'Paper Bag Records and Sweet Potato Pie\r'

'Sweet Potato Pie Eugenia coal miner From up here on the fourteenth floor, my comrade Charley checks like an insect scurrying among other insects. A deep feeling of love masss through me. patronage the distance, he seems to feel it, for he turns and scans the upper archows, alone failing to find me, continues on his way. I earn him moving quickly”gingerly, it seems to me” down Fifth passageway and around the corner to his shabby taxicab. In a moment he will be drift back uptown. I turn from the window and wash come in down on the bed, shoes and alone.Perhaps because of what happened this afternoon or maybe Just because I see Charley so seldom, my houghts hover over him like hummingbirds. The cheerful, impersonal spruceness of this room is a world away from Charleys walk-up apartment flat in Harlem and a hundred worlds from the b be, screaky shanty where he and the rest of us worn out(p) what there was of our puerility. I close my eyes and nerve by side I se e the Charley of my boyhood and the Charley of this afternoon, as clearly as if I were looking at a split TV screen. Another surge of love, seasoned with gratitude, wells up in me.As far-off as I know, Charley never had any childhood at all. The oldest children of sharecroppers never do. mommy and Pa were swarthy figures whose voices I heard aguely in the morning when remainder was shallow and whom I glimpsed as they left for the land before I was fully awake or as they trudged wearily into the house at darkness when my lids were irresistibly heavy. They came into sharp focus only on peculiar(prenominal) occasions. One such occasion was the daytime when the crops were in and the sharecroppers were paid. In our cabin there was so much excitement in the air that as yet l, the â€Å"baby responded to it.For weeks we had been running out of things that we could neither grow nor push on credit. On the evening of that day we waited anxiously for our parents return. Then we wou ld luster around the rough woody table”I on Lils lap or clinging to Charleys neck, little Alberta nervously tugging her plait, Jamie crouched at Mamas elbow, like a panther about to spring, and all seven of us silent for once, waiting. Pa would place the money on the table”gently, for it was made from the sweat of their bodies and from the childrens tears.Mama would count it out in little piles, her dark flavor stark and, I think now, beautiful. Not with the hollow steady of well-modeled features but with the strong radiance of one who has suffered and never yielded. â€Å"This tor the store bill,” sne would mutter, making a I p e. â€Å"This tor cllection. T for a piece dgingham… ” and so on, stretchability the money as tight over our collective needs as Jamies outgrown pants were stretched over my bottom. â€Å"Well, thats the crop. ” She would look up at Pa at last. â€Å"Itll do. ” Pas face would relax, and a general grin flitt ed from child to child.We would survive, at least for the presend. The other time when my parents were solid entities was at church. On Sundays we would don our threadbare Sunday-go-to-meeting costume and tramp, along with neighbors similarly attired, to the Tabernacle Baptist Church, the frail construction of bare oards held together by God knows what, which was all that my parents ever knew of security and future promise. Being the youngest and whence the most likely to err, I was plopped between my gravel and my mother on the long wooden bench.They sit huge and eternal like twin mountains at my sides. I remember my fathers still, black profile silhouetted against the buoyant window, looking back into dark recesses of time, into some gloomy antiquity, like an ancient ceremonial mask. My mothers face, usually badly set, changed with the varying nuances of her emotion, its planes shifting, shaped by the soft highlights f the sanctuary, as she progressed from the subdued  "amen” to a loud â€Å" service of process me, Jesus” wrung from the depths of her gaunt frame. My early memories of my parents are associated with special occasions.The contours of my everyday were shaped by Lil and Charley, the oldest children, who rode herd on the rest of us while Pa and Mama toiled in fields not their own. Not until long time later did I realize that Lil and Charley were little much than children themselves. Lil had the loudest, screechiest voice in the county. When she yelled, â€Å"Boy, you better git yourself in here! ” you got yourself in there. It was Lil who caught and bathed us, Lil who fed us and sent us to school, Lil who punished us when we needed penalise and comforted us when we needed comforting. If her voice was loud, so was her laughter.When she laughed, everybody laughed. And when Lil sang, everybody listened. Charley was taller than anybody in the world, including, I was certain, God. From his shoulders, where I spent enor mous time in the earliest years, the world had a different perspective: I looked down on the heads rather than at the undersides of chins. As I grew older, Charley became much father than brother. Those days return n fragments of splintered holding: Charleys slender dark hands whittling a swindle from a chunk of wood, his face thin and intense, embrown as the loaves Lil baked when there was flour.Charleys quick fingers channelize a stick of charred kindling over a bit of scrap paper, making a extraordinary picture take shape”Jamies face or Albertas rag doll or the spare fgure of our gaunt brown dog. Charleys voice low and terrible in the dark, telling ghost stories so delightfully atrocious that later in the night the moan of the wind through the chinks in the wall sent us scurrying to the security of Charleys pallet, Charleys sleeping form. Some memories are more than tragmentary. I can still teel the bash ot the wet disn rag across my mouth. Somehow I developed a st utter, which Charley was determined to heal.Someone had told him that an effective cure was to slap the stuttered across the mouth with a sopping wet dish rag. Thereafter whenever I began, â€Å"Lets g -g-g- -,” whap! From nowhere would come the ubiquitous rag. Charley would invariably insist, â€Å"l dont want to hurt you none, Buddy”” and whap again. I dont know when or why I stopped stuttering. But I stopped. Already fit(p) waste by poverty, we were easy prey for ignorance and superstition, hich hunt us like hawks. We sought education feverishly”and, for most of us, futilely, for the sum total of our combined energies was necessitate for mere brute survival.\r\n'