“When I told your father that I would see to it that you earned your pay, he and I wanted to be sure you learned this lesson: There’s no such thing as a free ride.”
The July sun pecked us like a fierce-eyed fowl, and the humidity was so high we needed gills to breathe. Way out in the middle of a Mississippi Delta field, I was working alongside Jaybird, my boyhood best friend and mentor. While my schoolmates enjoyed the summer, I was chopping weeds out of cotton.
When Dad brought us lunch, I asked, “Why must I work all summer? My schoolmates don’t.”