From the Beginning

Abstract

From the Beginning François Scarborough Clemmons (bio) When I was born, the Sanders-Scarborough clan had lived for several generations in the sprawling, blanched little town of Blackwater, Mississippi, just north of Meridian in the backwater region near the Okatibbee Reservoir and the Alabama border. If you weren't a cotton farmer or sharecropper, or a smithy who worked for white folks, there wasn't much else to do there. Some folks got along raising chickens and guinea [End Page 121] fowl, some did light farming but could not prosper. Each year they fell further in debt to the landowner, Ol' Man Sanders. Twice in our clan's memory the floods had come in late spring, and no one had been able to plant in time for a summer crop. The seed money was wasted. But most folks stayed on because they didn't have any place else to go. It seemed better to be around your own folks, to scratch out a living in the tired earth, than move to some strange place where folks called you "Mr." and "Mrs." and didn't know your nickname or your granddaddy's name, or how your uncle Jeb had lost one finger in the smithy on Mastuh Sanders's homestead, or even who to call for a county fair game of baseball. New folks wouldn't know nothin' at all about you. That was no way to live, so folks stayed on, hard as it was. To my great-grandmama Laura Mae Sanders Pinman, this is what seemed important and what made her call this place home. She was also tired. Laura Mae Sanders Pinman had raised thirteen children of her own and found herself once again imprisoned by the grandchildren and great-grandchildren she had to raise when their mamas couldn't do it. The children just kept coming. She would cook. She would clean. She would wash and pray. The more she did, the more it seemed there was to do. So she worked and didn't slow up for old memories to catch her. The Old Homestead on Mastuh Sanders's land had been falling apart for as long as she could remember. Every shutter was hanging down or gone. The paint she had helped put on when she was a young girl had never been refreshed. It was barely visible. If she could ever get the front door to close on the sagging porch it might help to keep the marsh rats from invading the kitchen on hot summer nights. She was always mindful not to leave food out where they could get it, and felt constant dread that those rats might crawl into the bedrooms of one of her grandchildren—her grans—and bite one of her darlings. When it rained, every bucket and pot in the house was used to catch the water. There were many causes for sadness in her life, but the way people tell it the greatest sadness of all was when her last husband, Noah Leon Pinman, got killed, ten years before the second flood. Noah Leon Pinman could work good and easy with his hands and had a quick smile and pretty teeth. He had been her third husband and had stayed around The Homestead the longest. Every day Laura Mae missed him and went on about her business. Otherwise she might start remembering again that day he was killed. My own mama, Inez Delois, would sometimes tell me and my brother the story later on, after we had moved up North, to give us an idea of how it was down South in the old days. The way she told it, everybody knew that Great-grandmama Laura Mae was Ol' Mastuh Sanders's woman. He came by to see her most every week. Noah Leon Pinman, Laura Mae's third husband, knew it too. Even though he had agreed to work the farm for Ol' Mastuh Sanders, he hadn't agreed to anything [End Page 122] else. Noah went on about his business farming and, with the help of the kids, year after year, got the planting and harvesting done. There was always some fence that needed...