If I decide to become some kind of artist, I’ll sculpt, or dance, or make music. I might even become an author and write funny little stories. But one thing is for sure: I won’t paint
Just the thought of Mama’s willow switch was usually a sufficient deterrent to my iniquitous nature. But not the time I painted my brother.
It was layby … a time when cotton farmers know they’ve done all they can to make their crops … a time to turn off the irrigation, disk around fields, run water furrows one last time, and park the tractors. They fought the good fight. The rest was up to the weather, the crop, and the good Lord.
Boss, my father, readied our slime-green Dodge DeSoto station wagon for a trip to the Gulf Coast. Mama made a pallet for us boys behind the back seat, and off we went.
Soon, the breeze and the DeSoto’s drone took their toll on my brother, and he fell into a deep sleep. But I was wide awake and bored. An idle mind is the devil’s workshop, and Satan saw an opportunity to put in a little time in my brain.
Mama was an artist, and not knowing when her muse might visit, she always took along paints, brushes, and canvas. One look at the paints and another at my somnolent sibling, so far off in Lalaland he was barely breathing, and the die was cast.
Dabbing a brush in the black paint, I decorated his upper lip with a mustache and matched it with a goatee on his chin, making him a mini-musketeer.
I never had any stopping sense, and wasn’t about to stop now: A dollop of fire engine red turned his nose into a clown’s; blackened eyebrows, and he was Count Dracula. Honoring my muse, I painted devil’s horns on his forehead. My creative fires were ablaze! Purple, orange, and green arcs on his cheeks, and he became a great West African mandrill.
When I’d finished Frankenstein electrodes on his neck, I heard Boss say he was stopping to rinse his mouth, having chewed half a bale of tobacco since daybreak.
When the DeSoto crunched onto the gravel in front of a country store, my brother awoke, crawled out, and stood blinking stupidly in the sunlight. A clutch of curious kids lolling on the porch saw this extraterrestrial apparition and, howling for their mothers, exploded like a covey of quail.
Now fully awake, my brother noticed his face felt funny. One look in the DeSoto’s side mirror and he too set up a howl, bawling like a calf for its mother.
Dashing out of the store, Mama took one horrified look at his face and went absolutely berserk. With that hated willow switch in one hand and me in the other, round and round we went, while my bedaubed brother cheered and Boss tried to persuade her to stop short of beating me to death.
I’ll tell y’all one thing: If I decide to become some kind of artist, I’ll sculpt, or dance, or make music. I might even become an author and write funny little stories. But one thing is for sure: I won’t paint.
Jimmy Reed is an Oxford, Mississippi resident, Ole Miss and Delta State University alumnus, Vietnam Era Army Veteran, former Mississippi Delta cotton farmer and ginner, author, and retired college teacher.
This story is a selection from Jimmy Reed’s latest book, entitled The Jaybird Tales.
Copies, including personalized autographs, can be reserved by notifying the author via email (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)).
