User:Justineokari/sandbox

== Things are Better Now! ==

As I walked down the dirt road, two things were on my mind, a good evening shower and a decent meal. That’s the feeling that always clouds me whenever I have such a grueling day in the farm. Working in a cotton farm from the chilly early mornings with cold dew still biting your hands throughout the sun’s arch with just a few mealtime breaks is not a good justice to one’s body, especially to a girl of my age. Well who am I to say that, how much do I know about science and the human body, apart from what Mrs. Monique seems to repeat all through the week, “Matter is anything that occupies space and has mass. Matter is made… ”. Well 13 years is not long enough to have learnt a lot in life. That’s what I often convince myself with. But why does Joe keep bringing old artifacts and wants everyone to know that they belong to him and explain how his uncle or father participated in the Civil War or was a foreman in a large cotton plantation with a ginnery. Maybe it’s because he is white, that’s why he’s is always feared in our class, alongside his handful of white, long-pointy-nosed friends. Whites are intellectually superior to us. A lump develops in my throat as that thought passes through my mind.

Are Whites really better humans than Blacks? Is that the reason why my father, his brother and my mother were made to work in large farms harvesting cotton or planting corn amid whips and shouts from a cruel white foreman? Is there a justification to the pain of slavery the people of dark skin were subjected to; forced labor, poor nutrition that many were swept away by pellagra?

“Sherry!” my mother’s voice rang from the kitchen window and I was startled out of my reverie. My name is Cherry, Cherry Bensons, but I am usually called Sherry both at home and school. I was so deeply in thought that I didn’t realize I had made the last curve towards our wooden gate that opens into a low grass lawn compound with our wooden, tin roofed home generally at the center. The house was built about a decade ago with the help of a Protestant missionary from the East coast, I was told. “Hurry up, move your skinny legs quickly, you are not on a horseback”, she reprimanded. The kitchen was at one end of the three-roomed house and its window gave her a direct view of the front gate. She should have been a singer with such a voice, I thought as I scampered the remaining distance to the front-door steps. A soloist would be perfect for her. One of the church missionaries had tried to include her in a travelling choir of the church throughout Mississippi. “It could have been great fun if things weren’t the way they were”, she had told me one day while we were washing. I had seen a look in her eyes, the same look I saw when we were in our head teacher’s office when she had been summoned to case after I fought with a white boy who kept calling me names and saying I belong in the farms not in class. The look of despair mixed with burning agony and a longing for better future.

Maybe that’s the agony that is in every black woman driving them to the streets championing for equal treatment as all American citizens, to be given the right to vote in the leaders they want and access formal education. I dropped the luggage beside the kitchen table and unpacked the utensils we had used to carry our lunch in. They needed to be clean for dinner. “Clean the dishes take a shower and have a change of clothes then come help me with the cooking. We are having a fish stew tonight”, she quickly instructed me and went about with the house chores. Fish always excites especially when well cooked. My mother is the best cook I have ever met. I hope I’ll be like her one day. My aunt who had visited one summer almost made me hate fish. There were a lot of scales as she hadn’t skinned it and the sight of the fish head was horrible. I’ve never eaten a fish head ever since. I went hurriedly went about clearing this and doing that. My brother Tom, who is ten, was playing outside with our four year old sister.

The dinner table was bursting with excitement as we devoured the sumptuous meal. For a nuclear family of four, one fish with enough stew alongside corn meal was enough to make for a decent dinner. “Mum, I want to go to a new school when we open”, Tom blurted out the words and we all froze in mid-bite. At least, Margaret, who was least aware of the implications of the statement, kept munching for a while. “But why?” mom finally broke the silence, “St. Peters fits you just fine”. “When I took position one in our exam test, our class teacher told Evans to ensure that I was put back in my rightful place”, Tom intercepted. Evans was the son of a renowned white settler who owned large tracks of land, probably the largest in Mississippi Delta and was thus given an undeserving respect. It seemed to everyone that position one in class was his reserve and for my brother, a black boy from a single parent household, beating him for the first time seemed conspicuously odd. The teacher may have spoken out his thoughts unknowingly but it will be engraved in my brother’s mind for his entire lifetime.

“Don’t worry a lot, things are better now!” my mother said after a long pose. I quickly glanced into his eyes and saw that same look of raging agony and I knew what was going on in her mind. Things are better now! Is living in a cottage, without a father figure better? What is better about working in a rented farm a mile away from home? What do stupid white kids know about growing up seeing only your mother struggling to make ends meet and keep you in school like the rest of the kids? How about the uncertainty of not knowing when your father will finally come back home? Things are better now! Really? My stomach cringed and a common lump formed in my throat, tears welled in my eyes and I immediately lost my appetite. Life was never fair for us.

“Kids, let’s go to sleep now. We’ll talk about that when the right time comes”. Anytime was the right time, even then, but there was nothing to talk about. The reality was harsh and bitter but it was wise to tough it out. Maybe that’s the reason I fight a lot in school. As I rummaged through my bedding, I couldn’t help thinking of dad. How hardworking he was and showed deep love for us, his family. He was so devoted to keeping us happy and safe. My father was the one who coined the name Sherry on me saying I was as sweet as the Spanish wine.

My father has been gone for eight years, at least I saw him leave, with a brown leather bag. He was going to the industrialized cities up north to look for an employment after we had been stripped of our land possession. They called it disenfranchisement, I didn’t know then. I was only told that the government has passed a new law and we could not be entitled land. That America was undergoing a great economic recession. But aren’t we too Americans? I hadn’t managed to ask that question. My dad would walk for miles before boarding a train towards the north where civilization was rife. He was going to probably work on one of the many car assembly industries as a mechanic and send money to support his family. I was five then and Tom was only two.

At least that was true for the few years that followed as mum received letters that came through a family friend who was also working up north. Several black Americans had migrated from our region following the massive loss of land and their replacement by white settlers who came to create mega farms. During Christmas we would get new clothes but dad would not come for reasons I didn’t understand. Mom had told me he was saving for us to one day go to where he was, Washington. The thought of living in a city with tall buildings and cars was exhilarating. However, things suddenly took a strange turn. The regular letters stopped coming and few months on, the family that used to be friendly to us stopped visiting. The usually jovial mom soon adopted a somber mood, resigned to fate. It soon became clear that handouts from up north had been involved in some sort of a train accident and wouldn’t reach us. It was now upon mum to fend for the family. The next one year was a difficult one. I could always see how mum strained to keep things on the rails but managing only barely.

With no farm to cultivate, there was no viable source of livelihood to us. We were growing up and needed to stay in school. Tom was also joining. But mom still had hope in her. A strong woman she is. Soon we started meeting Aaron just outside our gate on our way home from school. We would sometimes find him fixing a door knob or a broken chair. He was an averagely built black man but had a slightly different pronunciation of some English words. Mom told us he was a friend of one of the white settlers.

I didn’t quite like him but he started becoming our regular visitor and would even stay for dinner. Through his well-connected channels, mum finally managed to secure a rented land on which we could cultivate both food and cash crops. Life started to slowly lighten up. Before we knew it, baby Margaret was born and we all had mixed excitements. Aaron’s connections too saw us moving to a mission School, St. Peters as there were better academic standards than the one we used to attend.

While in the years that followed, nothing much surprising happened, I would keep asking myself if Margaret would also have Bensons as her last name like we did. Well, the idea of having Aaron in our home was always disturbing. At least it hasn’t happened yet but the fact that his coming into our lives made things a little hopeful is clear to me.

As I slowly drifted to sleep, the events at the dinner table came back to me. I knew the chances of my brother’s transfer to a different school were as bleak as the chance of ever seeing my dad. The hope of seeing a better future is what has been keeping me going and my mother and probably every black woman and man in the South region of America. The land with a long history, they call it; the region that keeps lagging behind in revolution and civilization. But things are better now!

Work Cited
Hurt, R D. African American Life in the Rural South, 1900-1950. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011. Print. Long, Worth W, Martis D. Ramage, and Kathryn Stephens. An Oral History of Tupelo and Lee County, Mississippi. , 2001. Print. MacAdam, Doug. Freedom Summer. New York [u.a.: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990. Print. McCord, Charline R, Judy H. Tucker, and Wyatt Waters. Christmas Memories from Mississippi. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. Print. Walton, Anthony. Mississippi: An American Journey. New York: Knopf, 1996. Print.