by Jeff Horton
And he’d loan you three or four hundred dollars, and if you had a big family and everybody needed a pair of shoes, that wasn’t going to do you no good. You’d get credit at the company store, but you could
never work it off.
To help pass the time, they would be singing in the fields. They’d
sing these different songs, strung out all over the field. Sometimes they’d be singing the same song; other times it would be different
songs. I never will forget, they would be just making up stuff to sing, like about the rain. Like, “I’m not gonna work another day without
pay, and it seems like it’s not gonna rain no more,” because you knew when it rained, regardless of how much cotton was in the field, you
couldn’t pick it because you had water in the rows. That is how a lot of blues songs was written.
It was rough back then in the area where I lived, but it wasn’t as
rough as it was in the Mississippi Delta. By Laurel being a city, it was a little bit better. They didn’t have as much cotton and stuff around
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Laurel and Jackson. That’s where your cotton would come to. They
would have a gin, and they would have oil mills where they made cot-
tonseed oil. And you know, people didn’t get paid much for a lot of
the work they did back then, but they had better facilities then than they do today. You take today’s railroads, it was the same way. When my dad worked on the railroad, they had to do manual labor in putting those rails down. I used to watch them doing that. It’d be ten men on a rail, four on each side and one on each end. These men would
get under the rail, and they’d pick it up off the flatcar. That iron is heavy, and they would be standing there holding that rail up. They
would pull the flatcar out from under, and they’d drop that thing
onto the crossties. Then the other guys who were standing there came along with mauls and drove spikes in it. One guy would drop the plate down, the plate that goes at the end of the tie, and then they’d put the spike into that. The spikes were set to the tie, and then they’d get it all lined up and everything.
Most railroads have white gravel; they’d take that gravel and put it between the ties. That was really hard work, but they had better railroads back then. The cotton fields and railroads went hand in hand.
You were a laborer regardless, and the only difference between the railroad and being a sharecropper picking cotton was the railroad was a
year-round, lifetime job. If you were a farmer, you were still just as important as the next man, but you didn’t get paid. The railroad had better pay than a lot of the jobs, because railroad has been federal for a long time. Then, every year they had more fringe benefits. They had a great thing going.
I don’t remember what year it was when they started discontinu-
ing a lot of passenger trains; then the federal government took it
over. They started doing a lot of railroad work by machine, and the
railroads and the maintenance of them wasn’t as good as it was when
the guys did it by hand from the real labor days. And you would all
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the time hear tell of trains having a wreck or running into something, but when a train had an accident back then in the early days, it was at a crossing or something like that. Nowadays, they have accidents
with trains when they’re just riding right along, and there are plenty more accidents now than there were back then, due to the fact that a machine is doing the work a man used to do. Nowadays one man can
operate a machine to put down the spikes and stuff; they do it with
a machine that took six men out of work. Just one machine. And the
work that the machine does, it just isn’t as good as the work that man-power did back in the days of the steam engine.
I still have a strong infatuation with trains. When I was going to
school, my mother would come out to Piney Woods and we’d go back
home on the train. I loved that. On one of those trips she told me,
“Son, now you’re a big boy. I’m going to ask you something, but you
got to promise me that you won’t get scared.” So I said, “What’s that?”
She said, “Suppose you come home on the train by yourself?” I said, “I would love that!” That was my first experience, and after that I would go everywhere by myself, and ever since I always had this thing for trains. I haven’t done it since I’ve been living here in Dallas, but I used to go out and stand by the railroad and watch the passenger trains go by.
There was a friend of mine, an older man named Sid Edwards,
who worked driving one of those big trucks that hauled bulldoz-
ers and road graders. He was working with a construction company
out of Memphis, but he’d come home to Jackson every weekend.
Sometimes he would go to some parts of Louisiana to deliver on
Sunday evening so it all could be together, ready for them to start
work Monday morning. I said, “Man, you’ve got a lot of gears and
shifts in there.” He said, “Yeah, this is what is called a twin-stick. It has thirteen forward gears and another with a split shift.” He told me that when he started changing gears, he’d get up to five, and when he’d kick in that “Road Ranger” he could get up to speed.
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Not far from where we lived they had a gravel pit, and Sid used to
drive what was called a “dirt train.” Sid worked in this gravel pit where they shifted sand and gravel out onto the trains to go to different areas.
He would drive the train, switch the cars in to be loaded, and then he would bring them up to the main line for the locomotives to pick them up and transfer them to where they needed to be. He taught me a lot
about driving a train. A lot of people look at it as being hard, but it’s a real simple thing. All of it works by levers. Once you get it started, you have a lever that you push to a certain mark, and that picks up the speed to how fast you want to go. I learnt from that, and when he had some time off I followed him near everywhere he went. When I’d be
home from Piney Woods, my mother would fix me a sack lunch just
like I would be going off to work. Sid would pick me up in the morning, and I would just follow him around all day. Ordinarily I wouldn’t be allowed to be on the job with him, but he got it straight with his supervisor that he would take care of me and see that nothing happened.
Being around Sid got me even more interested in music. I used to
love the way he whistled. He was about one of the best whistlers I ever heard. He could whistle most any song, like “The Tennessee Waltz” or
“Blue Moon of Kentucky,” and he would whistle a lot of blues songs.
He could even whistle the sound of a bird. All through the day when
I’d be around with him, he’d be doing his work and then he’d whistle tunes for me. He loved teacakes, so when we would stop by the house, Mama would fix him teacakes with ginger and cinnamon in them.
Mama would ask him, “Sid, do you have your lunch?” and she’d fix
him a big paper bag of those teacakes. He kept a big jug of water up in the cab of that engine, and that’s all he would do, eat those cakes and drink that water. He would make the day like that.
If I didn’t see him right away in the morning I would really be out
of focus. Sometimes he’d be late coming by, and I’d wonder where he
was. We’d go on, and he would show me different things about the
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p; train. When he would get all of his loads ready, it wouldn’t take him long, because he had a big steam shovel on the end of the loader that they had on the train. He’d take a couple of scoops and fill up a truck or a boxcar. He showed me how to start it and where the gearshifts
were, and I learnt from there how to crank up all that stuff. His thing was, when he was going to show you how to do something, the first
thing he would do was to show you how to start and stop it in case you were going to run into something, or if you weren’t going in the right direction. He would show you what lever would keep it level and on a straight path. All that grew up in me, and I learnt pretty good after that.
With Sid and another guy who worked at a sawmill, we never did
have to worry about toys and food at Christmas time. Them and my
dad was real good friends, and they would get fruit and toys for us.
That was a happy time for me. But it’s strange how things can happen.
I had been home from school for two days in the summertime. One
morning, instead of coming by the house, Sid was running pretty late so he went straight on to work. Something just didn’t let him come by to get me on that particular day. After a while we heard a big explo-sion. A boiler had blown up on the train he was driving, and he was
killed. If he had picked me up on that day, I would have been right
there with him. Boy, that was a great loss. I think about that old man, as long as it’s been, I think about him right today.
There’s something else I never will forget. Ben Maxwell, he was
a sawmill guy. He could fix anything or do any kind of work around
a sawmill that needed to be done. He lit the boiler, he worked in the saw shop sharpening saws, but his main job was running the head
saw. When a log was cut into lumber, he had those saws where he sat
on a stool and he took a piece of lumber and put it over on one side for two-by-fours. On the other side he may be cutting two-by-sixes or whatever. And then he ran a cut-off saw. All the saws were around him on that big stool. When the lumber came off the logs, they came out
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of a big house where they have big, giant saws. When the logs come
through the door, they just rip ’em open with the rip saws and then
the other saws took over.
One day, Ben got his leg cut off. Wasn’t noticing what he was doing, and it would be so noisy in that mill they had to use shortwave radios.
Somebody would be on the conveyor belt when the lumber was
coming off it, and if they weren’t watching what was going on, he
would holler, “One coming!” Then they would know to move back
and get ready to mark it. They would cut the ends of ’em off, put ’em on another conveyor belt, and then they’d go out and stack ’em. A guy would come through with a forklift and they’d take ’em and stack ’em in the yard until they had a big pile of ’em. And that mill didn’t throw away nothing. The sawdust went into a big vat that looked like a boxcar.
They had some kind of chemical that had big pipes blowing it into the vat where the sawdust was. It would turn that sawdust red and it would be just like a powder, so they would make floor sweeper out of it. The only thing that they wouldn’t save would be the bark of a tree.
So this guy Ben Maxwell was cutting some boards one day and
wasn’t noticing what he was doing. As long as he’d been working there, one of those saws just cut his leg off. He reached down and pulled it up onto that durn conveyor belt. He hollered to them, “If you see anything red, that’s part of me!” Cut his durn leg off as smooth as my hand, just above his boot top. The guys rushed to him and said they were going
to take him to the doctor. Ben said, “No, I’ve got to work.” They said,
“But man, your leg is cut off!” He said, “Damn, it wasn’t no good no way, wasn’t nothing but a botheration.” They knew he was in hysterics, and they grabbed him up off of that stool, and he was fighting them
off. They knew then that there was really something wrong with him.
The accident wasn’t the cause of his death, but he died a few years later when he got to where he couldn’t do anything more with just one leg. It must’ve been that it just worried him to death.
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C H A P T E R 3
PINEY WOODS
In 1909 educator Dr. Laurence C. Jones founded the Piney Woods School in rural Rankin County, Mississippi, a few miles south of Jackson. He began the school with a handful of children and held his first classes in an old split-log sheep shed. The shed remains preserved on the campus as a historical exhibit and still contains the ancient piano that was used to teach music. Today the nationally recognized school occupies over two thousand wooded acres that includes a five-hundred-acre working farm and a campus of classroom buildings, dormitories, and activity centers.
Piney Woods graduates small classes of about twenty students every year, and almost all of them move on to college or careers in the military. The school has an outstanding reputation for academics and has been featured twice on the CBS news program 60 Minutes . When Sam began his schooling there in 1947, Piney Woods was also home to the state school for the blind.
Piney Woods was not like any ordinary school; it was more like a trade school. Some people looked at Piney Woods as being a correctional
facility or a prison, but it wasn’t. It was a school of higher learning, in a country life. Whatever trade you wanted to learn, you could decide on what you wanted to be in life, like a brick mason, a carpenter, a
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cement finisher, or a musician. If you wanted to be a doctor, they even had a hospital where you could learn that. They had any type of work that you wanted to do right there. They had to travel off the campus for only a few things. The buildings were built by the hands of the staff and the students. They grew a lot of their own food and had cows for milk. The students learned how to help pick the food crops and how
to help tend the cows. That was part of their trade and their learning as they grew up. Of course I was interested in music, and that is what I mostly studied from age ten up to where I am now. It was music that was the cause of me knowing what two and two is. Even today, I look
back on my life and the early years and see where music has played a very important part.
One thing that was interesting about the school was that we never
had any performers to come on campus to do our social activities. The band was large enough so that we played our own social functions
and gatherings. Sometimes in the summer we would sign up everyone
to do it. We would travel across the country with the Piney Woods
Band Glee Club. That’s where I learned a lot about singing, doing a lot of gospel music and such. Back in the forties it would get super cold indoors compared to what it is now with modern heat, so we would
sing gospel music in the dormitory. What I remember is that we had
only steam from the radiators to keep us warm. We would get in a
group in a room and do a lot of this singing just to keep from freezing.
O l l i e M y e r s :
When he was going to school at Piney Woods, Sam’s mother, Celeste, left to go out to visit him when the buses were about to go on strike. She had sold a calf and bought a Smith & Wesson .38, I never will forget that.
She was on the bus, looking in her bag for something, and she had her flashlight on the side. The bus driver told her he couldn’t stop at Piney Woods, because the strike was going to start in Jackson at midnight, and
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it was quarter to twelve then. She said, “Right here is where I’m going.”
He said, “Yes, I know where Piney Woods is, but I’m not suppose
d to stop.” And she said that when she was looking through her bag, the driver spotted her pistol and flashlight. He said, “Well now, you know letting you off here will be at your own risk, but I think you’re able to take care of yourself! ”
Unlike some of the kids at Piney Woods who got into mischief and
stuff, I was sort of a quiet kid. I really didn’t want to go to the school, and I tried several times to run away. I didn’t know any better. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even know where to go. I just didn’t want to be where I was. They put a gentleman with me, a Mr. Jonas Brown. We all called him “J. B.” He was there to find out what I really liked or what I didn’t like about the school. He would ask from time to time how I
was doing. I didn’t think about it until later, after I found out what I really liked about Piney Woods. We were standing out in front of
the dormitory one day, just talking. I guess I was about ten years old.
I always wanted somebody to read to me, so he was getting ready to
read to me, and I heard the band rehearsing, getting ready for a football game. I heard this sound that really struck my attention. I asked,
“What’s that?” J. B. said, “Do you like it?” I said, “Yes, indeed! I like to hear those horns.” He said, “That’s the band playing, getting ready for the game.” I asked, “Would they say anything if I went up there? I’d like to go and listen to it.” He said, “No, you can go anywhere on the campus that you want to. Do you want to go?” I said, “I sure would.”
So we went up there and walked in when they were getting ready to
take a break.
There was this young student named Anna Mae Williams who
blew trumpet. I never will forget, after J. B. introduced me to Mr.
Charles McGilvery, the band director, I went over to her and sat down.
I said, “What is that?” She told me, “A trumpet.” I asked, “Can I see it?”
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She said, “Sure. Do you want to learn to blow this one?” I said, “I’d like to, but right now I just want to listen.” She told me then, “You can’t sit here and listen and not take part in it.” J. B. said, “It looks like you done found a friend.” They started to play a march called “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” and I said, “Boy, oh boy, I wonder could I be able to do that someday?” She said, “Yes, but you’ll have to practice.” I did have sense enough to know that. I said, “I’m not going to bother you all; I just love to listen.” Mr. McGilvery told me I could stay as long as I wanted. Between songs Anna Mae would show me her horn and
