B. U. G. S.

One of our favorite blacks in the brick plant, Charlie, had to spend several months on the chain gang.

He didn’t like it.

It wasn’t the work he minded. Working on the chain gang was much, much, MUCH easier than working on the brick plant.

MUCH easier.

Did I mention the word “much?”

On the brick plant there was one major qualification for getting the job. That was not “monkeying.”

“Monkeying” meant passing out. If you passed out twice on the job they let you go.

Did I mention that the chain gang was easier than that?

So Charlie didn’t mind the work. He made jokes about it.

He also didn’t mind the man with the shotgun. The man with the shotgun was a friendly old guy and you would only get shot if you ran.

RAN?

It was a CHAIN gang. They actually did have chains on.

Anybody who tried to run with chains on would not have been shot. He would have been sent to the State Hospital for mental observation.

So Charlie didn’t mind the work or the shotgun.

No, Charlie didn’t mind the work, Lord knows, and he didn’t even seem to mind the jail.

What got to him was corn bread and peas.

Every day for months he ate nothing, and I mean nothing, but corn bread and black-eyed peas.

We had very little in the sand hills, but we had FOOD. Lots of food. Lots of GOOD food.

Whenever I walked down to the plant through the places that were referred to by everybody, including the blacks, as the “niggah houses,” my mouth watered. The same was true of the rest of my family.

The “niggah house” were shabby, but they were free, and only Charlie and a couple of other black men got them. We gave them to the blacks we WANTED to live near us. They didn’t have to commute many miles to the brick plant as so many others had to.

Work was scarce in the sand hills, very scarce. You had to drive and you could not “monkey.”

Nobody EVER gave up one of the “niggah houses.”

Food and shelter, sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it? My family provided that for some eighty people with those throw-away things. Most of the the people we provided them for were black.

Nobody ever gave up a “niggah house.” To live there, you had to be on personal terms with the Whitakers. We were big people in our little world.

So Charlie wasn’t upset with the lack of decor in the jail. What he talked about for months afterward was corn bread and peas.

I could see why.

When you walked by the “niggah houses” all you remembered was the smell of the stuff cooking. It was cooking all the time, and whoever wanted something to eat just took some.

I didn’t go in and eat after I was about five. When I was very small, my parents would leave me with the black folks, and me and the other “niggah” kids would eat whenever we felt like it.

The average African today would give his soul for a steady diet of corn bread and black-eyed peas.

I’ve been there. I know.

Charlie missed FOOD, and he missed it bad.

You can’t have food like that today. It was dripping with fat, it was made to taste good and it made your stomach dance.

My yuppie niece went to a black wedding in the low state a few years back and she couldn’t believe how good the food was. She ate and she ate.

It was her only chance to eat it. It would have scandalized her Yuppie friends. Every bite was verboten, Evil and full of every poison we are warned against.

She just couldn’t stop. She talked about it for months.

Many a person in Pontiac, South Carolina back then died at the age of ninety or so of cholesterol poisoning. So Modern Opinion has to be right.

But nobody out there was EVER hungry.

I don’t know where Jane Fonda found her “children starving in South Carolina.”

But it sure wasn’t in our sandhills.