Cruel Harvest (4 page)

Our first night, Daddy and Mama did not speak. Daddy left the shack and went to get drunk somewhere, and Mama's mood immediately lightened.

“Anyone want some bean patties?” she asked.

Seeing her smile, we got excited. We surrounded her as she mashed up the pinto beans left over from dinner, added flour, and formed them into thin patties like hamburgers. She dropped the bean patties into hot grease in a deep iron skillet. I watched the patties as they sizzled in the pan and turned golden brown. When they were done, she removed each one and laid it on a towel to cool.

While we ate, Mama told us a story about a princess and a frog. Every opportunity she had, Mama tried to lift our spirits and give us hope. She had a kind, lighthearted spirit, and I never heard her speak ill of anyone. After the story, she started dancing around the old wooden table, trying to make us laugh as we stuffed her bean patties into our mouths. Her body rose up and down and she popped her hand on her open lips, making sounds like an Indian doing a war dance. Daddy often called her a squaw because of her Native-American ancestors, but it never seemed to bother her, and she made us all laugh as she danced around the room.

Taking a last bite, I jumped up and joined her. Soon, all five of us were hopping and hooting around the small shack. We must have danced for an hour before she declared it bedtime. Mama put the four younger kids down with smiles on our faces. Still excited, I lay on the bunk and listened to her and Brenda speaking softly in the front room. They talked for a long time before Brenda came to bed.

At some point in the night, my daddy came home. I woke up and heard his voice. He and Mama were set up to sleep in the front room near the stove. I remember hearing his footsteps coming into our room. I can still smell his whiskey breath. He bent over Brenda's bed. I heard harsh whispering; then it stopped. It sounded like two people leaving the room, but I was already falling asleep again, filled with a deep sense of unease.

The next day,
as the sun just touched the horizon, Mama woke us. There was no breakfast and we had slept in our clothes, so fresh out of bed, Daddy took us straight to the fields to pick cotton. The fields were so long and wide that you could hardly see from one end to the other.

I imagine that little had changed since the Dust Bowl years. We worked from sunup until sundown. Workers would occasionally shuffle over to a fifteen-gallon milk can filled with tepid water, sharing one tin dipper between them. There were woods on one side of the field, a convenient latrine for us to use during the long workday. A large wagon, about thirty feet wide and fifty feet long, was parked in the middle of the cotton field. It was our job to fill its wire-sided bed with the day's harvest. The foreman stood in the wagon at the center of the field handing out canvas sacks of various sizes to put the picked cotton in. My sisters and I had done this before. We scurried up to the wagon and tried to find the smallest sacks. Brenda gave me the shortest one; I was so small, I couldn't drag a bigger one around the field for the whole day.

I took the bag and slung it over one shoulder, following Daddy to our row. Each family started to pick at one end of a row, and they didn't wander from that area until the cotton was pulled from every bole. Daddy would choose the area, and each of us, except Robbie and me, would have his or her own row. I tried to stay in front of Brenda, because if I left too much cotton, the farmer would holler. If the farmer hollered at me, I'd pay hundredfold when Daddy got me home that evening.

The stalks had to be cleaned with no trace of cotton left in the dry brown boles. I glanced over my shoulder; Daddy was behind me. He was looking at me, a frown on his face because I wasn't bent over picking. By the time I was twelve, I had to meet a quota of between ninety to a hundred pounds each day or he would beat me. When I was very small, though, my only requirement was that I had to keep working and not stop. Usually we poured my sack of cotton into my Daddy's to keep the field boss from knowing how little I was able to pick.

The cotton grew in stalks, sometimes up to four feet high. Smaller stalks grew off the main one, and at the end of each of these sat a dry brown bole filled with a puff of cotton. Picking cotton was the worst work I can remember. By the time the cotton was ready for picking, its three-inch-long green pods had opened up to expose the cotton, the boles drying to a hard, deep brown, with four or five needle-sharp points on each end. That day, as I reached my hand down to pluck the cotton out from the center, one of those points cut into my hand and drew blood. I dropped the cotton into my sack and did not pause to put my finger into my mouth. Instead, I forced myself to move on to the next bole, and the next prick. Everyone's hands bled when they picked cotton, and a few drops of blood were not unusual. Sometimes, at the end of the day, my hands would be so sore that I would pump water onto the ground and press my fingers into the cool wet mud to ease the pain.

As my fingers bled in the field, I heard the rumble of a large engine. I knew immediately what made it. I'd seen the source before, and I often thought of it. Every morning, I had a new plan for its arrival. As the sound of the engine grew nearer, I busied myself, moving down the line of cotton as if double-checking our work. The road was only about a hundred feet away. Slowly I bent down and pulled a tuft of cotton out of its spiny shell. A flash of yellow appeared in the corner of my eye. I stood, dropping the cotton and frantically pressing my tangled hair down flat with both hands. I brushed at the dust and dirt on my dress and stood up as straight and tall as I could.

I turned to face the school bus as it rolled down the dusty road toward me. I stepped closer to the road, spitting on my hands and using them to clean the dirt off my face, only succeeding in smearing the grime around in circles. I tried hard to make myself presentable.

“You gotta stop this time,” I whispered.

My bare foot tapped the dirt with anticipation as the bus came closer and closer. I thought it slowed, and my heart raced with excitement. But it wasn't so. The bus full of kids flew past me on its way to school. I saw pairs of eyes looking down from those square windows; they belonged to girls and boys with clean clothes and shining faces. The bus passed me by—again.

Could the driver not have seen me?

Day after day I had contrived to stand closer to the edge of the road. Finally, this day, I realized that the bus driver could see the truth in my tangled hair and ragged dirty dress. He knew I did not belong in school, that I never would. Tears sprang to my eyes when I pictured myself walking up the bus stairs and sitting in one of those green benches. But I closed my eyes tight, trying to push the thought away. At the sound of Daddy's voice hollering my name, I scrambled back to the line.

As that day
went on, the picking got sparser. More than once, I saw Mama and Brenda huddled near each other, speaking in hushed tones. I still had that same unease from the night before. Mama and Brenda never whispered alone or took a chance by talking in the fields. But Daddy didn't seem to notice that day. I knew something awful was going on in my family, something worse than the beatings my mama had to endure. I knew it, but I couldn't admit it until I was older.

“Down!” Daddy called out.

I saw Brenda and Mama react as if they'd been caught dancing with the devil. Daddy, though, was pointing up toward the road. I glanced in that direction and saw the car parked beside the fields. A man in a tan uniform was standing outside the vehicle. He had a pair of binoculars to his eyes, and he was peering in our direction.

I knew what this meant. The man was a truant officer. He was checking the fields to see if any kids were being held out of school.

My Daddy growled his order again. I tried to obey, but my heart would not let me. School was the one dream I held inside. I wanted more than anything to go to school with the children on that bus, to learn as they did, read books, and someday write down the wonderful stories that Mama told us. I stood still, looking at that man, hoping he would find me and take me to where I belonged. The sun reflected off the spyglass.
He'll see me for sure
.

Something hit the back of my leg, and I crashed to the ground. I rolled over and looked up into the burned red face of Daddy. He stood over me, his hands balled into tight powerful fists.

“I told you to get down,” he snarled.

He opened the top of his cotton sack, pushing it toward my head. I quickly climbed inside. The dust and heat were suffocating, but the beating I would get if we got caught would be much worse. After a few moments he kicked at me through the sack.

“Ok. Get out,” he barked.

I crawled out of the sack, and he left me there. I didn't have to get up off the ground to know that the truant officer was gone.

After working the
fields all day, we walked slowly back to the shack. Daddy did not stay long. He yelled at us for not working hard enough, but soon left us alone. We all knew he was going out to get drunk. Although it was a relief to have him gone for a while, we also knew what state he'd be in when he returned. So there was a darkness to our moods.

Many times when he came back roaring drunk, he wanted to fight. Mama usually bore the brunt of his moods. Sometimes he came back already bloody from fighting, and then he would keep us all awake hollering and cursing. Everyone in our family was afraid of him whether he was roaring drunk or sober. Other times, he got satisfaction from pouring some of his whiskey over our food and forcing us to eat it. If we got sick, we would get beaten with his belt or fist.

After he left that night, Mama opened up a can of pork and beans. She sat us in a circle on the floor to eat and told us a story. Her voice was soft and full of love—and something more. I can guess now that it was longing.

“Things ain't always been the way they are now. I wish ya'll could have met my mama and papa. All men ain't mean like your daddy. I want you to remember that. My papa loved me.”

A tear slid down her cheek as she talked. “We lived in South Carolina. My papa had a dairy farm, and fourteen men worked for him. Mama cooked buttermilk biscuits and chicken. We had a long table in the front room of the house, and Mama rang the dinner bell at six every morning. That was to let the workers know they could come in and eat breakfast with us after the milking was done.”

Mama leaned forward, cocking her head to one side as if to make sure nobody was there to hear except us children. Then she continued.

“One day this young man about nineteen years old came in to eat at the table with us, and I couldn't keep my eyes off him. Papa's foreman had hired him the night before. Papa said he was a ‘no-good,' and I remember hearing him tell Mama to keep me and my sisters ‘away from that one,' cause Papa had ‘a feelin' about him. Papa was real protective of his girls, and he hired Nanny Taddie, the retired schoolteacher, to come to the farm and teach us to read and write. Papa wanted us to do our learnin' from home rather than sending us to school.”

Mama seemed uneasy as she talked now, and she got up several times to look out the front of the cabin door. She went on to tell us about the first time she slipped away and met Daddy.

“I didn't know anything about life back then.” She looked sad. “This young boy, Broadus, didn't have any parents, and I felt sorry for him. I was sixteen, and Papa didn't let us date. The foreman told me Broadus had showed up hungry, asking for work. He was hired to do the milking for his room and board. Oh boy, was he good lookin' back then. And he could talk a milk cow into giving milk without puttin' his hands on her.”

On her way back to us, Mama turned the lamplight lower. “He just swooped me out of my shoes and my dress. If Papa had known it, he would have killed Broadus, but by then it was too late. I was crazy about him. I loved my Papa, but Broadus had won my heart, body, and mind.”

As Mama continued, I hung on her every word. It was very rare to be given the opportunity to listen to her talk about her parents, or any of her family for that matter. I did not want to miss a single word she said. Considering where the conversation would go later that night, though, I think she was lost in that moment, contemplating the impossible.

“Papa caught us late one night in the hayloft together. I think if I hadn't stood between them, Papa would have killed Broadus. I made my choice, and Papa disowned me. Papa declared I was no longer his daughter, ordered me never to set foot on his land again. He let me take my Bible and the clothes on my back. That Bible is all I have of him now. I guess I broke his heart.”

Mama quietly wiped tears, then stopped suddenly as if she had heard something. She looked at all of us gathered around her. Fear was back in her soft, dark eyes and the sound of her voice. “You must never, ever tell one word of what I've told you here tonight.”

The truth is that Daddy began to bully Mama the first day of their new life together. They went to Texas, but instead of working in the oil fields, he got a job for the two of them in the cotton fields. Because of one mistake my mother made when she was a young girl, she would spend the next seventeen years of her life in regret.

My daddy started to beat her if any man in the fields looked at her. By the time Brenda was born, my mother was so cowed down and brainwashed from fear that she obeyed him like a prisoner. It just got worse when they began to have more children. Mama gave birth to her first child, my oldest sister, Brenda, ten months after she met daddy. The following year, another daughter, Susie, was born. Two years after Susie, she gave birth to her first son, Jimmy, who would eventually be sold to Uncle Mose and his wife, Gracie.