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More In The Man
from Grit, Guts, and Baseball: The Stories of Coach Sank Powe
by Beth Boswell Jacks
Fall '57 in the Mississippi Delta. Fields of solid white--rows of snowy cotton stretched about as far as you could see. Blanched waves, every direction. The crop dusters, Stearman double-wing planes, flew over spraying their gray dust to defoliate the plants. Then the pickers hit the fields.Exhausted from picking cotton all day, I hitched a ride back to the gin on one of the mule-drawn trailers. We still had a couple of mule teams on the Ray Plantation, although most of the cotton trailers were now pulled by small tractors. My back was aching, especially my right shoulder where the strap from the canvas sack cut deep. Sprawled on the trailer of cotton, I picked at my scratched-up hands.
"Dammit!" I could talk pretty tough. "I sure ain't gonna pick cotton the rest of my life. My hands cut to high heaven, my back cricked like ten tons of lead, my eyes burned out of the sockets. No sir. Got to be a better way to make some money."
Driving the two-bale trailer was Old Trott, clucking and coaxing Boss and Zadie, the strong, ornery mule team. We were jerking and rocking and bumping along the turn-row. "Here now, Boss . . . Zadie!" Old Trott called to the mules. "Just a ways more. Gonna get you a cold drink, a cold drink."
"I need ME a cold drink, Mr. Trott," I said. "Picking cotton's plum terrible. I'm gonna get a better job. Pick all day and don't make nothing. Two dollars fifty cents to work all day with the sun beating on me like devil's fire. No breeze. Hurting. Cut up. Sweating. Just not worth it."
"Oh, run your mouth, young Sank," Old Trott said. "When I was a youngun, I talked just like you . . . just exactly like you."
"How come you didn't get yourself some other kind of work to do?" I said. "How come you didn't just leave and find a job in town?"
"Talk come easy," Old Trott answered. "I just decided early on if I didn't have the best of a thing or two, I'd just hitch up and make the best of the thing or two I had."
"But, Mr. Trott," I squinted my eyes and cocked my head in its best arguing position, "why you want to keep on and keep on doing something that makes you plum miserable? Don't make sense. Seem to me, a person gotta find something in life that makes getting out of bed worth getting. That's what I think."
"That's what you think, huh?" Old Trott smiled all patient like. "Let me ask you this, Sank Powe." He clicked his tongue at the mules. "What put the idea in your head that Trott Johnson is a miserable man? How you figure any honest work ain't worth getting out of bed for?"
"Well, yessir. . ." I stopped, trying to figure a way to win this discussion without making Old Trott think he was a miserable man. "Guess you probably an expert by now, seeing as how you can do most any job on the place. I guess if a person get good as an expert, then he just probably satisfied and happy. Me being only fifteen years old, well, I ain't no expert, and I spect I'd rather learn to be expert at something else--like baseball, maybe. Yeah."
"Boy!" Old Trott slapped his hand on his knee big like. "You need to get a job preaching. I'd say you should go to stumping, but there won't never be a colored man to get nowhere in politics, that's so. You got a way with words, boy. Expert!" Old Trott's joking made my hurts feel better, and I chuckled too.
"Son," he said, "baseball ain't gonna make you no money and you still be out in the hot sun--unless you a Jackie Robinson or something. But every young gent think he a Jackie Robinson, that's so."
"How you gonna know less you try? I figure if I don't make it to the Majors I can always come back to the farm."
"Sank," Old Trott said kinda slow and sad, "dreams can hurt a man . . . can really hurt a man."
"Yessir. I guess so."
I sure needed a cold drink. We were getting close to the gin now, and I'd get off at the commissary. "I'm hopping off now, Mr. Trott. Thank you for the ride." My bare feet hit the dirt. "See you later.""Bye now, Jackie Robinson." He smiled. "Watch them curves!"
I grinned back at his tired old ebony face. Didn't bother me none. Seemed to me grown-ups always had to be thinking they had answers to stuff kids hadn't even thought of yet. When I hit twenty, making the big time, Old Trott would be saying something like: "Well, I be damn! That knucklehead tol me. He sure nuff done tol me."
Opening the screen door, I entered the commissary, walked up to the wooden counter, and pulled a nickel from my overalls pocket. The bossman was sitting behind the counter, scribbling on some papers.
"Excuse me, Boss," I said. "Could I get a cold soda pop, please?"
I put the nickel square in front of him. Without a word, he got up, opened the old, red drink box, took out a soda, and placed it on the counter. "Sank," he finally said, "I hear you planning to go back to school in October when picking's over."
"Yessir."
Squinching his lips together, acting like he was thinking hard, he tapped his fingers on the counter and looked at me. I knew what he was going to say because he'd already talked to Mama.
"Sank, I told your mama y'all not gonna stay on this place if you insist on going to school." The words were sorta wheezing out of him like an old pump or something. "You're wasting your time. You need to be in those fields making money to help your family."
"But see, Boss, my sister and me can do both. We pick till the picking's almost done, and then we go to school in October. When we get home from school we pick some more if y'all still working. We learning at school, Boss, honest to goodness. Do good in school. Real good."
"Humph! You stay in school any longer and you be ruined as far as chopping and picking goes. I know good and well what I'm talking about. Schooling puts ideas in your head. Impossible ideas. I won't stand for it, Sank."
"Now, Boss, you look at those words on that calendar right there. Been hanging there all year, and I read that sentence every time I come in here."
He turned. Big, red block letters, big as you please, seemed ready to jump right off the calendar and dance on his head: "THAR'S MORE IN THE MAN THAN THAR IS IN THE LAND."
"Maybe I'm wrong," I told him, "but to me that means I'm worth more than any land or cotton fields, and what I get in my head in the way of learning can't never be taken away."
He turned and stared at me. His eye was twitching funny-like and his nose got red, redder than I'd ever seen it.
"I'm gonna work hard to help my mama," I said, "but I tell you this, and I really ain't trying to smart off. I'm gonna go to school." I walked out, closed the old screen door respectfully, sat me down on the commissary steps, and had myself the best cold soda pop I believe I ever tasted.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
SANK REMEMBERS:
Even though I'm a person who hates confrontation, I have to admit the day I stood up to the plantation owner was a proud day for me. Now, I don't mean to say this was a brave thing to do. It wasn't. Mr. Ray wasn't a mean man. He was just stern and cranky and worried about making a living. He never carried out his threat to force us to leave, and all the Powe children continued to go to school.
I was proud, I reckon, because speaking up like that made me realize how committed I was to staying in school and getting an education. This was my ticket out of the cotton fields, and even though I was still young I knew education was my only hope.
I'll never forget a certain day in English class a year or so after my run-in with Mr. Ray. Leafing through the textbook, I chanced on a section of poems by Sidney Lanier. Never had heard of Lanier in my life, but one of the poems jumped at me: "THAR'S MORE IN THE MAN." There it was--my calendar philosophy. Lanier was a nineteenth century poet, a Georgian by birth, and he understood Southerners' love of the land. I believe he also must have known the yearnings of a young fellow to be of more value than an acre of cotton. Splashed up there on that big commissary calendar, Lanier's words were just another one of those lucky happenings--just happened to be there when I needed them.
Yes, I was a lucky boy. So many of the paths I chose seemed to run in the right direction, and I was fortunate to have guidance from adults who made me want to be the best I could be. These were the people who set young Sank Powe free, not free from struggle--struggle was with me every step of the way--but free to dream, free to work, and free to grow.
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Here are several USADEEPSOUTH articles by Beth Boswell Jacks, USADS writer and editor:
Ski humor: Warning to hotshots -- shhh!
Pilgrimage to China
Garden Club Gab
To Edith and Bill, With Love
Getting My Get-Up-And-Go To Go With My Get-up
Floyd Shaman: Mississippi Sculptor
A resident of the Mississippi Delta, Beth Boswell Jacks holds a B.A. in English from Millsaps College and M.Ed. from The University of Mississippi. Jacks is the author of 3 books.Jacks stays happily engaged (in addition to her other writing) with a personal essay/humor newspaper column titled 'Snippets', which she describes as an attempt to "joogle a bit of Southern wit and wisdom in a few snappy paragraphs."
Want to know more about the legendary Sank Powe? Contact Beth at BethJacks@hotmail.com.
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Read about Beth's SNIPPETS books -- two collections of her columns.
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