Mississippi Cotton Read online

  Mississippi Cotton

  by

  Paul H Yarbrough

  WiDō PublishingSalt Lake City, Utah

  Copyright © 2011 by Paul H. Yarbrough

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written consent of the publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  eISBN 978-1-937178-03-1

  www.widopublishing.com

  To my wife, Marion, and my son, Douglas.

  The most loyal people I have ever known.

  And

  Mississippi. The finest land; the finest people

  I am a face in the Southern collage of

  Gentlemen and scholars, belles and writers,

  Soldiers and sharecroppers, Cajuns and Creoles,

  Tejanos and Islenos, Celts and Germans,

  Gullah and Geechi, freedman and slaves,

  We are all, the South.

  Deo Vindici

  PROLOGUE

  The river gave up manifold jetsam—roots, silt, limbs and a number of dead fish; and human flotsam—beer bottles, food wrappers and an occasional automobile license plate. Yesterday under the Greenville Bridge, it gave up a body.

  The Mississippi river basin is the second largest in the world, covering almost two million square miles. Its watershed encompasses almost forty percent of the lower forty-eight states.

  Along its length of over 2300 miles is a marked path: areas, regions, neighborhoods and homes, all with indigenous qualities born of some function of the river with its strength and power and sometimes gentleness, like a midwife allowing new birth. But as it gives life, it takes life. It could also be a monster, as in the 1927 flood. Death is the beginning of life as life is the beginning of death, and all floods start a movement that cycle from scouring to sediment building. The same sediments that build also bury.

  One such area, the Delta, spread across three states—Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana. Though the river had created an alluvial plane it adopted the area as a delta child, and the richness of life it brings. The Mississippi region of this area is the Mississippi Delta. Someone described the Mississippi Delta as, “Beginning in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ending on catfish row in Vicksburg.”

  Bounded geographically on the east by the Yazoo River and the west by the Mississippi, the region has been cleared, farmed, invaded, fought over in THE WAR, and farmed again. Originally occupied by Indian tribes living in swamps and marshes the Delta was cleared by pioneers and made due for farming from its fertile sediments grading into rich soil; a soil, whether fallow or plowed, that hid ghosts.

  Central African Negroes, enslaved by West Africans, sold to and transported by English and New England slave traders to the New World, and their agrarian masters moved in and developed their world. Before The War white and black worked side by side: free and slave, master and servant. After The War white and black worked side by side: free and free, together and apart, shaped by Yankee Black codes; codes that would uncover that which had been planted.

  An old Negro man and his son had been fishing when they discovered the body. They thought they had hooked a big channel cat; a downward pull on the line, like a catfish, not moving side-to-side. It was when the cane pole broke he saw the back of the neck, a man, a white man just below the water. His shirt collar was hooked.

  The Negroes were not brought to the station, as they weren’t suspected as having done anything. They had simply discovered the body, and because the sheriff knew them, they were allowed to leave. They lived in the Delta not far from the river and often fished, like many, under the bridge. The old man was upset. He had not seen anything like this.

  “I usually just catch fish.” He watched as the body was placed in the hearse.

  The sheriff told him he could go on home now if he wanted to. The department would get in touch if it needed him. The hearse pulled away from the edge of the river, climbed the hill and drove to the county morgue in Greenville, the body of John Doe wrapped in a plain white sheet. The Negro man and his son loaded their old ’37 Ford pickup with cane poles, bait buckets and tackle.

  “Come on, Daddy, we seen ‘nuff for one day. Let’s git home.”

  “Okay, Julius. I guess I’m ready.”

  They had found a ghost.

  The coroner had tagged the toe of the body with John Doe. The man appeared to be in his late sixties or maybe early seventies. The cause of death was gunshot wounds. Two shots-- one to the chest, one to the head-- .22 caliber. The heart was punctured, as well as other organs, but either shot would have killed him. It was hard telling how long the man had been in the river, though the coroner had guessed maybe a couple of days at most.

  The sheriff had no missing person reports on anyone matching the description of the body, his original appearance having somewhat changed after spending time in the Mississippi. Catfish, gars, minnows, snakes, whatever carnivores could get a taste had been at him. Maybe surrounding counties had a missing person. The deceased could have been from anywhere.

  CHAPTER 1

  My mother gave me last minute reminders while my daddy checked my suitcase and rechecked the schedule. It was Friday morning, early in August, 1951. The bus station was full of people. Some coming, and some, like me, going.

  I always liked to watch the guys in military uniforms, especially the sailors. There was a war going on in some place called Korea. I had no idea where Korea was, but the men looked real sharp in their white uniforms and sailor hats.

  I’d wanted to be a sailor since my brother and I had seen The Fighting Sullivans at the picture show a couple of years earlier. It was the story of five brothers in World War II who were all killed at once. I almost cried when their parents got told they’d been killed. I didn’t cry, though. All the guys at school would have found out, and that would have been the end for me. Anyway, I always kind of thought I’d be in the Navy one day.

  “When you get to Cotton City, be sure to tell the driver that you need to get off at Cousin Trek’s. It’s just outside of town, you tell him,” my mother said. “He’ll let you off right in front of the mailbox. But you have to ask him. You’re sure you understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I was about to get on the Trailways bus for a three week visit with cousins in Cotton City, Mississippi. My parents had taken me to the station. If I was old enough to drive, I guess I might have been driving myself to Cotton City.

  Although my older brother Farley said when guys got old enough to drive, they drove to New Orleans, not Cotton City. He had been driving over a year, but he still hadn’t been to New Orleans by himself, so it made me think he was talking about something over my head. That’s what he said about things I didn’t understand—that they were “over my head.”

  I didn’t see what was so great about New Orleans. My mother and daddy had taken us there for a weekend once when I was seven. Mostly I remember Canal Street and the giant billboard sign of OLD CROW WHISKEY with a monster cutout of a crow that looked like something Walt Disney might have had in one of his cartoon picture shows. And there was a sign, even bigger, that advertised Jax Beer. My daddy didn’t drink beer but was always singing the Jax commercial:

  “Hello, Mellow Jax Little Darlin’,

  You’re the Beer for Me…,”

  There was this place called the French Quarter that all four of us went to during the daytime
. We stayed at the Roosevelt hotel at night. Our parents said Farley and I were too young for the French Quarter at night, but during the day we walked through it and I remember some pretty odd people walking around. Some of the men had beards, scraggly beards that looked like they just didn’t shave very much. And they carried brown paper bags under their arms like a woman’s purse. We had no idea what was in the bags. And some of the women had earrings that were as big as the ones on our shower curtain, and there was one very fat guy who looked like Oliver Hardy without a derby. Farley and I kept looking for his skinny friend, Stanley.

  I asked my daddy where these strange people worked. He said most probably didn’t, which made me wonder how the fat guy got so fat. Farley and I saw one guy with an eye patch who Farley said may have been an heir of Jean Lafitte. It made me wonder that if someone wore an eye patch, would all their children wear eye patches. Actually, it didn’t make sense. But, Farley was older than me.

  The one thing that looked good to Farley and me was the Voodoo House of Marie Laveau. My daddy let us go in, although my mother had not been a hundred percent in favor of it.

  Marie Laveau was some old voodoo queen or priestess who was part of New Orleans history. She died a long time ago, but she had been, supposedly, able to call up demons and make voodoo magic and a lot of other weird stuff. I guess her shop was run by her grandchildren or something. They had all these different charms and stuff you could buy, like Gris-Gris bags and charms and even custom made dolls. I guessed the dolls were for voodoo-ing people you didn’t like. And all the rooms were lighted with nothing but a bunch of candles, so the rooms were dark and strange. Daddy said Marie Laveau was a legend of the city, but voodoo and black magic weren’t something we needed to get into, he said.

  New Orleans was the biggest town I’d ever been to. One day we tried to catch the Canal St. trolley. There must have been a special signal because Daddy never could get one to stop. Finally, he shouted at one that passed and sort of pointed at it with his hand turned toward his face and one of his fingers sticking up. Farley was twelve and pretty much a man-of-the-world by then, so when I asked, he told me Daddy was doing something called ‘giving the finger.’ I wasn’t sure what that meant, but my mother seemed to know. She bellowed the word mor-ti-fied; then bellowed it again. That’s all I remember about New Orleans.

  Ten was old enough for a boy to take a bus to Cotton City, alone, my daddy had said, although my mother wasn’t wild about the idea and had belabored the notion to the point where she had done everything but pin a note to my shirt regarding her earlier reminders. These instructions also included telling me to be sure and eat the sandwiches she had wrapped in wax paper and put in a small brown sack, folded two folds over from the top. She didn’t want me wasting money on bus station hamburgers when we stopped. Although my daddy had given me three dollars, which had to last me the three weeks of my visit, I had always been instructed not to spend money. Save it. And there would be several stops on the way to the Delta.

  “What if he doesn’t wanna stop?” I asked.

  “He’ll stop. It’s his job. But you be polite when you ask him or you’ll wish you had. Cause your daddy and I will find out. We will.” Her light smile had gone straight-faced at the thought that I might be impolite. And somehow she always held that strange power over us, my brother and me, “…we’ll find out.”

  When Farley was just a kid like me, and I was just starting kindergarten, he said our parents must have friends with the FBI or something. That was all he could figure. Now that he’s grown with his driver’s license and everything, he says it was just something they said to make sure we didn’t ‘screw the pooch.’ That was over my head, too.

  “And don’t you put any money in those dad-blamed pinball machines,” my daddy said. He let my mother give most of my instructions—eat your food, be polite and all that stuff. But when it came to the important things, like pinball machines, he stepped forward as chief disciplinarian. He just let my mother go on about the sissy stuff, so she wouldn’t worry that I might misbehave out of her sight.

  “Those dad-blamed things are there to take your money,” he said. He could never speak enough of the evils of pinball machines. “Electrical parasites,” he called them. And “dad-blamed” was the only profanity he allowed himself in front of Farley and me—most of the time.

  Instructions were interrupted by the blaring intercom: “Trailways scenic cruiser for Flora, Yazoo City, Belzoni, Indianola, Greenville, Cotton City and Cleveland, with final destination for Clarksdale now boarding from dock number two. Leaving in ten minutes. All aboard, please.”

  “Okay, son, I checked your grip.” My daddy always called a suitcase a grip. “Better hurry if you wanna get a window seat. But don’t run, you’re liable to knock somebody down.”

  “Yes, sir.” I hated to look at my mother because she was about to get all weepy and stuff. This was my first trip alone out of the county, but she acted like I was off on a mission to find King Solomon’s mine.

  She pulled me toward her and gave me one of those colossal mother hugs while she was crying. Of course, she got snot on my shirt. “Oh dear! Give me your handkerchief, Zack.”

  “Well, if you don’t quit slobberin’ on him he’s gonna miss the dab-blamed bus, Leslie.”

  “Just you never-mind, this is my baby and he’s leaving home by himself. He’s not going to miss the bus.”

  We walked outside to the buses, and went straight to the slot where the one had ‘Clarksdale’ printed above the front windshield. Its engine was idling with the diesel smells in your nose.

  Last minute instructions came from my mother. “Now be nice. Don’t roughhouse in your good clothes, and don’t scratch yourself on the bus.”

  “Yeah, only off the bus,” my daddy said.

  This got him a stern look from my mother. “I’m trying to teach him manners. And you should be helping and not making your cute little stale remarks. If you want him to grow up to be an animal, well you can just jump off a barn.”

  I climbed the steep steps. The aisle was narrow and lined on both sides by huge cushion seats sewn with white cloth patches where your head could rest. The bus hadn’t filled and there were still plenty of window seats, as everybody who had gotten on so far was pretty old and probably didn’t care whether they got a window or not.

  I got the first window seat I saw, on the station side of the bus. I knew my parents would want to wave goodbye when the bus pulled out. My daddy would want to as much as my mother, but he wouldn’t do all that slobbering snot stuff like her. Course it’s not so bad if snot just gets on your shirt, but sometimes some gets on your face or neck and that’s pretty horrible.

  I had no sooner sat down than I saw my parents. They appeared distorted through the window, like what funny mirrors do to your image in the house of mirrors at the State Fair. I thought at first there was something wrong with the window so I pushed it with my finger, revealing the problem. The last guy who had been sitting here must’ve been leaning his head on the glass with a dose of Wildroot Cream Oil in his hair. I wiped my finger on the back of the seat, then jumped up and moved down the aisle to select another seat.

  Through the window I could see my mother mouthing something, probably trying to ask if something was wrong. I just waved and shook my head. If she knew why I had moved she probably wouldn’t let the bus driver leave until the whole bus had been steam-cleaned.

  The bus pulled out onto Pascagoula Street and moved eastward. Then along the main artery, State Street, which was lined with crepe myrtles and old white-column houses. It turned north onto Woodrow Wilson Avenue, where its final turn would take it through town and onto Highway 49, straight to the Mississippi Delta. I could feel the big engine switching gears, building and losing power as it moved through several stoplights, often stopping, then re-gunning its engine.

  Most of the passengers seemed settled for their trip, wherever it was they were going. I pulled on the window latch and slid the window back
ward in its frame. I wanted to reach out and grab some berries off the crepe myrtle bushes, like Farley and I did on the city buses, but the Trailways’ windows were too high for me to reach the bushes. The air streamed into the bus and though it was almost a hundred outside, the flow of air felt good.

  The seat next to me was empty, which suited me just fine. I was afraid somebody about a thousand years old would sit next to me and try to talk to me, asking me questions like: “What’s a little fellow like you doing going off on a trip by himself?”—or “How far are you going?”

  I would rather sit by myself until I got to Cousin Trek’s house, unless it was someone my age who had something to say I wanted to talk about. And even at that, I liked having the extra room. I put my sandwich sack on the seat hoping to discourage anyone who might stroll down the aisle looking for a seat.

  I was riding all the way to Cotton City without changing buses. There were a handful of stops but no changes. All I had to do was wait until I was outside Cotton City and walk to the front and tell the driver I wanted to get off at the Mayfield mailbox. Daddy had said that Cousin Trek knew when the bus came by and he would be waiting.

  These last three weeks of summer would be spent with my country cousins, Casey and Taylor, in the Delta. We could stay out past dark and come and go as we wanted, as long as we were home for dinner and supper and didn’t destroy anything.

  We had almost done that a couple of Christmases ago, when we were out in somebody’s field. The grass was dead and dry, and we were throwing firecrackers around.

  Casey, who was in the first grade at the time, started striking matches and setting small clumps of grass on fire. Then before it spread he would stomp it out. For some reason, Taylor thought it would be a brilliant idea to throw firecrackers in the fire while he was stomping. But a gust of wind came up, and the fire began to spread. At first we began stomping as fast as we could, but the fire was gaining faster than the stomping. Finally it occurred to us that if we could get some of the pond water we had a chance. The fire had spread and it wouldn’t be long before the wind really took over and half the county would be on fire.