It’s Just Pinched
Brother Dave and I were hooking up a turning plow, the first plow in the field in the spring. I was 8 or 9, he was 10 or 11, so he was driving. I was about to hook the tractor’s lift arms to the plow and I was motioning to him, “Down, down, down, Ooooweeee!”
My left thumb had been caught between the tractor lift arm and the plow and mangled. I screamed, pulled my bloody thumb free, and took off running for the house.
Dave hopped off the tractor and was right behind me, yelling, “It’s just pinched, Pat, it’s just pinched!”
Never has a pinch left such a scar.
The Way It Was
We rarely went into town, into Gadsden, AL, when we were growing up on the farm in the late 1940s. In town is where you’d see the segregation signs. In the lobby of Sears & Roebuck there were two water fountains with signs over them. One fountain was for “White,” and one was for “Colored,” the signs said.
When I was a boy I never thought much about it one way or the other. It was just the way it was.
Dodging Work
Picking cotton is real job. Not like newspapering, not like a lot of so-called jobs. Dave and I didn’t pick a lot of cotton, but we picked enough.
It was hot work and hard on your back. And if you weren’t real careful when you pulled the cotton out of the boll the needles on top would slice your fingers open. Heck, you got cut even if you were careful.
We were picking for a sharecropper who worked my Dad’s land, in shouting distance of our house. One one of us – the way I remember it, it was Dave — said:
“I think I hear Momma calling us.”
And then I said, “I do too.”
And we ran for the house.
NOTE: That’s the only time I can remember my brother running away from work. He’s 79 now, and he’s still working — two jobs.
Coming Monday: Setting Goals