As I lie here resting,
in the arms of the
spirit Peace,
the troubling trials of life
weighing down on my soul
are released,
freeing my mind to drift away
to a destination I shall
again soon reach,
where the gravel road leading to
Grandmother Easter’s house
feels like Paradise beneath
my feet…
One. Home
Lumbertown, Mississippi, better known to the local people as “L-Town” or “The L,” is the place where the journey called “my life” first begins. L-Town was a very small city. There are four cities located in Lamar County: Lumberton, Purvis, Oak Grove, and Sumrall, and Lumberton is the smallest. It was a very compact and crowded place to live, with a population of about 2500 people, who all went to the same Head Start, kindergarten, preschool, and high school, and most often, the same college. There were times you could go days, even weeks, seeing the exact same people in the exact same place every single day.
In the early 1980’s, most parents worked for McGraw and Edison, a new and growing power plant where a large majority of the younger population worked. If you didn’t work for the power plant, you worked for Mr. J. P. Miles at the wood and lumber sawmill. Even though the power plant was a new and upcoming company, the sawmill was the main source for income in Lamar County.
L-Town wasn’t known as a racist place to live. Sure enough, racism did exist, but it was very dormant, especially on Friday night. During the fall season, on Friday nights, your race, gender, religion, or beliefs didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was Panther Pride. When the Friday night lights came on and Panther Pride was on the field, everybody was family. If there was one thing that could bring this little Dixie city together, it most definitely was the Panthers. L-Town loved all their high school sports, but their love for football was the heartbeat that kept the city alive.
Racism may have been overshadowed by the love for football, but prejudice could be felt looming in the air. No matter the opponent the Panthers faced, the people of L-Town made sure they knew they were not liked or welcomed. “If you ain’t from L-Town, you ain’t shit” could be heard chanting from the stands no matter the arena the Panthers played at. When they were scheduled to play in a different town, you would’ve thought President Ronald Reagan was headed to the game, the way the cars lined up on the highway. For miles and miles, the only thing that could be seen were old-school cars and trucks filled with fans traveling to support their pride and joy, the L-town Panthers.
As much joy and happiness as the Panther Pride brought to this little city, there was a reality that would cause someone who didn’t live there to think that they were not a city of togetherness and support, but a city of separation. Growing up as a child, you went along with the way things were. But as you grew older, you began to realize the ways you were accustomed to were not ways you agreed with.
The separation of communities was due to the redlining system used to divide races geographically. Lumberton consisted of five different communities known as the “quarters.” The entire time I lived there, until I was fifteen, the black population lived in The Turnkey Quarters, The Big Quarters, The Love Quarters, and Wellstown Quarters, while the population of whites lived in the community called The White Folk Quarters. As small a place as it was and still is, I never really understood why there were so many different communities, especially in the black population, but I guess it was one of those things not meant for me to understand.
Wellstown was a very small community located in the county. To the people living in the city limits, Wellstown was looked down upon and sometimes even teased as being country. Thinking about it now, how hilarious was it to be teased for being country by people who lived in a city that had two department stores, two grocery stores, three gas stations, and one hamburger stand. But for some reason we were labeled as the “Country County” or the desert people. Whereas the city limits had paved basketball courts, parks with swings and monkey bars, swimming pools and stores, the people of Wellstown had sandlot courts, ponds to swim in, no parks other than your back yard, and grandmothers’ kitchens or food stands.
In those days, it was such a beautiful place to live. It was very clean and green. Where it lacked in some of the luxuries offered in the city, it offered you a feeling of hospitality. Very close-knit family vibes could be felt as soon as you entered the community.
The Winstons and the McLemores were the two largest families living there. The roots to my family’s heritage are connected to both families, but the McLemores are where go deepest. Of the sixty-two homes in the community, there were only two I wasn’t related to.
Some of the most peaceful moments in my life occurred in open fields covered with beautiful green grass, and walking through the woods filled with pine trees tall enough to have a child thinking they were extended from the heavens and oak trees with trunks huge enough to build a house inside. And when the opportunity presented itself to bypass my mother’s watchful eyes, I took it. These were the days I navigated the landscape with my bare feet, to feel the softness of the grass beneath my feet. While most kids were playing the usual game that kids from the country play, I was somewhere in the woods looking for snakes to catch or a tree to build a secret treehouse in.
Because Lumberton was very limited, with a lack of opportunities, many members of my family moved away after graduating high school in search of a better life. But no matter the distance traveled or the time spent away, most of the people who left home returned for the peace and Southern hospitality that could only be found in the community of Wellstown.
Cultivated and well-kept lawns were another beautiful part of Wellstown’s landscape. Almost every home had lawns that were well kept. Some lawns were so amazingly beautiful that they could have been published in the best-selling lawn and gardening magazine available during this time. The people of the community spent most of their time when they weren’t working in their lawns—especially the men. It was peaceful to see men who had worked long hard hours at their day jobs somehow still have the energy to work their lawns and help others work in theirs. I learned a lot of things by being around these great men almost every day of my life. But the very most important thing I learned was how to take care of family, friends, and those who are without.
As much as I learned from being around these giants of the community, they learned from the very best, my grandmother, Lucille Edwards, Grandma Lu. She was the centerpiece, not only to these men but to the entire community. The way people treated her, I thought she was an earthly angel.
One of the most compassionate relationships I have ever been witness to was the one between my grandmother Lu and my father. If you didn’t know any better, you would think they were blood-related mother and son. They were not. But the way they loved and treated each other, it’s hard believing my father was her son-in-law’s son. He would walk to her house every day he was home from work to make sure she was okay and to enjoy a plate of her special seasoned food.
Lu’s Kitchen
It still amazes me how a one-speaker Panasonic AM/FM cassette tape player radio could produce sounds loud enough to be heard over the entire house.
Sitting on the kitchen floor, covered with every ingredient used to prepare many meals, is the one-speaker radio blasting the sounds of deep Southern gospel music, known to most African Americans as “church music.”
Everyone living under her roof knew what it meant when she was in her kitchen and her “church music” was screaming loud enough to burst eardrums. “Get up, wash yah faze, brush yah teeth, feed yah faze, and get ready fah church,” she would say to us. “Yah woorked all week and partied all weekend. God gon get today, yea,” she continued.
My grandmother, Lucille Edwards, known to everyone as Lu, was truly an earth’s angel. Her heart was pure and her smile was so reassuring. She was the glue to many broken families, putting them back together and keeping them connected at the broken pieces. Every memory I have of my early years, I got from my grandmother. Whether it is with her or in a story she told, all of my memories are her stories.
Her kitchen was the pillar of peace she turned to for comfort and motherhood. It was her zone. She controlled her kitchen. It was her domain. It was her place to rule, after a long day of being controlled by the cooking, the cleaning, babysitting, and disrespectful perverted sexual harassment she received from her boss. Leaving the house of her rich white boss and returning to her little three-bedroom, one-bath, Farmer’s House Association (FHA) brick home sitting on a very small hill was like leaving the pits of hell and entering into the gates of heaven.
She would enter into the house and head straight to her bedroom down the hall, disposing of all paper trash she might have collected while cleaning at work in the trash can in the corner of the bedroom. Piece by piece, she removed her work uniform and placed it on the back of her chair. When she exited her bedroom, you didn’t see Mr. Lucille draped all in white from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet. You saw this very short, very dark-complexioned lady dressed in an old dress, hair pulled back into a very short pony tail, with an apron that appeared to be in its last days, heading to the kitchen.
Lu’s kitchen prepared and served foods that could satisfy both your mental and physical hunger. There were many nights I stumbled through the doorway, drunk from all-night partying, expecting to look in the oven for the plate she would leave wrapped up for me, but instead, I received the plate she had waiting for me in the fridge. Those were the nights she fed me from her garden of knowledge. She would fill me up with the words she knew my life needed; then, she would remove the plate from the fridge and warm it up for me to eat.
The walls surrounding the early part of my life are the wood-designed paneled walls of Lu’s kitchen.
Two
On her doorstep lay a welcome rug
that means just that—
Welcome!
home to loving arms and
a tear-drying charm,
like preserved plums and
hand-picked fresh pecans;
come on in, my son, and have a
seat;
while I go into the kitchen
to fix you a nice plate of good
home cooking to eat;
man, it was just something
special about sitting at the
kitchen table at
Lu’s house…
Had I not known the actual facts of my birth, I would have gone through life believing I was born at Rte 2 box 10, to my mother, Lucille Edwards. For as far back as my mind will go, Rte 2 box 10 was home to me. After I was born, my grandmother took me to her home and raised me as if I were her very own child. Later in life, my mother explained my grandmother’s reason for raising me. Since she never conceived a son, she embraced the moment to raise me. And raise me was exactly what she did. Lu had ways then that are still very present in my life today. She didn’t believe in whipping children with belts, switches, or anything you could get your hands on. In those days, it was legal to abuse children in the form of discipline. But Lu’s way of whipping didn’t leave your body with broken skin or bruises. Lu had a way to whip you with words that felt worse than being physically abused.
If she had a temper, I never saw it cause her to flare up or act aggressively toward anyone. She was always in high spirits. She was the backbone to my generation, the generation before me, and the few future kids she was blessed to see born before Heaven called her Home.
The oldest of ten siblings—eight girls and two boys—she became a mother at a very young age. After her parents migrated from the swamps of Alexandria, Louisiana, to Wellstown, she had to take on the responsibility of raising her younger siblings while her parents worked sunup to sundown trying to get the house suitable to live in and the fields prepared to grow food.
She would tell me about their journey from Alexandria to Lumberton. How she, her parents, and four very young siblings traveled across the Southern swamps and back trails, on the back of her father’s trailer wagon, in the smothering heat. During the daylight hours, the sun would drain their bodies dry of fluids, and during the night, the blood was drained from their bodies by the bugs and mosquitoes that were sometimes the size of a house fly.
“Dark Chil’, saaaay Dark Chil’, commine. Say, Imma penny short, let me hold sumthin,” she would ask me. “De wurse feeling is waaking up brooke and hungry,” she continued. She would always pull down on me to make sure I had at least one penny in my pocket. “It may not bee much but, ah man withah penny can go a lot fuuurther than ah maan that don’t,” she would say to me as she was putting a folded dollar bill in my left pocket. Since I was right-handed, she would put the money in my left pocket so I wouldn’t be so quick to grab it, was her answer when I asked why she did it that way.
She groomed me to be the man of the house. We spent a lot of time together. We created a friendship you wouldn’t find in most grandparents’/children’s relationships. Loyalty over love was our motto. “Lu, where you get the name Dark Chil’ from?” I asked her many, many years later. “Baaabe, outta all my grandcherry, you dah only one I nevvver worry about. You have alwaaays traveleed yo own way, and y’all travel in dah dark,” she said with a little chuckle and grin. She went on to tell me how I would sleep through the rays of the sun and be up all night walking in the moonlight.
It never really crossed my mind when I was growing up that she was the only person who called me Dark Chil’. Most of the time, it was when we were at home alone or in a space where there were very few people. That will be an answer I’ll have to receive in a different life. Blessfully, in 2007, Lu spoke her final words and found rest in the comforting arms of the spirit Peace.
Life was so much easier and more peaceful when I was coming up in Wellstown. Everything appeared to be so simple. But, as with everything that exists on this earth, there is no peace without war.
