Chapter 4

What sets one Southern town apart from another, or from a Northern town or

hamlet, or city high-rise? The answer must be the experience shared between the

unknowing majority (it) and the knowing minority (you). All of childhood's

unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered

there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and

labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and

maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks

they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.

Mr. McElroy, who lived in the big rambling house next to the Store, was very

tall and broad, and although the years had eaten away the flesh from his

shoulders, they had not, at the time of my knowing him, gotten to his high

stomach, or his hands or feet.

He was the only Negro I knew, except for the school principal and the visiting

teachers, who wore matching pants and jackets. When I learned that men's

clothes were sold like that and called suits, I remember thinking that somebody

had been very bright, for it made men look less manly, less threatening and a

little more like women.

Mr. McElroy never laughed, and seldom smiled, and to his credit was the fact

that he liked to talk to Uncle Willie. He never went to church, which Bailey and

I thought also proved he was a very courageous person. How great it would be to

grow up like that, to be able to stare religion down, especially living next door to

a woman like Momma.

I watched him with the excitement of expecting him to do anything at any

time. I never tired of this, or became disappointed or disenchanted with him,

although from the perch of age, I see him now as a very simple and uninteresting

man who sold patent medicine and tonics to the less sophisticated people in

towns (villages) surrounding the metropolis of Stamps.

There seemed to be an understanding between Mr. McElroy and

Grandmother. This was obvious to us because he never chased us off his land. In

summer's late sunshine I often sat under the chinaberry tree in his yard,

surrounded by the bitter aroma of its fruit and lulled by the drone of flies that fed

on the berries. He sat in a slotted swing on his porch, rocking in his brown threepiece, his wide Panama nodding in time with the whir of insects.

One greeting a day was all that could be expected from Mr. McElroy. After

his "Good morning, child," or "Good afternoon, child," he never said a word,

even if I met him again on the road in front of his house or down by the well, or

ran into him behind the house escaping in a game of hide-and-seek.

He remained a mystery in my childhood. A man who owned his land and the

big many-windowed house with a porch that clung to its sides all around the

house. An independent Black man. A near anachronism in Stamps.

Bailey was the greatest person in my world. And the fact that he was my

brother, my only brother, and I had no sisters to share him with, was such good

fortune that it made me want to live a Christian life just to show God that I was

grateful. Where I was big, elbowy and grating, he was small, graceful and

smooth. When I was described by our playmates as being shit color, he was

lauded for his velvet-black skin. His hair fell down in black curls, and my head

was covered with black steel wool. And yet he loved me.

When our elders said unkind things about my features (my family was

handsome to a point of pain for me), Bailey would wink at me from across the

room, and I knew that it was a matter of time before he would take revenge. He

would allow the old ladies to finish wondering how on earth I came about, then

he would ask, in a voice like cooling bacon grease, "Oh Mizeriz Coleman, how

is your son? I saw him the other day, and he looked sick enough to die."

Aghast, the ladies would ask, "Die? From what? He ain't sick."

And in a voice oilier than the one before, he'd answer with a straight face,

"From the Uglies."

I would hold my laugh, bite my tongue, grit my teeth and very seriously erase

even the touch of a smile from my face. Later, behind the house by the blackwalnut tree, we'd laugh and laugh and howl.

Bailey could count on very few punishments for his consistently outrageous

behavior, for he was the pride of the Henderson/Johnson family.

His movements, as he was later to describe those of an acquaintance, were

activated with oiled precision. He was also able to find more hours in the day

than I thought existed. He finished chores, homework, read more books than I

and played the group games on the side of the hill with the best of them. He

could even pray out loud in church, and was apt at stealing pickles from the

barrel that sat under the fruit counter and Uncle Willie's nose.

Once when the Store was full of lunchtime customers, he dipped the strainer,

which we also used to sift weevils from meal and flour, into the barrel and fished

for two fat pickles. He caught them and hooked the strainer onto the side of the

barrel where they dripped until he was ready for them. When the last school bell

rang, he picked the nearly dry pickles out of the strainer, jammed them into his

pockets and threw the strainer behind the oranges. We ran out of the Store. It

was summer and his pants were short, so the pickle juice made clean streams

down his ashy legs, and he jumped with his pockets full of loot and his eyes

laughing a "How about that?" He smelled like a vinegar barrel or a sour angel.

After our early chores were done, while Uncle Willie or Momma minded the

Store, we were free to play the children's games as long as we stayed within

yelling distance. Playing hide-and-seek, his voice was easily identified, singing,

"Last night, night before, twenty-four robbers at my door. Who all is hid? Ask

me to let them in, hit 'em in the head with a rolling pin. Who all is hid?" In

follow the leader, naturally he was the one who created the most daring and

interesting things to do. And when he was on the tail of the pop the whip, he

would twirl off the end like a top, spinning, falling, laughing, finally stopping

just before my heart beat its last, and then he was back in the game, still

laughing.

Of all the needs (there are none imaginary) a lonely child has, the one that

must be satisfied, if there is going to be hope and a hope of wholeness, is the

unshaking need for an unshakable God. My pretty Black brother was my

Kingdom Come.

In Stamps the custom was to can everything that could possibly be preserved.

During the killing season, after the first frost, all neighbors helped each other to

slaughter hogs and even the quiet, big-eyed cows if they had stopped giving

milk.

The missionary ladies of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church helped

Momma prepare the pork for sausage. They squeezed their fat arms elbow deep

in the ground meat, mixed it with gray nose-opening sage, pepper and salt, and

made tasty little samples for all obedient children who brought wood for the

slick black stove. The men chopped off the larger pieces of meat and laid them

in the smokehouse to begin the curing process. They opened the knuckle of the

hams with their deadly-looking knives, took out a certain round harmless bone

("it could make the meat go bad") and rubbed salt, coarse brown salt that looked

like fine gravel, into the flesh, and the blood popped to the surface.

Throughout the year, until the next frost, we took our meals from the

smokehouse, the little garden that lay cousin-close to the Store and from the

shelves of canned foods. There were choices on the shelves that could set a

hungry child's mouth to watering. Green beans, snapped always the right length,

collards, cabbage, juicy red tomato preserves that came into their own on

steaming buttered biscuits, and sausage, beets, berries and every fruit grown in

Arkansas.

But at least twice yearly Momma would feel that as children we should have

fresh meat included in our diets. We were then given money—pennies, nickels,

and dimes entrusted to Bailey—and sent to town to buy liver. Since the whites

had refrigerators, their butchers bought the meat from commercial

slaughterhouses in Texarkana and sold it to the wealthy even in the peak of

summer.

Crossing the Black area of Stamps which in childhood's narrow measure

seemed a whole world, we were obliged by custom to stop and speak to every

person we met, and Bailey felt constrained to spend a few minutes playing with

each friend. There was a joy in going to town with money in our pockets

(Bailey's pockets were as good as my own) and time on our hands. But the

pleasure fled when we reached the white part of town. After we left Mr. Willie

Williams' Do Drop Inn, the last stop before whitefolksville, we had to cross the

pond and adventure the railroad tracks. We were explorers walking without

weapons into man-eating animals' territory.

In Stamps the segregation was so complete that most Black children didn't

really, absolutely know what whites looked like. Other than that they were

different, to be dreaded, and in that dread was included the hostility of the

powerless against the powerful, the poor against the rich, the worker against the

worked for and the ragged against the well dressed.

I remember never believing that whites were really real.

Many women who worked in their kitchens traded at our Store, and when they

carried their finished laundry back to town they often set the big baskets down

on our front porch to pull a singular piece from the starched collection and show

either how graceful was their ironing hand or how rich and opulent was the

property of their employers.

I looked at the items that weren't on display. I knew, for instance, that white

men wore shorts, as Uncle Willie did, and that they had an opening for taking

out their "things" and peeing, and that white women's breasts weren't built into

their dresses, as some people said, because I saw their brassieres in the baskets.

But I couldn't force myself to think of them as people. People were Mrs.

LaGrone, Mrs. Hendricks, Momma, Reverend Sneed, Lillie B, and Louise and

Rex. Whitefolks couldn't be people because their feet were too small, their skin

too white and see-throughy, and they didn't walk on the balls of their feet the

way people did—they walked on their heels like horses.

People were those who lived on my side of town. I didn't like them all, or, in

fact, any of them very much, but they were people. These others, the strange pale

creatures that lived in their alien unlife, weren't considered folks. They were

whitefolks.