After heavy rains gave Dad’s cotton crop a much-needed soaking and halted fieldwork on his Mississippi Delta farm, my boyhood best friend and mentor Jaybird offered to take my cousin Calvin and me fishing. The night before, we pitched a tent in Jaybird’s yard, knowing the old black man, a master storyteller, would entertain us with terrifying, hair-raising tales as we sat around the campfire.
I envied Calvin. Only fifteen years old, he was an athletic Adonis, muscle-bound, over six-feet tall, with what girls called “come hither” cobalt blue eyes, perfect teeth that flashed in a devil-may-care smile, and thick, raven-black, curly hair. On tiptoes, my ninety-pound-weakling frame barely reached five feet, I had over-sized lips (Jaybird called them “dumpling coolers”), pimpled face, un-curly hair, “run thither” myopic bland eyes, and front teeth the size of a horse’s that made my face look like a Studebaker grill.
