In summary of my last seven blogs, I grew up in Southern Mississippi, Lincoln County, in a community called Caseyville about fifteen miles West of the county seat, Brookhaven. My mother being a single parent, could not properly raise me early, so I was raised in part by my father and mother’s family members until I was around ten years old.

When I was twelve years old, we moved to the HC farm about five miles west of Caseyville. There we sharecropped for five years. We were a family of thirteen members consisting of my mother, stepfather, ten children and my grandmother.

In addition to the the HC farm, there were three other White farm or land owners in the area. None of them had sharecroppers. Most of their farmland was near the Homochitto River. Farmers TW and JP were relatives, uncle and nephew. They provided milk from their herd of cattle and other provisions for us year round, especially during the winters months. Mr. JP had a small store where we could get extras on credit. Mr. TW was an older man, who taught me how to drive his truck and trusted me to drive him to pick up supplies for his home and farm. He allowed me to cut pulp wood on his farm for a percentage of the sale. His sister often made cookies to share with us.

Unlike Mr. HC, our sharecropper landlord, the TW and JP families were kind hearted, friendly, Christlike who seemed to not allow racial segregation to bother them. In other words they lived in the system because they had no choice but did not allow the system to control how they interacted personally with African Americans.

Overcomer by hope, the confident expectation of something good.