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Fiction Vignette

Grady T. Kirbo

Grady T. Kirbo is a native southerner born in Albertville, Alabama in 1948. He is currently working in Alabama as a freelance journalist and writer and is pursuing a doctorate in communications at the University of Colorado. He lives with his family in Alabama and in Boulder, Colorado.

Black Dress Shoes on a Red Dirt Road

I spent a long time looking out at the overgrown field my brothers and I slaved in as youngsters. A different life; a different world.

Deep down South, the summer sun beats on down so hard that you think it's gonna come through on the other side. The cotton is spurting outta its bowls and lotsa backs are bent in them fields. Folks like tall cotton, healthy pretty cotton and not so far to bend at it.

My daddy didn't have nothing; what with ten children to feed, he was always bent and broke. Not much time for school when you was a sharecropper neither. We rotated going to school; go a day and then work a day, like that. Reckon I didn't go to school two days running til I was in sixth grade.

Our house was papered inside with paper taken from magazines like Look and Life that got throwed out downtown. I learned myself to read from them pages and got me a hankering to see the world come the time I could run off.

The road we lived on was red Georgia clay with lots of ruts from cars going down when it was mud. Didn't have no shoes most the time. Never in the summers and raggedy ones stuffed with paper, winters. Didn't get that cold nohow deep down there. We could do without lotsa things.

Even though we was poor as Job's turkey, and had to work most of the time as soon as we could see over the end of the bed, Daddy wanted for us. He didn't have no education hisself and couldn't read nor write but let him catch us fallin' outta our school work and we'd get strapped good. "You wanna grow up and live yo whole life behind a mule?" he would shout.

Lotsa uppity people called us poor white trash 'cause we was poor and lived like the black folks had to live. Wasn't spit bit of difference between us and the coloreds 'cept the color of our skin and getting to sit in the white folks' part of the bus station. But we was the cleanest poor folk, I reckon. Mama scrubbed us down every night before supper with a bristle brush that nearly would skin you and we dried off by the woodstove mama used to cook on. The water in the pot she washed used to wash us got a little soupy towards the end but we was clean.

Supper was always a solemn occasion, like going to church on Sundays. We was all clean and dressed as best we could and there was always something to eat even if it was just greens and a turnip or some fatback. All of us sat there and waited for daddy to say the blessing and then we wolfed down the food to try and hush up the noise in our stomachs. Wasn't much, but what was not on the table was in daddy and mama's hearts for us.

Night time come along and mama would sing songs to us as we lay down tired and full of sleep. Then the Sandman came, you know, the man who looked over you while you were asleep and left a little sand in the corners of your eyes come morning.

I came back to my roots after running off to join the army. I went to college on the GI Bill, even graduate school and became a professor. Standing there in that dirt road in my shiny black dress shoes, I heard the sounds of poor blowing in the breeze and banging on the old fence in front of that house done gone to ruin so long ago.