A Motherless Child

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Chapter I

PROLOGUE

BLUES ALLEY

It began on April 6, 1942 in Clarksdale, Mississippi a/k/a Blues Alley located seventy-two miles southwest of Memphis, Tennessee and forty-five miles east of the Mississippi River in a place called the Delta. It is the original birthplace and World Capitol of the Blues, where the intersection of Highway sixty-one and forty-nine meet. There exists an established folklore Legend that Robert Johnson¹ made his eternal deal with the devil on this corner. In exchange for his soul he would become a famous Blues artist.

Among the famous people to call Clarksdale home are, gospel-soul singer Sam Cooke, McKinley Morganfield a/k/a/ Muddy Waters, Hollywood film producer and entrepreneur Larry A. Thompson, writer Tennessee Williams, musician Ike Turner, legendary blues artist John Lee Hooker and today it is the site of actor Morgan Freeman’s ‘Ground Zero’ Blues Club.

On my official birth certificate, Shelley Dal Fisher is named as my Father, age twenty-three, Ann Fisher, a twenty-two year-old ‘housewife’ assisted by a mid-wife named Mary Jamison. The handyman and the housewife were Negros who lived in a three-room shotgun house located on McKinley Street.

Mother lived just two months after my birth and died from untreated complications of childbirth. A visit from a general practitioner and a series of anti-biotics most likely would have saved her life. But life was hard and doctors were called only as a last resort usually when it was too late to treat the sick and he was required only to sign the death certificate.

Mother had breast-fed me up until the final two months of her life, so I was susceptible to respiratory illness from the start. I weighed just four pounds, nine ounces at birth, two months prematurely and with weak lungs. Ironically, it seems that all that crying that I did in the first six months outside the womb most likely made them stronger.

But I was not my mother’s first born. She gave birth to a son named Robert Lee Simpson, one and a half years before I was born and he was in the custody of her parents in a small town called Mound Bayou, not very far from Clarksdale. We would meet only three times before he died tragically from a heroin overdose at the age of sixteen years in Maywood, Illinois.

In 1942, a child born out of wedlock without a doubt brought shame not just for the mother but also for her entire family. My mother’s parents were not about to raise two bastards, especially with one unhealthy. Neither were they about to allow my mother to continue to live in their home. They hastily arranged a right thing to do marriage before she started to show.

The marriage had taken place six months before I was born, officiated by my mother’s father a Baptist preacher. My maternal grandfather was a Creole from Louisiana named George O. Robinson, who had the reputation for being a strict disciplinarian who would not hesitate to use his hands or his belt on his family members.

I don’t remember much about my Mother’s mother except that she had hazel eyes; a large mole over her right eye and her name was Mariah. Excluding one faded black and white² photo of my mother the only pictures are in my mind of my mother’s family; she had two siblings, an older sister Atlene and a younger brother named Major.

Aunt Atlene didn’t have children of her own and I remember her coming to visit me in Crenshaw and calling me Baby Boy. Later we heard that she had some real challenges and spent several years in the Whitfield mental health facility. Her only brother Major Robinson would go on to pastor the Second Birth Missionary Baptist Church on the South side of Chicago.

Dad was drafted into the US Army just one month after my birth and after six weeks of basic training he was shipped off to fight in World War II. It would be a month after my mother was buried; he received the news from back in the States, that he was the father of A Motherless Child.

Dad had suffered from malaria as a teenager that left him with permanent kidney damage. How he passed the physical requirements for induction is questionable but it borders on immoral that he would have to leave his sick wife and a newborn child. Now he was crawling around in the mosquito-infested jungles somewhere in the Philippine Islands stricken with the disease again.

So it was decided that my paternal Grandmother would be the one to bear the burden of trying to save me. Her name was Icy Bell and she was married to a man named Silas Fisher. These two people would save my life and as soon as I began to talk I called them Mama and Granddaddy and they nicknamed me Sonny and sometimes called me Shelley Jr.

They had settled down in a sleepy little town called Crenshaw about thirty-two miles Northeast of Clarksdale in the Delta bottoms where the hills stopped and the flatlands began. The total population of Crenshaw in 1942 was roughly four hundred and fifty people a little more than half of which was people of color or coloreds. Anyone with one drop of African blood in their veins was deemed to be in this group including some Native American’s from the Choctaw tribe and Creoles.

The Illinois Central railroad track still runs through the center of Crenshaw but in 1942 it separated the races. The coloreds had to be back on the West side, their side of the tracks after sundown during the week unless they were working late on the other side. On Saturday afternoon until early evening they were allowed to sit in the balcony of the segregated movie theater across the tracks and dream of being somebody else for an hour or two.

There were a few stores on our side of the tracks that were owned and operated by black people. There was a barbershop, three of them sold nothing, one sold chewing gum and palm readings with the family living in the back.

Mr. Loon House was a half white man in his late fifties. All the members in his family were light skinned people with straight hair. They ran a clean, profitable, general store that sold quality food at fair prices and whenever Granddaddy could afford to buy sugar and coffee, which wasn’t often, he’d get it from Loon.

The story is that Silas had met Icy Bell Hemphill over in Starkville, Mississippi another small town in the hills close to the Alabama state line. She had been a young mother with two small boys, the eldest my father and Uncle Johnny who was three years younger, no husband and on hard times. Silas was more than just a few years older than Icy Bell and had adopted the young family, given them his last name and moved them to Crenshaw some sixty miles west where he had lived for some time.

Icy Bell could read and write and Silas could not so she was an asset. The world was changing and if a man couldn’t sign his name he needed a wife that could. It was not unusual to adopt the children of a woman when he moved her in with him and since they were eventually married in church, it was a blessed union.

But there were whispers that Granddaddy had a second family in Crenshaw with a light skinned woman with long black hair who was also the mother of his two biological children, a boy and a girl. I remember that all the members from both sides of my family had hazel eyes except Granddaddy. I didn’t learn that Silas Fisher and I were not related by blood until after he died. Later I would begin to question whether or not my father and uncle were from the same father. Genealogy was spread around like poverty.

The water fountains and restrooms in Crenshaw were clearly marked white and colored and strictly enforced. But somewhere between the boundaries of the law and the power of lust the races mixed, at least the white men and colored women with reputations did. Now and then a mulatto baby would be born to a colored woman and soon afterwards she would move up north where she and the child would less likely to be ostracized.

A Chinese family that operated the laundry-dry cleaning business and two Jewish families lived on the privileged side of town. Sam Lapidus owned the general mercantile store where he sold sewing materials and work clothing. It was also the drug store and his son was the pharmacist. Barney Siegel ran the hardware store and a gas station that also served as the bus depot and the train station.

The Mothershed’s grocery store sold the best meat in town for the cheapest prices. Mr. Hensley and his wife Miss Mary operated the United States Post Office. She spoke with hardly a trace of a southern accent and always smelled nice. Mama said it was her perfume from France.

Cotton was the main industry in Crenshaw and two families the Claytons and the Crenshaws for whom the town was named controlled it. It was the reason they owned the bank and the thousands of acres of land, which was worked by the Negros. The cottonseeds were planted in the spring chopped in summer and picked in the fall. In the summer when the children were out of school they chopped right alongside their parents and grandparents.

The workers stood on their feet nine of the ten-hour days with only two fifteen-minute breaks and a half hour for lunch depending on the weather. They pulled and pushed the dirt and s m a l l rocks around with the hoes that had to be sharpened at least twice a day. The overseer was usually a man from the church who drove the truck that picked up and delivered the workers to the field and was mainly responsible for the quota.

In the fall the sun would rise just after six o’clock in the morning and the pickers would begin to pull the soft wet cotton from the plants. At that time of year a thick gooey mud called gumbo stuck to the boots making it extremely difficult to put one foot in front of the other. It was cold in the morning and scorching hot in the afternoon so we worked hardest in the morning.

Every summer a couple of people would suffer a stroke in the fields and never fully recover. So a water boy carried a bucket filled with cold ice water to keep them from succumbing to heatstroke. Unless they brought his or her own drinking cup, everyone drank from the same tin can dipper. Many a day Granddaddy walked slowly home from town after working in the fields, his blue work shirt showing the dried salt stains from dehydration.

One great piece of advice I received from Granddaddy was the first time I went to pick cotton with him. After he had chose two cotton sacks, an eight-footer for me and a larger twelve-footer for himself he proceeded to pick three adjacent rows.

After he had carefully made his choice he looked down at me and said, Now Sonny, you gon’ pick yo’ hardest in the mo’ning, that way you don’t hafta work so hard in the evening time. I never forgot those pearls of wisdom not that I was thinking very much about the evening time in my morning years.

Old Meter Hymn Lining ³ is an African-American tradition that dates back to slavery. The art form incorporates African tonal sounds and rhythmic and percussive hand clapping and-or stomping. Sometimes in the afternoon as it was getting close to quitting time one of the better voices would sing ever so slowly, Oh I love the lord, he heard my cry. The rest of the voices would response in concert. I---love---the---Lord---he heard---my-----cry. Those who didn’t sing either talked with each other or got lost in their own thoughts until it was time to climb back on the back of the truck for the bumpy ride home.

Even though slavery had ended formally with the thirteenth amendment in December 1865 and the Fifteenth Amendment ratified on February 3, 1870, most black people were still subservient to the whites and were dependent on a relationship with the plantation owners for their economical existence. No longer called slaves now they were sharecroppers. The sharecroppers were provided with credit for seed, tools, living quarters and food. In return for the credit they worked the land and would receive an agreed share of the value of the crop, minus charges. It was unusual for the debt to be fully paid at the final tally. It was legal slavery.

Some tried to gain favor by bowing and grinning when they were having a conversation with a white person answering with Ya’sa or ‘N’om (yes sir and no ma’am). If you were black you never looked a white person in the eye when you spoke to them. Granddaddy was no different than the other ‘coloreds’ in keeping with the custom. It was called survival but I would hear him mutter som bitch under his breath afterwards.

I have seen strong black men reduce themselves to behaving with the character of an obedient dog at the simple command of a teenage white boy. This is why I strongly challenge social media glorifying the word Nigger under any circumstance whether as a quasi-endearment by trendy Entertainers using the word as a shoutout or a black woman berating the father of her children. My forefathers were called the N word and spit on as they were led to the gallows to be beaten and hanged. There are so many other words that exist in the English language that can be used to express our emotions without resorting to using one born out of hate.

The Fishers lived in a tiny, two room wooden house that sat on an acre of land. They had worked hard, saved and paid two thousand dollars cash for the property and could not have been more proud if it had been a ten-room mansion. Most of all they were proud of not being sharecroppers.

Silas Fisher was born on December 31, 1882, just seventeen years after slavery ended in Mississippi allowing Negro men to own land. He was an extremely dark skinned man who stood erect for a man of his years at around five feet, nine inches tall with a medium build.

Granddaddy was clever as a carpenter and because he owned the basic tools of the trade and was dependable he was the first to be offered carpentry work around town. In the winter months when there wasn’t much work in the fields he did odd jobs around town. Repairing one or two tar shingle roofs could mean the difference between a hard winter and a hard, cold winter.

Only a few homes in Crenshaw had electricity, gas or indoor plumbing. There were maybe a total of ten telephones in the entire community, all party lines. It was not uncommon to make an appointment at the post office for a call from relatives up North. They were classified as long distance calls and I remember going with Mama to receive such a call from her brother Frank who lived in Los Angeles. He had written a week earlier saying what day and time he’d be calling to report the medical condition of their older brother, Jim Hemphill.

Mama’s dream was to one day not to have to go out back to use the toilet, which was a seat with a hole in it. Most families took the time and effort to dig a hole in the ground about six feet deep and then they built the ‘outhouse’ on the top of the hole. The unavoidable stench was abated with lye. They couldn’t afford the luxury of toilet paper so the pages from an old catalogue or newspaper were the closest things to toilet paper.

There was no insulation from the strong north wind that blew through the cracks in the wall of the ‘out house’ and going to the toilet could be a chilling experience. If we had to relieve ourselves at night each of us had our individual ‘slop jar’, buckets made out of porcelain. Mama and I had white porcelain ones and Granddaddy had a distinctive, blue masculine one. Traditionally at night the ‘slop jar’ was placed at the foot of the bed to keep from knocking it over. So when if you heard the phrase that someone had kicked the bucket it meant the person has died and in a final attempt to cling to life, they had kicked the ‘slop jar’ over.

There was an icebox to prevent perishable foods from going bad. It was a vertical, rectangular box that required being kept filled with ice at the cost of about fifteen cents each time. The Iceman would stop by once a week in the summer months; his wagon pulled by a horse that was so old and over-worked it should have been retired with its driver years ago. In the winter it was just too cold he would only stop by once a month.

We had space enough for a vegetable garden where greens, peas, squash, okra, corn and tomatoes grew to be canned for the winter. A shed at the very back of the lot was a shed that provided cover for a milk cow and two hogs. One of the hogs would be sacrificed around Thanksgiving to provide meat for the winter. A smoke house kept the heavily salted hams and other parts of the full-grown hog preserved year round.

As soon as I became old enough, feeding or slopping the livestock once a day was my responsibility along with grazing the milk cow that Mama had named Flossy. Flossy had nice big brown eyes and actually seemed to cling on to my every word when I shared my innermost thoughts as she chewed on the nice green grass that grew along the railroad tracks. We didn’t give the hogs or chickens names, the thought being is that you don’t give a name to something that you are going to eat. A clothesline was strung between the smokehouse and the chicken coop.

Granddaddy had a half dozen peach and apple trees where the corn was planted that had started to show worm problems so he ordered some stuff called DDT that was going to fix the problem. He had learned about it from one of Mr. Crenshaw’s ‘top boys’ so it must have been true. They told him they were already using it on the cotton to get rid of the boll weevils, a small insect that destroys the cotton. But since word had spread that it would kill bugs and insects, people were using it not only for killing garden insects but to spray their bedrooms at night to exterminate the mosquitos before trying to sleep in the hot, humid summer. It would be revealed a few years later that DDT was highly toxic and could cause cancer.

Mama cooked two meals a day on the wood burning stove that also served to heat the water for washing the dishes, the clothes and once a week on Saturdays, the tepid water for our baths. Water for use inside the house came from a faucet outside the back porch that was hooked up to the main water supply that ran in front of the house. A house with inside running water was considered a luxury. It was a simple place in a simple time.

They had finally managed to save up enough for indoor plumbing when her oldest brother Jim returned from the war with tuberculosis. Now he was in hospice at the Veterans Hospital in Norwalk, California. She took the train to Los Angeles and back to Memphis in nine days. It took three days each way to make the trip to see her dying brother.

When they brought me up from Clarksdale my health had deteriorated to the point that I wasn’t able to process solid food because my throat and my rectum had closed up so she used a small rubber syringe to get food in me the way one feeds a bird. Oatmeal with raisins and applesauce were the only two things that I could eat and I credit oatmeal as one of the reasons that I am alive today. Even though Mama added raisins and prunes to my diet I developed two hernias as the result of straining to move my bowels.

She would remind me The day we brought you from Clarksdale I could hold you in one hand and see the fluids moving in your intestines. She would go on to say I just shook my head and asked the Lord to help me. I was too young to take strong laxatives and had to endure the pain of ordinary bowel functions. This was a condition that I suffered with until I was about five or six years old. The only doctor in Panola county was a white man who treated both races but Mama’s religion didn’t believe in doctors. An appointment cost about a dollar in a time when no one could afford to be sick especially the old and young.

I continued to thrive in spite of nonexistent medical care but when I was four years old I developed a heart rhythm disorder called Arrhythmia that was never treated. I could be playing or just walking along and my heart would start pounding like it was going to jump out of my chest. I could see it beating through my clothes. The glitch hung around until I was around twelve years old.

By then I had learned to control it by holding my breath until it returned to its normal rhythm. I thought I was going to die each time it happened so everyday I dealt with the possibility of going to hell. Implausibly I was running, jumping and just being an active child with a heart that sometimes beat in irregular time and two hernias as big as chicken eggs. When I was eleven or twelve years old I must have outgrew the anomaly because it just went away.

My Grandmother was a devout member of The Church of God in Christ (COGIC) and took the King James Version of the Holy Bible literarily in her embracing of the church’s teaching. She felt that anyone who did not practice its doctrines word for word was headed straight for hell. They condemned doctors and modern medicine and trusted instead the Laying on of hands and speaking in tongues to heal any illness.

Once Mama became deathly ill with a severe pain in her lower right side. She was in bed with a high fever for almost a week and then the Elder came with a group of six or seven members from her church. They prayed and spoke in tongue throughout the night into the early hours of the morning while one of the Sisters kept a hot towel over her