I

I SEE her: a thick-bodied unbeautiful woman, going through frozen dawns to milk a cow with burrs in its pale hide; or chopping and toting firewood into the West Tennessee cabins where my childhood was mostly spent; or bogging through mud and slashing November rain to feed the pigs and mule — a shapeless person in a man’s old coat, man’s brogan shoes, a crocus sack over head and shoulders to turn wind and rain.

When I was a child I accepted her as a child accepts all that befalls it, of hunger, poverty, summer sunlight and warm rain, sleet and snow and nightmares of malaria. She used to do the washing out of doors at a tub stand by the spring, her strong body moving with rhythm over the washboard. Near by a pot of clothes bubbled with lye suds over a bright fire of dead sticks. Between washings the iron pot served as a chief cooking utensil in provident summers when the gardens were good. Into it my mother would put a large soup bone and meat scrap, add onions and potatoes, vegetables of all sorts, and make a large supply of thick soup, which later she put aside in crocks to be reheated and thinned for dinners and suppers through the ensuing week. She might, at hog-killing time, boil the backbones and spareribs in the same manner, and thicken the resultant broth with cornmeal. This would later be cut into strips and fried as needed. Grub like this, she said, would stick to the ribs. Surely it was more than good enough for a share-cropper’s family in the dark boxed cabins in the delta cotton lands of West Tennessee.

It was all very different in seasons of starvation — when high waters cut off the crops, or low prices of the staple took it all for the planter’s share. I recall that for weeks one bitter winter we lived on dried cowpeas, frozen turnips, and corn cake made by mixing meal and water. The little meat to be had was given to my father because it was he who went to wage-work. My brother Charles had saved seeds in the summer and fall: corn ears with blue grains, cornfield beans of varied colors, crowder peas. We boiled the corn and ate it, and cracked the beans and peas into flour to thicken the johnnycake.

There was, that late winter, a great freshet in the Mississippi River, and backwater came up Forked Deer, covering all the bottom lands, and surrounding our cabin in the creek bottom. I remember the night when my mother waked me, and I looked out upon the gray-brown cold expanse of dreary water. Charles, my two sisters, and I huddled on the porch while my mother brought old sacks and wrapped us. I wept, staring across that silence of flood. I could see the trees dark against it, and heard a fish thresh at the steps. The cottonweed stood just above the water in the fields. We waded out to our waists, going through the dim bleak rain, through the night, out of the flood. We found our way by the snags and decayed fence posts. We waded almost a mile before we were free.

To this day, at night when I am chilled, I dream of water — of floodwaters, eddying sullenly about me in the darkness, while I cling to cottonweed, grope for a lost road, and cry out for help in the rain.

II

I suppose in the freshness of youth this huge woman who bore me was comely, but I have no memory of her in physical or mental beauty. I recollect a woman of broad hips and deep breast, standing at the paling gate and laughing loudly at a ribald jest exchanged with old Jeff Goff, a neighbor sharecropper. The year we lived on Mud Creek we cleared a tract of bottom land, a labor in which all the family engaged. While my father, Charles, and I rolled logs and made them into heaps, my mother and oldest sister Murdy toted trash and chunks to the burning piles on a pole litter. Murdy was a deepbreasted, red-cheeked, powerful but clumsy girl. Walking at one end of the litter with a heavy load, she would often stumble and fall. My mother would curse her angrily.

‘Are you going to fall over all the rotten logs in the woods?’

The year that I was twelve we moved to Dyersburg, living for a time at the Fair Grounds. This was a locality of Negro dwellings and bawdyhouses. I went to work for a butcher named Griggs, delivering meat. I would get out of my pallet at fivethirty, eat a cold breakfast, and walk uptown to the meat shop to start deliveries of steak and ham and sausage about six. Each Saturday night my mother would appear at Griggs’s shop and say to the butcher: ‘I’ll take Harry’s pay now.’

Griggs would pay her a dollar and a half, my weekly wage. She would go away with the money.

I remember that my pants became so ragged and worn at the seat that I was ashamed to go into the back doors and kitchens. One of the pretty young town girls — her name was Cora — said to my mother: —

‘If you don’t patch that child’s pants, I will put him to bed and put on the patch myself.’

My mother washed my pants and patched them.

III

Another year we were living in a log house at the back of the Wash Pearce plantation. We had a two-acre patch of pea hay, which had been cut on Friday, but by Sunday it was not yet fully cured. In the summer afternoon a thunderstorm quickly gathered. The rain, my father thought, would ruin pea hay. The whole family began frantically toting the hay and putting it in the log barn, and we succeeded in saving it just as the downpour came. It was perhaps a week later, at supper, that my mother said in a hushed voice: —

‘ A man come to the back door to-day and warned me that the grand jury was going to set and pass on us taking up the hay last Sunday. He warned that it would be best for you to go away, Pap.’

She described the man vaguely, then with some minuteness of detail. My father was frightened. I recall that that night he slipped away, armed with an ironwood walking stick, while my mother stood in the yard, in the dim moonlight, watching after him, her square face strangely set with a square expression of fear. My father was gone for two or three weeks, while night after night my mother would put us children to bed at dark, not allow the lamp to be lighted, and sit brooding in the darkness. Perhaps through the day she would run the cards, sitting at the table and smiling faintly at times. The man who had warned her — or she had said such a man had warned her — was the jack of diamonds. Sometimes she would turn the coffee cup and study the ground patterns a long while. I would look on, sometimes asking why she smiled.

‘Was I smiling, Harry?’ she would ask.

It was a bright moonlit night when my father came back home. I saw him at the gate, through the door as I lay on my shakedown. He came in, asking, ‘Maw, is it all right? Reckon it would be all right now, Maw?’

‘The man come this evening and it’s all right now,’ she said.

It was a prowler now that worried her. He would go around the house, she said; she’d wake deep in the night and hear him knocking about. So my mother and father contrived a device for making sure about this prowler. Between log smokehouse and corner of plank lean-to there was a narrow passage across which my parents stretched a strand of haywire about breast-high to a man, and ran the wire through a crack into the shed room, attaching it to the heavy headboard of a bed, so balanced that anyone’s running into the wire would throw the board against the floor with a crack like a gun.

They sat up for many nights, but the board did not fall.

Now it was autumn, and Charles, a boy of fifteen, had that afternoon walked to Dyersburg. Murdy and I were playing at the chip pile when my mother came frantically running, snatched us up, and crushed us to her bosom, weeping and screaming.

‘Soddy is dead! He has been killed. I saw it as plain as life!’

She stood there with dilated eyes, beating herself in grief. She caught my sister and me to her again and smothered us with caresses. Great tears washed down her terror-gray face. It was a face that terror sat upon with a curious hospitality. Murdy and I began to weep as crazily as she.

‘Soddy’s dead . . . Soddy’s dead!’

‘We got to go find him.’

We started away, the three of us, along the small road that went by the field’s edge toward the big house. When we had gone perhaps a quarter of a mile my mother bent suddenly and picked up a fragment of Charles’s old straw hat which he had torn off and thrown away. She sobbed, clasping it in her hand and kissing the fragment. We kept on, and had come near to the Wash Pearce big house when my mother had a change of expression. She watched furtively, and saw Mrs. Pearce in the yard. My mother stopped. She stood hesitant, then turned away into a path that went past the big barn, as if her errand took her that way. We crossed the orchard, got into the beech woods, and thus roundaboutly returned to the tenant cabin.

At sunset Charles walked into the yard.

IV

I worked, through these years, off and on for Griggs, or at this or that job, for, with other boys in school, I was always at work. My folks had moved out to the Roellen cotton lands, and I lived now with Griggs and his lank wife in the two small rooms in the rear of the meat shop. He paid me a dollar and a quarter a week now. Unvaryingly my mother appeared Saturday nights and said, ‘Mr. Griggs, I will take Harry’s pay, now.’

Perhaps she had risen that morning before day, and worked through the intervening hours until she walked the four miles into town. She would take the money, buy food, and walk back that night. She was a woman of almost superhuman physical endurance. She had a spiritual indolence that was, at last, beginning to fill me with a boy’s sense of shame. She would not patch my clothes until Nell Griggs sent word they’d have to dismiss me unless my pants were patched. I can’t recall that she grieved when we had those seasonal periods of starvation. She may have worried and I was too young to realize it. I think of her as a coarse, illiterate person, jesting loudly with uncouth men, but clinging to a curious virtue of sex. I don’t believe that she ever thought about me except as a child who, in becoming a dependable source of limited income, was only paying the debt it owed her for giving it life.

I would sit wistfully at Griggs’s shop window in my idle hours when school children trooped wildly down to town from the schools on the high hill known as College Heights, and watch the clean, bright girls and the loud, bullying boys. I wondered how it would be to go to school. Horror that I would forget my lessons when time came to recite to the teacher would make me start up with a shudder. I had learned to read a little —Cora, at the big ‘sporting house’ down at the Fair Grounds, had taught me out of a primer on quiet Sundays; I began to read some now. Griggs picked a book up out of the road down at the slaughterhouse and sold it to me, deducting a dime from my week’s pay. My mother was angry.

I recall vividly one night how this ability to read did a curious thing to me. Someone — a kinsman, maybe — telephoned to Griggs from Roellen, ten miles away, that he wanted a message delivered to a place two miles north of Dyersburg. The night was freezing cold, and the rain turned to ice as it fell. Griggs turned to me: —

‘Want to carry that message out and make a quarter?’

‘Yes, sir!’ I said eagerly.

Griggs wrote it down on a piece of paper, and I put it into my pocket. I went out into the night, bending into the bitter north wind. At the last street light out of town I read the paper. It said: —

‘Little Jenny is dying, and we want you to pray for her immortal soul.’

I struggled on and delivered that message, returning through the bleak icy night, so numb that I could hardly stagger along. Two days afterward a letter with a quarter arrived for me. It was Saturday, I recall; and that night when my mother came I remember how proudly I gave her the extra coin.

I do not remember that she thanked me.

It was some while after this that I went to work at the local telephone office as messenger and office boy. My folks had moved close in, just without the limits of town, west. It was a small unpainted four-room house, set in oak trees. Since I must go on duty at six o’clock in the morning, it was necessary for me to get up and eat breakfast and walk a mile and a quarter to be on time. I went off duty at nine o’clock at night. I had every other Sunday off. For this work I was paid fifteen dollars a month. I was, at this time, fifteen years old — a tall, blue-eyed boy, quick-muscled, willing, and affable. Every first of the month my mother would appear at the manager’s desk.

‘I will take Harry’s pay now, please, Mr. Lyles.’

Afterward she would go away with the three five-dollar bills.

I carried my dinner in a tin pail. Once I remember how ashamed and choked I became when one of the pretty central girls discovered me behind the switchboard eating the contents of the pail — lye hominy, cold, which my mother had hastily prepared for lunch, with nothing else.

Looking back, I can see that, for all the long hours, these were good years. I had leisure, and access to the library of a gentleman who roomed next to the central office. I read much, and learned to write.

One day — I was eighteen — my mother and I had a bitter quarrel because I wished to spend ten dollars of my wages for a suit of clothes.

‘You owe a debt you can never pay for me bringing you into life!’ she said, and took the money and went away.

Soon afterward I left home and did not again return to live with my folks.

V

Twenty years passed. I had educated myself, married, taught in country schools in the Deep South, and worked my way through college, taking the B. S. and M. A. degrees. I became a college professor and wrote a book — a novel, of the lives of share-croppers in the delta cotton lands. The book made some stir, sold well, was issued in England and sold to the movies. It was a strange dream to be realized by myself, this boy who used to tote meat into back doors and drag cotton sacks across the delta rows. I might be forgiven a bitterness for my childhood of labor, poverty, a species of nakedness — but I was n’t bitter.

I am not sentimental when I say I am somewhat grateful. For I learned to work. I’ve heard men say they owed what they were to their mothers. I, too, may say this, but not in the sense I suppose these men mean. From my mother I have an inheritance of almost superhuman energy. Those boyhood years, with long hours and the necessity of keeping on the job, disciplined that energy. When I left home I worked with the fury of ambition. I never knew much about spending money, so I saved most of what I earned. I had concluded that only men who can do the mental and physical work of two men really ever succeed in a real way, for the work of one man is required for a living, and that of the other to achieve success. So I lived frugally, worked hard, and with wife and children paid my way through college, took my degrees, and wrote my book. I had known hunger, nakedness, cold, and shame and fear. I had wanted so much and had so little.

So it was to occur to me after a while that my mother’s contribution, if negative, was of profound value in a life of achievement. Even her phantasies became, in me, a source of creative power. Those harsh years made me a realist. Her dramatizing herself in strange rôles was my birthright of creative ability.

I see her now, my mother: an untender, shapeless woman, going through cold and rain; clearing in the muddy bottomlands; working in the plantations; cursing, laughing at her ribald jokes; wading the floods with her babies out of the dark cabins by night in the Tennessee cotton lands — a hard, queer, futile old woman; and it seems to matter so little that she took my last quarter, and would n’t patch my pants, or let me buy a new suit of clothes now that I was grown up.