[em]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 [strong]The Jaybird Tales[/strong].
Copies, including personalized autographs, can be reserved by notifying the author via email (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)).[/em]
On his Mississippi Delta farm, my father operated a small cotton gin, and during harvest season, my after-school and weekend job was hammering together the flat metal straps and buckles used to bind cotton bales. When my boyhood best friend and mentor Jaybird wasn’t busy doing something else, he helped me.
As a Little League baseball player, when I stepped to the plate, bunting was the last thing on my mind. Instead I focused on slugging the ball over the outfield fence. A bunt, I thought, was an insult to my Louisville Slugger bat.
As a boy on my father’s Mississippi Delta farm, I looked forward to Saturdays, mainly because I didn’t have to go to school, but also because Friday’s paydays were followed by Saturday’s dice games.
Sometimes, a well-intentioned plan to provide enjoyment for others leads to an experience one soon wants to forget. Such was the day when this old pilot and Frankie Fay flew.
“He was such good man,” the tiny Oriental woman said in tortured English as she handed me a bag of peanuts. A solitary tear coursed down her leathery, grieving face. “One minute we talk, next minute he fall dead.”
Because my lifelong friend and mentor Jaybird had seen hucksters, hawkers, and horse thieves come and go, the old black man often warned me: “Boy, if somebody offers you sumpin’ that sounds too good to be true, it is.” But even he fell for the great rainmaking hoax.
On a cold, clear February day in 1978, my eighty-year-old flight instructor unbuckled his safety harness and stepped out of the airplane.
Whenever folks on Dad’s Mississippi Delta farm saw my boyhood best friend and mentor Jaybird “whuppin’ gars” early in the morning, they hoped to be sitting at his supper table later that day. The old black man could cook anything to gustatory perfection, even garfish, which most folks consider inedible. Unchanged since the Jurassic Period, gars are bony on the inside with thick skin and scales on the outside.
Some folks are naturally accident-prone. I am. My boyhood best friend and mentor, Jaybird, said I should write a collection of stories about my accidents. If I do, the first story will be about the time we discovered the honey hole.
In angling parlance, a honey hole is a place nobody else knows about, and we found one. A creek flooded its banks, filling a cow pasture, and bass were thrashing minnows in the shallows.
Dust swirled behind my father’s pickup as he sped through the fields on his Mississippi Delta farm, delivering lunches to tractor drivers, one of whom was Jaybird, my boyhood best friend and mentor. The old black man and I had been riding together on his tractor since daylight.
Cotton was my father’s whole life. On his Mississippi Delta farm, he grew it for fifty-two years, and from the time he plowed with mules until the day he shipped his last bale from his own gin, he devoted every waking minute to his crops, and for the life of him he couldn’t understand why I was interested in other things.
His name was Richard Mortis, but folks called him “Rigor” Mortis because, like a two-day-old corpse, he walked with robot stiffness, and when he stopped, nothing moved, except his Adam’s apple, which cycled constantly up and down his long, thin, bony neck.
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.
Shortly before sundown, we drivers finished cultivating my father’s Mississippi Delta cotton fields, and no sooner had we parked our tractors than a long, steady, soaking summer rain began drumming on the shed’s tin roof — just what the bolls needed to finish filling with fiber.
At her country store, Maya Angelou’s grandmother tolerated a few customers who were chronic complainers, but no matter how tough things got, her outlook on life remained positive, and she instilled that attitude in her granddaughter.
That warm, spring Mississippi Delta Saturday was ideal for doing anything outdoors, but the calamitous way it turned out was less than ideal.
Pietro Menotti stood on a ship’s deck among throngs of weary, penniless immigrants like himself. Staring into the haze of a hot summer day, he saw the first of two women who would determine the course of his life.
Inflated egos are dangerous. When my flight instructor certified that I was a licensed pilot, my ego and I were flying high … too high, as was made terrifyingly evident the day I flew the Pup.
In barbershops, even the most sanctimonious listeners accept professional grade lying as entertaining tall tales.
One day, while Larry the barber clipped the white scraggly hackles festooning my haggard old head, he related a tall tale, after which one of the waiting customers said, “Reed, you make a living out of lying by writing stories that never fall within the realm of truthfulness; tell us one that will top Larry’s.”
Wintertime winds are brutal in the Mississippi Delta. They are soaking with humidity, and howl unchecked across ironing-board flat fields. Delta folks call these winds “cuttin’ body hawks.”
At daybreak one freezing January morning, the body hawk unleashed its full fury upon us two duck hunters: my lifelong best friend and mentor, the beloved old black man everyone called Jaybird, and me.