Sampson, Mississippi
1939
It was Bennie’s tenth birthday. Lottie pinched him between her knees and cropped off the tower of hair that was overheating the top of his head. “Bennie, be still.” A cigarette hung from her pouty lips, hand-rolled from the store but supplied by the fields around them. The dangling ember grew a balanced ash an inch long, threatening to set his black wool naps on fire.
When Bennie was born, she was only thirteen years old, so he did not know to talk to her in a string of Yes ma’amsand No ma’ams. He called his mama by her first name.
“Ouch, Lottie! Put that cigarette out befo you burn my head.”
The porch was refuge from the sun. It was so hot that day, the birds panted on the low-lying maple branches. The heat did not deter Baby Lenard. He played in the bare dirt of the yard making mud of the used wash water, his skin and the earth the same tint of copper. The sky was a clear cornflower blue except for one white cloud, comfort that passed over the three of them before it grew thin and evaporated.
“Be still, boy.” She snatched him in place and chuckled. “Ain’t nobody gonna burn yo little pea head. Mo likely the birds gone set up shop if I don’t chop this shit off.”
Like an older sister and little brother, they were so close that it didn’t matter that she hadn’t tied a kerchief to hold her breasts in place under her loose cotton dress. She was still gonna hold him close where he could smell the warm womanhood of her body sweating in the heat. But at the same time, she would snatch at him and tease him like he was some meddlesome little pet.
He laid his head back in her lap, and the two of them looked in each other’s big round eyes. “Okay, boy. I’ll put it out fo a minute. Cain’t smoke my smokes for worrying about you and Lenard gone have a complaint.”
He tilted his head forward for her to cut the back. His question hung in the heat of the afternoon: “What you and Old Deddy bumping around about last night?” He knew Old Deddy whipped her with the strap that was for the money satchel in the same way that Old Deddy whipped him. Her beatings were constant, where his only came when his chores were half-done. But he didn’t have to be trapped in the room with Old Deddy at night. She always had welts on her smooth, creamy legs, some of them purple from a few days back, some of them red from last night. He knew the beatings were getting more frequent but didn’t know why and didn’t know the right thing to ask.
She grabbed a fist of hair at the back of his head and turned his face up to hers. “Benjamin Lee, let me tell you something.” She pushed his head forward again. “Don’t you never trap no woman in yo house like she a cow who happened by yo barn for shelter. Don’t you never be that kinda man.”
“Ouch!” he complained and put his hands on the back of his head. She smacked his hand back down and tilted his head onto her thigh to get the sideburns. He felt a twinge of shame for seeing her breast beneath her arm and wanting to crawl into the safety of her lap and suckle, the way she still did for Lenard who was three years old now but still in need of her food. One of her loose dark curls fell from under her head rag, and high above her, the wasps’ nest that she knocked down every summer danced with the brown insects making their home.
The next morning, the wide fan of late spring tobacco leaves made the dew sweet and heavy. For a change, Old Deddy did not come in with the gray, warm light of dawn to jerk Bennie to his feet off the pallet. Instead, Old Deddy was already with the mule in the vegetable field tilling the soil for their table crops. Lenard sat next to Bennie, tying a string onto the leg of a half-dead June bug, and the house was strangely quiet. Bennie looked out the window, and there was the washtub on the old tree stump, but she was not there. He pulled the worn overalls up over his discolored underpants and went out to the open room, but she wasn’t at the pump doing dishes or putting wood in the stove for breakfast. The lump beneath the chicken bone cage of his chest squeezed tight, and like remembering a dream hours after waking, he remembered Old Deddy’s voice muffled in the middle of the night: “Lottie! Lottie! Where you at, woman?”
As the sun burned the dew and blackened fallen acorns, Bennie walked to the chicken coop, fetched the warm eggs, set the birds out in the yard to peck, set his brother out in the yard to play, and waited at the door of the barn, just inside its gaping mouth where shade could offer him some comfort. This spot was a vantage point for watching his little brother in the yard. He could see down the road when she returned or see off toward the fields if Old Deddy came wondering why he hadn’t come to hold the mule steady.
The two cows behind him watched over the black naps of his head where sweat crept from beneath his hairline, their massive bodies quiet except their synchronized breathing. They were content in the shade of the barn even though it was midday and he had not relieved their sore teats with milking then setting them out to graze.
In that hot space that grew hotter with none of his chores tended to, he wished above the deafening pitch of cicadas that Lottie would just come home. He made up his mind sitting there in the opening of the leaning barn that he was going to help her with the laundry, the canning, help her keep up with whatever work she fell so behind on that Old Deddy saw fit to beat her every day.
Bennie pinched his eyes shut against the sting of sweat and wished that she was not where he knew she was, off getting what made her happy. She told him one day while she scrubbed up and down on the washboard, “I got me a secret place I go and makes me more money than Old Deddy ever gone make on this place. Gone get us money to go to St. Louis.” He was captivated with her fantasy and churned the butter, glad to be in that best place he loved to be, rapt in her attention. “I slips my money off for Mr. Genorette to save it for me, and I slips a little money in Old Deddy satchel sometimes after he been gamblin too.” Mr. Genorette was a tall cocoa-skinned man who was wide as the barn door. He looked like the young happy version of Old Deddy. Nobody knew by what means, but he owned the swamp-bottom tavern outright. Lottie bent down to the basket for the next piece of clothing. Her loose curls made a veil between the two of them.
“Did you hear me, Bennie? I don’t want my boys goin’ hungry on account of they Old Deddy cain’t catch up on thangs.” He didn’t know anything about St. Louis, but he knew St. Louis was where his oldest brother, James, had gone, and Bennie imagined cars and men in fancy hats, tall buildings, and women strolling down the avenue like in the Easter parade. She snapped the water from a sheet before pinching it between the wooden pins and seemed to be talking to herself. “Yep, I think he been figurin me out though.”
Bennie knew how to put two and two together by the time he was ten. The oldest boy at school, Jasper Jackson, said the fast women went to make them some money down at the tavern. Bennie figured his mother must have been very fast at doing something that people liked to pay good money for. He also knew from the way she looked around before confiding in him that if Old Deddy found out, it would be the last thing done wrong.
Bennie imagined her at the money place of Mr. Genorette’s tavern. A man pounded out the blues on the piano. The fellow on the guitar slid his plow-worn fingers up and down the rusty strings. Grown-ups touched each other and giggled and seemed happy in the midst of what people called the Depression. He danced to jiggedy blues with her, was happy too, laughing out loud with her, until he heard Old Deddy coming out of the swamp like an angry bear. He tore down the salty, weathered boards of the joint. Bennie’s imagination had slipped into dream where he slept just inside the barn door, waiting for her to come home.
The sun pushed the shade of the barn back and left him sitting in the sun, visible for Old Deddy when he came to scold Bennie about the chores. Deep in his sleep, he heard Old Deddy’s footsteps enter the barn. He heard the thunk of something, maybe a board against his head. He could hear Old Deddy’s voice as if it was the song sung with the piano tune: “Get yo lazy ass up. You hear me, boy?!” Bennie’s small heart beat slow while he danced in the safety of the dream, smell of gin and cigarettes on her breath, ribs poking through her cotton dress when she hugged him. The sound of gospel melodies with naughty words faded into scuffling feet on the dirt floor of the barn.
Bennie came conscious when he felt the braided leather of Old Deddy’s cowhide across his back and saw his gangly shadow cast against the walls when Old Deddy’s whip connected with the dry, unmothered skin on Bennie’s legs and arms. He tumbled and turned unnaturally, and the cows bowed their heads while they prayed and wept thick tears as he yelled for his mother, “Lottie!”
In the distance, Lottie paused between sips of corn whiskey. The rose flesh bloomed in her womb and knotted in the place where Bennie and Lenard once etched on fetal walls just before each of them followed the deceptive light out of her womb into the trap set to ensnare them. The gut-wrenching feeling almost made her put one foot down on the splintered floor of Genorette’s, the next foot on the muddy floor of the swamp to rescue her sons. But before she could succumb to the spell of a mother sensing the distant cry of a child, she turned to the guitar man leaning back in his cane-bottomed chair: “I woke up this mo’nin, find my, my little baby gone.” And she turned up the mason jar of corn whiskey and sang with him.
Before everything that had been done to her, Lottie was considered a rare white dove among the crows of Sampson, Mississippi. Her parents were sharecroppers for J. W. Pritchard, who also owned the land where Old Deddy sharecropped. Among her two dark-skinned brothers, she was the mulatto child born of the landlord’s rape—something everybody knew, but nobody spoke about. Her parents dreamed she would become a schoolteacher and bring pride to their family. When both of her parents died in the fire of 1928 that scorched flesh and fields, J. W. Pritchard sold the children to pay the family’s unpaid debt—sold them, as if the proclamation of Negro freedom had never been issued.
He sent her two brothers to work on a farm north of Jackson for his cousin, who would send back their earnings, and she was not sold but tagged with Pritchard’s last name and put in will-call as wife to one of Pritchard’s Negro sharecroppers, a man more than five times her age whose wife had died of tuberculosis four seasons before. Leander Lee was born just in time to escape the sweaty back lashings of slavery. The other, unscorched Pritchard farm, where he sharecropped, still benefited from the demand for tobacco, the demand for enough corn to supply a healthy underground whiskey industry. Old Deddy is what Lottie called him, since on the day J. W. Pritchard spoke the deal to this Negro sharecropper he was sixty-two and she was twelve.
All Old Deddy heard was, “the land is yours for half the debt.” All young Lottie heard was “keep her,” like she was some prized pig washed down in buttermilk to look white and clean before being parceled off for somebody else to feed, fatten up, and breed. Old Deddy’s sloppy “X” on folded sheets of paper and he would keep her. She was twelve, and her new stepson James was also twelve.
Beautiful, kept, but at a price to Leander Lee of a smart mouth to feed. She walked around acting like she understood more about count and yield than him and wasn’t giving birth to field hand children fast enough for his taste. In ten years, all he had to show for all she ate was Bennie and Lenard, two bodies for the two bodies lost in the fire.
“Lottie!” Bennie yelled for his mother again, and his own yelling voice brought him clearer into the moment. Old Deddy’s dusty skin, hair flecked with yellow naps, a six-foot shadow on the barn floor. He flung the whip and caught Bennie in its relentless maneuvers. The boy saw his own blood like the spray of scuppernong wine caught in the shaft of sunlight.
Lenard sat in the dirt of the yard like the chickens waiting for Old Deddy to be done, waiting for Bennie to come and pitch the goat bladder ball to him.
Bennie didn’t think about Lottie every day anymore. It had been near three years since she left, and his days were the rhythm of holding the mule, or tying the tobacco, or splitting wood and teaching his baby brother, Lenard, to do the same. Most days were so hot, Bennie could make skillet bread on the blade of the broken hoe, and once Old Deddy took a nap or went to town, Bennie could go to his hiding place with Lenard, and they would be free and easy in making each other laugh, which they did in quiet snickers as they splashed each other with murky pond water and watched the bats appear in the peach sky. Bennie watched the stars light up a few at a time until they expanded above him as tiny white seeds speckled on a black firmament. He’d look off at the line of woods toward Mr. Genorette’s tavern and imagine himself cutting through the back end of the swamp and peering through the window until he caught her eye. He let it go, remembering Old Deddy’s words, “Go up there look’n for her whore ass and I’ll whip the skin off ya, boy.” When Bennie relaxed like this, he knew the treatment from Old Deddy was wrong, but he was about to turn thirteen and still didn’t have anything right to compare it to.
Now and then, he’d catch sight of something, like his own toes on the bank of the pond, and see Lottie’s feet while she held him between her knees cutting his hair, and he would wonder if she was ever gonna save enough and get him and Lenard away from there.
On Bennie’s thirteenth birthday, Old Deddy looked at him through the clear corner of his glaucoma vision and hollered, “Come on, boy. Let’s go to the fights.”
“Woo wee!” Bennie screamed and went to get his cleaner pair of overalls, the hand-me-downs left behind by his older brother, James. Lenard came and stood next to him while he buckled: “I’m goin’ too, Beebee.” He never learned to say Benjamin or Bennie, and at six years old Bennie felt like Lenard was getting too old to be calling him “Beebee.”
Old Deddy honked the truck horn, which was so half-rusted it sounded like a goose getting its neck wrung for Christmas dinner. Bennie stood on the porch and yelled out to him, “Old Deddy! What ’bout Lenard?” but Old Deddy did not answer him. Bennie touched his little brother’s shoulder. “Stay here and watch the cows feed.” He stooped down to look Lenard in the eyes. “They behind the house now, and time we get back, they been done circled round back to the barn. Okay?” He didn’t want Lenard to experience what he experienced, but it was his turn to do like his brother James had done, turn into a man and go to the dogfights with Old Deddy. It was Lenard’s turn to stay behind and watch the land. Bennie and Old Deddy pulled off in the truck, making a cloud that blotted out the view of Lenard sitting on the porch steps.
The dogfights—corn whiskey, cigar smoke, fists full of bills, Old Deddy’s bullfrog voice, “We gonna win. I feel it!” Bennie perked up and laughed with him, “Yes, sir. Yes, sir. We gonna win!” Men hollered and slapped each other on the shoulder. Old Deddy and Bennie were on one side of town standing over the pit yelling and hollering in anticipation of the sweat of the angry dogs. On the dead-end side of town, Lottie was dancing and collecting the dollars from the drunk men. One of them copped a pinch for free, and Mr. Genorette took a wide stance, aimed his pistol at the misbehaving man, and tossed the body into the dark sulfur water of the swamp, where the bullet hole leaked all the blood down through the mud, a sight that caused Lottie to call on God: “Lord, Jesus, God in heaven, help me!”
Bennie’s little-boy ears that once tweaked at the sound of his mother’s distress turned toward the sounds of the pen. He looked up at Old Deddy’s gray naps and felt a new solidarity as strong as the plow strap between man and the mule who both earned their rest through shared backbreaking labor. He knew something he hadn’t been mature enough to reckon with until then. Surely, Old Deddy knew where his young wife was spending her time. “Quit goin’ up to let them mens pinch on yo ass!” His little-boy ears almost awakened at the memory of Old Deddy yelling as the sound of her body struck the wall, but he didn’t want any of those memories invading his place by Old Deddy’s side.
The two of them stood next to the thigh-high wooden structure. “Good placement,” Old Deddy kept saying with his hand on Bennie’s shoulder and his head turned sideways. The corner of his right eye tipped down toward the pen to see around the glaucoma blockage. At an angle, he could see just fine down to where the action would happen.
Bennie didn’t know he was grinning until he tasted the stagnant thick air of sweat in the fur of the chained dogs. The other men pushed at his back to see over in the pit, and he was glad he was up close because he was only shoulder height. All of them leaned over the pen like trees over a pond.
They got to hooting and hollering when the men came from either side through the little path with the dogs on chains, muzzles strapped around their faces. The dogs were docile, looking not at each other but around at the crowd, obeying the occasional jerking motion of the handlers. ...
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