These sample chapters will give you a feel for the voice and story of "Boiled Peanuts and Buckeyes". The full chapters are available in PDF format, and require Adobe Reader. [Get Adobe Reader Free]
Preface
When I was growing up in the steamy heat of the South during the 1930s and ‘40s, as one of two boys being raised by a single mother with less than a fifth-grade education, I had no inkling that we were poor. My days were so filled with the richness of friends, music, handmade toys, sports, nature, and the love of my mother that life for me was both full and fulfilling. In addition, my life was filled with the scrumptious tastes, smells, and sounds of the South—tastes like sweet, crisp watermelon savored in a clearing of the woods on a stifling July afternoon after splashing around in a swimming hole. There were smells like the aroma of freshly ground peanut butter mingled with the fragrance of newly picked cotton that left its mark everywhere, and sounds like the shunting of railroad cars on steely tracks or the desolate yet oddly comforting cry of a passing train’s whistle. There in my corner of the world, green as an unripe peanut snug within its shell, I couldn’t imagine having or wanting anything more.
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Chapter 1
Upon my birth on February 22, 1916, I was given the name Myrtice Mae Armstrong, and later I changed the spelling of my first name to Mertice. One of the most critical times of my life was when my mother died.
According to the calendar, March 7, 1922, was close to being spring. No one had told the sun that, however. A late winter storm that year, with an extended period of below-freezing temperatures, had caused the ground to freeze, resulting in what I had heard my daddy refer to as a barkbusting cold winter. I sat on the ragged old couch staring out the window at the frozen, lifeless ground outside my Freeport, Florida, home only two weeks after my sixth birthday. Until yesterday, it had been a happy home. Poor, but happy. The excitement from my birthday had not worn off yet—until last night, that is. Last night my mamma died, only a few days after she had given birth to my twin brothers, Hilburn and Wilburn, who were born on February 26, 1922. She was one month short of being thirty-eight years of age, and now was as cold and stiff as the skeletal fingers of the laurel oaks, water oaks, and maples that tapped an unsettling rhythm against the windowpane on which my forehead rested. The only difference between them and my mamma’s lifeless body was that they would eventually flush and bear fruit again.
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Chapter 7
In 1942, Camp Rucker opened as a training facility for soldiers going overseas. Many of the soldiers who went to Camp Rucker were from the North, and many blacks were included. A lot of the people working in the cotton mill took jobs at the camp. That left the mill extremely shorthanded. The mill was forced to hire blacks. However, they gave the blacks that were hired the worst jobs in the mill, usually in the card room. Not only was there a lot of lint there—more than in the spinning room—but there was also a great deal of dust and dirt. Not having hired blacks before, there were no separate toilets for them. Some of the whites complained that they were not going to use toilets that were being used by blacks, but eventually they did.
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Chapter 11
It seems like I was always moving in the early years as I struggled to make a living and support Eudon and T.E. It wasn’t, and still isn’t, easy to find a job that pays well with less than a fifth-grade education. I would work someplace until I found a better paying job that would allow me to better raise my two boys. Those with deep and established roots stayed put in their surroundings. Some, unable to find work, watched as their hard-earned property and possessions slipped away from them. Others, like me, became wanderers. We floated through life like driftwood, our destinations determined by the tides of life. Somehow, we stayed afloat and always washed up in safe harbors.
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