(Photo: 1955 - Randy in cowboy hat, Papa Bonnell, Ricky, Ronda)
by Randy Reynolds
I'm eight years old, traipsing on a windless 1957 afternoon behind my grandfather as he forces a manual plow through the hard-packed ground. There is no mule and no motor, only his own muscle and willpower to propel the primitive plow through the field at the corner of Hancock Avenue and Wildwood Drive in Gainesville, Georgia. I want to be like Papa. I want to do everything he does. "Papa, slow down," I whine. "Let me do it." He ignores me and I feel my sense of injustice rising.
Although he pushes the very earth before him and I have only myself and my pique to carry, his long, loping hardscrabble-farmer stride carries him so far ahead of me that I know he can't hear me anymore so I demonstrate my feelings by throwing myself to the ground. Rolling over and over, disturbing several of his newly-plowed rows, I get the cool red soil all over me, I lick my lips and taste it. Not bad.*
I lie face upward, not sure if the cottony clouds in a bright blue sky are moving or if the earth is. Now I'm dizzy as well as angry, waiting for Papa to come back down the row and deal with me. If he'll only stop to listen, I can tell him that I want to plow, too; that I want to be like him. I think he'll be so honored that he'll turn the plow over to me and stand back to proudly watch me finish plowing his side yard and he'll go inside to brag on me to Mama Maude and, later in the week when my daddy returns to get me, Papa might tell him about it and Daddy might be proud of me, too. That feeling is what I live for, but it's hard to come by for a little boy who happens to be the oldest child in a large and growing family, and therefore the one who gets the least attention.
I fear that I won't be the man my papa is because I've heard him say that he started plowing when he was eight years old, the age I am this day, and nobody lets me do ANYTHING yet. Papa began with one mule and a plow stock as high as his shoulders. His daddy told him to keep plowing till twilight. Papa didn't know what 'twilight' was, exactly, having never heard the word before, so he plowed till it was good and dark, just to make sure he wouldn't get a beating for quitting too soon. **That night his daddy took the plow reins and whipped him for working the mule too hard and sent him to bed without supper. Deep in the night, his mama snuck over to the bed he shared with several younger siblings and gobbed lard onto the back of his shirt to loosen it from his bloodied flesh.
A half-century later, Papa Bonnell tells this story ironically. "Hell, I can't blame the old man for taking care of his mules better than his young'uns. He could always have more kids, but a good mule was hard to come by when cotton was five cents a pound."
I crawl over to the row that Papa's on and lie there watching him come toward me, pushing the manual plow, pulling it back, pushing again, pulling it back. He pretends he's going to plow right through me, and I roll to safety and sit up, licking more dirt from my lips, still liking it, feeling I'm a part of it somehow. Maybe that's what Papa feels. Maybe that's why he comes home from a hard day as a loom-fixer at the cotton mill and plows till twilight. All he says to me that day is, "Get up from there, you little skeester!" And he keeps going, herky-jerky, straight down the row, no time for foolishness.
Although he pushes the very earth before him and I have only myself and my pique to carry, his long, loping hardscrabble-farmer stride carries him so far ahead of me that I know he can't hear me anymore so I demonstrate my feelings by throwing myself to the ground. Rolling over and over, disturbing several of his newly-plowed rows, I get the cool red soil all over me, I lick my lips and taste it. Not bad.*
I lie face upward, not sure if the cottony clouds in a bright blue sky are moving or if the earth is. Now I'm dizzy as well as angry, waiting for Papa to come back down the row and deal with me. If he'll only stop to listen, I can tell him that I want to plow, too; that I want to be like him. I think he'll be so honored that he'll turn the plow over to me and stand back to proudly watch me finish plowing his side yard and he'll go inside to brag on me to Mama Maude and, later in the week when my daddy returns to get me, Papa might tell him about it and Daddy might be proud of me, too. That feeling is what I live for, but it's hard to come by for a little boy who happens to be the oldest child in a large and growing family, and therefore the one who gets the least attention.
I fear that I won't be the man my papa is because I've heard him say that he started plowing when he was eight years old, the age I am this day, and nobody lets me do ANYTHING yet. Papa began with one mule and a plow stock as high as his shoulders. His daddy told him to keep plowing till twilight. Papa didn't know what 'twilight' was, exactly, having never heard the word before, so he plowed till it was good and dark, just to make sure he wouldn't get a beating for quitting too soon. **That night his daddy took the plow reins and whipped him for working the mule too hard and sent him to bed without supper. Deep in the night, his mama snuck over to the bed he shared with several younger siblings and gobbed lard onto the back of his shirt to loosen it from his bloodied flesh.
A half-century later, Papa Bonnell tells this story ironically. "Hell, I can't blame the old man for taking care of his mules better than his young'uns. He could always have more kids, but a good mule was hard to come by when cotton was five cents a pound."
I crawl over to the row that Papa's on and lie there watching him come toward me, pushing the manual plow, pulling it back, pushing again, pulling it back. He pretends he's going to plow right through me, and I roll to safety and sit up, licking more dirt from my lips, still liking it, feeling I'm a part of it somehow. Maybe that's what Papa feels. Maybe that's why he comes home from a hard day as a loom-fixer at the cotton mill and plows till twilight. All he says to me that day is, "Get up from there, you little skeester!" And he keeps going, herky-jerky, straight down the row, no time for foolishness.
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CHILD-BEATERS
**After losing slavery, the source of their affluence, my branch of the family fell into a poverty that--if not for a little taste of white privilege now and then--was almost as severe as that of their former slaves. Generation after generation of my forebears were extremely rough on their children. It seemed as if the punishment these fathers received as children became the pattern for how they treated their own children.
I don't know if surviving slaves meted out the same level of abuse that they had received, but I know the former masters and their descendants did.
I've often wondered if this was "inherited trauma" --parents' and grandparents' trauma affecting the DNA of their offspring?
Or was it the "spare the rod, spoil the child" philosophy that I've heard expounded from hundreds of pulpits in my life. Is that Biblical imperative the reason one of my ancestors beat his children with a harness, and a generation later, one of his sons tied up his own son--tied him to a tree in the forest--and beat him unconscious and left him there all day to be found by his mother and brother and cut down that evening?
Was it inherited trauma or the spare the rod, spoil the child philosophy that caused each succeeding generation to whip their children mercilessly, oftentimes in public, with belt or tree limb or whatever was handy?
Or was it a combination of both?
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CLAY-EATERS
*I have it on reliable authority that as a very small child, I used to eat dirt frequently. In fact, the only anecdote I have about my great-grandfather Bill Donovan (my mother's maternal gandfather) concerns the time he caught me , a three-year-old standing beside a flower pot that was in disarray. My lips were smeared with dirt and I had both hands filled with soil from the flowerpot. Grandpa Donovan said, "Boy, what are you doing?" As legend has it, I quickly put my hands behind my back, flashed him my most charming dirty smile, and said, "Hi, Pop!"
His daughter (my grandmother Minnie Donovan Appling) told me the story often and always ended it with, "Daddy never did get over that!" (Which is a southern expression meaning something was so funny it could never be forgotten.)
Obviously, I was still eating dirt when I was eight, trying to get my Papa Bonnell's attention while he plowed his vacant lot, but I don't remember eating any since then.
-Clay was consumed by African-Americans and poor whites in the South. Anthropologists have noted the practice of eating clay and other kinds of soil among African cultures, comparing its taste to the smell of fresh rain and favoring certain clays over others.
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