Gone to Hell This Morning

I never shall forget that Saturday afternoon in May 1954. It is etched in my memory like a branding iron burns the brand on a steer to identify the ranch to which it belongs.  I was only five years old at the time but I remember it well; and that afternoon is as vivid in my memory today as it has been over all those years since then.

     Sitting on a low stool on the porch of our five-room green wood-framed galvanized tin-topped house on our farm in the Rock Hill Community in southwest Jasper County, Mississippi, I was being instructed in the ways of righteousness by Cousin Mary Lou Beavers.  She was the old lady who lived up the road just west of our house about one-tenth of a mile with her husband, Cousin John Beavers. In our community just about every older person was called cousin even if they were no kin. You could see their house clearly from our’s, it was west of us just across the field and up the hill.  Cousin Mary Lou had come to our house that day to bring some peas she had picked from her garden and had more than she was going to cook; she had taken the time to visit for a while.  She was sitting in a chair on the porch, I was sitting next to her on the stool, and my daddy, Otha Lang, Sr., was lying on the floor on the west end of the porch in the shade with his feet propped and slightly elevated against one of the wood posts that formed the supports across the front of the open porch.

     Daddy was lying there nodding as Cousin Mary Lou was talking to me.  Mama and the girls, Walterene, Brenda and Bobbie, and my brother just older than me, Otha Jr., were inside the house cleaning up after the noon meal.  The three older brothers had gone back to the barn to unhitch the mules to turn them out of the barnyard into the pasture.  They were done plowing and planting for the day and were going to town later in the afternoon.

     Cousin Mary Lou was also my Sunday School teacher and was my surrogate grandmother.  She and my mother were my first two teachers, and mama had already taught me to read fluently by the time I was five years old in 1954.  As it was hot in the house, Cousin Mary Lou was sitting there listening to me read to her from the Sunday School book waiting for mama to come out of the house to sit and talk with her.  Daddy was nodding because it was just after the noontime dinner meal and he was full.  Daddy always found a way to take a nap after a good meal no matter where he was or whose company he was in.

     On this particular Saturday, however, daddy was nodding for another reason. You see, daddy had already been drinking moonshine whiskey all day that Saturday morning.  The fact was, daddy had been drinking moonshine ever since he had come home from work on the Friday before.  Although daddy was not yet drunk that Saturday around 1:30 p.m. he was well on his way to tying on a good one.  If it had not been for Cousin Mary Lou coming to the house just as we were finishing up the meal, daddy would have been back in the woods or out behind the smokehouse, or wherever he had hidden his whiskey jug that day and would have already started back to drinking.

     But out of respect for Cousin Mary Lou he had pretended to be more sober than what he was; plus, the good meal he had just eaten was easing the effects of the whiskey from drunk to sleep, and he had been able to carry on a conversation with her before I started reading and he fell asleep.  The nod had overtaken him as the heat was bearing down from the sunshine; it was a clear sunny day and the temperature was at least 95 degrees.  Daddy never drank whiskey in the presence of us children, but you could tell when he had been drinking; you could smell the moonshine whiskey from seemingly 50 yards away, and you could tell by his demeanor and the look in his eyes.

     It was early May but the heat was already oppressive in southeastern Mississippi.  School was out for the summer which meant that my three oldest brothers, Charles, Claude and George, were now working with daddy building houses when they were not plowing, chopping or planting on the farm.  The oldest brother had just graduated from high school and was working full-time with daddy every day trying to earn enough money to be able to attend Jackson College (now Jackson State University) in the fall.  George and Claude, along with my three sisters, were making sure all the plowing and chopping were getting done.

     In those days when there was nothing pressing to be done on the farm, the three oldest brothers would work with daddy in the building business.  In the Spring of 1954 daddy had begun building a house for the young lawyer son of one of the prominent lawyers in Bay Springs. The Old man was having the house built for his son who had finished law school at Ole Miss a year or so earlier and had come home to join his father in the law practice.  The son had gotten married to a local girl from one of the other prominent white families in Bay Springs and his father was furnishing the money to have a house built for them.  The old man had made an agreement with daddy to build the house on a labor provision basis meaning that he would pay daddy and his helpers for their labor by the hour and he would provide all the building materials.

     Back then it was almost unheard of for a black man to get a contract of any kind to build a new house for a prominent white family. Mr. Roy James, a white contractor, was the most prominent builder in the area and he built most of the houses being built by whites in the whole county.