On May 30, 1955, Raymond Boggan sent for the midwife, Miss Hannah, as his wife’s labor pains came closer and closer together. When Miss Hannah arrived and checked on Sallie Mae, she came out of the room with a smile on her face.
“That baby is coming, but not until tomorrow,” she announced, speaking with the confidence that came from ushering dozens of babies into the world. “I’ll be back first thing in the morning.”
But before she could open the front door to leave, a baby’s loud scream echoed throughout the house. My mother would later tell me that it looked like I had stood up and propelled myself out. My time had come. I had arrived.
By the time my parents were done, they had nine children. In order from oldest to youngest, they were Lena, Celestine, Coria, Thelma, Julius, me, Patricia, Ruby, and Dolores. Eight girls and one boy. Seemed liked Mama was always having babies, a process that fascinated me.
All of us but Patricia were born at home. When the doctors/midwives showed up at the house to help deliver them, they’d take their black leather bag into the bedroom. After a while, I’d hear a baby cry and they’d come out with yet another little sister. For years, I was absolutely sure babies came out of those black medical bags, a biological certainty I’d tell everyone I knew. No one ever corrected me. People assumed you were acting too grown if you tried to find out more about such topics.
Along with some other family members, fourteen of us lived in a small cinder block house a landowner named Mr. Abernathy provided in Cockrum, Mississippi. The house had two bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen, though we had no running water. We had an outhouse, where we used newspapers instead of toilet paper. In one bedroom, we had two big beds, three in each bed vertically, and a couple at the bottom of the bed horizontally. I hated sleeping at the foot of the bed, because I disliked waking up with feet in my face. No matter where I was situated, however, I couldn’t toss or turn. We fit snugly together and dared not move until the next day, when the sun’s rays came through the poorly insulated windows and warmed us.
Mr. Abernathy allowed my parents to farm his land in exchange for a share of the crop. He got a really good deal, since my daddy, Raymond, and my mama, Sallie Mae, had lots of children to help farm. Since Mama was busy having babies, most of the work done on the farm was done by Daddy and us kids.
“This is the last time we’ll have to work these cotton fields,” my daddy told us at the beginning of every year. We had family in Gary, Indiana, who promised us that if we ever could make it up north, they’d help my daddy get a job in the steel industry.
Until then, we had to chop cotton, which meant we went out into the cotton fields with a hoe and got all the weeds and the grass away from the cotton plants to give them room to grow. That work, done under the scorching Mississippi sun, earned us $3 per day. Then, in late August, the cotton popped out of its green shell, which turned into a dry, brown husk. The cotton caused the beautiful fields to look like snow. When I was five years old, Mama dressed me in long sleeves to protect my skin from the sun’s rays and sent me out to do the repetitive, painful work. The edges of cotton bolls were prickly and sharp, so when I put my hand inside the boll and pulled the cotton out it’d scratch up my hands. We worked from sunup to sundown and would always beat my daddy out into the field, since he had to get up even earlier to milk the cows. He’d meet us out in the fields after milking, would pick cotton during the day, and then milk the cows again in the evening. My older sisters gave me a little sack to fill with cotton, but I probably didn’t even get enough to make a Q-tip. But I did get faster. My sister Celestine—who had hands quicker than lightning—would pick three hundred pounds on her best days. We got paid two cents per pound. Once we were done with our fields, I remember my mama would send Julius and me to our aunts’ house to help our cousins with their fields.
We made the most of it, though.
“Soon I will be done,” my daddy would begin to sing during the long, monotonous days. Then we kids would join in. “With the troubles of the world . . . I’m going home to live with God.” I joined in too—though my voice wasn’t as smooth as my sisters’—and passed the time. “No more weepin’ and wailin’ . . . No more weepin’ and wailin’ . . . No more weepin’ and wailin’ . . .”
We always sang one song called “This May Be My Last Time,” and my siblings would laugh because I couldn’t pronounce my Ls correctly.
“Come on, Marie,” they’d egg me on, calling me by my middle name. “Sing it loud.” I sang it sincerely, though it sounded like I was saying the word “ass” instead of “last.” I didn’t know why they were laughing, but I sang it loud. Regardless, the old spirituals kept us going hour after hour. Honestly, when I think back to those days, I remember those harmonies and that laughter more than any ache in my back or scratch on my hands.
No matter how much we picked, old man Abernathy kept the books. At the end of the season, he pasted a disappointed look on his face and told Daddy the cotton hadn’t yielded as much as he needed. “Plus, you still owe me for seeds,” he’d bark. “There’s not enough money left over to pay you.”
Dejected, my daddy would tell us we’d have to stay for one more year. I began imagining Gary, Indiana, the way some people considered the land of Canaan: a city flowing with milk and honey. But we never saw Indiana.
The work never stopped. I graduated from my small cotton sack to one that was four feet long. Once children got older and good at filling these sacks to the brim, they were given sacks made of burlap that were nine feet long, and they’d drag them on the ground as they worked. One year we picked twenty-eight bales of cotton. We thought for sure that this would be the year we could get away from Mr. Abernathy’s farm.
At the end of the season, however, that mean old man created new ways to keep us in his debt. My parents couldn’t very well accuse him of lying, and they realized Mr. Abernathy would never release us from our so-called obligations.
They came up with a plan, one that involved food. My mother spent all day making various kinds of soul food like fried chicken, barbecue, ribs, homemade breads, and pies. Even to this day, if I close my eyes, I can still smell the sweet aroma of my mama’s blackberry cobbler wafting through that tiny house. After she cooked, she loaded everything into our car and then drove to places the Abernathys would never go, like black baseball games. I’d sit by her side while she was cooking. “Marie,” my mama would say to me, “you can’t ever mention this to anyone.” I was named after my aunt Alice. Instead of calling me Li’l Alice, they called me by my middle name, Marie.
When we got to the black parts of town, Mama and Daddy would open up the trunk and secretly sell every morsel. Sometimes our car—nicknamed Nellie Bell—would break down on the way back home, so we’d have to get out and push. But with every step, we were getting further and further away from the poverty of the cotton fields. Little by little, my parents squirreled away money. Mr. Abernathy never suspected that my parents were working all day for him and still had enough energy and productivity to make money in other ways. But that’s exactly what they did.
Daddy secretly bought a house in Olive Branch, which was about ten miles from where we lived. The house was basically just a frame, probably not even a thousand square feet. During the days, Daddy got up early, milked the cows, picked cotton, then milked the cows again. Then, at night, he sneaked away to hang the Sheetrock on that wooden frame. He installed the windows, put down the floors, and eventually my mother hung the curtains. Once the house was finished, my parents moved our belongings just a few things at a time in the car during the night, so the Abernathys wouldn’t be any the wiser.
Once, in the middle of the night, I woke up with a hand over my mouth. My mother looked at me with wide eyes and a finger over her own mouth.
“Shhhhhhh . . .”
I tried to talk, but she wouldn’t let me. She scooped me up into her arms and put me into Nellie Bell’s back seat. My whole family was there, including cousins and my uncles. The car was in neutral, the headlights were off. In the darkness, I tried to ask questions—Where were we going? Why was it a secret?—but every time I tried to ask, someone would put a hand over my mouth.
The men pushed the car quietly down the driveway, the only sound the gravel crunching beneath the wheels. No one said a word, until we finally made it to a little store down the road. When we got there, they turned on the headlights and everyone cheered. With all the secrecy and covert planning, you would’ve thought we were slaves escaping the plantation. Mr. Abernathy never suspected a thing, and I never saw that old house again. Looking back, I realize how much courage it took for my parents to defy mean old Mr. Abernathy like that in the Jim Crow South, but they did it for us kids. For our futures.
Though Olive Branch was only ten miles down the road, it felt like a whole other world. My daddy got a job as a welder, which meant we had more money. My mama got a job cooking at the Lions Club, the Jaycees, and both the white and the black schools. Later, she worked at a country club as the head chef. Consequently, our family became well respected in the community, and, as an added bonus, Mama was able to bring home fine food to feed us. You can’t ever feel poor when you are feasting on filet mignon, even if you’re eating leftovers from the rich white folk. Eventually, in 1975, she fulfilled her dream of opening her own restaurant—Sallie’s Kitchen Restaurant—so we always ate as well as anyone else. By then, her cooking skills were so renowned that she didn’t even have to advertise.
The new house had three bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, and even a bathroom. At first, it didn’t have running water, so Julius slept in the bathroom—and I was jealous of him because, as the only boy, he had all the privacy. Every time I bring this up—even to this day—Julius points out that sleeping in the bathroom wasn’t as glamorous as I made it out to be. When we did get the bathroom hooked up to water, I was the first one in my class with an indoor toilet. If you ever wanted a shortcut to popularity back then, indoor plumbing was it. Thankfully, Daddy loved gadgets. We were the first ones to get a party line telephone and the first ones to get a color television, so our home was the place all our friends wanted to be. To this day, I don’t know how Mama made room for us all, but we always had plenty of room, food, and love.
I knew about love, but I was woefully uneducated when it came to sex and anatomy—which meant their strategy was working, as far as my parents were concerned. Once, however, when I was a Girl Scout, my sisters and I somehow came across a magazine that had photographs of nudists. I’d never seen a naked man before, so my sisters and I were shocked at the images we secretly viewed far away from Mama’s watchful gaze. I was shocked when I saw the private parts of a man in the photo. I’d never seen anything like it, but I wasn’t going to let my sisters know that.
“What are those?” My sister Patricia pointed at the photograph.
I always needed to have an answer, whether or not I actually knew what I was talking about. “Those are eggs,” I said. “And that’s a bird.”
“What?” She gasped. “Well, that’s the ugliest bird I’ve ever seen.”
And so we made do, trying to figure out this topic by ourselves. Children were supposed to do as they were told and not ask questions.
* * *
One thing I never needed to question was my faith. I’ve always known the Lord. If my parents ever wondered where I was, they knew to find me lying down in the grass somewhere, looking up at the sky and talking to Jesus. I was ten years old when I wrote my first poem, called “Who Is He?”
It began:
Sometimes, I look upon the fields
At the scattered hay and blowing mills
And I wonder
Who made us all?
Was he big or was he tall?
Does he stand erect with pride?
Can he see my glistening eyes?
Can you hear his voice so clear?
When he is not even near?
Those things I cannot say
Because I wasn’t there that glorious day.
When I recited that poem at school, my teacher called other teachers into the room to hear me say it. They entered me into a competition with the middle schoolers, and I won even though I was younger than the rest of the entrants.
Daddy was a praying man. When he prayed, the whole church lit up. Prayers were some of the only times I ever saw my daddy cry, he’d sometimes be so moved by the experience. When he walked into even a visiting church, they’d call him up to the front and say, “Mr. Boggan is here. Can you lead us in prayer or a song?” Mama was very encouraging, but if Daddy ever missed a word she would definitely let him know.
Mama was our church’s welcome and announcement person and mistress of ceremonies for as long as I can remember. On our way to church, she’d write down the order of the events and what she needed to say. She didn’t have to plan too much in advance, because she had a ready-made choir with just her own kids. Plus, she had a knack for knowing who could do what. One memorable Sunday, the piano player didn’t show up, and we walked in to see her sitting on the piano bench. It looked like the spirit was moving her, but the sounds coming from the piano didn’t necessarily match her enthusiasm. She never said no to an opportunity and was never afraid to fill in when needed.
At some point, however, our parents’ faith was not enough. When we got old enough, we were expected to join the church and be baptized. But you couldn’t just walk up to the preacher and tell him you wanted to join. Not back then. When I was eleven years old, my sister Patricia and I went down to the “mourner’s bench,” where the preacher approached us and motioned us to kneel during a weeklong revival.
Then the elders of the congregation gathered and sang songs really loudly all around us. They’d sing about driving “old Satan away,” over and over. While they sang, we repeated, “Oh Lawd, save my soul, oh Lawd, save my soul.”
We repeated this until the spirit hit us. How long that took, exactly, depended on the person and God . . . It usually took a week. Honestly, it would’ve embarrassed our parents if it took us too long, because people might have speculated we were full of sin. The congregation could tell when the Holy Spirit fell, when you started crying, running, shouting, or jumping for joy. That’s when everyone knew God was there and that Satan had been driven out. I didn’t stay too long. I came off the mourner’s bench on Tuesday.
Maybe some people faked this enthusiasm for God, just to get on with the process, but not me. When I was on the mourner’s bench, I focused on God and really felt His presence. When the spirit hit me, my shouting was purely exuberant praise. Afterward, I prepared to be baptized in the pond behind the church. I was dressed all in white and my gown was tied at the ankle so it wouldn’t billow up in the water.
First, the deacons made sure there were no cows or snakes in the pond. Then three deacons and the preacher—all dressed in white too—waded out into the water. My daddy was a deacon, so he baptized me. Even though the water was muddy, I came up feeling fresh, clean, and oh so righteous.
Okay, so maybe I was just a little pious too. That was back when I knew everything.
Back then, parents didn’t sit down and talk to their kids about serious issues. I learned all I ever needed to know about the important things in life by eavesdropping. We had one phone in the middle of the house. When my mama talked, she was like E. F. Hutton. All of us kids listened. When grown folks came over, my mama always shooed us kids away. But I never left. My favorite thing to do was to crouch just outside the room or behind a chair and listen to my parents talk about the world. This frequently included conversation about racial issues.
Amid all of the sad, depressing tales, they spoke hopefully about the future. It was during those times that I overheard my mother talking to her friends one day about a charismatic, peaceful man named Martin Luther King Jr. He seemed to give her so much courage, and I detected awe in her voice as she described him. I think he also inspired her to action. Mama was active with the NAACP so she could make sure black people voted for whomever they wanted. By helping the poor people in our Mississippi community, my mother was an unsung hero of the civil rights movement.
At the time, most places were segregated. Being educated in an all-black school meant we didn’t think much about race. We had great black teachers, a talented black band, and we had some great achievers come out of little East Side High School. I loved to learn, and the Boggan kids had a reputation for being smart. Plus, I think people showed us special favor because of my mother, a woman truly ahead of her time. She cared about what would now be described as social justice issues, though at the time it just seemed like common courtesy, right and wrong.
When poor people—of either race—got into trouble, they called on Mama to help represent them in the courtroom. Usually, if she vouched for them, the judges would give more lenient sentences just based on her word. Or if people were being sentenced, they counted on her to show up at sentencing. The judge would allow her to essentially be the parole officer for that prisoner. She would promise to keep an eye on them, to make sure they were in church, and so forth. Also, she helped many people get their first jobs by speaking up for them. As a sign of just how well regarded they were, my mother and father were the first black grand marshals of the Olive Branch parade. Everyone in town knew about her cooking, which allowed her to get to know all the bankers and business owners. Because she treated everyone well, she and my father were very well regarded in the community by both whites and blacks alike.
But I just knew her as Mama. On Sunday mornings, she’d get up and make us breakfast—fried chicken, biscuits, gravy, and rice. We’d line up around the kitchen table, which had benches on either side of it, and my father would say the Lord’s Prayer. (I could recite the Lord’s Prayer before my ABCs.) Your age and rank in the family determined which piece of the chicken you got: the breast was for the most senior among us, and the youngest received the wing, which had less meat on the bone.
Mama got up early every Sunday morning and had both breakfast and dinner prepared before we’d head to Mount Gilliam Church in nearby Byhalia. Most of the time, she didn’t invite people over for dinner, they just showed up. Our home was situated on a little hill, and people walking by could hear the music coming from our small house. They’d stop by to see what was going on and they’d stay for dinner. She always cooked more than enough to feed everyone. After we ate, my sister Celestine played spirituals on the piano and everyone sang. I danced next to the piano, perfectly free and full of joy.
Though we had next to nothing, we were richer than anyone I knew.
* * *
One night, when I was tucked snugly in bed, I overheard grown-up conversation from the other room. My parents were talking to a man; I could tell that much from his deep voice. Though I strained to hear what they were saying, I couldn’t make out the words. In the morning, he was gone.
This happened a few times. Then one night, my mama crept into our room and woke us up, and I could hear that man’s voice talking to my father. A stranger’s voice.
“Y’all children, get up,” she whispered. “I want you to meet somebody.” We crawled out of bed and rubbed the sleep out of our eyes. I had been in a deep sleep and had no idea what time it was. We followed our mother to the living room. There, I saw a man who reminded me of my father sitting on the couch. He bore a strong resemblance to him—was he an uncle?—but I’d never seen him before. And so we sat, uncomfortably, in the room as my parents introduced us.
“This is Marie,” my mama said, then went down the line introducing the rest of us. Though he was still, the man’s eyes were full of emotion. When he looked at us adoringly, we felt like he was just drinking us in.
At the end of our short visit, he called us over to him. “Come here, baby,” he said. “Do you know who I am?” Of course, it was a rhetorical question, since we’d never been introduced.
My brother later told me that this was our true grandfather. His name was Charlie Carter, but he went by Emmett Jones. He’d moved to Watson, Arkansas, and had created a life for himself. He was a woodsman—a logger—but he couldn’t read. He got along fine without being able to read, but he’d fallen in love with a woman who lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She wrote him love letters, full of sentiments he never would be able to enjoy. Instead of writing back, he kept the well-worn letters for years without knowing the content. When his factory offered him a promotion, he knew he couldn’t perform the job without being literate. He turned the promotion down, but he was too proud to explain to his boss why.
He had a nice, secretive life in Arkansas, but he did have to go home for his mother’s funeral. That’s when the sheriff found out he was in town. When my grandfather discovered that the law was after him, he fled. He ran and jumped out the back door of the church to get away.
The man we called Uncle Dan was apparently my father’s stepdad—not his biological dad. The true story, the one my parents couldn’t trust us to know, was much darker. When my grandmother was pregnant with my father, our nighttime visitor had gone to buy some whiskey at a store owned by a white man. The man’s daughter came out to the counter and started to flirt with him. The store owner came back to the counter, overheard the flirtatious banter, and pulled out a gun.
The man froze, but the store owner pulled the trigger anyway. Some of the buckshot struck the man, so he pulled out his pistol and returned fire. The store owner, hit, crumpled to the floor. Though the man didn’t die, his self-defense altered the course of his life forever. He changed his name, ran away, and never stopped running from the law. He never got a chance to raise my father. This pained him very much, especially as time went on and he couldn’t even know his grandchildren.
The only man I knew as my grandfather, the man we called Uncle Dan, married my grandmother even though she was pregnant with my dad, in order to give him a proper name and a future. Daddy looked legitimate, but everyone knew that he had been conceived by a different man—everyone but us grandkids. My real biological grandfather secretly visited us at night, for a few sleepy hours stretched out over years.
As a kid, I didn’t realize how very tragic that actually was. But soon enough, I’d know the pain of family separation all too well.