My boyhood best friend and mentor, the old black man everyone called Jaybird, who never wasted one day in a classroom, proved what Will Rogers once said: “Nobody is stupider than educated folks when you get them off the thing they’re educated in.”
Years ago, after having earned a few college degrees, I fancied myself a well-educated man, thoroughly grounded in grammar. A small college down on the Gulf Coast thought so, too, and its president offered me an English teaching job that paid a whopping annual salary of $6600. Shoot! I couldn’t turn him down.
After I had taught a few years, my father called one day and said that he had lost the man who had managed his Mississippi Delta cotton farm, and being as I had spent all my summers working for him, he asked me to take the job.
“I would, Dad, but I’m making a ton of money down here, and I don’t think you can match my salary.”
“How much are they paying you?” He asked. When I told him, I heard a suppressed snicker.
“I’ll pay you twice that much.”
“Yas-suh, Boss! I’ll submit my resignation today.”
When I returned to the farm, I visited Jaybird after church one Sunday. As we’d done so many times during my growing-up years, he and I sat on his porch and chatted.
The old man loved flowers, and his thumb for growing them was as green as it was for growing vegetables.
“Ain’t dem roses beautiful?” he asked, pointing to several rosebushes. They were gorgeous, and I told him so.
In a little while, when a neighbor’s kid was about to pick one of the roses, Jaybird said, “Boy, come on ’way fum dem bushes.”
Despite the grammatical incorrectness of his command, it worked, but in a few minutes, the boy was pestering the bushes again.
“Boy, you betta come on ’way fum ’roun dem bushes!” Again the convoluted command worked, and I was intrigued that, even though the grammar had deteriorated even more, the command’s meaning was even clearer and more effective than something I would have said, such as, “Boy, leave the bushes alone.”
A little while later, the hardheaded nuisance of a boy sneaked up behind one of the bushes and reached for a flower.
This time my friend could take no more. Rising from his rocking chair, grabbing his willow switch and pointing it at the brat, he roared, “Boy, you betta come on ’way fum up in ’roun behine dem bushes, or I’ll tear yo’ butt up wit dis switch.”
One look at the old man’s angry, scowling face and the instrument of torture in his hand, and the boy fled for good.
What my mentor said made better sense and was more effective than anything his mentee could have ever come up with.
Will Rogers was right. I’m too educated and therefore too stupid to put together such an effective set of words: On ’way fum up in ’roun behine.
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)).
