Mississippi Cotton

by Paul H. Yarbrough

  Our eyes had gotten used to the dark now, and I could see the look on his face. It wasn’t a smile or a frown, just a plain look. It reminded me of an old guy who was in the picture shows when Mother and Daddy were little. A man named Buster Keaton. I saw him in the newsreel once, but I had never actually seen him in a picture show. Anyway, that was who Looty’s look reminded me of.

  “And so you think BB’s home too, huh?” Casey asked.

  “Yeah, I guess so. Did y’all know that Andrew was in jail once? He was in a jail up North after the Yankees caught him at Shiloh.”

  His words returned to the black and white Confederates as if they were always present in his mind.

  We told him we didn’t know, because we really didn’t. We had never even heard about Andrew and Silas until Big Trek had told us about them. Of course we hated to admit in front of Farley that there was anything we didn’t know about the story. We had to know more about something than he did. It was our biggest power over a guy with a driver’s license.

  “He got what they call ‘exchanged’ before the war was o’er, and him and Silas went through the res’ of the war together.”

  “You’re still gonna live here, aren’t you, Looty?” Casey asked. “I mean you’re not gonna move away or anything, huh?”

  Looty didn’t answer, but I doubted he was going anywhere. He wasn’t the kind of man that could really leave the home he had known all his life. Besides, what would he do? I think Casey knew it but just wanted to say something nice to Looty.

  “Maybe when you come down to visit your momma you can come by and visit us,” Farley said. I know he was just trying to be nice because the state hospital was just across the county line from Jackson. But it still sounded kind of dumb. ‘Hey, as long as you’re down visiting your lunatic mother, why not stop by and we can visit. Maybe make a day of it.’

  All of us stared at Farley. Casey’s teeth clenched, Taylor rolled his eyes. Farley got a little defensive. “Well, he might come by, if he’s there anyhow.”

  We said nothing. Looty spoke. “I would like to see your house. I sure would. Maybe I’ll come by if I go down there to see my momma.”

  It was nice the way Looty tried helpin’ Farley, I thought. But I knew it would probably never happen. I doubted that Looty would ever see his mother again. She would be a lonely old lady in a hospital or prison and he would just be a simple-minded lonely man. Mother and son, apart.

  Finally Taylor said, “We better get going. It’s almost nine thirty.”

  We all said goodbye and I thought maybe we were supposed to shake Looty’s hand or something like I always saw my daddy do. But we didn’t know how to handle it, so we all just yelled, “See ya, Looty.”

  “Bye y’all,” he said.

  We left him on the porch. In the dark.

  Our drive back to the house was quiet. Even Casey said little. I guessed everyone was thinking about Looty, same as I was. He was safe but alone in his old house, with the mayonnaise jar.

  But something more was going through my mind. I thought about the big, black man who had become my friend—the reader, the worker, the football player, the war hero. And he was a Mississippian. Just like Looty. Just like me. And just like Andrew and Silas and the University Grays and Johnny Vaught. I wondered if I would ever hear from BB after this summer ended tomorrow.

  CHAPTER 22

  Saturday morning we got up before seven. We were going to stay for dinner then drive back to Jackson. Taylor and Casey and Cousin Trek had a 4-H club meeting at nine o’clock. For some reason known only to Farley, he went with them. Maybe he hoped there would be some farm girls there. But I stayed behind, because I knew that mostly they would be talking about things that I wouldn’t be interested in, like chickens and hogs and manure. Besides, I had to pack up my gear and clothes that had gotten scattered around over the last three weeks in places not necessarily known to Cousin Carol.

  After they left I pulled everything together and took off on one of the bikes, assuring my mother I would be back before dinner. I wanted to see BB before I left.

  I had taken Looty’s word that BB wasn’t in jail and assumed he was home. Last word was he wasn’t going to be in any real trouble.

  I rode the two miles in about ten minutes and worked up a sweat. If it had been any other day I would have asked Ben to spray me with the hose, but not that day. That day I had to stay pretty clean. As I rode up, Ben was washing his truck with a garden hose and BB was scouring the hood with a soap-soaked sponge. It oozed with soap as he moved his hand back and forth. I guess I was surprised that he was at the house and not working in the field. I wasn’t surprised that he was working at something.

  “Well, looka here who’s come callin’,” Ben said, grinning like always.

  BB dropped the sponge into a bucket then wiped his hands on his tee-shirt. He was wearing blue jeans and was barefooted. I had worked with him on and off for three weeks and knew he was a strong man. With his tee-shirt soaked, I could see his chest muscles ripple, and from his long arms his biceps were taut as a result of hard work. I could see how he could have been a good football player. Something told me too that if he had been at Gettysburg, we would have whipped the Yankees; because I would’ve bet he was whipping the Communists in Korea until they shot him.

  “So, you come to say goodbye?” BB said.

  “Well, dat’s thoughtful of you, Mr. Jake. It shore is,” Ben said. “We shore gonna mis’ you ‘round here.” He took out his handkerchief and blew his nose. Then he coughed, kind of low. “I think I gots me a sniffling cold, gittin’ out in that rain the other night. Even in dis hot weather, it seems like.”

  “Mother says summer colds are the worst,” I said.

  “You know what, Jake. We need some more rain bad. And I’m gonna bet we get some soon as you leave,” BB said.

  I looked at BB, then at Ben. I thought maybe Ben was going to tell me what BB meant. I wondered if he was going to say I’d been a jinx or something. Finally, I asked, “Whadaya mean, BB?”

  “Well, I think the Lord prob’ly held back on the rain jus’ so you could work in the heat. Sometimes He’s rough on a fellow just to toughen him up.” He looked upward toward the sun.

  I had never thought like that before, that someone could be hard on you to help you.

  It seemed like BB was always saying things that seemed smart—maybe wise is what Mother would say. BB was smart and wise. Looty was simple and good. And they had a special bond between them. And they would always be special to me.

  “After you leave, He’ll prob’ly send us some rain. I’ll just betcha,” BB said once more.

  This time I looked at the sun. This time I smiled.

  “But next summer, if you come back, you’ll be as tough as everybody else and there won’t be any need for such temperin’.”

  “Well, I won’t know until June next year if I’ll be coming back. And I don’t even know if Cousin Trek’ll want me hoeing cotton.”

  Ben coughed again, putting his handkerchief up to his mouth.

  “Daddy, maybe you ought to go and lie down. Take some of that cough syrup.”

  “Naw, I be all right. Jus’ gonna shake this little cold.”

  BB turned back to me. “Well, he’ll want you working, I’d say. If he don’t, then you can help me paint this house. I need to do it before the end of next summer. Think you’d be a good house painter?”

  “Oh, sure.” Painting? “Well, I’m gonna miss y’all.”

  And I knew I would. It had been a summer better than anything I had ever experienced—hard work, a murder mystery, and new friends. One friend was a strange man whose mind was not much older than mine. Two others were colored men who had taught me that work was a gift. That my Confederate ancestors were fighting for their land and against those who invaded it. That Confederates were black and white, and therefore Gray. That with a lot of hard work, the Delta land grows wonderful and beautiful cotton. The best kind of cotton—Mississippi cotton. God gave the
cotton and God gave the work.

  I kind of wanted to say something special to them like guys did in the picture show, but I didn’t know what to say. I finally told them that I hoped everything worked out for them. I didn’t say “with the sheriff,” but they knew what I meant. I told BB I hoped he got to go to college and I told Ben I hoped he got over his cough soon. I was afraid I’d start crying if I said I was sorry about his momma and daddy getting killed a long time ago. I waved and rode off, back to the house.

  It was a big dinnertime. There were eight of us at the table. Cousin Trek and Cousin Carol had hoped that Sally would get back from summer school before today so she could visit at least one day with us, but Cousin Trek said she wouldn’t be back before Tuesday.

  Talk and over-talk, the clink of dishes and silverware, made it a noisy family meal. It was like Christmas or Thanksgiving with so many people trying to talk at the same time and so much food passed. Much of the talk still centered on the murder until Daddy finally changed the subject.

  “Well, have you decided what you’re gonna be when you get old enough, Taylor?”

  Taylor had a mouth full of mashed potatoes and had to wait a second to answer, so Casey spoke right up. “I’m gonna be a crop duster.”

  “No, you’re not,” Cousin Carol said. “And you weren’t asked.”

  “Well,” said Casey, not ready to give up, “I thought it was a free country when you got grown.”

  “No, it’s not,” she said. “Crop dusting is out. Now, Taylor, Cousin David asked you a question.”

  Taylor was wiping his mouth with his napkin, having inhaled the potatoes. “I’m not sure. Maybe a farmer. Maybe a travelin’ salesman.”

  “I see,” Daddy said.

  Big Trek looked across the table at Farley and asked him what he wanted to be.

  “Might become a doctor—”

  “Can I ask about it being a free country?” Casey interrupted.

  “No! You may not,” Cousin Carol said.

  “So a doctor, eh?” Big Trek said. “Why did you decide on that?”

  “So he can look at naked girls,” Casey blurted. He had no sooner gotten it out than Cousin Carol picked up the butter knife from its tray and smacked him on the fingers. It not only stung, I’m sure, but smeared butter on his hand. It was all Taylor and I could do to keep from laughing, but we didn’t or we’d have gotten in trouble, too.

  “You are not goin’ to talk like that at the table—or anywhere!”

  Cousin Trek immediately took charge. “You can just go to your room ‘til I come up there. Now git. Now!”

  It was inevitable. Casey had been flirting with danger for three weeks. It was written in the cards for him to get a switchin’ before I left.

  We had only a brief look at everyone as we drove away. They all were standing in the yard, but within seconds they disappeared into the brown cloud of dust raised by our car leaving for Jackson. The top of the windmill was the last thing I saw.

  As we drove back to Jackson, we passed through the little towns I had traveled through three weeks before on the Trailways bus next to the straw-haired lady. Each time we slowed through one of the towns I thought of her and Looty and BB and Ben. I thought about them all the way home.

  Around Christmas I got the next piece of news from Cotton City. Cousin Carol had written us a letter. Ben’s cough was not caused by a simple cold or sniffle. He had advanced lung cancer, and died a week before Christmas.

  Although the straw-haired lady seemed to have revealed the truth to everyone, I guess she thought it was not enough. She hanged herself in her room at Whitfield the day after Ben died.

  Looty had accepted Cousin Carol’s fruit cake, but turned down her offer to spend Christmas day at their house. He just wanted to be “by his-self,” he had said.

  I guess BB was by his-self now, too.

  Epilogue

  I visited several times after that until I finished high school but never again saw Looty. I don’t know if he had ever gotten to see his mother before her death, but from what my parents had said, he hadn’t. He lived to be an old man and died many years later, alone and at home. Taylor and Casey told me he was buried in the county somewhere.

  After Ben died, BB went off to Florida and played football. He wasn’t even in Cotton City the next summer to paint his house. His leg injury had kept him from being as good a player as he could have been. As it turned out, he stayed on after his playing days in Florida as an assistant football coach. His wife died in childbirth giving an only child, a son, who returned to Mississippi and was an All Conference Center at Mississippi Southern in Hattiesburg.

  Casey didn’t become a crop duster but he did serve as a fighter pilot in Vietnam. I guess his sixth sense was still with him since he returned home unharmed. I heard later that someone had asked him when he returned from the war if he still wanted to be a crop duster. He told them, “Crop dusting is too dangerous for me.”

  Farley went to Ole Miss and became a doctor. But by the time he got there, Dixie Daniels had graduated, so he had to live with his childhood memories of her. He married a girl from Hickory, Mississippi, where the welcome sign claimed it was ‘The Little Town with the Big Heart’. When Farley got married, Casey told him, off to the side, that Cotton City should have a sign: ‘Home of Dixie Daniels’.

  Taylor went to the cow college and became an agricultural engineer. He came back to his family farm and specialized in cotton, of course. But the days of people hand-picking fields of cotton were over. The land still produced abundantly, but the harvest was highly mechanized as machine-driven cotton pickers poured through the fields in the late summer and autumn. Much was wasted, but more was harvested in a shorter period of time. Farming it somehow made farming less personal for the true agrarian. It was a numbers game and the bottom line had to run a profit or the land would be lost.

  In 1952 William Faulkner had spoken to the Delta Council at Cleveland. He reminded them of freedom and spirit, of their steadfastness and honor and not just their tenure and ownership and profit of the fertile land that had been their legacy. But he wasn’t sanguine: “We knew it once, had it once…Only something happened to us.” Faulkner’s words drew on my youth, my days in Sunday School: “God said unto them. Be fruitful… and replenish the earth…”

  Another ancient memory flashed. The old signs, long since gone, about seeing seven states from Rock City: one of those things that I looked for which were never there. I hoped the land, the people, were still there. Faulkner’s words reverberated. “Only something happened to us.” I didn’t want my old home, my roots to be something to be looked for in vain, something else that wasn’t there.

  A couple of years ago, BB passed seventy. He retired and returned home to the house he had been born in. It was run down, but the land had been farmed and planted on a rent basis from Mr. Hightower and Cousin Trek. I decided to pay a visit and see the man I had learned so much from almost fifty years before.

  I drove up in my Blazer. The old house was dilapidated and probably beyond repair. There was a concrete slab about fifty yards away, an indication he was about to start over. I thought his hearing might be impaired, as he had his back to me and did not seem to hear my car as I pulled into the driveway.

  “Say,” I said as I got out. “Need some help paintin’ this old house?”

  He turned, slow and deliberate, like a man in his early seventies. His eyes had not lost their keenness. I had not seen him in almost fifty years, but I suppose there is something in the structure or the topology of a man’s face, even from childhood, that marks him in another man’s mind; marks him so that he is never forgotten.

  “Well, I’ll jus’ say. It’s little Mister Jake. Actually, you wasn’t Mister the last time I saw you, you was Master Jake. But you was a hard workin’ one.” He still called me Mister. It was not out of subservience. It never had been. It was just Southern.

  He didn’t give me a chance to shake his hand, but grabbed me in a bear hug and sque
ezed me like he was wrapping up a fullback on a tackle. He was still strong. I think we both wanted to cry but we didn’t. I like to think he was thinking the same thing I was thinking: too many men crying these days just for anything. We kept our tears on our hearts, but they were there. This was my black friend. Now he was old, but still as black as the first day I saw him. And still my friend.

  We drove into Cotton City and went into the old café downtown. I didn’t know the owners now, but whites and colored sat at the counter and tables. Once it was for whites on one side and colored on the other. The pinball machine was gone. We talked for over two hours.

  His son had gone into coaching, too. He’d been a good player, mostly through hard work, since he had less natural talent than BB. But he had been a well-respected defensive coach and had been sent feelers as to him taking a head coaching job at a major university.

  “You don’t tell me,” I said. “Well, where is it, BB? What school?”

  “Well, between you and me and the fence post, Mr. Jake, it’s Ole Miss.”

  “Really. Ole Miss? You mean—“

  “I mean the first black head coach at Ole Miss,” he said in a whispered voice.

  I took a sip of coffee and glanced around to see if others were listening. “Is it certain he’s gonna be offered the job? Will he take it?”

  “Well, it’s his decision. But I told him that there were a lot of white folks up at Ole Miss wanted him to have it just because he’s black and because most of the players are black. Those people are about as sorry a lot as you’ll find, black or white.”

  “You’re trying to tell me something, BB. I can feel it.”

  BB smiled. It was that white-toothed smile contrasted against his black face. The same smile I had seen fifty years before. The only color change in BB was in his hair, now mostly white.

  “Well, I told my boy, Jesse, that these people who want him as head coach are the same people who don’t want white people to sing Dixie or carry their flags; the same flags that the Mississippi Grays carried. They don’t care about Ole Miss and they probably won’t care about you or your players. You know, Mister Jake, they tell them boys that the sound of Dixie is a sound of evil and they should shun it. They don’t care that they get themselves tattooed and stick jewelry in their ears and noses, as long as they ain’t Dixie boys. As far as I’m concerned, those people can go to hell. And I told Jesse that he oughta tell ‘em that if you don’t allow Dixie or the Bonnie Blue flags, then you don’t allow me. If you start singing it like us Gray men sing it, if you teach ‘em that this is their land; their land to love and work and maybe even fight for one day, then I’m your man. Because I’m not gonna lie to those young men, black or white, about their heritage. Not even for the million dollars they’re offering you.”