by Gin Phillips
“It’s good. Run give it to your mama.” I watched him out of the corner of my eye: That melon weighed twenty pounds if it weighed an ounce. But he wedged his arms under it up to the forearms, little paws latching on the other side. Before he started to heft it up, I stopped him.
“Bend your knees ’stead of your back.”
“Nothin’ the matter with my back, sir,” he said, still hunched at the waist. His feet were bare with garden between the toes.
“Son, it’s like me liftin’ a watermelon the size of a car.”
He bent his knees a smidge, still taking the weight on his back. I let him. Couldn’t tell my kids nothing once their minds got set—mules, every one of ’em. The melon got a couple of inches off the ground, then thudded back. He didn’t raise his face, just stood there panting, not saying a word.
“Don’t kick that melon, Jack.”
He met my eyes then, all squirrel cheeks and hard little line of a mouth. Mad as all get out.
“Grab this basket and start on that row of beans,” I said. “I’ll bring in the melon later.”
“I can get it.”
“Be more help to me with the beans.”
He backed away slowly. “Yessir.”
“Hold on, Jack.” I stooped back to the tomatoes, but I couldn’t help think of Tess’s nightmares. Jack was even younger than she was—no telling what he’d got in his head. “You upset ’bout that baby?”
When I looked at him, he was already swinging the basket as he trudged off.
“No, sir.”
He seemed pretty sure about it, and I didn’t waste any more time worrying. The tomatoes had turned out better than I expected. Blight had been going around, but they looked red and juicy. My mouth watered at the look of them, insides about to burst through the skin. I plucked one and bit into it like an apple, juice running down my chin.
“Come ’ere, Jack.”
I pulled another one off and handed it to him, still tasting summer in my mouth, seeds stuck in my shadow of a beard.
“Virgie and Tess don’t get none,” he said, looking pleased.
“Girls,” I called. “Get down here.”
They were there in a flurry of flying skirts and legs and wide smiles.
“In the middle of the afternoon?” asked Virgie as Tess reached to grab one.
“Any one you want,” I said. “Pick the biggest, sweetest one you see.” I smiled at them all, chattering and slurping, teeth and tongues and hands and arms covered in tomato innards.
“They’re happy vegetables, aren’t they, Papa?” asked Tess, chomping great chunks out of hers. “Cheerful and excited. Like lemons are pouty and peaches are flirts.”
Virgie took tiny bites, bending over to hold the tomato away from her dress. But hers was the best, fuller and redder than the others. “Tess thinks they all have a personality,” she said.
“If she can eat it after she makes friends with it, ain’t nothin’ wrong with it,” I said.
We all picked beans until supper time, sticky and sweating, licking our fingers and hands and tasting tomatoes and dirt. When I swung Jack and Tess up the steps on the way in, our hands didn’t want to come apart.
Virgie MAMA DIDN’T EAT MUCH. SHE GAVE EVERYBODY ELSE a helping before she helped herself, and sometimes she’d leave herself out altogether. Especially with meat. She’d usually take a spoon of everything when she fixed her plate, but she’d never get seconds. Sometimes she’d skip a meal if she thought no one would notice.
We had fried pies for dessert, and Mama flicked them out of the skillet with a fork, one on everybody’s plate except hers.
“You ain’t havin’ one, Leta-ree?” Papa asked.
“Full up,” she said, sitting down.
“You love peach pies,” I said.
There were two left, and I knew she was thinking she’d let us have them after dinner the next day or pack them in Papa’s lunch tin. I sat there looking at my pie, smelling the cinnamon and butter, and didn’t touch it. Tess and Jack stuffed their cheeks with pie, not saying a word. Mama smiled at them.
“Eat up, Virgie,” she said.
I pushed it around my plate, a puffy half circle with forked-down edges. Then I sliced it in half, brownish orange filling smoking as it oozed out. “I just want half.”
“I’ll have it,” said Jack, already reaching.
I ignored him, blocking him with my elbow. “Take half, Mama.”
“Jack can have it,” she said.
“How’ll you know if it’s good if you won’t have any?” I asked. “Take it.” I plopped it on her plate before she had a chance to answer.
She looked like she’d argue, but then she just stared at me, eyes squinted a little, like she was trying to figure out her next move in checkers. “Alright, alright,” she said.
She bit in, and I started on mine. It was sweet and delicious, like always.
3 Cicada Shells
Jack AUNT CELIA CAME AROUND ABOUT ROOSEVELT EVENTUALLY, long before his train pulled into Carbon Hill. Tess was in high school, I had one more year of grammar school, and Virgie’d come home from Livingston for the weekend by the time Franklin and Eleanor’s train swung through town—it turned out that some old-time city commission wrote into their contract with the Frisco line that any train tour on the line had to include a stop at Carbon Hill. So Jasper got passed up and we got a look at Mrs. Roosevelt. Pop and Aunt Celia and the girls and I walked to the train station to see them, along with most of the town. Only Mrs. Roosevelt came out of the car.
People had their Sunday clothes on for that split-second wave from Mrs. Roosevelt, who I thought was homely, Tess thought was splendid, and Virgie thought was uppity. Aunt Celia yelled louder than anybody—she hadn’t called anyone a Bolshevik in years—and when some of the men tossed their hats, she got carried away and tossed her bonnet. She never did find it. But she apparently thought of it as her own sacrifice to the altar of the Roosevelts and told the story with plenty of theatrics for the next few decades.
You never saw such New Dealers as the whole town was then. Whatever seedlings we might have been before the Depression, we’d all grown into fine Democrats, warmed by TVA and fed by Works Progress. By the early ’30s, the mines had nearly halted altogether, and the town was 75 percent dependent on those mines, according to a pleased-with-ourselves letter the city commission sent to the federal government. Property values were down by 60 percent. Then the president’s safety net fluttered around us, with over $180,000 from the government matched by over $100,000 from local citizens. Roosevelt’s public works program spit and shined Carbon Hill into something unrecognizable, giving us curbs and sidewalks and more paved road—for the longest time we only had five paved blocks—a swimming pool, a gymnasium. We got a new high school—the one Virgie and Tess went to had twenty rooms for eight hundred kids. Before Roosevelt, we didn’t have hardly any indoor toilets in town, and those that were there would drain into ditches that ran right along the streets and the stench nearly knocked you over in the summertime. The new sewer system took care of those ditches.
You could smell the difference the New Deal made every time you walked through town.
Even before Roosevelt, though, the town was solid enough. Physically. Little pigs could have survived a wolf just fine under any roof—I can’t remember more than three wooden buildings left in downtown. Nothing but brick. There’d been fires that did some damage, but then a cyclone cut a swath through the middle of town in 1917. It destroyed the churches and the high school and a slew of other buildings. A few years later a bigger fire took out most of the town, from the Pearce Hotel to Sweat’s Restaurant. Then came the rows and rows and block after block of brick.
It had always been a town shaped by forces of nature. Wind and fire and earth that demanded a few lives every now and then in exchange for the coal we kept prying out. And one man in a wheelchair was as big a force as any of it.
Albert THE SUN HAD TURNED GRAPEFRUIT-COLORED WHEN Cecil Bannon—
Ban we called him—and Oscar Jones stopped by. Leta’d finished putting the dishes up, and she’d just eased into her rocker and picked up her needle when we heard them holler from the road. By the time they came up the steps, it wasn’t hard to figure what they’d been doing. I could smell the home brew on Ban’s breath, but he knew better than to pull out his flask on my porch. My kids thought of liquor as some far-off thing from stories, and I didn’t intend to let them get a closer look.
Still and all, they wasn’t men to let a few drinks rattle them. Walking steady, they’d taken the steps several at a time, nodded their heads politely at Leta. Long as she didn’t get within breathing distance, she wouldn’t guess a thing…or at least she wouldn’t be forced to admit she’d noticed. She said hello, then stood up from her chair, waving off Ban and Oscar’s don’t-trouble-yourselfs, and walked over to the girls. Which I thought meant she’d caught a whiff but was in a forgiving mood. She slid to the top step smooth as a leaf falling, pulling Tess toward her to smooth her hair. I’d lost track of what Oscar was saying.
“…say Pete’s never gone see again. Blind as a mole.”
“Thought we’d take up whatever we could for him,” Ban said.
Pete had gone to work for DeBardeleben in Birmingham after Galloway let him go, and he’d lost his eyesight in an explosion a month or so back. There’d been some thought he might get better, and he’d had them bandaged since it happened, hoping they’d be good as new when he got unwrapped. That was the way I’d heard it anyway.
“DeBardeleben send anybody over?”
“Gave him and his wife nothing more than pocket change,” Oscar said. He was a block of a man, short, with arms so thick you could hardly see the elbows. His wife was bigger than three of Leta and probably couldn’t have squeezed into the rocker. I couldn’t shake the thought that he must roll into the center of the mattress every time she got into bed. Now her, she could’ve gotten the cover off the well lickety-split.
“Yep, we ought to take up a little something for him,” I said.
“They’re comin’ back to town next week,” Oscar said, propping his feet on the rail. “Wife’s got family here to help out. Thought we’d let you collect the money if you don’t mind. Fellas’ll feel better about you holdin’ on to it.”
I nodded. Now, I knew Oscar’s wife hadn’t had a baby anytime recent, but I couldn’t help but think that nobody’d have noticed if she was carrying a child. She didn’t strike me as a cruel one, though. She packed a good lunch for Oscar, sometimes slipped in ginger cookies.
Wasn’t a normal thing for me to be thinking on women. Leta was Leta, of course, and it didn’t seem right to lump her in with all the rest. The rest were made up of dresses and small hands and hair twisted into complicated knots. Ban’s wife was just his wife. Oscar’s wife—though I puzzled over the size of her—wasn’t no more than his wife. I had no notion of what went on underneath those complicated hair knots.
“So that’s alright with you?” Oscar leaned back with his eyes closed, not even looking at me.
I left off thinking about wives. “Yeah. Sure, I’ll take up the money.”
We’d done it plenty of times before. None of the operators wanted to do a thing for you. Living in their big houses with maids and gardeners, cream in their coffee and roast chicken whenever they wanted, they could empty out the change in their pockets and pay a crippled man a year’s wages. But they didn’t. Could be money was a sickness that spread through their veins, but they couldn’t ever have enough. They’d let a man die from bad mine construction, with his wife and children looking forward to starving as soon as the funeral was over, and they’d no more than toss a bill or two on the coffin. Hearts choked off, no feeling at all. Like a woman who could kill her own child. We couldn’t do nothing about them. But we might could do something about her.
The sky turned a darker and darker pink-red that night, with trees blowing toward the burning pink like they were trying to warm themselves.
“Carried the nigger fellow to work yesterday, did you?” Ban asked.
Crickets were just beginning to chirp. Only halfhearted sounds, like they were caught up with the sunset, too.
“Yep.”
“Good buddies with him,” Oscar piped in. He wasn’t a mean man, and his words didn’t have much bite. More like he felt he needed to get his two cents in.
“You’ve known him for years, both of you,” I said. “He’s got a name. And ain’t nothin’ in the world wrong with Jonah.” It came out more tired than bad-tempered. But it floated up with the smoke and hung out there awhile, nobody arguing with it. I took my time wrapping my next cigarette, smoothing the paper on my thigh and pulling a pinch from the tobacco tin.
“Niggers just don’t work as hard as we do,” Ban said finally, after I’d taken my first puff.
Made it through half a cigarette after that comment, rockers creaking. Nice thing to sit and rock and smoke. You can tell a man by his rocking—slow and steady, antsy and skittish, lazy as a slug. Ban’s rocker creaked timidly, like he thought the porch might rear back and bite if he came down on it too hard.
A word or giggle drifted over now and then from the children. Now those kids, they no more knew what it was like to look eye to eye with a Negro child than I knew how to dig a shaft to China. Leta neither, other than when their paths crossed during some trouble at the mines. Some coloreds did drink up their wages, and some of ’em were shiftless. Wouldn’t show up to work unless there wasn’t no money in the house. Don’t know as that had all that much to do with them being Negroes.
But you work shoulder to shoulder with a man, push his cars with him, he pushes yours, that changes how you look at things. A few years back, five men were burned to cinders in a gas explosion, and when the bodies got brought out, they was all black as coal. There’d be a Negro woman and a white woman staring at the same body. When your wives stand next to each other trying to sort out if one of those charred logs is their husband, that means something.
“Shouldn’t have let them in the union,” Oscar said.
Now he and Ban were only tossing things out, not mad about anything, not really caring that I gave Jonah a ride to work. Just talking the same old words. Like kids and nursery rhymes. I kept rocking. They’d seen the same things I had, and Oscar was grasping at an old straw to bring up the union. Wasn’t even a union anymore. But even with all the hue and cry over coloreds and whites pulling chairs up to the same table, the union had mixed smooth enough. Weren’t no choice, for one thing, because the UMW stood firm on it. For another, any thinking man understood how all the gears locked and turned together in the big machine of it all.
Bible says, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the last of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” Real truth is what you do to the least of these, you do to yourself. Long as the Negroe’s wages were in the dirt, ours were bound to be. Long as the bosses rid them hard, couldn’t force them to do better by us. All go up together or all stay down together.
The state finally killed off convict lease in ’28, not because it was wrong putting fellas to work in the mines instead of jail, but on account of the big operators not liking the advantage the convict mines had. Didn’t have to pay ’em and nine out of ten of ’em was colored, so they didn’t have to treat ’em human. Whipped ’em like animals. Worked ’em from six in the morning to ten at night, kept ’em in line with the whipping and the sweat boxes and no food. Kept us white men’s pay down, a’course, because why pay somebody when you got slaves, and that’s what they still was, just called ’em by a different title. You hold a slave up to a man expecting fairness and wages and you tell him he can take his leather grips to Kentucky so far as you’re concerned, because you don’t need to pay nobody for what you got a body to do for free. You come to the bosses complaining about short-weighing and needing more safety inspections and they just wave that slave in your face.
Those men mostly done nothing more wrong than steal a sack of meal, maybe g
et too drunk and make noise walking home. And they got thrown underground with a whip to their back. Wasn’t much different from us, but at least no white man got a whip.
I didn’t say none of that. I noticed we had a dirt dauber’s nest under the eave of the shed. Might have been an old one.
“Awful good sunset,” Oscar said. “Makes you hate to see night.”
“Sure does,” I said.
“They’s just not the same as we are is all I’m sayin’,” Ban said, like he was hoping I’d agree as much as I agreed about the sunset.
“Seem to recall Ben Barrett sayin’ somethin’ like that,” I said instead.
Eleven years ago, during that same 1920 strike, a Negro union man threatened other Negroes about turning scab. The sheriff had words with him at the commissary about those threats. Then Hill—a white fellow and another union man—went after the sheriff and shot and killed him and his deputy. For the sheriff’s words to the colored fellow. ’Cause at that moment I guarantee Hill thought of him as a union fellow. I knew Hill, and he was a spittin’ snake of a man, all the time howling at the moon about something. Sometimes he was howling about the coloreds. Then he went and died for one.
The sun was down so that all we could make out of one another without straining was the glow of our cigarettes. Still we rocked. Tess was in Leta’s lap getting her hair plaited. Virgie was playing bucking bronco with Jack in her lap, holding on to his hands while she swung her knees back and forth, making him whoop.
“Mine were crazy about that one,” said Ban, waving the glow of his embers toward the kids and their horse game.
“Only got to hit the ground once before they change their minds,” said Oscar. “My youngest one’s slippery as a crappe.”
Ban and me didn’t even try to keep from laughing at him. “Only happened the once,” said Oscar.
We got ourselves together finally. “Best be headin’ home,” Ban said, pulling out change from his shirt pocket. “Here’s my fifty cents for Pete.”