goliath. That was the story about the little shepherd boy, David, who was the least likely guy to be able to do anything about Saul’s enemy, the giant Philistine.

  We had all heard the story before, but this was the first time a Sunday School teacher had made such a point that we’d often see God use the most unlikely people for a big job. David just charged out there and killed the giant, Goliath, with a rock and a sling.

  Casey said that personally he would have used a hand grenade.

  You were supposed to take church more seriously than the picture show but church was fun too, because you got to see a bunch of the guys and talk about whatever we had done Friday and Saturday. We also got to talk about our big fishing trip that afternoon.

  After church and the Sunday parking lot talk, we got home and raced inside to change clothes. We collected all of our gear and waited for Mr. Hightower to pick us up to go fishing down the river at Greenville. He had a friend with at least two boats, maybe more. The boats had outboard motors so we would be cruising up and down the mighty Mississippi. Even if we didn’t catch any big catfish ‘as big as a hog,’ Mr. Hightower had said—it would be fun.

  “Now y’all do exactly what Mr. Hightower tells you,” Cousin Carol said. “And stay in the boat. That river is dangerous.”

  There was something in her voice when she said ‘that river.’ It made me think about the dead man. I guess that the river has taken a lot of bodies in all the time it’s been coming down from Minnesota, or wherever it started, to the Gulf of Mexico.

  But today we would have fun, especially when you had somebody like Mr. Hightower who really knew how to fish. Besides the fishing, we were close to Greenville where the dead guy was found. It was kind of spooky thinking we might hook another body like Ben Samuels and BB had done.

  Our sc
hool teacher, Miss Ashley, said the Mississippi River had one of the biggest river basins in the world. It was almost as big as the Amazon’s which was the biggest in the world and it was down in South America somewhere. But the Mississippi probably was the longest river in the world, depending on where it started. Nobody was sure of that. Except maybe it started in some lake in Minnesota. And no river in the world caused as many problems when it flooded. Engineers had been trying to control it since way back early in the nineteenth century, she had told us. Robert E. Lee was an Army engineer, and the army got him to try to control some part of it around St. Louis one time. And if the river could beat Robert E. Lee, there was no telling what it could do. It had some of the most dangerous whirlpools and currents that anyone had ever seen. It sure wasn’t some place to go swimming.

  We pulled off the highway onto a gravel road that led to a levee. Once we were across the levee, we could see the big, wide, brown river. It always looked bigger than anything else in the world no matter how many times you saw it.

  Mr. Hightower greeted his friend, Mr. Smith, and introduced us. I got in the boat with Mr. Hightower and Taylor, and Mr. Smith took Casey. Mr. Hightower told Mr. Smith he could use Casey for bait if what we were using didn’t work. Taylor and I laughed. Casey didn’t. He probably wasn’t sure if Mr. Hightower was kidding or not.

  We started about a mile upriver from the bridge. The river looked a mile wide along this stretch. Like a big lake. I had never been on the river and had only crossed it in a car when we had gone to Vicksburg one time.

  The time we were in New Orleans, I don’t remember seeing the river up close. Although the city was built up right alongside it and even called the Crescent City, because it was in a moon-shaped crescent of the river.

  Our boats remained close to the bank. Once in a while you could see a swirl that looked like water going down the bathtub drain. The whirlpools and eddies looked as harmless as the ones in the bathtub; but below the surface of the river they were fierce, we were told. Occasionally a bit of garbage would float by, a piece of paper or an empty beer bottle bobbing up and down, its neck pointed toward the sky. It was the only way you could tell the river was moving except for the eddies, because it looked like a large, wide, brown roadway. I wondered how much there was on the bottom—how much stuff you couldn’t see. I kept thinking a leg or head would pop up.

  We moved within what seemed like a football field distance of the bridge and turned the motors off. We left the anchors up and just floated for a few minutes. Dragon flies bobbed around us. Casey would swing his arm and yell “Git!” as if he were yelling at a yard dog.

  Then Taylor got his strike, the first one of the afternoon. “I got something!” Taylor was reeling like a madman. Whatever he had hit, his strike was pulling the rod over in a big bowed arc, almost pulling the tip of the rod into the water.

  “Just reel him in slowly, Taylor,” Mr. Hightower said. “Here, a little less drag.” He reached over and slipped the drag down on Taylor’s rod. Taylor and Casey and I were cane pole fishermen. Rods and reels were new to us. “You’ll get him. He’s a nice one, unless it’s a gar. Ya never know.”

  Gars were weird fish and had all sorts of wild stories told about them, none of them good. They weren’t good pan fish. They looked like a barracuda. I had never caught one myself, but there were plenty of them around in lakes and bayous, and especially rivers.

  I was fishing with my daddy one time when I was six or seven. He hooked an alligator gar, and just as he got it up to the side of the boat it jumped and landed in the boat. It clamped its teeth around daddy’s foot, and it was sure a good thing Daddy had some good boots on. He must’ve smashed that gar in the head with a paddle at least ten times before he killed it. Scavenger fish is what everybody called them. But they could be dangerous, too. There had been stories of them grabbing hold of swimmers and drawing blood.

  Taylor was straining, his arms taut, his left hand gripping the rod and his right hand turning the reel, trying to reel more line in than the fish took out. I kept glancing at my own line. What if he pulled a body alongside the boat, a dead man, right next to me?

  Then Mr. Smith called out, “Casey’s got one o’er here, a little one anyway.” At the same time Taylor pulled his to the surface right next to the boat. Mr. Hightower reached over, grabbed the huge fish in the mouth and pulled him into the boat. It was no gar; it was the biggest catfish I had ever seen.

  “About twelve pounds, I’d guess,” Mr. Hightower said. “’Bout twenty inches long it looks like.”

  Casey pulled his in very fast. “About two pounds!” Mr. Smith yelled across the water at us.

  Taylor was about as excited as you could be. He acted as though he caught the biggest fish ever caught. I just hoped he didn’t turn the boat over. He pointed at the fish then himself. The fish was flopping around, and Taylor, flopping around more than the fish, was trying to step on it.

  “Jake, can you believe the size of that thing. Must be fifty pounds.”

  “I think Mr. Hightower just said, ‘about twelve pounds.’”

  “Well, twelve or whatever. Still a big fish.”

  Mr. Hightower hooked the fish onto the stringer, keeping him alive tied to the boat, swimming back and forth with nowhere to go.

  It was about thirty minutes before I caught my first one. Taylor had already caught two more in just a couple of minutes. Neither was as big as the first, but they were a keepable size. He acted like Simon Peter, the Great Fisherman. He kept hollering to throw my line here or there, or fish deeper, or use a roach instead of the catfish blood and mush.

  I thought about hitting him in the head with a paddle. He had caught more than me, and although Casey had caught three in the other boat, they were all about the same size as one another.

  Once when Mr. Hightower wasn’t looking I gave Taylor the finger. I wasn’t that skilled at it, and it kind of hurt my fingers. I guess as you got older your finger muscles got more developed so you got where you could do it as good as Daddy and Farley. I still wasn’t sure what it meant, but since it had mortified my mother, I knew it wasn’t something I should let a grown-up see me do.

  Mr. Hightower and Mr. Smith had caught one each, but they weren’t really fishing much. They were mostly helping us and telling us where to pitch our lines. All of us got backlash a bunch of times, not being used to reels, and Mr. Smith and Mr. Hightower had to untangle our lines. But they didn’t seem to mind.

  Our boats were only a few feet apart. I could see Mr. Smith spit brown every now and then, though it blended when it hit the water. When Mr. Smith wasn’t watching, Casey put his hand over his mouth like he was gagging, when some brown slime ran down Mr. Smith’s lower lip.

  We had drifted almost under the huge bridge that crossed into Arkansas. I wondered if we were near the spot where the body was found.

  “Mr. Hightower, is this where they found that dead man? I heard it was under the bridge.” Taylor turned from his line.

  “Well, I s’pose it is. If you believe what the newspaper says.”

  “You mean it might not be the spot?” Taylor asked. He had taken his eye off his line.

  “No. Oh, no. That’s jus’ an expression of mine. I guess it’s somewhere around here. But this is jus’ where they found him. No tellin’ where he went in. Could be miles from here, far’s I know.”

  “Think we might find another one?” I asked.

  “No. Now you boys don’t worry about that. To tell you the truth, I’d forgotten about it when I thought about us comin’ over here to fish. I don’t want y’all getting’ upset now.”

  “Oh, we were jus’ wonderin’,” Taylor said. “Don’t get many murders around here. Jus’ seemed kind of spooky, him washin’ up in the river and all.”

  “Well, one is enough, I can tell you,” Mr. Hightower said. “You boys just keep your minds on fishing.”

  By four o’clock we had caught fifteen or sixteen catfish and one gar. Mr. Hightower had caught the gar, but h
e didn’t keep him. After fighting him for what seemed forever, he pulled him up to the side of the boat, cut the line just above the hook and let him go. He said they weren’t good to eat—tasted like cotton, he had heard. The biggest catfish we had was the first one Taylor caught, although there were a couple others that were pretty close. I had caught four catfish and probably five bream, each of the bream being pretty small and I threw them back. And Casey was about oh for a hundred hitting dragon flies. I don’t know for sure how many fish he caught.

  Back upriver we pulled into shore, got out, and left the boats at the edge of the water. Mr. Smith and Mr. Hightower iced down the fish in big wash tubs. He said we could take the smaller ones home to eat if we wanted, but the big ones were too old and tough to eat. We just admired them for a moment then released them to swim away. We really didn’t care; the fun had mostly been being out on the river and just fishing.

  We pulled the boats out of the water and helped Mr. Smith load them one on top of the other in his pickup. Then we tied them down.

  “Let’s go into town and get something cold to drink,” Mr. Hightower said.

  Mr. Hightower followed Mr. Smith’s pickup to a paved road that led to the highway to Greenville. Mr. Smith drove about two miles an hour. It took us about forever to get to the paved road. Taylor said it was because Mr. Smith couldn’t drive fast and spit at the same time or the tobacco juice would blow back into his truck.

  Mr. Hightower pulled over at a Pure Oil filling station which had a big blue sign advertising ‘Be Sure with Pure.’ A couple of men came out. One asked Mr. Hightower how much gas he wanted, and the other started wiping the windshield.

  Mr. Hightower came around to the bed of the truck. “Okay, you boys go get yourselves a cold drink. And one of you bring me a Dr. Pepper.”

  He stayed to watch the man check the oil while we attacked the drink box. It was filled with ice and a bunch of cold drinks. I got an RC—a Royal Crown Cola, about the biggest size there was. We returned to the truck to help watch the dipstick get wiped. It was something they always did after looking at it. They’d wipe it off and stick it back in somewhere in the motor. The man slammed the hood, acknowledging everything under there was okay. Mr. Hightower turned his Dr. Pepper up and almost drained it in one gulp.

 

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