by Adam Makos
For eleven hours that day, Jesse and his brothers had chopped plants until their backs ached and their hands were covered in blisters. Now they were headed home to do their chores; there was firewood to chop and chickens to feed and a garden to maintain. The garden was everything to the Brown family, because it was actually theirs.
As a sharecropper, John Brown didn’t own the thirty acres that his family farmed. He rented the fields from a skinny white landowner named Joe Bob Ingram, who also owned the town’s general store, where the sharecroppers rented their tools and bought their seed. Throughout the year, the store ran a tally on each family’s purchases. At year’s end when the bill was presented, Joe Bob always adjusted it to erase the Brown family’s yearly profit. For John Brown, it was a no-win life, one he hoped his boys would escape.
The father and sons approached a roadside footpath that led into the woods. Insects buzzed about the entrance. Lura and Fletcher perked up and grinned. With fresh bounce in their steps, the boys approached Jesse and tapped his arm, motioning toward the woods. Every day they came to Jesse at this same spot, with the same imploring eyes.
“Ask him!” Fletcher whispered.
Jesse knew what his brothers were hinting at and shook his head. He and his brothers still had to bring in the mules and do their chores.
The faces of the younger boys sank.
“C’mon, ask him—please!” Lura whispered.
Jesse looked down at his disheveled younger brothers. He felt exhausted too. Jesse’s face loosened and he steered his mule closer to his father.
“Pa,” Jesse said. “Do we have time for a quick break?”
Fletcher and Lura hurried forward and grinned toward the big man.
John Brown stopped to wipe his brow. He stroked the face of his panting mule, its eye half-closed. He had served in an all-black army cavalry unit during World War I, a unit that had been set to deploy overseas but the war ended before they could ship out.
John Brown looked at his boys and saw their raised eyebrows. His lips broke into a smile. “I’ll handle the mules,” he said. “Just do your chores when y’all get home.”
The boys glanced at one another with fresh life in their eyes. Jesse handed his father the reins to his mule and the boys handed him their tools. The family parted.
Lura and Fletcher took off skipping toward the forest path with Jesse following.
“Hold your horses!” Jesse called. At the trailhead he grabbed a sturdy stick from the ground, swung it through the air, and saw that it was good and steady. Jesse warned Fletcher and Lura to stay behind him.
Then he led the boys into the woods.
—
Jesse walked slowly and swept the path ahead with the stick. The trail wasn’t used much and weeds crisscrossed the dirt. The creaking and zipping from insects and croaking from bullfrogs were complicating Jesse’s efforts to listen for the hiss of a cottonmouth.
Cottonmouths were the thick brown-black vipers that infested the backwoods, and it was tough to spot one on a trail. They were poisonous, even more than rattlesnakes. The little girl next door to the Browns had been bitten on the foot. She lived, but only after sweating and groaning for weeks while blood bubbled from the wound.
Fletcher tried to race ahead, but Jesse stopped him. “Get back here, Mule!” Jesse shouted. He had nicknamed Fletcher “Mule” because the boy had a mind of his own. Fletcher stopped and grinned.
With his brothers behind him, Jesse resumed the march. He waved the stick at ground level and watched the trail, unblinking. One time, on the same trail, a coiled cottonmouth had threatened Jesse’s brothers and blocked their path home. So Jesse beat the snake’s head with a stick and killed it. When his brothers investigated the carcass they found a series of big bulges along its belly. Fletcher and Lura took it home and cut it open. Inside, they counted twenty-two frogs.
In the center of the woods, the boys reached a pond of stagnant water dammed off from a nearby stream. The water was brown and a thin layer of green scum floated around the edges. The boys stood a few moments and watched a snake crisscross the pond. Only its triangular head swam above the surface, its blunt snout parting the scum around its black eyes. There were always a few they couldn’t see, as well. The boys knew how to get the snakes out of their swimming hole.
Jesse unhooked his overalls and peeled his T-shirt from around his neck, then tossed it aside. He hadn’t even stepped out of his pants before Fletcher took off, naked as the day he was born, running down the dirt hill. Legs flailing, Fletcher jumped straight into the center of the pond. Lura followed and Jesse plunged in last.
Muddy water bubbled up from the shallow bottom. The scum shook and waves carried it toward the pond’s outer fringes. The cottonmouth didn’t like the disturbance. It slithered in retreat up the bank.
The muddy pond felt as warm as bathwater and the brothers splashed and paddled around, hooting and hollering to make as much ruckus as possible. Keeping the noise up was the best way to keep the snakes on the banks.
—
Dripping wet, the boys walked down the same dirt road as before, talking happily. Even after a bath in the muddy water, they felt clean.
Jesse smiled with amusement as he listened. Fletcher often jabbered about his girlfriends, twin girls who lived next door, whereas Lura knew all the current events from the newspapers left over after his paper route. For this reason, the family had nicknamed Lura “Junior” because he was like a junior Jesse, always reading.
The brothers paused their banter. Behind them, around the bend, a truck downshifted. It sounded imposing. The road was narrow, so Jesse led his brothers to the side and glanced back.
A school bus burst around the corner. It was black on the nose, yellow on the body, and its engine rattled like a laboring air conditioner. The bus shifted gears and picked up speed. Jesse edged his brothers farther into the weeds.
From the windows toward the back of the bus, a half-dozen white faces poked out, sporting mops of brown, blond, and red hair. The kids in the bus shouted a chorus of curses.
“Heya niggers!”
“Dirty niggers!
“Looky here, niggers!”
As the bus roared past, the kids spit at Jesse and his brothers. Sticky gobs of saliva splattered on Jesse and his brothers and stuck to their bare chests and arms as they tried to cover their faces. Dust and hot diesel exhaust enveloped the boys as the bus roared away. The kids in the bus stared back and pointed, laughing and whooping.
Jesse and his brothers frantically tried to wipe away the spit. They found it in their hair. Fletcher began to cry. He and Lura looked to Jesse for an answer. Jesse glared at the cloud of dust where the bus had been. He clenched his jaw and tightened his fists. He seldom lashed out and never cursed; instead he became tense to the point of shaking. He was “PO’d,” as he called it.
The brothers resumed their walk home in silence. It wasn’t the first time they’d encountered racial hostility, but usually it was just a curse or an angry eye when they walked into a store. Never had anyone spit on them. Never had they felt this dirty.
Lura’s flat eyebrows sank over his eyes with disgust. “I know what I want to be when I grow up,” he said, breaking the silence. “A Greyhound bus driver—so I can get the hell out of Mississippi.”
Jesse nodded. He was thinking the same thing.
CHAPTER 4
THE WORDS
Several days later
Lux, Mississippi
BY EARLY AFTERNOON, the heat struck the sharecroppers full force.
With his back hunched, Jesse Brown hoed between the shin-high cotton plants. Sweat dripped down his back, turning his overalls deep blue. He squinted at the acres of leaves ahead. The rows of green looked endless and the distant pines made the field feel like a prison.
In a nearby row, Fletcher swatted his face constantly. Gnats buzzed his ears and darted for his eyes. Only seven years old, he often lagged behind. Lura, at nine, could keep time with his older brother
, but he was away that day with his father, watering the mules or fetching supplies.
Alongside Jesse and Fletcher, six farmhands hoed the furrows. For fifty cents a day, each helped the Browns during planting season. Women wore breezy cotton dresses and worked alongside men dressed in overalls and T-shirts. The adults all wore wide-brimmed straw hats.
Chop. Jesse took a step, then his hoe struck earth again. Chop. Jesse thinned the cotton by chopping any weeds between plants. The sun was white-hot overhead. Steamy air settled in the fields and breathing became difficult. Time seemed to stand still.
The sounds of the fields were uninspiring. Hoes jangling the dirt. An occasional sigh or grunt. The hock of a worker spitting. No call-and-response songs were ever sung in any field that Jesse Brown worked in. But sometimes there was music. Lost in a daydream, Jesse often hummed to himself. Fletcher and others would glance over to try to discern the tune. Sometimes Jesse hummed a slow folk song and other times a radio jingle.
At one point, it was Jesse who noticed that Fletcher’s hoe had gone silent. Jesse looked over and saw the younger boy rubbing his eyes with both fists. This happened often. Jesse walked to the end of the furrow, grabbed a jug of Kool-Aid, and carried it over to his little brother.
“Gnats getting to you, Mule?” Jesse asked.
The younger boy sniffed, wiped his nose against the back of his arm, and nodded. A gnat or two had found its way into his eyes and made them sting.
“They’re peeing in my eyes,” Fletcher insisted.
Jesse handed Fletcher the jug. Fletcher took a swig. The lemon-lime Kool-Aid was hot but sweet. Kool-Aid was a new invention and it cost just five cents a packet. Fletcher wiped his chin. A timid smile returned to his chubby cheeks.
He and his brother returned to work.
—
At first, no one heard it coming.
Not Jesse as he hummed.
Not Fletcher as he swatted away the buzzing gnats.
The airplane dived down from the sky. From across the field, Jesse heard a shout. A farmhand was pointing frantically toward the edge of the field. The man dropped to the dirt. Other sharecroppers were falling down too.
Credit 4.1
A BT-9/NJ-1
Jesse turned just in time to see a sleek blue airplane traveling toward him at treetop height. Its wings were low and yellow, its engine was round, and two large landing gear hung down from the wings—but the plane’s propeller wasn’t whirling. It was fixed straight across.
It was aiming for him.
Jesse ducked and dropped to the earth. Fletcher was already down. The pilot steered down a row of cotton. Jesse lifted his head and his eyes went wide. The plane was stretching larger and larger as it glided toward him.
Jesse buried his nose in the dirt and when he thought he would hear the plane smack the field and slide with a grinding groan, its engine whined, coughed, and bucked to life. Jesse felt the gust of hot exhaust as the plane roared over him.
The plane climbed, whistling toward the clouds. Jesse stood and studied the machine. The plane had a long glass canopy big enough for two men to sit one behind the other. The pilot—whoever he was—jerked the wings and wagged the red-and-white-striped rudder. It was a stunt. The plane had never been in danger of crashing.
“It’s that fool Miley boy again!” one of the sharecroppers yelled. Miley was a neighboring landowner whose son was training to be a pilot in Alabama.
Jesse envisioned the pilot and a redneck buddy having a good laugh at the black folks they had scared senseless. At the far end of the field, the plane turned above the pines. It was circling back for another pass.
“Head for the trees!” shouted a sharecropper.
In the center of the field lay a tall clump of oaks. The farmhands sprinted for safety. Some clutched straw hats as they jumped over the rows of cotton.
Jesse didn’t move.
He shaded his eyes with his hand and watched the distant airplane coming around. Fletcher stayed too. If Jesse wasn’t going to run, then neither was he, even though he was shaking.
A male farmhand darted out and hollered, “Fletcher! Jesse! Git your asses over here! That boy’s gonna kill you!”
Fletcher’s knees began to bend in terror, but Jesse didn’t flinch. The plane zoomed over the far end of the field and aimed at them. It wasn’t gliding now. Its engine was alive. The silver propeller blades whirled at shoulder height and the low-hanging wheels threatened to skim the dirt.
Jesse stood tall and stared right at the oncoming plane. The pilot hugged the earth, his prop wash blowing away the loose plants. The machine grew large in the boys’ vision. Its wings stretched. Fletcher hit the dirt and covered his head with his hands.
Just before the plane could cut Jesse in two, its nose pitched up. The pilot gunned the engine and the machine’s wheels soared over Jesse.
Fletcher looked up from the soil in time to see Jesse’s hands reach toward the wheels as the plane passed above his fingertips. The engine’s blast blew soil around the boys. Jesse shielded his eyes and then waved vigorously at the plane as it shrank in the distance. The farmhands ran to his side.
“Did you see that?” Jesse said. “A BT-9! I’ve only ever read about them.”
“You’re crazy!” one of the farmhands shouted. “That boy was trying to kill you!”
Jesse laughed and explained that the pilot would never have hit him—at that altitude the pilot would have crashed if he’d tried.
The other farmhands insisted that the pilot was out to get them. “He was up there laughing, yelling, ‘Run, niggers, run!’ ” one man said.
Jesse brushed the comment off with a grin. “He was just having fun. When I get my plane I’ll probably do the same thing to you!”
The farmhands broke into laughter. In front of them stood a barefoot thirteen-year-old boy dressed in stained overalls.
“Child, throw that idea straight out of your mind!” said a female field hand. “If Negroes can’t ride in aeroplanes, they sure ain’t gonna be flying one.”
Jesse’s smile faded. He returned to chopping but this time he didn’t hum. His shoulders tightened and his chin tucked. He was PO’d and not because the farmhands were ignorant but because they just might be right.
—
Several days later, after the farming was done, Jesse, Fletcher, and Lura walked on the dirt road, heading home to their chores. Dark storm clouds filled the horizon, a brewing summer storm.
Behind them came the distinctive sounds of a gear shifting and an engine rattling like a laboring air conditioner.
Jesse pulled Fletcher off the road into a nearby field and Lura followed. Jesse looked his brothers in the eyes. “If I say to run, then you run—get it?”
The younger boys nodded rapidly.
Jesse scoured the ground until he picked up a dried cornstalk about four feet long. He shook off the dirt and ran back to the roadside, the stalk in hand.
As the school bus neared, the windows slid back and the same angry faces emerged. Jesse stood to the side of the bus’s path and choked up on the cornstalk like a bat. As the bus passed, he swung the cornstalk and smacked the first face that jutted from the windows.
The angry face squealed and reeled back inside. The boy’s friends yelled at the bus driver to stop. The bus made a grinding sound and stopped. Jesse lowered the cornstalk but kept it in his hands. The boys in the back of the bus swore until a male voice barked, “Shut up!” The bus door banged open.
A white man in suspenders stepped out, spit tobacco juice, and strode toward Jesse. The bus driver was older, yet he had broad shoulders and big fists. Lura shielded Fletcher and glanced nervously up at Jesse, waiting for the order to run. Jesse remained still, his eyes fixed on the approaching driver.
“What in the hell just happened here?” the driver asked, his eyebrows narrowing.
“Sir,” Jesse said. “Every day when you pass us, those boys stick their heads out and spit on us.”
The driver’s ey
ebrows lifted. He turned and stared at his bus. The boys were leaning halfway out the window, like dogs with dangling tongues.
“C’mon, let him have it!” yelled the crying boy.
The driver turned and studied Jesse from head to toe, taking in the sight of the boy’s bare feet and patched overalls. The driver then glanced to Fletcher and Lura, who were cowering in the nearby field and looking up with frightened eyes.
“Well, that won’t happen anymore,” the driver said.
The man turned and strode back to his bus. The door slammed harder than before. The boys’ heads disappeared from the windows. Through the open windows of the bus Jesse and his brothers heard the driver chewing the kids out. Soon enough, the bus started and drove off with a grind and a roar.
When the bus was out of sight, Jesse and his brothers resumed walking home. The storm clouds still brewed in the distance, but things felt different.
After a few silent paces, Fletcher looked over at Jesse. His eyebrows were arched in astonishment. Jesse smiled, shrugged, and raised his hands, palms out.
His younger brothers broke out in laughter.
—
The rain was falling thick and heavy by the time Jesse and his brothers reached home, a cabin nestled in a thin grove of trees. The cabin was made of unpainted pine boards and was covered by a rusted tin roof. Kerosene lamplight flickered in the windows. The whole structure sat on blocks, a pile under each corner. Behind the home was a garden fence and then some railroad tracks. When trains raced by at night, the cabin shook.
Jesse and his brothers stepped onto the porch, where the mosquitoes had collected, seeking protection from the rain. The boys swatted the pests and entered through the cabin’s rickety front door.
