Prison Narratives: ‘The Pet,’ ‘Cotton Picking’ and more by Vincent Young

VOX Press‘ book, Prison Narratives, features personal stories written by prisoners at Parchman Farm. Here are three from the book by Vincent Young. The book can be bought here.

Vincent Young was raised on a farm in New Albany, Mississippi. His father was an airplane mechanic and sometimes bare knuckles fighter. He is serving a life sentence for armed robbery and aggravated assault.

I. The Pet

New Albany, Mississippi
Out in the country – 1968

I’m six years old. My sister and I are playing outside, chasing each other around and through the pine trees by our home. Our mother is on the porch shelling peas and watching us play. “Truck” – our pet hog – suddenly appears. We call her “Truck” because she’s so long.

Truck joins in our play by chasing us around and through the pine trees. She was so long that we’d take turns riding around on her back. Mother called out, “You kids might be in trouble when your daddy comes home!” That’s because he’d always tell us to let Truck out of her pen before we began to play. Otherwise, she would be so excited to join us that she’d break out of the pen and chase us around.

We forgot to let her out that morning, and sure enough she broke out. My sister and mother and I went to fix it, but first we had to round up the other hogs and return them to the pen. We tried to fix the fence before daddy came home, but all we did was make it worse. When he did come home he surprised us all by not being angry. He did nothing but laugh, and we laughed too.

Daddy went to fix the fence, but first we had to count the hogs to know that none were missing.

They were all there safely inside the repaired fence when we were through, and the next day we did exactly what daddy told us. We let Truck out first, before our play began, and the fence was fine when we were done.

That day we went to pick berries, my sister, mother, and me. And Truck. She ate more berries than we could pick. Truck really loved her berries. Everyone else had the usual cats and dogs, but we had a pig who was part of the family. When Truck was little she stayed in the house, but we had to keep her outside when she got big. She was so big that when she did come into the house she’d always knock things over.

We had a lot of fun when it was time to give her a bath. It was easy when she was little. We’d just put her in a bucket. When she got big it was like washing a car. It seemed that every time we got her clean, she’d go and wallow in the mud! Then my sister and I would have to wash her again! It took two baths to keep her clean for the day.

A few months later Truck died. She wouldn’t get up and come to me when I went to feed her one morning. Even when I went into the pen she still wouldn’t get up. I ran to Daddy to tell him and he told me when we got there that Truck was dead. I cried so long I thought I’d never stop. I continued my weeping when Daddy gave Truck a funeral. He built a coffin for Truck which we placed in the grave that he’d dug himself. I was surprised when so many people came to Truck’s funeral, including all my uncles, aunts, cousins, and friends. Daddy said some words over her grave. It was a proper and moving ceremony.

My sister and I were sad for a while, until daddy brought us another pig. This one we named “Legs” because her legs were so long. My sister and I took turns feeding her from a bottle and taking her outside to go potty. All our fun started anew with Legs.

Daddy made Legs a special pen in the barn, which made more work to keep it clean for my sister and I. We didn’t mind, because we didn’t want Legs to go the way of Truck. She’d stay in our room some nights after she was house-broken, and Mommy didn’t minds as long as we kept her clean. Still, we never forgot Truck because she was our first pet.

I still wonder to this day how we chose to have a pig for a pet instead of a dog. Daddy had plenty of dogs, mostly hunting dogs. Maybe pigs made a good pet for us because we could ride them when they got big and you can’t ride a dog like that.

II. Cotton Picking

The time I’d liked least as a 6-year-old was cotton picking time. That season came around about late September and October. My sister and I had to go out to the cotton field every morning with our mother. You may wonder why a 6-year-old is in a field every morning instead of school, but that was normal in 1968. My parents didn’t trust the school with kids as young as us, so we had to wait until we were nine. Until then we were homeschooled by our mother.

My mother would give us a pillow case to put our cotton in. The mornings would be cool and the cotton would be wet from the dew. My fingers would get wet and cool. They’d get so cold they would hurt, but I never told my mother. She called me her “little man”, and I was trying to be that little man for her.

My sister and I were the only kids out there working. Everyone else were adults, mostly women.

I always noticed how they were dressed, with big straw hats hanging on their back from a string around their necks. When the sun was low and the morning was cool, they’d put on their hats by 11 A.M., my mother too. We didn’t have hats on a string around our neck, but my sister always wore a scarf to cover her head from the sun.

I’d fill up my pillow case about ten times a day, with most of it coming from the other women. They’d reach into my sack when my mother wasn’t looking and fill it with some of their cotton.

My sister didn’t pick much cotton, mostly she’d lay on my mother’s long cotton sack and let her drag my sister down the rows.

I saw the women take off their shoes about noon when the dirt warmed up. My mother would give me a kiss every time I’d empty my pillow case into her sack, and I wanted my kisses from my mother because her kisses meant she loved me and I was doing good.

There was a lot of singing, from my mother mostly. She’d be asked to sing a church song, and she can really sing. Even the preachers in their churches would ask her to come sing, but she always told them no because she had two children to raise.

One day I saw a baby born in the field. The lady was putting some cotton in my pillow case and I noticed her feet getting wet, looking like she’d used the bathroom down her legs. Then she grabbed her stomach and started yelling. The other women close by came running and laid her down on her back, raising her dress and I could see everything. Between her legs was something coming out of her. I moved closer to get a better look and I saw a little head poking out. I don’t know who hollered louder, me or the woman, and I cut a trail to my mother for help. The way this woman was yelling told me that whatever was coming out of her must be bad! I reached at my mother and told her what I saw. She explained to me that the woman was having a baby.

The day after the birth, my mother caught me getting cotton from the other women and she called me by my whole name. That’s a sign I was in deep trouble. She made me work by her side for the rest of the day. I couldn’t run around the field getting cotton from the other women. I only got four kisses that day instead of ten. Once we got home she told me to go to the kitchen table and that meant I was going to receive a talking to about what I’d done. When I got there she got on me for taking cotton from the other women. She told me that those women gave me cotton because they thought we were poor after seeing my sister and I in the fields instead of in school.

My time to go to school was almost here, so it was a short year in the fields for me when I was around seven years old. I’d always wanted to go but now that my time was near I wasn’t so sure. My uncertainty arose when I’d heard some stories about it. I’d never seen a white kid my age.

We didn’t go to town to shop. The town came to us in the back of a truck called a rolling store. You name it and it was there, shoes, jeans, bread, milk, lumber, nails, power saws, dressers, car tires, bikes, meat, flour, and candy. So we had no need to go to town, and that’s why I’d never seen a white kid my age. I’d heard many stories about them, especially about their behavior. I lived in dread of turning nine years old because I loved the world I was in. Everyone was black and seemed to be friends. There were twenty-one houses around each other and no more than 1⁄2 mile apart. All I’ve seen was my race of people, including the driver of the rolling store. I’ve seen white men on T.V. Sometimes a white man would come into our area selling stuff, but they never stayed long because one of the men would tell them, “No one here is buying anything today.” They told him that every time, but he always returned the next month. I was thinking too far ahead of myself because I still had two more years of running in the fields and playing with Legs.

III. First First Encounter With Racism in 1969, in the Small Town of New Albany, Mississippi

I went to a sale barn with my daddy when I was seven years old. A sale barn is a place where you buy and sell livestock. My daddy and I went there to sell fifteen of our forty hogs. We were sitting in a small arena that held about 150 people. The animals were brought out as a showcase and a white man began calling out numbers so fast that I couldn’t keep up. All the white men sat on one side and the few black men there were on the other side. A black kid was bringing the animals in and out. My daddy always brought me things, but this was our first time out together. I’d gone hunting with him, but this was different, because I’d never been with him to a place outside of our world before.

This was a new experience for me. The first thing I noticed about the white men was that all of them were spitting black-looking stuff out of their mouths. The way they talked was strange, as well. The words that stuck in my mind were, “By God!” and “Nigger”. I knew about “By God!” but I didn’t know what “Nigger” meant. All I know was that a white man said to me, “By God, Nigger! What’re you looking at me for?!” I was looking at him because he had the biggest booger hanging out his nose that I’d ever seen and I looked at it in a trance with my mouth wide open. I could hear him, but I was speechless. The man turned away, mumbling something, and just then daddy gave me a dollar to buy myself a hamburger and a Coca-Cola.

I left the sale barn and walked 100 paces to the place they sold the food. I noticed white people looking at me there, and I thought that was because the bell rang on the door when I opened it. At the counter I asked the man for a hamburger and coke, but I had to ask him again because he didn’t seem to hear me even though I showed him the dollar bill. He said, “Boy, can’t you read?” When I said yes he grabbed my arm, took me outside, and told me to read the sign which said, Coloreds Served around Back. The white man gave me a crazy look and went back inside. A black man who was standing outside and saw this happen showed me the way around to the back. We had to go by all the horses, cows, hogs and goats to get to the back window which had a pen on each side of it. One pen held cows and the other held goats, and both of them were bad-smelling. Around those two pens were about 100 more, with half of them being filled with more animals.

When I got back to daddy, I told him what’d happened. He said he was sorry that he hadn’t explained to me about black and white people. I asked him, “What are coloreds and niggers?” He explained to me that the words had different meanings. Colors mean red, yellow, orange, green, and so on, but some dumb man had made the word colors include our skin color.

Daddy also told me about the word, nigger, saying that it’s a disgrace word, and a word made up to break the spirit of our race. He told me, “Never let anyone call you a nigger and get away with it.” He asked me who called me a nigger, and I showed him the man who did it. I watched Daddy give all his money and his truck keys to his friend before he told me to come with him. He led me over to that white man and told him to apologize to me for calling me a nigger. The man turned very red and said, “I didn’t know that was your boy, L.D.” See, L.D. is my daddy’s initials from when he used to box bare knuckles to skull on the weekends, which is boxing without gloves on. The white man apologized to me and gave me a dollar, so I went and bought my sister a burger and a coke too, and with the leftover change from both dollars I was able to buy Legs a burger too. Daddy asked, “Who’re the extra burgers for?” I told him, “for Mattie and Legs.” He said, “Legs eats better than any pig I’ve ever seen!”

That day changed the way I looked at the world, because now I knew the world looked differently at me. I did my best to explain what happened to Mattie, but I had a bad stutter which caused her to run to Mommy and Daddy. A few weeks later we all gathered around the kitchen table, and that’s when I learned that the white race called us “colored” or “nigger”. My mother and father told my sister Mattie and I that our blood-line comes from Africa, making us Africans. So no matter what anyone else says, I know I’m somebody. I’m not a nigger or a colored person. I’m an African-American born in the U.S.A. I’m a man with strong roots and love for his family.

We had a T.V. in our home. Mattie and I were only allowed to watch certain shows like I Love Lucy, The Rifleman and cartoons. We weren’t allowed to watch Tarzan because our parents felt it was too racist. Daddy felt that the show was saying that everything must be controlled by the white man, even the animals, and he didn’t want us to watch shows like that.