When I Left Home Read Free Page A

see a big league game.
    I was too young to remember when Joe Louis fought Max Schmeling in the 1930s, but as a youngster, I was out in the backyard, standing next to my father and grandfather as Louis beat down Billy Conn in the thirteenth round. I remember all of us hooting and hollering for a man who, before Jackie Robinson, was the only American hero with skin the color of ours.
    When I think of tough characters, my Daddy’s mama comes to mind. I never saw her without a corn pipe in her mouth. When the pipe was smoked out, she’d take the burnt ashes and spread them over her lips. If any of us misbehaved, she was the first to notice. She wouldn’t think twice about grabbing the biggest switch off the tree and tanning our bottoms.
    On the other hand, Grandpa was more a talker. He liked to tell stories. His favorite—the one that spooked us out—was about the Jesse James days, when white folks was scared to keep their money in the banks. Instead they buried their cash in the ground around certain graves. To keep the black man from digging up that cash, the white man spread a scary story—that ghosts guarded the burial grounds. They said that if you wanted to hunt for the money, you had to leave out shots of whiskey. Give the ghosts whiskey and the ghosts wouldn’t bother you none. As a child, these stories messed with me. They crept inside my mind and stayed there. I had dreams of drunken ghosts chasing me all over the chicken house.
    Just as bad weather led to the death of the crops, bad circumstances led to the death of people I knew. In the country, death comes often. I remember putting my uncle George in a plain pine box when he died a young man. When I heard that a neighbor, sick of mind, slit his own throat and bled to death, I thought of Christmastime when I had to slit the throat of the pig. Why would anyone slit his own throat?
    A little friend of mine, Grant Clark, went hunting in the woods with his dad. Many times I’d done the same thing. But my friend never came back. In a terrible accident that was no one’s fault, a gunshot blew off the top of his head. That also haunted my dreams for months afterward.
     
    Life in the country is set by the seasons. In the early months we sit behind the mule as he pulls the tractor to cut furrows in the soil where we’d soon be planting seeds. The mule ain’t easy. The mule don’t like to be told nothing. “Stubborn as a mule” ain’t no lie. The mule likes to fart in your face and piss in the wind. He got the foulest-smelling shit of any animal on earth. And all the time that I’m shouting for him to get done with this dirty work, I’m whipping his fat butt so I can get home and play baseball or run into the woods with my rifle with the hope of bagging a bird for dinner.
    Life was steady. We grew the greens, we picked the cotton, we planted the corn. It was a cycle that didn’t stop. We watched the sky, hoping that the weather be kind. We watched the fields, hoping the crops would grow.
    In a world without changes, one change did come. It didn’t keep us from farming like we’d always farmed, but it did give us something we’d never had before.

Light
     
    It was near the end of the 1940s when we finally got an electric line. I was twelve. There was one little light bulb that hung down from the ceiling. Didn’t take much of a storm to knock out the power, though. Fact is, that the roof of our shack was so flimsy that any heavy rain created big leaks. Mama had tubs lined up all over to catch the pouring water. Wasn’t till much later that I learned what it was like to trust the roof over my head.
    The introduction of that little light bulb in our cabin didn’t improve life much. But our first piece of electrical equipment, a beat-up used phonograph that played 78 records, changed everything. I thank God that my daddy loved the blues and wanted to hear music when he came out from the fields. I thank God that my daddy had this one record by John Lee Hooker