The Plantation

My early years, the late 1930s and early 40s, were spent on three plantations in the Mississippi Delta-that fertile, flat area of farmland which runs from Memphis southward to Vicksburg. The big River itself forms its western boundary. A range of low hills mark its eastern limits as it sweeps southeast, widening to fifty miles or so near Greenwood, before turning southwest to terminate at Vicksburg's bluffs. If the Delta, this ancient floodplain of the Mississippi, were the whole, the plantations were its most important parts.

First of all, it was a terrible breech of etiquette to call them "farms" and their owners "farmers" even if technically that's what they were. To the Delta landowners, those small land holdings in the Mississippi hill country were farms and the families who worked them were farmers. They themselves were "planters" who owned "plantations" of as much as one to two thousand acres and some even larger. These Delta planters and their families formed a social class unto themselves.

Seldom did a planter oversee his plantation. A manager would be employed to see to the day-to-day operations. That was my father's role although he did not hold that position when I was born. At that time he was a sharecropper.
Sharecroppers or croppers occupied the second lowest rung of the Delta's economic ladder. The colored farm tenants were relegated to the lowest. Most sharecroppers were only the latest of several cropper generations-poorly or non-educated, backward, producing large families, living close to physical and economic starvation, lacking either the skills or ambition to claw their way to a higher position. However, my father was not an ordinary sharecropper. He had had two years of college at Mississippi A and M which is today Mississippi State University. He quit college to manage one of the School's experimental farms and eventually wound up as a salesman and district manager for the Wrought Iron Range Company, maker of iron cook stoves and heaters. But the Depression took all this away, forcing him back to the land-land that would provide food but little profit in an era of depressed cotton prices.

I first saw the light of day on a damp, cold evening in December in a three-room shotgun house on Jabe Dunnaway's place near Anguilla. There were no hospitals. Doc Smith, a genuine country doctor, handled the delivery. He was my uncle as was Jabe.

By the mid 30s my father was sharecropping a large new ground farm back toward the River. As they opened new farmland, planters would often use sharecroppers until they were ready to incorporate it into their plantations. And "new ground" was an apt description of these areas. The land had recently been drained and cleared, had never known a plow, and was full of stumps and roots, making cultivation extremely difficult.

One of my early remembrances is helping to haul chunks of stumps to a large fire in the center of the cotton field.
The soil was not the sandy loam of the old Delta but buckshot, a rich, grainy soil which responded poorly to both wet and dry conditions. When wet, it clodded up, was slow to dry, and was extremely slick-"as slick as owl shit" I remember hearing one old fellow say. When dry, it would contract and break into spidery cracks an inch or so wide and several inches deep. But the black soil, only recently liberated from rank bayou waters, was rich and would produce a bumper crop of cotton in years when the weather was neither wet too late nor dry too early.

But late in the year 1937, that is after all the crops had been gathered, my world changed.
My father became the manager of Mr. E. J. Ganier's plantation located on Deer Creek at Percy, Mississippi. Percy was named for that Mississippi family which came to claim considerable political and literary fame after its founder, Charles Percy, hacked the original plantation out of the surrounding wilderness in the 1840s. Mr. Ganier was a smallish man of French descent who strutted about the place like a bantam rooster and whose facial features resembled one.

This plantation covered about two thousand acres, although some acreage was in woods and not under cultivation. My father managed three plantations at different times as I was growing up but they were all run the same. Later, when I studied history, I was struck by the similarities between the plantation and the medieval manor.

The rich, delta soil was worked by forty or so black families who lived in weather beaten tenant houses scattered over the landscape. Some were called "shotgun" houses because of the way the rooms were arranged-three or four rooms in a line one behind the other with a porch across the front. The last room was the kitchen; the others were combination sitting/sleeping rooms. There was no chimney but there were flues for a wood cook stove in the kitchen and for wood heaters in the other rooms. Water came from a pitcher pump in the back yard. The sanitary facility was a rickety outhouse somewhere out back. This was no frills living for sure but it was the going standard and so common that no one really thought about it.

Tenants with larger families usually were assigned square-shaped houses with a long porch across the front and maybe even a back porch. These would be four or five rooms with more space than a shotgun house afforded but, other than a chimney with a fireplace, everything else was about the same. Five or six sleeping in one room was not uncommon.

The manager's house was a step up from the large tenant house but not a huge step. There were some outbuildings: smoke house, chicken house, storage shed, and a garage, but no plumbing or electricity. We had a pump and an outhouse out back and used coal oil lamps for light. The Big House, the owner's residence, was the only building on the place with plumbing and electric lights. This was normal for the times.

Our house on the next plantation had plumbing and a Delco lighting system. Power was provided by a whole bunch of batteries located in one of the outbuildings. When the lights started to get dim, my father would start the gasoline engine that sat beside the battery building and charge the batteries. This would take several hours but only had to be done about once a week. With both plumbing and lights, we thought we were living in the lap of luxury. Our next place even had plumbing AND electricity. The Boyd family was moving to undreamed of heights
The land was cultivated by black labor using hoes and mule-drawn plows. There were two tractors which were used primarily to work the large block of the plantation reserved for the owners-the medieval demesne. Because of the plantation's dependence upon the labor of the black tenants, a good manager had to be able to attract and keep good workers. That's probably why my brother and I were instructed never to call one of the tenants "nigger" to his face. As Mama said, "Call them ‘colored'; ‘nigger' hurts their feelings." I cannot recall either of my parents ever calling a colored person "nigger" to his face, although the term was used freely around the house. I seldom used the word. For reasons I was yet to understand, I did not like the sound of it.

In December and January after the crops had been sold and farm work was minimal, my father began to "trade" with the tenants for the next crop year. On the designated days, they would gather in the back yard, come in the back door (never the front) one by one, and stand with hats in hand before my father who sat at the kitchen table with the account book. It was the day of economic reckoning. They were told what they had been "furnished" (advanced in money and goods against their crop) and what their crop (always cotton) had sold for. They were paid any profit in cash. A negative balance meant that they started the next year in the hole-if my father decided to "trade" with them for another year. If not or if they wanted to go to another plantation, the debt had to be paid by the other plantation before they could leave. The sheriff was sent after those who left with debts on the books. Also, there were few managers who would take a tenant without checking out his status with his previous manager. This union of the law and the dominant economic class kept the black laborers in a state of peonage. It was not legal or right but it was the way the system worked.

In the "trading" discussion, it was proper for the tenant to make certain requests, e.g., additional cotton acreage, more day work, etc., but it was strictly up to my father whether they were granted. He would write the terms in the ledger for his information but the agreement with the tenant was always verbal since it was rare to find one who could read or write. However, they could, with few exceptions, recite the terms of the "trade."

Some unscrupulous managers took advantage of this illiteracy and kept the books so that their tenants seldom got out of debt. Although uneducated, these folks were not stupid. They knew which managers tended to cheat their tenants and spread this knowledge by word of mouth throughout the colored community. As a result, these plantations found it difficult to get and to hold good tenants. During the "trading" times, there were always men from other plantations looking for a place with my father. "Yasser, Mista Luke, I's bin over on Mista Charlie Camp's plantation gwine on two years now. I jest needs mo' cotton land. I's got nine kids. Six kin do field work. An' Bessie Mae kin cook fer th big house. I's a good worker. Won't burn up yore house. Ya' ken as' Ike. I's bin knowin' him ‘bout ten years."

And when word got around that my father would be leaving for another plantation, the back yard would fill with tenants asking, "Mista Luke, will ya' take me witcha when ya' go?"

In all the years of living on plantations, I can only remember one of my father's tenants "departing without leave." Sometime on Saturdays my father would take me with him. One October on such a Saturday, he took me and a group of eight or ten of our tenants to Jesse's house. It was a standard shotgun house with a chicken house and outhouse out back. Neither Jesse nor his wife was about. The men went through the house and hauled the meager furnishing out in the yard. Then my father divided them among the crew. The same division was made of the few scrawny chickens and the vegetables in the garden. As I was helping to pick the okra in the garden, I heard my father say, "We'll come back Monday and pick his cotton and pull his corn." This prompted me to ask the man who was working on the okra with me, "What happened to Jesse?" He rolled his eyes and looked all around before he spoke as if he were fearful of being overheard, "He's done runned off," he replied in a hushed, secretive tone. Nothing else was said. Nothing else needed to be said.

A plantation manager, with the backing of local authorities, had a great deal of power over his tenants. These colored folk had no power at all but they did possess one neutralizer-humor. They seemed to know instinctively that if they could keep the white man laughing he wouldn't be too hard on them. Many were good con men and would play the fool to keep their overseers amused. Although it did not happen on one of our plantations, the following incident is a good illustration of this tactic. Rufus was only in his late thirties but poor diet and no attention to oral hygiene had caused the loss of most of his teeth. In fact, he only had one upper front one left which hung there like a loose stalactite. When he grinned or laughed (which he did a lot), most of his gums were exposed and he had the habit of flicking the tooth from side to side with his tongue. One Saturday during pay time Rufus and some of the other men were joking with each other and Rufus was, of course, flicking his tooth. For some reason the manager was annoyed about something and became more so as he looked up from his ledger and money box and saw Rufus standing in front of him with a wide grin and the tooth in constant motion. "Damn you Rufus," he exclaimed, "I'm sick and tired of looking at that damned tooth!"
Rufus' grin disappeared. "Yasser, Boss."

"Here," the manager said as he counted out Rufus' pay for that week's day work, "I'm gonna give you an extra three dollars. I know you're going to town, so I want you to go by the dentist and get that thing pulled. I don't wanna see it come Monday morning. You understand me?"
"I sho' does Boss. Is gwine ‘a do jes' lik you say. Yous done seen de las of hit. You sho nuff is." Rufus took the money and hurried away.

On Monday the manager was at the barn lot making work assignments when Rufus walked up. He still had his tooth. When the manager saw him, he was more than angry. "You sorry-assed field nigger! I gave you the money to get that damn thing pulled and you still got it. Why, I'm gonna . . .!" The other tenants began to gather around to see the showdown when Rufus interrupted, "I tried, Boss. I jes' done the bes' I could." He stood before his manager, his eyes downcast and his lanky frame in a humbled posture.
"Whatta you mean, you did the best you could?"
"Well, Boss, you know my woman Sadie is with child."
"Of course, I do, but what in hell has that got to do with anything?"

"Boss, I done went to dat tooff man. He look in my mouff an' he look me up an' down. He look me all over an' he say, ‘Rufus, ain't you bin breedin?' an' I say ‘I sho nuff is' an' he step back an' he say, ‘I cain pull no tooff from a man whut's bin breedin". Hit jes' ain't right. You gonna hafta come back later afta you breedin' time is done.' An' dat's the Lord's Truff, Boss."

The manager knew the story was one big fabrication but he loved the way Rufus told it. He walked away chuckling. Rufus kept his tooth and the three dollars.

It was unusual for a colored tenant to own a car. Those who did generally had vehicles that looked as if they had been rescued from a junkyard or put together with parts from one. And they usually ran about the same way. They were always breaking down and two or three flat tires on a Saturday trip to town was not unusual. Most of the time an owner spent more time working on his vehicle than driving it. This is undoubtedly the source of the definition of "a colored weekend"-8 hours of f-king and 40 hours of fixing flats.

Charlie was the hostler who worked around the barns on one plantation and he had a car. It was a Model A Ford - one of those big square two-seaters with a spare tire mounted on the back. Most Saturdays I knew I could find Charlie at his house close by the barn lot trying to get his car ready to drive to town. I liked to visit him on these days because he would let me help him. He taught me how to put patches on the inner tubes which were mostly patches to start with. Often Charlie's mechanical work on the engine was not of lasting quality. Sunday morning would find him knocking on our back door to get permission from my father to take one of the tractors or a team of mules to pull his car home.
If I ran out of inner tubes to patch on those Saturdays, I would go into Charlie's house and visit with Pearlie, his wife, who would usually be straightening her hair in preparation for the trip to town. She used two wood handled straightening irons and a kerosene lamp. While she used one, the other would be stuck down the lamp's chimney getting hot. She used some type of salve on her hair and when she pulled the hot iron through it, there was a lot of smoke and an usual smell. The process fascinated me. I expected to see her hair catch fire but, fortunately, it never happened.

One Sunday Charlie managed to drive his A Model all the way to the Memphis airport. Everyone was fascinated with aviation and Charlie and Pearlie had gone up to watch planes land and take off. There were not many commercial flights but it was the early 40s and there was plenty of military training going on at all airports. Charlie parked by the side of the road right at the end of a runway. He and Pearlie sat in the front seat watching the planes passing directly over them as they practiced take-offs and landings.

They had been there for a good while when they noticed a plane coming in very low. In fact, the plane looked as if it were about to fly through the car and before they could get out, it did. The plane's left landing gear hit the car in the left rear door and sheared away the rear of the car clear down to the frame. The plane made a safe landing. Charlie and Pearlie were left sitting in the front seat uninjured.

They had to get home by Greyhound bus the next day after selling the car to a junk yard for ten dollars. They were afraid no one would believe them but the story and picture in The Commercial Appeal verified their account of the event. Charlie had lost his car but he was the center of attention around the plantation for several weeks.

In late summer after the cotton was laid by, that is, after it required no further cultivation, it was time to cut the winter's supply of wood. Since everyone cooked and heated with wood, it was necessary to lay in a good supply before time for picking cotton and pulling corn and before the wet winter weather set in.

A section of the woods on the back of the place would be selected. Since my father also used this operation for clearing new farmland, everything was cut. The only tools used were crosscut saws and axes. The underbrush and limbs were piled and burned. The trees both large and small were hauled out by wagon and a share distributed to each tenant. There were two or three special wagons to haul the big trees; the small stuff was carried on the regular farm wagons. The decision as to how much wood each tenant got was my father's alone. If a tenant wanted more, he was free to use the mules and wagons and to cut more on his own time. The sawing of the large pieces into blocks to split for stove wood and fireplace sticks and the chopping up of the saplings was left to each tenant. They would share the labor on this, several working at each house until each one's pile was done.

Sometimes I got to go to the woods to watch the operation. I loved to see and hear the big trees fall and to marvel how the teams of mules could pull the large logs up the pole incline onto the heavy log wagons. Hardly a day passed that the crew didn't turn up a snake or two. Occasionally, there would be a rattlesnake and, if we were near a swamp, a cottonmouth, but most were harmless. Regardless, they all were killed. The vast majority of colored folk were deathly afraid of snakes and to them the only good snake was a dead snake.

The tenants were not paid for their labor in wood cutting. It was a communal effort with the plantation furnishing the wood and the tenants the work. Generally, any work that did not involve a tenant working on his own crop was day work for which he was paid. The going rate in 1937 was a dollar a day and these were long days. It wasn't a lot of money but it gave those tenants who were willing to work more a little extra cash. Every Saturday was payday.

Each tenant was responsible, along with his family members, for his assigned acreage. Of course, my father told him what to do and when to do it and furnished him the mules and plows to work with. The seed and fertilizer were also furnished but charged to the tenant's yearly account.
In addition to working his own plot, the tenant and his family furnished day work labor for the owner's portion of the plantation. There were two tasks connected with cotton when outside labor was often needed: the hoeing and the picking.

Since no chemicals were used, the cotton had to be hoed (or chopped) and plowed quite often to keep the weeds down. The two went together. Every time a field was plowed it was also chopped. If extra hoe hands were needed, my father would send a large farm truck to town. It would be driven slowly through the colored section with the driver blowing the horn. Those who wanted to chop cotton that day (and it was mostly women and children, the men would be already at work) would come running out of the houses with their hoes and climb aboard. Children as young as ten were expected to put in a full day of fieldwork. These extra hands would be paid at the end of each day and brought back to town. The next day the whole process would be repeated.

Extra labor for picking cotton was procured the same way. The main difference was that pay for cotton picking was always by the pound, usually expressed as so much per hundred. In the late 30s a dollar a hundred was standard.
It was backbreaking work dragging a nine-foot canvas sack all day long, not to mention the little burrs on the ends of the cotton bolls which were always pricking the ends of your fingers, breaking off under the skin, festering up, and becoming almost too sore to touch. But good cotton pickers like Junior Potts prided themselves on how many hundred they could get in a day. Junior's goal was to pack his sack with two hundred pounds before noon and to get close to three in the afternoon. The afternoons were longer because you couldn't start picking in the morning until the dew dried off. I remember Junior really getting upset at one noon weigh-in when his sack only tipped the scales at 202 pounds with three knocked off for the sack, giving him only 199 pounds. But Junior and those like him could earn four or five dollars a day picking cotton, a princely sum in those days of a dollar a day for fieldwork.

There were always stories bandied about the picking fields about super pickers who could pick seven or eight hundred pounds a day. They were always "someone I know'd on my las' plantation" or "someone my cousin, Jackie Lee, done hear tell of over ‘bout Panther Burn." These were, I'm sure, just embellished tales but they made good listening.
The cotton was weighed-in at noon and again at the end of the day. The sacks were emptied into a small cotton house which stood at the border of the field. Later, it would be transferred to wagons and taken to be ginned.

It was not uncommon to find, especially among the temporary pickers, those who tried to add to their pounds by placing large rocks or horse shoes, or other foreign bodies in their sacks. If caught, they were banished from the fields.
The non-plantation pickers were paid at the end of each day and taken back to town. Tenants were paid on Saturday. Twenty to twenty-five dollars could represent a luxury for the family or a big Saturday night in town.

With the advent of World War II, cotton prices rose and managers worked to increase production. However, the labor supply was diminishing causing the picking price to rise-first to $1.25 per hundred, then to $1.50, and finally $2.00, an exorbitant sum according to the managers. They moaned about the cost of getting the crops picked. But the era of hand-picked cotton was coming to a close as mechanical pickers began to appear in increasing numbers. There was much resistance at first. "Hand-picked cotton is better cotton," avowed many managers. And maybe it was, but with improved technology the steel giants soon took over the cotton fields.

During the time I lived on plantations, "cotton was king." Of course, my father had to raise enough corn, oats and hay to feed the livestock but the owner always wanted every other acre planted in cotton. My father wanted to diversify, especially with soybeans. He argued that soybean prices were always good and could help with the profit margin in years when cotton prices were down as they generally were in the 30s. It was a hard sell. The owners had grown up with cotton, their fathers and grandfathers had built both their plantations and social position on cotton. No need to change a good horse. However, he did manage to get some soybean acreage-until cotton prices began to rise. He, and those few like him, were voices of the future for now soybean acreage in the Delta probably outstrips that of cotton. And diversification has gone to the absurd with catfish farms and gambling casinos.

There were usually only two white families living on a plantation: the manager's and the owner's who lived in the Big House. All the rest were colored. Although difficult to discern by the causal observer, this group had its own social divisions.

Occupying the top position was the hosteler. He usually had a small family or none at all and his house and garden plot were close to the barns. He was in charge of the feeding and care of the animals (mules, cattle, hogs), of issuing animals and equipment (plows, wagons, harness) to the tenants, of repairing and maintaining the harness, and of seeing that things ran smoothly around the barn lot. Since his was a year-round job, he did not make a crop but was paid a salary.

A notch down from the hosteler were those who had some special skills-the tractor drivers and the blacksmith. They might make a small crop if they had a family large enough to work it since most of their time was spoken for during the crop season.

Of all the colored workers, the elite were the servants who worked in the Big House as cooks, maids, butlers, and chauffeurs. There was a sharp line between this group and the majority of coloreds on the place who were generally classified as "field hands" and the "house niggers" were careful to make sure that this line remained sharp. I remember one time being in the yard of the Big House when a "field hand" who was doing some yard work lured one of the maids into the shrubbery and attempted to get under her skirt. She rebuffed him with, "Get yo'self ‘way from me, boy. Yo' ain't nothin but a field nigger."

These house positions were much sought after not only for the prestige attached to them but also for the perks. House servants were given leftovers to take home for their family's table. They also were recipients of torn, worn, outdated, or unwanted clothing as well as broken or castoff household items. As a result, they were better fed, better dressed, and had better house furnishing than the common field hand.

There was one hard and fast rule for a house servant: you must not steal from the Big House. Most of the silver items were under lock and key but there were all sorts of other things which could go missing. Mrs. Ganier told the story of a maid she had whose name was Hattie. Hattie always wore a little round hat to work which sat square on top of her head. One evening at quitting time Hattie had her hat on and was going out the back door when Mrs. Ganier stopped her to discuss something they were going to do the next morning. The longer they talked the more Hattie wiped the sweat off her face. It was a warm summer day but Mrs. Ganier thought that the perspiration was somewhat excessive as it quickly soaked the rag Hattie was using. She became more suspicious when she noted that the streams of moisture were not the color of normal sweat and asked Hattie to take off her hat. They had been churning butter that day and there on the top of Hattie's head sat one of the fresh pounds of butter. Hattie was allowed to keep the butter but she was banished from the Big House to spend the rest of her time on that plantation as a field hand.

Nothing illustrated the similarity of a plantation to a medieval fiefdom any better than the relationship between the plantation and the police. Suffice it to say that the owner and/or his manager were the law on the plantation. No law enforcement person would have come onto a plantation to deal with any of the tenants without first going through the owner or manager. To do so would have been a terrible breach of etiquette.

I remember one Sunday right after dinner a deputy from town came by and told my father that he'd come to arrest Silas for some trouble he'd caused in town the night before. My father got into the car with the deputy and took him down to Silas' house. As they drove up, they saw Silas at the woodpile splitting stove wood. When Silas saw the deputy, he dropped his ax, vaulted a six-foot picket fence, and disappeared into a twenty-acre cornfield. There was no way they were going to find him amongst the eight-foot corn, so the deputy just went on back to town. Later that afternoon my father let me go with him when he got into his pick up and went back to find Silas. He was sitting on the front porch in a straight chair tilted back against the wall. My father did not get out of the truck. He just leaned out the window and commanded, "C'mere, Silas."

Silas ambled out to the truck. "Yasser, Mista Luke."
"Silas, why in the dickens did you run off a while ago? You saw me with the deputy. You knew I wasn't gonna let him hurt you."
"Yasser, Mista Luke, I knows. But my feets jest wudn't stay. When I seen de law, all I seen wuz dat big gun he done had thow'd down on me las' evin' an' deese feets jet tuk me on away."

"Well, Silas, the deputy tells me that you got with some of those boys from over on Sunflower Plantation last night and got into devilment. That right?"
"Yasser, Mista Luke, I ain' gonna lie to ya'. Das whut we done did."

"Well, Silas, we got to go in and take care of it. Get in the back."
Silas started to jump into the bed of the truck but stopped and came back to the window. "Mista Luke, is dey gonna put me in jail?"

"Naw. I'll make bail for you but they've got to arrest you first and you've got to be there for them to do that. After that I'll make your bail and bring you on back."
A look of relief spread over Silas' face. "Thanka, Mista Luke, thanka. I's much obliged to ya'. I knows ya'd take care o' me."

Sometime early on a Sunday morning a deputy would drive out to see my father. "Mr. Boyd, we had to put ol' Dave in jail last night. I know he's one of your tractor drivers and I know you're in the middle of breaking ground for planting, so you're probably gonna need him in the morning. Just come by sometime after dinner and get him." And this my father would do.

During the crop season, the day began about daylight with the ringing of the plantation bell which was mounted on a tall wooden tower next to the barn lot. This was the hosteler's job which meant he had to have a clock. Most tenants did not but they did not really need one since their work schedule was governed by the bell. This early morning ringing was the signal for them to get up, come to the barn lot, and get their mules, plows, wagons, and other work equipment. If they were in the middle of plowing time, the plows would have been left in the fields the previous afternoon. This early morning organization usually took from one to two hours since the tenants had to walk varying distances (some as much as a mile and a half) to the barn.
At noon the bell would signal dinner time (not lunch) and ring everyone back to work at one. At sundown the bell would toll the end of the workday and be followed by the migration of the tenants to the barn with their mules and equipment. One of my favorite tasks in the summer was to ring the bell-the symbol of power and control.

Perhaps my favorite time of the year was ginning time. Sometime in September the gin men would come and the tin-sided building with all the fascinating machinery would be coaxed back to life after ten months of slumber. Long lines of wagons loaded with cotton would stand waiting their turn to pull under the suction pipe. The cotton would be sucked up into the gin's maw and be routed through a series of machines containing rows of multiple-toothed saws, picks, and other devices. The seeds came out at one place and at the end the white fibers were deposited into a heavy wooden frame. When a particular wagon load was completed, the sides of the frame were moved in, the cotton compressed into a bale, and then secured by steel bands. If these bands were not put on correctly, they could come loose or break when the bale was rolled out of the press turning the cotton into a lethal weapon. Still vivid in my memory is the scene at the press of an exploded bale. It was completely wrapped around a twelve by twelve post which was broken three quarters through. One gin worker had saved himself when he jumped behind the post at the sound of the band's failure.

The gin seemed to take on a life of its own. It was noisy, dusty, and seethed with activity. The gin workers on the inside were always running around yelling at each other over the roar of the machines. Outside, the drivers of the cotton wagons gathered in groups to swap stories. Their ranks were swelled by others on the place who were not otherwise engaged. The cotton platform usually had some activity going on under it. It was built of heavy timbers about six feet off the ground for the deposit of the ginned bales awaiting transport. The main activity for this site was usually a crap game. Ever so often some dispute-generally over who had covered the last nickel of the quarter the shooter was betting after he had made his point-would erupt into a fight. Because of this my father discouraged crap games for it they escalated into a cuttin' that meant lost work time with trips to the doctor and incapacitated workers.

Although I was close to some of these, I never felt I was in any danger. When one broke out, one of the tenants would grab me and say something like, "C'mon boy. You ain't got no bizness bein' ‘round dis kinda stuff," and hustle me away. I suspected my father had privately assigned two or three of these to watch out for me. Anyway, the last thing any of the combatants would want to happen would be for me to be hurt. Their fate would have been too awful for contemplation.

The worst fracas I ever saw from "under the platform" activities occurred one day right after the dinner break. The wife of one of the gin workers had brought him his dinner but had stayed on to entertain some of the wagon drivers under the cool, dim shade of the platform. Somehow the gin worker got wind of what was going on and interrupted the entertainment. There was yelling and screaming and colored folks flying out from all sides of that platform like chickens from a busted chicken coop.

Since there were no white children nearby, my father would find my brother and me a little colored boy about our age to play with during the summer when school was out. He would not be able to come every day because even at age seven or eight there were certain jobs he had to do. But two or three days a week were better than nothing. And he loved it-no fieldwork, snacks with Kool-aid, and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at noon, things he never got at his house. We would dig some worms and go fishing, get the hosteler to catch us some mules on which we'd ride around the place, or just play all sorts of games around the barns and sheds.

I remember one summer that LeRoy was our playmate. He had his own set of ideas or superstitions about almost everything and would not accept any counter view. For example, one very hot day we had been playing in the hay loft of the big barn and had come down to the well house to get some water and to cool off. We drank and then let the cool water run over our heads. Gene and I were ready to play some more but LeRoy sat down in the shade of the willow tree that grew by the well house and would not budge. When asked why, he replied, "I cain go out in dat sun wid no wet hed. Hit'l bus' open." We tried to tell him that this wouldn't happen and even stood out in the sun to show that our heads were unaffected. But LeRoy would not be swayed, "Dass cuz yo' hed ain' lik mine. Iffen I's be out dar, my hed ‘ud be layin' wide open an' all de brains runnnin' out jus lik' a bussed watermelon. My mama done tol' me dat." So we all just sat there while LeRoy's head recovered.

On another occasion LeRoy told us that he could fly by just flapping his arms real fast. We challenged him to do so but he said that humans could not just take off from the ground. They had to jump off a high place. When Gene and I scoffed at this, he said, "I'll jes show ya, den." And proceeded to get in our rope swing and pump it up to maximum height which was probably about nine or ten feet. We thought he was just fooling until he launched himself out into space flapping his arms furiously. To his credit LeRoy did not flinch and continued to flap until his face and chest plowed into the ground throwing up a large cloud of dust and knocking the wind out of him. We hauled him over to the well house and threw water on him, which served the dual purpose of washing off the dust and eventually bringing him back to consciousness. "I told you you couldn't fly," I said. His response was not what I expected. "I jest ‘bout did. I cud feel m'sef startin' to liff up jest ‘fo I hit. I jest needs uh higher place." I looked at LeRoy with muddy water running off him and his nose and lips swelling rapidly from smacking the ground. Then I looked across at the barn loft which was probably thirty feet off the ground and hoped he wouldn't think of tripling his heights and end up killing himself. He knew he could fly under the right conditions; I knew he couldn't. I thought it best to leave it that way. So far as I know, the swing attempt was LeRoy's last "flight."

Except for the colored school in town there was no place for the children on the plantation to attend classes. The town school had short, sporadic sessions but only the town's children lived close enough to attend. There was no bus for the colored children who lived on the plantations. Whites were transported to the white school in town.
Sometimes after the crops were laid by in late summer and before cotton picking began or in the winter between harvest and spring planting, a teacher might come and hold some classes in the plantation church house. The children might learn a little but not nearly enough.

One day when we were playing with LeRoy, the subject of school came up. He surprised me when he said, "I likes school." I said that I had much rather be fishing, riding mules, or playing in the barn. To which LeRoy observed, "Yeah. But when I ain't in school I's pickin' cotton or toten water to the hoe hands. You ain't." LeRoy might have been ignorant but he wasn't stupid. So much for the doctrine of "separate but equal" in education.

The plantation and the plantation life of the thirties and forties are gone now. Gone also are the tenants and the mules. What few tenant houses that are needed are all clustered around the barns. The remainder have long since been destroyed. The gooseneck hoes have been replaced by chemicals and the mules have given way to huge machines with enclosed, air conditioned cabs and tape decks. The land still produces cotton and soybeans but the modern delta sports catfish farms and gambling casinos. There was some good in the old but much bad. I suspect the same is true today. The good/bad ratio lies with the one making the assessment. There is, however, one thing for certain. It's different.

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