Читать книгу El Segundo - James Newton - Страница 6

Just West of Hell

Tallahatchie County is located in the Mississippi Delta region. The county was founded on December 31, 1833. Tallahatchie is a Choctaw name meaning "rock of waters". Geographically, it’s located in the Northwest area of the state. But according to my father and other’s who scratched out our meager existence under the Blazing Mississippi sun, we lived “Just West of Hell”. The wind would blow a hot breeze as if to taunt us and remind of how cruel life could be.

The cruel work under crueler conditions made many a man say, “God had abandoned the land”. Even if the Almighty had not forgotten His people, we all were in a desert place tolling under a mean sun which seemed to make the people meaner.

Years later, history would demonstrate the barbaric cruelty of the land and the people when on August 28, 1955, 14-year old Emmett Till was kidnapped in the middle of the night from his uncle’s home by at least two men, one from LeFlore and one from Tallahatchie County, Mississippi.

Till was a black youth from Chicago visiting family in Mississippi, was later murdered, and his body thrown into the Tallahatchie River. He had been accused of whistling at a white woman. His badly beaten body was found days later in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi.

According to my daddy, we weren’t borne into his misery. No sir. This burden poverty that was placed on us had only started for 17 years ago. It didn’t break us but gave us a great hunger and deep desire to break these chains of poverty.

My Great Grandfather owned a sizeable farm. He was part of the "Landed Gentry" so to speak. His son, Jim Newton my Grandfather, was a lawman, and ran a house for the poor in Paynes which was just about 13 miles east of Tallahatchie. My mother worked for the government, my and father, Bryan Newton, was the chief of police of the Sunflower, Mississippi which was about 50 miles southwest of this hell on earth.

We owned a beautiful antebellum plantation home, and enjoyed a good life. Oddly enough, while we were a proud family we were not racist family, which was a dangerous novelty for these parts. We were a large family of 12 including me and our “adopted” sibling Snow Quirk who was a young black boy we had accepted into our home because he had no where else to go. I grew up with and he look out for me like an older brother and I looked up to him the same. Snow lived with us until he was in the mid twenties, finally marring and moving out on his own. Snow Quirk died in 1971, at 41 years of age. I miss him still.

Although the Great Depression presented hard times, we were one big happy family. The war was already raging between Germany and England, but the United States had not entered as of yet. So were fine…until the depression came to our door step. I still am unsure they called it the “Great Depression”. There was nothing great about it to me. They darn sure were depressing.

My dad lost his job; we lost our home. The times were so hard that one year we rented a patch of land to work and the boll weevil destroyed our harvest. Things just keep going from bad to worse. As a land renter, at least you could control your hard earned money. We had a 1941 ford sedan, things were tolerable….at least we were cotton farmers. Working the land, plowing the fields, tilling the ground, planting the cotton, chopping the grass out of the fields, then gathering the cotton by hand and making several bales of cotton was our life’s work. But it was the boll weevil, not the war or the depression that caused my family starvation, in the world of cotton; it was the boll weevil that brought us to fall.

While the rest of the world stood in hungry lines for food all across the United States, while everybody was hurting across the Nation. While stock markets collapsed, and the very rich were committing suicide, we were doing pretty good farming cotton. We could control our own future and enjoy the fruits of our labor. As renters, we were even respected in the community. These swarms of little insects brought us to our knees.

In truth, the boll weevil hit all across the King Cotton South land affecting owners and renters alike. Everybody suffered because of the boll weevil. It threw many lands and their renters off their rented properties. Consequently, many cotton people like my dad resulted to sharecropping.

Share chopping was just indentured servitude or slavery. The big farmers would supply you a shack, called a bungalow or a shot gun house. There was no running water. You normally had hand water pumps outside about twenty-five or thirty yards from your shack with outhouses or out door toilets located about 50 yards from your living quarters.

We were living in hell or just west of it.

'="" src="assets/image-jpeg_dfe7144ea6c0fa8093cb0c399a80efec.jpg" the=""/>James at 11 with older brother Dennis and sister Mary Jane in sharecropper