Jaybird, my best friend and boyhood mentor, never read William Faulkner; he never even heard of him. And, besides, he couldn’t read. But he would have agreed with what Faulkner said when he stood before royalty, dignitaries, and scholars in Stockholm, Sweden, and gave his Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech.
Toward the end of that speech, the great novelist said, “I decline to accept the end of man … I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail.” Jaybird’s field-hand vocabulary didn’t contain the words endure and prevail; for him, they would have come under the heading of “stayin’ pow’r.”
“Boy, you got no stayin’ pow’r,” he’d say, when I began whining toward the end of a long day of chopping cotton. “I’m old enough to be yo’ great-granddaddy and dis ignunt stick ain’t got de best o’ me. You jes’ a sissy. Be tough; take what life throws on you and shake it off. When dat ole sun draps down and teches de ground, we’ll go to the house. Now git to hoeing.”
The beloved old black man would have loved the following story, and because he refused to give in to what life tossed on him, would have understood it better than anyone.
It was a Saturday, and as was their wont, Clyde Rakestraw and his wife Ophelia planned to go to town to purchase their weekly supplies. The old farmer fetched the small, two-wheeled wagon out of the barn and called for Jeremiah, his faithful donkey. In response, he got a long, mournful bray that sounded as if it came from a cave. Continuing to call, he finally found the animal. It had fallen into an abandoned cistern.
Staring down at the sad creature staring up at him, he realized there was no way to get him out. “Ophelia, that donkey is old, and probably wouldn’t be much good to us a whole lot longer anyway,” he said. “Besides, I’ve been meaning to fill up that old cistern, and this is a good time to do it. Let’s get the neighbors to help, and we’ll just shovel dirt into the cistern and bury him.”
Soon, the men folk were tossing spades of dirt down on the donkey, whose brays got more and more piteous. After a while, though, they noticed Jeremiah had quieted down. Assuming the donkey had given up the ghost, Clyde looked down, and was amazed at what he saw. The animal was almost at ground level! Every time a shovel full of dirt hit his back, he would shake it off, and the dirt rose steadily beneath him. Soon, he stepped out of the cistern and trotted off.
The story contains an obvious moral: To prevail, human beings must endure, a reality Nelson Mandela understood when he said, “After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb.”
Jaybird taught me to keep climbing those hills. He knew what I needed to get through life: stayin’ pow’r.
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)).
