One Night in Mississippi Read Free Page B

enough cash to cover two months’ rent, then I picked up the suitcase and the thermos and walked out.

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    Mississippi, 1946
    My mother spent thirteen hours in labour, sweating and screaming in my parents’ bedroom with Aunt Louise at her side. The radio was on, tuned in to the country station because that was the only station we could pick up and at that not very well. Hank Williams’s voice scratched and warbled through the static, but it couldn’t drown out the sounds.
    I went back and forth to the kitchen, bringing buckets of water from the well, which our father would pour into a pot and heat over the stove, or else fetching a fresh blanket when the one our mother covered herself with had soaked through to the point that it needed to be rinsed out and hung from the clothesline in the backyard.
    The rest of the time I sat on the porch, staring out past the thin red line of the county road and into the stand of pine trees in the distance beyond. Glenda and Etta had been sent off to a neighbour’s house during the birth. Though Glenda was a year older than me — seven to my six — Papa apparently thought that seeing Mama in pain was OK for me, but not for my sisters. I didn’t remember Etta’s birth, don’t know if I was there or not, but this time around I was present and I prayed hard. I prayed for a boy, because then he would be able to help in the fields in a few years’ time, unlike my sisters who were mostly given just house and yard work as chores. I went through names in my head, weighing each one, and in the end, I decided on Henry. I hoped it was a boy, and that they named him Henry. I got half my wish.
    Aunt Louise guessed that Graden must have been near ten pounds at birth. He was big to begin with and he kept growing at an impressive rate, leading Ma to sometimes chide that he was “too slow being born and too fast growing up.” I’d prayed for a brother who could help in the fields, and I got more than I could have expected. By the time Graden was eight, he could pull as much cotton in a day as I could, though still not as much as Papa. By the time he was twelve, I had a hard time matching him. Walking in the row beside him, we would sometimes talk, sometimes sing, but even when we were silent I could see his lips move. I asked him one time what he was doing.
    â€œLessons,” he replied.
    â€œLessons?”
    â€œYeah. I’m trying to memorize all the states.”
    â€œWhat for? You ain’t ever going to leave this one.”
    â€œYou don’t know that.”
    â€œDo too. This is where your family is. You got a head full of stuff that you don’t need.”
    He didn’t look up, just kept trudging along, working his fingers through the bolls, and depositing the cotton in his sack. He was silent for a few steps, and when he did continue to speak, it was with his head down, as if he didn’t want me to hear the words coming out of his mouth.
    â€œYou know there’s places up north where black men have jobs. They get dressed up and go to work and get paid, just like white folks.”
    â€œThere’s places like that right here in Mississippi. It don’t mean nothing to you though.”
    â€œMaybe it does.”
    â€œNow hold on. All that schooling’s messing you up. Papa gets paid. How you think he bought this patch of land? People get rich off cotton.”
    â€œ We don’t. If you hadn’t dropped out of school, you might have learned that.”
    I stopped to argue, but Graden just kept picking, and I had to bend back to my work to try to keep pace.
    The next morning, Graden was not at breakfast. Mama asked if any of us had seen him. The girls both said no, but Etta fidgeted nervously. Papa looked up from his plate and fixed me with a stare.
    â€œWe got a lot of work to do today. If your brother ain’t around, it’s going to be a long day.”
    A long day in