The Pilgrim Jubilees

3. Mississippi: Cleave Graham

3. Mississippi: CleaveGraham H orse Nation, Mississippi, doesn't exist today. Traces of it can be seen from the single lane gravel road—the remains of singlestory wooden buildings completely engulfed by the trees and undergrowth that have reclaimed the land. But when farmer Columbus Graham and his wife, Josie—the former Josephine Chandler—moved there in 1934 with their family from nearby Woodland, it wasa small, self-contained farming community, seven miles from the Chickasaw County seat of Houston , which today has a population of about four thousand. About a mile from the derelict homes, at the intersection of county routes 86 and 85, is the sole remaining active part of Horse Nation, the New Zion Missionary Baptist Church, founded in 1885. It isa tree-surrounded brick building with a covered entrance; this sanctuary wasbuilt in 1973, replacing the wooden church that was there when the Grahams came to the area.1 Today, the church has its own pastor, and services are held every Sunday. But when young Cleave Graham started going to New Zion with his family, full services were held only once a month—on the third Sunday—presided over 29 30 Mississippi: Cleave Grakam by a Memphis-based minister who pastored several small north Mississippi churches. Cleave now lives on Chicago's South Side on one of the streets running off 95th Street. From the street, the brick house looks small, but it is long, running from the sitting room and dining room in front to a den and bedrooms at the back. Cleave and his third wife, Billie—a train driver on Chicago 's commuter network—have lived here for about five years. Five television sets are scattered through the house; Cleave explains it's so Billie can keep track of what she's watching as she goes about the home. "New Zion Baptist Church, that wasit. It's in the rural area—it's a country church. Horse Nation was just... oh ... a southern community. Everybody 's post office address wasHouston. We had two stores—Charlie VerelFs store and Dayton Woodruff's store. That's where everybody did their little everyday shopping. Where I was born, you can't get there. Youwould have to get a mule or a horse and ride up through the woods. I wasborn ... the midwife wrote down 1928. But my mom says she put down '28 by mistake because I wasbom in the first of the year. I've been saying I wasbom in '29, but she put down '28 and I have to go with what's on mybirth certificate— January 8, 1928. Myfamily consisted of four boys and three girls that lived. The whole family wasthirteen, but seven lived. Some died at birth or right after. I lost all my sisters. The girls died at a young age. One died at two years old, one died at thirteen, one died at fifteen. My baby sister died at fifty-eight. We were farmers. We rented. They had sharecroppers, but my daddy always had his ownfarm tools, his own horse . . . horses and mules was the thing back then. What he did, he wouldrent land and farm it." A sharecropper grew crops on usually white-owned land for a share of what the crop fetched at market, minus "expenses" and advances. It was a system with great potential far abuse, and landowners usually took full advantage of that potential, leaving sharecroppers trapped in a perpetual debt cycle in which the amount they made each year never quite equaled what they owed in advances and expenses. A farmer who "rented" paid a set fee for the use of a block of land and took the full return from the crop, minus the rent. Clay Graham recalls that his father rented and sharecropped at different times, but Cleave is adamant that "we never did sharecrop, no." Mississippi: Cleave Graham 31 "My mom and dad sung in church. My mom . . . the church really depended on her. That wasbefore they really had church choirs too much. So before the preacher preached his sermon, my mom had to sing something . My dad, he didn't sing too often at the churches, because he wasn't really a church-going man. But he always saw that we got there. He would hitch the mules up to the wagon and bring it out in front of the house. He always looked out for my mom...