El Segundo. James Newton
as, we believed. We believed in the principles of America.
Poor and used by the plantation owners as servants, as mules that labored all year, the share cropper, cotton picker was rejected by most during that era. Even in little towns of Sumner, Mississippi, where later the murder Emmitt Till case was showcased in a world recognized mockery trial, things were a changing. Yes, there was institutionalized racism in the Deep South…. We acknowledged it and lived it, while the whole nation accepted it.
I grew up in a segregated society. All white schools and social settings. No contact with those “other people” was allowed outside of the proscribed “southern norms”. Strangely, it was poverty that breached the walls and crossed some of those lines for me. Poverty was God’s first blessing in disguise. Poverty was a common legacy.
There was a farming strip about 6 miles out from Sumner on an old gravel road. It was called Deep Slough. A strip of land that turned back north to an isolated place designated for the darkies and the white trash share croppers.
Deep Slough was nothing but a strip cotton fields that stretched from this desolate hideaway to Parchman Mississippi State Prison. For the record, Mississippi Prisons were and are always built in lower income communities. Greenwood, Mississippi was the cotton capital of the world. Cotton was King. Consequently, a cotton picker regardless of race as tied and inextricably linked financially to the “plantation”.
Despite laws and morals, a cotton picker chains and bonds were crafted by the plantation. Be you white or black. You were not able to leave; never able to be better yourself; never able to be somebody. If you wanted to pull yourself up by the Boot Straps, you’d have to find yourself a pair of boots first.
While we were entitled to less, we knew in our hearts, that things somehow someway were going to get better. We couldn’t see it, but Lord knows we felt it, and darn sure believed it.
Our secret was and still is, our faith that was forged by the immutable belief of a faithful Grandmother, and a prayerful Mother. Their faith galvanized our strength, nurtured and tended our seeds of hope that we would prevail.
Their faith reminded me of a Brush Arbor tree. A Brush Arbor tree seems like it was designed by God to cover and keep safe those under its huge arms. The tree shields you from the heat, snow rain and winds. Our tree protector continuously provided wood to keep our home so warm through an old pot butted stove that it would make the stove so hot, that it would seem to run winter away.
We had no other source of heat or no electric lights. Light came from our oil filled lamps which were dim but just bright enough to illuminate the dirt and saw grass floor of our share cropper shack and place of worship.
We worshipped differently from traditional White Southern segregation worship. Most God Fearing share croppers were called Holy Rollers. We found the term demeaning. The conventional religious community, which was largely controlled by big land and plantation owners, looked down on our expressions of faith. It was just another check and balance to make sure that we never escaped from the clutches of King Cotton.
The overseers who were backed by high paid lawyers and fueled by greed, stole our hard earned minimal wages. While poverty and the system was built to keep us from escape, the faith of praying people with hearts of grit would give us strength and help us persevere.
We would continue to preserve and over come through a secret that was revealed during that “Cotton Picking” War.
James Newton at 16 with brother Hamp at 15.
Chapter Two
Just West of Hell
Tallahatchie County is located in the Mississippi Delta region. The county was founded on December 31, 1833. Tallahatchie is a Choctaw name meaning "rock of waters". Geographically, it’s located in the Northwest area of the state. But according to my father and other’s who scratched out our meager existence under the Blazing Mississippi sun, we lived “Just West of Hell”. The wind would blow a hot breeze as if to taunt us and remind of how cruel life could be.
The cruel work under crueler conditions made many a man say, “God had abandoned the land”. Even if the Almighty had not forgotten His people, we all were in a desert place tolling under a mean sun which seemed to make the people meaner.
Years later, history would demonstrate the barbaric cruelty of the land and the people when on August 28, 1955, 14-year old Emmett Till was kidnapped in the middle of the night from his uncle’s home by at least two men, one from LeFlore and one from Tallahatchie County, Mississippi.
Till was a black youth from Chicago visiting family in Mississippi, was later murdered, and his body thrown into the Tallahatchie River. He had been accused of whistling at a white woman. His badly beaten body was found days later in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi.
According to my daddy, we weren’t borne into his misery. No sir. This burden poverty that was placed on us had only started for 17 years ago. It didn’t break us but gave us a great hunger and deep desire to break these chains of poverty.
My Great Grandfather owned a sizeable farm. He was part of the "Landed Gentry" so to speak. His son, Jim Newton my Grandfather, was a lawman, and ran a house for the poor in Paynes which was just about 13 miles east of Tallahatchie. My mother worked for the government, my and father, Bryan Newton, was the chief of police of the Sunflower, Mississippi which was about 50 miles southwest of this hell on earth.
We owned a beautiful antebellum plantation home, and enjoyed a good life. Oddly enough, while we were a proud family we were not racist family, which was a dangerous novelty for these parts. We were a large family of 12 including me and our “adopted” sibling Snow Quirk who was a young black boy we had accepted into our home because he had no where else to go. I grew up with and he look out for me like an older brother and I looked up to him the same. Snow lived with us until he was in the mid twenties, finally marring and moving out on his own. Snow Quirk died in 1971, at 41 years of age. I miss him still.
Although the Great Depression presented hard times, we were one big happy family. The war was already raging between Germany and England, but the United States had not entered as of yet. So were fine…until the depression came to our door step. I still am unsure they called it the “Great Depression”. There was nothing great about it to me. They darn sure were depressing.
My dad lost his job; we lost our home. The times were so hard that one year we rented a patch of land to work and the boll weevil destroyed our harvest. Things just keep going from bad to worse. As a land renter, at least you could control your hard earned money. We had a 1941 ford sedan, things were tolerable….at least we were cotton farmers. Working the land, plowing the fields, tilling the ground, planting the cotton, chopping the grass out of the fields, then gathering the cotton by hand and making several bales of cotton was our life’s work. But it was the boll weevil, not the war or the depression that caused my family starvation, in the world of cotton; it was the boll weevil that brought us to fall.
While the rest of the world stood in hungry lines for food all across the United States, while everybody was hurting across the Nation. While stock markets collapsed, and the very rich were committing suicide, we were doing pretty good farming cotton. We could control our own future and enjoy the fruits of our labor. As renters, we were even respected in the community. These swarms of little insects brought us to our knees.
In truth, the boll weevil hit all across the King Cotton South land affecting owners and renters alike. Everybody suffered because of the boll weevil. It threw many lands and their renters off their rented properties. Consequently, many cotton people like my dad resulted to sharecropping.
Share chopping was just indentured servitude or slavery. The big farmers would supply you a shack, called a bungalow or a shot gun house. There