by Bellewriter

Created on: May 16, 2008

Breaking Soul ties

Growing up in a family of seventeen, you are bound to face challenges that are bigger than you. At some point the bonds are broken and your life boils down to the choices that you make. It was the last time I would watch my Mama get beat by my Dad. He was a drunk and that would never change. I guess I would drink too if I had to provide for seventeen children and I had only a third grade education.

Shortee Haygood was a young man who was determined not to keep living the lie of a sharecropper. He knew that there was a better life for a black man if he had a job. Just thinking about moving away from this dead town in Mississippi gave him all the confidence he needed to move up North. He would become a man by working a respectable job in one of those factories or on the railway. He already had mouths to feed so a better job would give them the life they needed. I mean if you can hustle a card game how hard was it to hustle a white man for a job.

Bethel Hodgins was a beautiful young woman who had the skill to do anything. Shortee was the best thing that had happened to her. Mommy never wanted me and she was tired of fighting off her husbands. Shortee loved her and besides that she already had three baby girls for him. Her future was set, she was up at dawn sharecropping, had the smartest kids she ever seen and could cook her butt off. What else could a girl ask for? I mean I was respectable I have been married since twelve and I was still nice looking at sixteen. God must really love him some Bethel.

I remember it like it was yesterday, Shortee had been playing Scrapple down the road wit dim loose collar boys for two weeks and every day he brought home at least forty cents. We were rich. We had toast and marmalade jams on a Two-day morn and on Thursday we had a piece of smoke ham fresh from the slaughter. Nobody on this side of Jackdaw Mississippi had meals like that during the week. We had made it Mama was gone be proud she got a girl like me. Maybe now she would see me more and come back home. We can afford to live in one of them shacks wit a tar roof and three sections maybe even our own outhouse hooked up in back. If I work extra hard we can have an extra twelve cents for some shoes the store bought kind made by a real shoemaker. Den one Saturday morn after I picked up my rounds for cleaning sheets. I was out back at the wash bin and Shortee came running down the road hoping and holing bout something. Said drop them white sheets gal we going

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