Coming of Age in Mississippi Read Online Free Page B

it. After she saw the place next to the log where it had been lying and the trail it left going to the swamp, she went and got Mr. Cook. For days Mr. Cook and some other men looked in the swamp for that snake, but they never did find it. After that Mama was scared for us to stay at home alone, and she began looking for a house in town closer to where she worked. “Shit, snakes that damn big might come up here and eat y’all up while I’m at work,” she said.
    In the meantime, she got our Uncle Ed, whom we liked so much, to come over and look after us every day. Sometimes he would take us hunting. Then we wouldn’t have to sit on the porch and watch those snakes in that boiling hot summer sun. Ed made us a “niggershooter” each. This was a little slingshot made out of a piece of leather connected to a forked stick by a thin slab of rubber. We would take rocks and shoot them at birds and anything else we saw. Ed was the only one who ever killed anything. He always carried salt and matches in his pockets and whenever he’d kill a bird he’d pick and roast it right there in the woods. Sometimes Ed took us fishing too. He knew every creek in the whole area and we’d roam for miles. Whenever we caught fish we’d scrape and cook them right on the bank of the creek. On those days we didn’t have to eat that hard cold pone of bread Mama left for us.
    Sometimes Ed would keep us in the woods all day, and we wouldn’t hunt birds or fish or anything. We just walked, listening to the birds and watching the squirrels leap from tree to tree and the rabbits jumping behind the little stumps. Ed had a way of making you feel so much a part of everything about the woods. He used to point out all the trees to us, telling us which was an oak, and which was a pine and whichbore fruit. He’d even give us quizzes to see if we could remember one tree from another. I thought he was the smartest person in the whole world.
    One day Ed was late coming and we had resigned ourselves to spending the whole day on the porch. We rocked for hours in the sun and finally fell asleep. Eventually Ed came. He locked the house up immediately and rushed us off the porch. He told us he was going to surprise us. I thought we were going to a new creek or something so I begged him to tell me. He saw that I was upset so finally he told me that he was taking us home with him.
    As we were walking down the rock road, it occurred to me that I had never been home with Ed and I was dying to see where he lived. I could only remember seeing Grandma Winnie once, when she came to our house just after Junior was born. Mama never visited Grandma because they didn’t get along that well. Grandma had talked Mama into marrying my daddy when Mama wanted to marry someone else. Now that Mama and Daddy had separated, she didn’t want anything to do with Grandma, especially when she learned that her old boyfriend was married and living in Chicago.
    Ed told us that he didn’t live very far from us, but walking barefooted on the rock road in the boiling hot sun, I began to wonder how far was “not very far.”
    “Ed, how much more longer we gotta go? These rocks is burning my foots,” I said.
    “Ain’t much further. Just right around that bend,” Ed yelled back at me. “Why didn’t you put them shoes on? I told you them rocks was hot.” He waited on me now. “Oughter make you go all the way back to that house and put them shoes on. You gonna be laggin’ behind comin’ back and we ain’t never gonna make it ’fore Toosweet get off o’ work!”
    “Mama told us we ain’t supposed to wear our shoes outround the house. You know we ain’t got but one pair and them my school shoes.”
    “Here it is, right here,” Ed said at last. “Essie Mae, run up front and open that gate.” By this time he was carrying Junior on his back and Adline half asleep on his hip.
    I ran to the gate and opened it and rode on it as it swung open. We entered a green pasture with lots of