I was born in 1961 in a little town called Bentonia, Mississippi. In this town, everybody knew everybody. My parents were young when they had me. Loving, kind, and caring parents. They believed in family values and supporting family. From the age of five to the age of eight, I would hardly see my parents, because they worked all the time. Nighttime and Sunday would mostly be the only times I would see them.
Mom and Dad worked from early in the morning until late in the evening. My dad had to be in the cottonfield, cotton gin, or sawmill all the time. My mom had to be at the white folks’ house to fix and have breakfast ready for them and their kids when they got up. I learned about these things later on in years. My grandma really raised me. She explained so many things to me, and showed me many pictures of black men and black women being brutally punished in ways un-describable because of the color of their skin.
Coming up, we (Negros) were not allowed to go through the front door of stores. We weren’t allowed to go to white folks’ cafés to eat with white folks or get close to them. That was something hard to understand, because we lived close to white folks.
My grandma kept white kids. We slept in the same bed. Ate at the same table and took baths together in the same foot tub. But in public we could not be together, nor could we say anything about eating and sleeping together.
The white folks loved my grandma, but they still hated us because of the color of our skin. Why?
Many times when I was a little boy I saw black men and black women get beaten because they said something they weren’t supposed to say to white folks. I witnessed two white men take a black woman in sex, and there was nothing done about it until her husband beat both men real, real, real bad. They whipped him with a bull-whip. I used to have nightmares about it for years.
Now I will describe the pictures my grandma showed me. Three Negros in a big black cast iron pot being boiled to death, their skin falling off their bodies, and white folks standing around laughing and celebrating. Then she showed me two different pictures of black women hung upside down with their stomachs cut open and their babies hanging out to see if they were boys or girls. Grandma said this is what white folks did when they didn’t want to wait to see which sex the baby was. She said if it was a girl, they would kill the baby but if it was a boy, they would keep it.
I remember the time my grandma took me to work with her. She told me to sit out back, peel potatoes and shell peas. I got hot and wanted some water to drink. So I went in the back door to the kitchen. This white woman came in the kitchen and noticed me. She screamed, “what is this N— Boy doing in my kitchen?” At that time I did not know what a n— was. I had heard it a lot, but no one explained it to me.
My grandma came in to see what was going on. The white lady said, “Mrs. Goldie, what is this boy doing in here? He is not supposed to be in here.” She got mad with my grandma and started yelling. I told her not to holler at my grandma like that. She called her husband home. When he got there and found out what had happened, he made my grandma beat me, not whop me, Beat Me. He also told my grandma that the N— Boy better not say anything to his wife again or he would have me hung from the biggest tree he could find.
When I was seven, the white folks killed one of my uncles because he was going with a white girl. They kept it a secret about my uncle being with her, but the baby she was carrying belonged to my uncle. They killed the baby and threw it on the doorstep of my uncle’s mama, with a note saying N— Trash.
My grandma was made many times to have sex with white men. Sometimes they beat her because she refused to. My grandma’s master fell in love with her and they had a son, but kept it secret from his wife and everybody else. When he was twelve, they sent him up north to stay with my grandma’s sister. My uncle never denied his family, especially me. He died nine years ago. I still miss him. He was and still is my favorite uncle. He explained and taught me a lot about racism—the hatred white folks have in their hearts against us, and the undefiled ignorance. So why are we truly hated because of the color of our skin? Slavery, racism, and hatred are still going on.
