As a reminder from my earlier blogs, my family sharecropped on H’s farm in Lincoln County, Mississippi for 5 years. We were neighbors to Lamar Smith who was gunned down on the Lincoln County courtyard in Brookhaven, Mississippi August 13, 1955. The gunman was never prosecuted. It was very easy for a White person to kill a Black and escape prosecution. One reason is because the makeup of the jury.

During the latter years of the 1950’s the number of small cotton farmers in Southern Mississippi diminished because of mechanized farming in the Northern Mississippi delta. Without cotton crops there were no need for sharecroppers. Because of the lack of farm work, my stepfather hired out as a woodcutter to a small pulp woodcutter company.

H started using me and my siblings to do small jobs on the farm. I was fifteen years old. I went on one fishing trip with H and his friend where they used a contraption to shock bottom feeding fish to the top of the water and scooped them up with a net. On another occasion, a friend and I went fishing with H and his friend on the Mississippi River. He rented two boats and one motor. My friend and I were told to hold on to the side of their motorized boat as they took us across to the Louisiana side of the Mississippi River. We did not have life jackets.

H, the land owner, was short in stature, slightly bald headed, with a pot belly. He wore a builded up shoe to support his shorter leg.

My twin sisters were three and a half years older than me. They were in their senior year of high school. One day while helping H on the farm, he said with out a warning, ” Set your sister up for me to have ____ with her and if you tell anybody, I will kill you.“

Overcomer by Hope, the confident expectation of something good to happen.