From The Land Of Cotton

"Pull over here," she says. There is a sign by the side of the road—MONEY, MISSISSIPPI. Across the highway, pointing down a dirt lane, is another sign—SWEET HOME PLANTATION. Up ahead on a sagging, unpainted, wood-frame building are the hand-lettered words GROCERY STORE. Farther on is a mobile home propped on cinder blocks. POST OFFICE. And finally, at the edge of Money, the tallest building, THE COTTON MILL.

A railroad track runs alongside the highway, and beyond are rows of green bushy plants flecked with white. A morning mist hovers over the plants. "I was born out there," she says, pointing out the car window toward the cotton fields. "On the plantation. We lived way down in the fields. Now they build the houses closer to the road, but in those days, before anyone had an automobile, they built them in the middle of the fields. My first memory is of my uncle leaving home. My mother stood in the yard and watched him walk through the fields. You could see the top of his head moving between the rows. When he reached the road and turned left, my mother said, 'Well, your uncle's leaving home.' He lives in Oakland now.

"I started chopping cotton when I was 10. We used a long hoe called 'the ignorant stick.' At five in the morning the plants were cold and wet and they soaked your clothes as you moved down the rows. It was a terrible kind of chill. But by late morning the sun would be hot. Lord, it was hot! You could see the heat waves shimmering behind you. 'Hurry up,' someone would shout. 'Hurry up, the monkey's coming!' And then others would pick up the shout, 'The monkey's coming, the monkey's coming!' Lord, those rows were long! You could chop for a whole week and never finish a row. I got paid $2.50 a day for 12 hours. I never understood why my father made me chop until now. He wanted me to be independent, and it worked. I call him my father, but he was really my grandfather. I was born with red hair, gray-green eyes, and skin so pale you could see my veins. My real father looked at me and told my mother I was not his child. Three days later he took a boat across the Tallahatchie River from Racetrack Plantation, picked me from my mother's arms and carried me 15 miles to my grandparents'. They raised me. I hold no animosity toward my father. It was just ignorance. Later on he realized that I was his child.

"We can go now."

It is nine in the morning and the temperature is 92� as the car heads south to Greenwood. Inside, however, the only sound is the hum of the air-conditioner. The road runs through fields of cotton. Occasionally, there is a shack alongside the highway.

"They painted sharecropper homes all one color, according to the plantation," she says. The ones along here are a faded red. "Plantation life was not bad, really. Every holiday there would be a picnic. They would dig a hole in the ground and start a fire, then throw a fence over the top and roast a pig on it. The owners supplied the food. Each plantation would have its own baseball team and the men would play against each other. If someone died on the plantation everyone would stock that person's house with chickens and greens and stuff, and if it was a woman who was left, they would come and pick her crops for her. It was a warm relationship. The hardest adjustment to make when I moved to the city was learning I could not be friendly, that you did not sit down beside someone on a bus and talk.

"This was a dirt road when I was a child. There were always people walking up and down, usually couples holding hands. They walked from Money to Greenwood and back, a distance of over 20 miles. They were courting. Now that is heavy courting. Then people got automobiles and the Ku Klux Klan started riding again. Right over there is where Emmett Till was lynched. You remember Emmett Till, in the '50s? He was the 14-year-old black boy from Chicago who supposedly whistled at a white woman in a grocery store. That night they dragged him from his uncle's home, tortured and shot him and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie. I remember once my cousin came to visit, and she got off the bus at the wrong stop. It was already dark so she started to walk. Two white men drove by. They turned around and came back toward her. She knew what was going to happen so she ran into the cotton fields and lay down. They searched for her for hours but couldn't find her. She heard them thrashing up and down the rows. It was the most frightening experience in her life, she said. I imagine it was. I never had any experiences like that. I try not to put myself in that kind of position."

The car crosses the Tallahatchie River into Greenwood's city limits. A tree-lined esplanade divides the main thoroughfare, Grand Boulevard. On both sides are massive mansions, aging and untended. From the second-floor balcony of one hangs a Confederate flag.

"They raised me well," she says. "My grandparents, I mean. It was not the same as having parents, of course. They were not affectionate. I never remember any warmth, any feeling that they really cared, but I never wanted for necessities. And they were strict. Very strict. Why, they would not even let me receive company until I was 16. Whenever a boy called the house and asked to speak to Miss White, my mother—my grandmother—would answer the phone and say, 'I'm the only lady in this house who receives company, and I am sure you are not calling me because I am a married woman.' And they would hang up quick. I appreciate that kind of thing now. It taught me self-respect. But then I just wanted to get out of the house. That was why I turned to sports. It was the only way I could stay out past five o'clock. And I was good at it, too.

"When I was in the fifth grade I played on the high school's varsity basketball team, and when I was 16 I was running track for Tennessee State. Sports was another kind of escape, too. As a child I was an outcast. Blacks were prejudiced against me because I was so light-complexioned. Parents would not let their kids play with me. They said horrible things about me. In school, whenever there was a play or a dance, the instructors would choose the black girls with wavy black hair, starched dresses and patent leather shoes. It did not matter that I could sing and dance better. I was too light and I had this funky red hair, and I was always running around in overalls with a dirty face and no shoes. The only way I could get any recognition was through sports. Now those same parents want me to stop by their house to visit a spell whenever I return to Greenwood. I can't do it. I feel funny. I remember things. Lord, I had a miserable childhood. But I survived. Baby...I...have...survived."