The Warmth of Other Suns (20 page)

She told George about it when he dragged in from the field. He didn’t praise her for her bravery or say much of anything. “I been seeing ’em all day” was all he said.

It was getting to be the 1930s. It was a hurting time, and the farm people almost couldn’t give the cotton away. The value of what they harvested, the worth of their hard labor and the measure of their days, plummeted after the crash of 1929. A bale of cotton had gone for nearly thirty cents in the mid-1920s and for nearly seventeen cents in the late 1920s.
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By 1931, the planters couldn’t get six cents for the same bale of cotton. The people in New York and Boston were not ordering up new seersucker suits and cotton pillowcases like they did just a few years before. The cotton ripened in the bud, but there was nobody to buy it. So the boss men went without new Model T Fords. The sharecroppers went without shoes.

Ida Mae fed the chickens and worked the field barefoot. She watched George haul in cotton with no assurance of what, if anything, the planter might give him for it and tried not to worry her mind over what she could not fix. Before long, she started feeling full around her belly. She didn’t think much of it. She went about her chores and rode horseback when she went to visit her kin people. No horse was fast enough for Ida Mae, and she raced now like she always did. It wasn’t good for the life that was growing inside her, and she miscarried riding those horses before she knew she was expecting.

Her belly got full again, and she didn’t ride horses this time. She hated waddling into church with her flour sack dress pulling tight across the front and her belly sticking out. She was in the field when the
thunder came. It started as a light knocking deep inside her. She ran into the house, and the thunder got violent. It shot to the top of the ceiling and hurled itself back into her. She got up and started walking, walking in a circle around the bed. The midwife came and watched her rock from foot to foot.

“I could see the pain comin’ down on the top of the house and keep comin’,” she said.

The men don’t know what the women go through, was what she was thinking, don’t feel the stab of lightning inside.

“Oughta be so they could,” Ida Mae said.

She stopped her pacing and squatted beside the bed. She was on her knees. The life force reached out of her and into the light.

It was a girl. Ida Mae never wanted a girl. She was still thinking like a tomboy wanting to climb a tree. The baby had big eyes and a brown, narrow face like her husband’s. They named her Velma. In time, Ida Mae took to her and held her close.

Within a year or so, she started feeling full again. It was another girl. They named her Elma but called her Baby Sis. Ida Mae took them to the field with her when it was time to plant. She set them both down in the shade of a plum tree. It got too hot for them out in the field. They were toddlers now. Ida Mae told them to sit still and then took her place behind her husband at the turnrow.

The sun bore down on Ida Mae and George, and soon they heard crying near the plum tree. It was Velma wailing and Baby Sis lying sick with half-eaten plums beside her. Velma had reached up and gotten her some, and Baby Sis ate them and got the flux, as the country people called whatever stomach ailment, poison, or virus had got into the baby. It was a perilous world in the early 1930s, even without Jim Crow. Dysentery, typhus, malaria all thrived in the backwoods of the Deep South before penicillin or common vaccines were invented. There were no doctors nearby, and, by the time they got Baby Sis to one, it was too late. They buried her in a little box at the church cemetery near Bewnie.

Ida Mae told herself that day that she would never leave a child of hers alone again.

In September of 1935, she finally got the boy she wanted. He had the brown, narrow face of her husband. When it came time to name him, a neighbor girl stepped forward. The girl looked after Velma when Ida Mae was in the field and took care of a little white boy in town when she
was summoned to do so. His name was James Walter. George and Ida Mae had never laid eyes on the boy, but they named their son after him and hoped maybe good fortune would rain down on their son like it seemed to fall on the white people.

Not long after he had begun walking, something took over little James. He began rearing back and shaking all of a sudden. It could happen anytime, and it so worried Ida Mae that she went looking for advice.

“Next time he has a seizure,” a neighbor lady told her, “whatever he got on, pull it off.”

George had managed to scrape together a pair of shoes and socks and pants for his only son and was still paying on them. On a Sunday after church, when George was out in the field somewhere, little James had a shaking fit. Ida Mae pulled off his shoes and tore off his socks as the neighbor lady told her to do. Off came his little shirt and pants. She made a wood fire and held little James tight as she threw his clothes into the flames.

George got home, and she gave him the good news that she had cured little James. But that’s not what stood out in George’s mind.

“Whatchu doing burning up his shoes?” George asked her. George didn’t have a decent pair himself.

Reason can’t explain it, except that maybe little James outgrew whatever afflicted him or maybe it wasn’t really seizures in the scientific sense of the word or maybe her belief that she had exorcised the thing actually killed it. In any case, whatever James had, it never came back after she burned his clothes to cinders.

A new year rang in. It was 1937. It looked to be no better than the year before. They were calling it the Depression now. People took to begging and scraping to eat. A man down the road started stealing hogs to sell and eat as his own. He was white and a friend, so to speak, to George. He rounded up somebody’s hogs one day and came by George and Ida Mae’s to get George to help skin them.

George didn’t want to get blamed for somebody else’s misdeeds. He could get killed for stealing a white man’s hogs. He told the man to do it himself. The man didn’t like hearing no. George and the man argued, and the man stormed off.

“I’ll be back,” he said. “I’m a fix you.”

Chickasaw County had a sheriff, but calling him would have never
crossed George’s mind. No sheriff would take a colored man’s side against a white man, no matter who was right. George called out to Ida Mae.

“Ida Mae, you take the kids and go on in the house,” he said. “I’m a sit right here till they come back.”

He sat on the porch waiting with his shotgun on his knee. He looked out for an open-bed truck trailing dust in the road or a car packed with men looking for trouble. Ida Mae crouched down and tried to still little James and Velma. George waited and waited. But they never came. “The next day or two,” Ida Mae said, “him and George back friends again, I reckon, getting the hogs.”

People learned to want less and live with whatever they had. The boss men said there was little to nothing to give at settlement time. They told the day pickers they wouldn’t be needing them. The cast-off croppers and field hands moved from place to place. They walked to the next farm up the road to see if they could use an extra hand and to the relatives who might make a place for them in their cabin. Mr. Edd kept George and Ida Mae on. They were good workers, Ida Mae’s picking notwithstanding, and he was an optimist. But now there were five people in their little sharecropper cabin. Besides them and Velma and James, they had taken in a boarder, so to speak. It was George’s sister Indiana. She helped with the picking of crops and the raising of turkeys, and she slept by the door in the front room.

In the spring, when George and Ida Mae planted cotton and prayed for rain, the turkey hen laid her eggs. “She’d set there and set there,” Ida Mae said. “Just sit there about three or four weeks. She’d get up, shake herself off, and go get her some water, dust water all over her and do round and all, take a bath, I reckon, what it was. She’d be setting while we planted cotton.”

By the time the cotton was in the ground, the chicks poked out of their shells and required Ida Mae’s attention. Ida Mae and Addie B. and other women on the Pearson plantation scooped up the chicks and tended them for Mr. Edd. He would be coming back just before Thanksgiving to take half of however many turkeys each woman managed to raise.

Ida Mae pulled off the beak crust that they came into the world with and crushed corn for them to eat because they were too little to eat feed corn. The hawks circled overhead, waiting for her to leave, ready to
swoop down and pick off a baby chick and fly back into the air before you knew it.

Ida Mae didn’t worry about the hawks. She knew the hens moved in a flock and didn’t leave their babies like humans do.

“You know a hen will take up for her chickens more so than people will take up for one another,” Ida Mae said. “Whenever a old hawk would come along—you heard talk how a hawk will hover and all the chicks run under her wing—she hugs them and she sticks up for ’em and keep a funny noise, and you knew that hawk was somewhere around.”

She trusted God and nature more than any man and learned to be a better person watching the lower creatures of the earth. “The ant see a crumb, he can’t carry it himself,” Ida Mae said. “Don’t you know another ant will come and help him? They better than people.”

Addie B. and the other women fretted over their turkeys, worried when they went off and when they took forever coming back because Mr. Edd was going to want his turkeys soon. Ida Mae let her turkeys run free and pick after bugs and ants and twigs in the dirt. They went exploring out in the woods and roosted wherever they pleased. And when they came back, she threw corn at their feet.

The turkeys grew big and plump as September approached, and the land was turning white with cotton.

A FLATBED TRUCK
creaked down a highway through rattlesnake scrub and okra growing wild in the field. George Starling should not have been on that truck. He should have been in a college classroom up in Tallahassee. But his father said he’d had enough schooling, and schools nearby did not allow colored students. So Lil George went and got himself a wife out of spite and love, too, and had to feed her now, and so was sitting on a flatbed truck en route to the groves instead of in the library stacks at a college in the state capital.