Sweetness Read Online Free Page A

dispensed pearls of wisdom (“Never give your kids soda.” “Rise early, sleep early, work hard.”), advised her friends, helped whenever help was needed. When Archie Johnson, Walter’s pal, describes Alyne as “remarkable,” he echoes a sentiment shared by many. “Everyone loved Walter’s mama,” said Johnson. “One thing I remember is that she was really into making her home look nice. During the fall she’d drive out to the country, to a rural area called Hawthorne where some of her family lived. We’d ride up with her, and on the way she’d inevitably want to stop and get us to pick the cattails for her.
    “Nothing about her life was haphazard. Everything was organized. She had a plan.”
    Alyne served as a church usher and was the leader, nurturer, and moral guide of the family. Peter, in turn, was the disciplinarian. Though only five foot five and maybe 140 pounds, with dark skin and unusually long fingers, Peter demanded respect from his children, both with his scowl and his belt. Docile in his day-to-day demeanor, Peter seemed to derive his greatest pleasure from meeting up with his closest friend, a neighbor named Brady Lewis, for a couple of hours in the backyard. There the two would lounge on a pair of lawn chairs, telling stories and polishing off a couple of dollar-fifty glass bottles of grape-flavored Mad Dog 20/20 until they were drunk. Because Columbia was a dry town, the two tried keeping their ritual a secret. But everyone knew. “Walter’s dad was real quiet and agreeable,” said Robert Virgil, who grew up with Walter and Eddie. “I remember his dad used to come to my house, and he’d help us kill a chicken or a hog. Then he’d drink his Mad Dog.” Peter wasn’t merely known by his first name. With the exception of his wife and kids, he was “Peter Payton” to everyone, in all circumstances. “Peter Payton didn’t do no harm, and he wasn’t a bad man, but we called him the town drunk, because he seemed to be drinking his Mad Dog all the time,” said Earnestine Lewis. “No one ever bothered him because he never bothered nobody, but it was always the same thing—Peter Payton being drunk, Peter Payton stumbling around. Sometimes Miss Alyne would holler at him, make him come inside the house. He’d yell back, ‘Oh, Alyne! Let me be!’ But then he would always obey her. She wore the pants.”
    If Peter Payton’s drinking created major problems, none of his kids seemed aware of it. If anything, the booze made him even more taciturn. Upon arriving home from wherever he might have been, Peter—voice as gentle as a pillow, if not a tad slurred—would review the day’s events with his wife. They would share a bite to eat, watch some television. Then, if the two agreed that someone had behaved in an untoward manner, he calmly approached the offending child—rarely Pam, sometimes Walter, often Eddie—and said, simply, “Go out in the yard and get a switch.” The soon-to-be victim would return with a thick stick (thin branches were unacceptable), then bend over, pants pulled down around the ankles.
    When Peter Payton rolled up his shirtsleeves and grabbed the switch, it was all business. In the best-case scenario, a session lasted only four or five swings. Occasionally the stick snapped. “Then he’d go and get the belt,” Eddie said. “It was leather, and it didn’t break.
    “Daddy was slick,” Eddie continued. “We’d go to bed, and we’d think maybe a punishment wasn’t coming. Then it’d be about eleven o’clock at night and you’d feel the blanket snatched from over you. You’d be in bed, curled up against a wall with nowhere to go.”
    It was an understood form of behavioral control at a time when black parents feared white reaction to unruliness among their offspring. Columbia’s white population was, by Mississippi standards, mostly cordial toward the town’s blacks. In August 1955, a fourteen-year-old boy named Emmett Till had been murdered in Money,