Delta Fragments: The Recollections of a Sharecropper's Son

The Wilsons

The Wilsons Aunt Sue has a head full of stories. Aunt Sue has a heart full of stories. Summer nights on the front porch Aunt Sue cuddles a brown-faced child to her bosom And tells him stories. Langston Hughes, “Aunt Sue’s Stories” I never knew my maternal grandfather, Eli Wilson, but those who did said that I resembled him not only in appearance but also in aptitude. According to my cousin Luevina Lymon, he was a stout, dark-complexioned man. “That boy,” some friends of the family said of me, “is the spitting image of Eli.” I always appreciated what seemed to me to be a compliment, so much so that I, quite unofficially , added Elias as a second middle name. My grandfather was considered a “professor,” a title one could have with only a ninth-grade education. When Luevina told me this, I was surprised and ready to question how he became a professor, she said, “Yes, a professor.” “Like me,” I wondered aloud. “Yes, a professor, like you!” Actually, Eli only taught in grade school, though no doubt he was called on to teach students at multiple levels, since typically students were placed in The Wilsons 8 the same church room and seated according to their particular grades. I do know that some of the girls were older, because, as I was told, he once got into trouble for making unwelcome advances toward one or more of them. In any case, teaching school was only a side job, for he and his students could only be in school during those few months when their labor wasn’t required for the cotton fields. My grandfather’s brother, Uncle Thorn, was said to be every bit as smart as Eli. He probably also taught school, though I don’t know that for certain . My mother told me he could write with his toes, and another of my uncles said Thorn could tell by the sound of a freight train just how much weight it was carrying. Well, I’m not sure about all that, but this is what I was told. My grandfather grew up in Noxubee County, where he met and married my grandmother, Alice. They had a large family of thirteen children, although several died early on. In fact, only five of his children were alive when I was born: Scott, Fred, Arybelle (whom we called Abelle), Obe, and my mother, Samantha. Since I spent my very early years with the Wilsons,1 I got to know them fairly well. This includes my grandmother, Alice, who outlived her husband and a number of their children. The circumstances of my grandfather’s death were never completely clear to me. It’s a matter that has continued to vex me, though there seems to be more reliable evidence to support one of the two versions I heard. According to one story, Eli was poisoned by a jealous plantation overseer, who knew that my grandfather would be able to keep account of expenses and therefore have a good sense of what was owed to him at settlement time each year—that day in December when sharecroppers were paid (or, more often, not paid) for the fruits of their labors during the previous months. Eli thus posed a direct threat to the white man’s authority. This story is quite in keeping with the deep prejudices and racial hatreds of the South of that era, and I accepted my grandfather’s martyrdom with a sense of pride. A number of years later, however, I learned a different version of how my grandfather died. According to this story, Eli had been carrying on an affair with a woman who lived not far from his home. On his last visit to her house, he died of a heart attack.2 My grandfather was known to be something of a womanizer. And my grandmother warned him that something would happen if he continued to see that “hussy,” who, she said, was no good for him, besides being ten or twelve years his junior. She warned him not because of her own pride, though she was known to be a very beautiful woman of fair skin with “good hair.” Rather, her 9 The Wilsons plea to Eli was for his own good. My grandfather, of course, didn’t appreciate that kind of talk, which provoked him to violence. Some even suggested that...