Littlejohn (15 page)

The day after it happened, it was all over school, of course, and Mike Draughon told Bonnie Cain and me that it was the sight of Ernest Naylor’s penis—except he didn’t say penis, of course—that drove her to it. We were a very clever, witty crowd.

When I got home that day—it was sometime after Christmas and before spring planting—Daddy was inside, sitting by the oil heater eating parched peanuts. It was just before we moved into Grandma’s old house, after Lex and Connie died.

“Nigger girl killed herself last night,” I said, swelled in the importance of imparting grownup news.

He stopped shelling peanuts and asked me who she was. I told him Latricia Wonsley. He said that her mother used to do laundry for us, and that he’d known her daddy since before the war. Daddy knew everybody in Geddie, East Geddie and Old Geddie back then.

“We ought to fix something and take it down there,” he said, thinking a coconut pie or a cake or something. People have been known to gain five pounds at a loved one’s funeral in the Geddies.

I told him I didn’t think that was a very good idea, because
the Wonsleys, whoever they were, probably hated white people.

He asked me how come, and I told him about some of the “jokes” that my more mean-spirited classmates, with the full consent and approval of the silent majority, had played on Latricia (leaving out the part where she was exposed to Ernest Naylor’s not-so-private parts, of course).

Daddy and Mom had heard me tell some of the stories at supper, and if they didn’t laugh out loud, they seemed to accept it as just part of high school pranks. Making life hard for black people was the official pastime of Scots County, after all.

“So you think she killed herself because you all were so mean to her?” he asked me. I wasn’t ready to accept responsibility for Latricia Wonsley’s suicide, and I told him so. Told him that she apparently couldn’t take a joke very well.

He got up and threw the peanut shells and newspaper he’d held in his lap into the trash, then went into his and Mom’s bedroom. He was gone about five minutes, and I thought we were through talking about Latricia Wonsley. I got myself a Pepsi out of the refrigerator and was sitting on the couch when he came back in with a handful of photographs.

“I got something I want to show you,” he said. “It’s some pictures I took when I was in the Army, during the war.”

He’d never shown me those pictures, and he’d never talked about the war other than to say he was a cook, which didn’t appear to be the kind of thing you’d use for bragging material in the neighborhood.

What really got to him, Daddy said after he’d showed me the pictures of the Jews, was the German people. I saw what he intended for me to see in the pictures of them: There was
relief, of course, there was obsequiousness, there was a certain haughtiness. Nowhere, though, was there any shame. And, like Daddy said, the Germans might as well have been us. They had little dogs and gardens and wore hats and went to school.

Daddy took the pictures from me and put his hairy, freckled hand on mine.

“When you don’t treat folks like human beings,” he said, “something terrible can happen. Let’s us don’t be like that.”

This was the beginning of my liberal education, coming from a Southern farmer who still called (and still calls) blacks “colored people.” It would be two more years, in my freshman year at UNC—G, before another teacher would broach this still-delicate matter of Southern whites treating blacks like garbage. And within four years, I was exercising the college student’s God-given right to assume omniscience and was lecturing Daddy on the atrocities of the South. He handled it as he did most things, with grace.

I would like to say that a veil was lifted from my eyes and that I went and sinned no more after Daddy showed me his war pictures. But is there a sixteen-year-old who isn’t mainly powered by the force of peer pressure? I certainly wasn’t strong enough to rebel against it. We still either laughed at black kids or acted as if they didn’t exist. It was more like I’d still do and say these hateful things, but later I would think about what I did and feel guilty. It took years for my guilt reflexes to get quick enough to kick in
before
I did a spiteful thing to another person.

And Daddy and Mom weren’t saints. They still felt as if the feds were bringing back Reconstruction, but they were
able to separate the cause from the effect, so that they didn’t, as lots of my friends’ parents did, treat black children like the chosen instruments of the Evil Empire in Washington.

It probably helped Mom that she had to spend a summer school at Carver. She had never been in a black high school before, but the summer before my senior year, she was persuaded to teach a course there in remedial English to help some of the kids make the transition to the white world.

She would come home at first angry, then sorrowful, about conditions at the school, how the state had let it fall into such disrepair that nothing much could save it. Mom had grown up in the building industry, and she knew crappy construction when she saw it. But it didn’t stop there. She saw kids having to share books. She saw the poor food—even by school lunchroom standards—they were getting. She wrote the superintendent a letter spelling it out, chapter and verse, and she was not asked to teach summer school again. When white kids started getting bused to Carver, though, they tore the damn thing down and built Sandy Heath High, for all races, creeds and colors, within another school year.

It was on the way back from Uncle Gruff and Aunt Martha’s that Daddy hit on his big idea. The farm was not doing all that well; it took a lot of people to work 320 acres the right way. Daddy always said the farm was just big enough to be dangerous. It wasn’t one of those farms in the Midwest where you can’t see from one end to the other, and it wasn’t a manageable little eighty-acre tract. Uncle Lex was over sixty, Daddy had just turned fifty and Rennie’s children seemed to want to leave home as soon as they got old enough
to get a job. I can’t imagine why they didn’t want to work for Daddy and Uncle Lex for nothing.

Cropping tobacco is what you’d call labor intensive. It became more and more of a problem for farmers around here in the sixties and seventies, when federal programs finally gave poor people an alternative to chopping cotton and cropping tobacco for seventy-five cents an hour and all the watermelon they could eat. You won’t find many fans of Uncle Sam around Geddie, unless he wants them to send their sons halfway across the planet to get their legs blown off in somebody else’s war, but, as far as I’m concerned, they brought it on themselves. They could have integrated the schools themselves, and not made such a bloody mess of it. They could have taken care of their own poor, set up programs to teach people how to do useful, productive things and then pay them a living wage.

The farmers would sit around the store and complain about how nobody wanted to work anymore, but you couldn’t have gotten one of them to pay those people enough to live on if you’d put a gun to their heads. It made them mad that the feds were stealing their slave labor away. Daddy used to tell me about one man, Loftus Bedsole, who had a farm between McNeil and Cool Spring. Loftus Bedsole hated the government so much that he wouldn’t drive on U.S. highways. He drove to Richmond one time to visit his sister and her husband, and he took nothing but state and local roads all the way up. It was a nine-hour drive, and when he got there, he had to call them to come and get him. They lived on a U.S. highway.

Anyhow, when we were leaving Uncle Gruff’s, he gave us
a quicker route back home. We wound up on 301, which took us across a larger, uglier stretch of Georgia. Before we got to the South Carolina line, Daddy was threatening to rename me Kansas or Connecticut or Wisconsin, anything but Georgia.

A few miles after we crossed the Savannah River into South Carolina, we started seeing signs that said
PICK YOUR OWN STRAWBERRIES
.

Since it was March, there wasn’t anything to pick, but the farmer didn’t want to go to the trouble of taking his signs down, I guess. It was getting late in the afternoon, and Aunt Connie was becoming a little anxious to find a place to stay for the night, but Daddy was intrigued by just about anything concerning farming, and he followed the signs. We turned left down a two-lane county road, followed it about two miles, then turned left at another strawberry sign and went up a dirt road that dead-ended at a big farmhouse.

There were strawberry beds all around the house and room for parking alongside it. A big spitz tried to chew our tires off, and we had just about decided to turn around and leave when a man came out of the house and shooed the dog away.

Daddy got out and introduced himself, and he and Uncle Lex and the man went off talking farming. The man’s wife, and I never did learn either one of their names, invited Mom and Aunt Connie and me inside for iced tea.

The rest of the way back, including half the night in the tourist park where we stayed, Daddy and Uncle Lex talked about strawberries. Daddy said the soil along the back side of their property would be perfect for them, but Uncle Lex
wasn’t sure, and he wasn’t eager to get into something that would require a loan and would take a couple of years to get going. He was eleven years older than Daddy and said he had nightmares about having to spend his old age in the poor-house. By the time we got back to East Geddie, though, Daddy had talked him into going into the pick-your-own-strawberries business, and had talked Mom and Aunt Connie and me into it, too.

Daddy and Uncle Lex wound up leasing several acres from the McDaniels, who were just about out of farming by that time, anyhow, and pieced that together with some of the swamp land they already owned. They eventually did well enough off strawberries that they were able to buy twenty acres from the McDaniels.

Daddy and Rennie and Uncle Lex and one of Rennie’s boys who wasn’t old enough to leave home yet built a big shed off the Ammon Road and ran a dirt road in from that side. Daddy said he didn’t want a bunch of strangers all the time coming up our road and parking in our driveway. They couldn’t plant strawberries until the next March, by which time they’d had to take out a mortgage on the farm to pay for an irrigation system and all the fertilizer and plastic sheeting that Daddy said they’d have to put under the plants. This was something he said he’d read about in the
Progressive Farmer
, something he said they could do to improve on the operation we’d seen in South Carolina. Taking out a mortgage on the farm worried Uncle Lex almost to death.

The farmers around Geddie and East Geddie thought Daddy had lost his mind. The last change most of them had made was to switch to tobacco sometime after World War
I. They’d kid him, during the two years it took to get the business going, asking him when he was going to bring them some strawberries.

“You’ll have to pay for them, and you’ll have to pick them,” he’d say. It never bothered Daddy to go against the grain, or the tobacco. It probably bothered me more. Kids whose parents would talk about the crazy McCains and their strawberries would call me “Strawberry,” but Daddy told me not to worry, that those strawberries would pay my way through college.

He was right, and so was his timing. They were just getting ready to open the interstate that runs a little east of the river at Port Campbell, not more than five miles from East Geddie. Daddy and Uncle Lex paid for space on a couple of billboards, driving Uncle Lex into even deeper depression, I’m sure, as he saw more money flying out the window. But Daddy knew that half the East Coast would come through on the interstate, and if he could just get one in a thousand to take a short side trip, they’d have all the business they needed.

Which is just what happened. The idea of picking your own strawberries was fairly new at the time, and Daddy picked up one good idea from the man in South Carolina: He advertised that you could eat all you wanted while you picked. Daddy would charge enough to make up for all a starving person could possibly eat. And everybody over-picked. They figured they’d gone to the trouble to find the place (Daddy was smart enough not to mention our town’s name, so we avoided the usual confusion that hits when people go east from Geddie and can’t find East Geddie), so they ought to pick plenty. I’m sure trash cans in rest stops
all the way from Maine to Florida were full of McCain strawberries. They probably still are. There’s a sucker passing by every minute on the interstate.

People from Port Campbell and the Geddies would come and pick, too, and many people would just slip in at night and pick for free, which never bothered Daddy very much.

“If they need food that bad,” he’d say, “let them pick.”

All through my high school years, I’d spend afternoons in May and into June out there weighing strawberries and ringing up sales. Daddy or Rennie would load the pickers on a flatbed wagon hitched to a tractor and tow them out to the parts of the patch that were ready to pick. Uncle Lex and Aunt Connie and Mom all pitched in, and they’d have to hire lots of extra help to cut the runners in the fall and pick off the flowers in the early spring. But Daddy was right. The soil there, on the edge of the Blue Sandhills, was perfect for strawberries. They branched out into blueberries and blackberries later, so that there was always something to pick in warm weather, it seemed.

Even while we were starting to rake in the money off Daddy’s idea, I didn’t much like the berry business. When we had tobacco, I could avoid doing much farm work, other than picking peas and beans and shelling them, and helping Mom with the canning. Daddy didn’t want his little girl to get her hands all grimy with tobacco juice and be around people that would bite tobacco worms in half for a quarter. But the strawberries were different. It was more meeting people than manual labor, from my end, and it didn’t hurt sales, as I got a little older, to have a cute girl at the counter. But I was never what they call smart around here, meaning I never was too crazy about working from sunrise to sunset.
I’d take a book with me and read every second somebody wasn’t waddling up with twenty pounds of strawberries they didn’t need.