Chapter One
Eureka, Mississippi
When I finally slither out mewling, I’ve already given Mama
hard labor, because she’s been cussing and screaming seventeen
hours. Then there’s a calm until she sees me. Then she starts
howling worse. And even though I come by the customary
channel, and she feels me struggling out for sure, and we’re
tied by an umbilical, still she swears I’m not her child and
she’s not my mother, and what in God’s name is going to become
of us? On account of my crazy, scary looks, because I just
don’t present to the eye like a black baby should.
Word spreads round the homestead. Folks gather in huddles,
whispering about the strange deliverance. Some say fetch the
doctor, and some say the veterinarian’s cheaper, but in the
end my uncle Nat rouses the Reverend Eugene Spinks for some
theology because this baby ain’t so much a medical issue as a
rude package of life delivered in error to the wrong address,
an ugly curse or strange blessing-a secret code written in
skin. Besides, doctor is white and charges travel and labor,
while the reverend is black and free and always comes willing
and wordy whether he’s needed or not, with Christ’s answer for
anything. After he inspects me all round, top and tail, and
lets me suck on his finger, Reverend Spinks confers with my
mama. He keeps his questions brisk, blunt, and worldly. He
leaves no mattress unturned, he asks plenty personal, and he
doesn’t spare her modesty. Then he hears enough and he turns
on his heels.
“Healthy, normal boy,” he booms, bounding down the sprung
porch steps beaming. “Eight pounds odd. Sound specimen. Praise
the Lord.”
“How about his looks?” folks ask.
“Happens. As we sow, so shall we reap”-the Reverend
smiles-“and Salmon begat Booz of Rachab; and Booz begat Obed
of Ruth; and Obed begat Jesse. This child comes to answer some
purpose. Almighty always got his reasons.”
“What’s this child come to show us?”
“Can’t speak for the Lord exactly,” concedes the Reverend
Spinks. “But never forget He’s got himself an Almighty sense
of humor.”
Eureka, Mississippi, where I got raised, is God’s Own Place to
grow cotton and stubborn, hardy trees. Clement Creek cradles
the tallest cedars in the state. The nearby town of Briar
prides itself as the pine capital of the South.
The folk are knotty and resinous too. They sink deep roots.
They can handle heat, dust, and drought. Needles fare better
than leaves.
Nowadays there’s a Eureka community website. The History page
says Eureka has no available history. The Community
Information page announces The community has no information to
share. The Links page has no links. The Contact Us page gives
a box number in Hannibal, Missouri. The Welcome link leads
nowhere.
That’s Eureka folk. They keep things buttoned up, close to
their chests. They can handle progress if it doesn’t change
things. They welcome any strangers who belong. If you come
asking questions, they’ll tell as much as they need you to
know.
Highway 28 crosses the tracks. To the north are Clement Street
and Front Street. They started to build Franklin Boulevard,
but it ran out of tarmac and self-belief after thirty yards.
To the south is South Clement Street and Back Street. They got
most things most people need-a grocery store, three churches
(black Baptist, white Baptist, and
never-mind-your-color-pass-the-snakes), two diners, a gas
station, a sheriff. And if you find yourself in need of a
newspaper, tractor tire, haircut, high school, or hospital,
you can drive to nearby Briar in less than twenty minutes.
You can see the heat shimmer off the tarmac, hear the rattle
of teal, the whining blades at the sawmill, and a
bad-transmission Studebaker pickup. You can smell pine resin,
sawdust, and hog pens. But the blue sky and cotton horizon
look hazy-clear.
Of course they got plenty history-far more than they care to
remember or use. Most of it centers round cattle, cotton, and
cars. We had some levitations too. Maybe we lie on some fault
line of gravity, because we got problems keeping things tidy
on the horizon, splitting the ground from the sky. Things
sometimes fall upward, and things come down that got no
business being up to start. You’ll likely think it sounds
fanciful. Take it or leave it. You got to experience it
firsthand.
But it’s the small personal events that stick in the mind.
Like the time Lou Carey shoots his Chevy Apache 427 CU
automatic outside the Magnolia Diner, once through each
headlight, twice through the radiator, and three times through
the windshield, and then leaves the corpse to rust and rot by
the curbside as a public warning to bad-attitude trucks, which
sounds a mean and cranky thing to do, but Eureka folk always
got sound reasons, and that’s the trouble with history,
serving it up cold and stale on the plate, when it needs to be
savored fresh and hot.
One month in ’57, farmers found their cows gutted or headless
in the morning. There’d been buzzing sounds and neon flashes
in the night sky. They were awful dazzling lights, of color
folks never seen before. Some blamed aliens and some blamed
the military. And it was God’s own task to recover the loss
from the Yankee insurers, who sent down an Italian
investigator with an attaché case, homburg hat, horn-rimmed
glasses, and a stammer to try get to the bottom of it. But
something spooked him into leaving early, after only seven
twitchy hours.
There was Elliot Holly, a black kid out of Detroit, who came
to stay with kin in Eureka in the summer of ’59, but got his
neck broke for making repeated personal suggestions to a white
girl serving in the grocery store, not knowing the difference
between city and small-town manners, black and white.
And it’s hard to look at any of the telephone poles down
Highway 28 without wondering who’s dangled there, besides that
boozed-up kid out of Vicksburg who got tossed out of his V-8
Mustang convertible (cherry red, auto, discs, and power hood
with pony trim) onto the telephone wires when he drove himself
straight into the post of the EUREKA WELCOMES CAREFUL DRIVERS
sign at eighty miles an hour.
They got themselves famous sons too-Red McKee, who played
tight end for the Dolphins, season ’61 through to ’63, and
Larry Whitters, who played session music in Nashville, backing
Patsy Cline, Hank Williams, and sundry other immortals from
the Hall of Fame.
And they never forget their famous daughter, Angelina Clement,
who just happened to be a close, personal childhood friend of
mine.
(Continues…)
Harcourt Trade Publishers
Copyright © 2005
Christopher Wilson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-1510-1123-0
Excerpted from Cotton
by Christopher Wilson
Copyright © 2005
by Christopher Wilson .
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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