Souls Grown Deep, Vol. 1 by William Arnett

I had a cousin was real sick in Buffalo, New York, I went there to see about. But I just put it damn down and went to Buffalo, New York. We had to ride the bus to school in Greensboro. I went to the ninth grade here-it didn't go higher than the ninth-and then we had to go to Hale County to the training school. I walked from way up there to way down here. It's too hot now, and too cold, and it rains too much, or not enough. The weather wasn't like it is now or we wouldn't have got nowhere. Things we shouldn't have done we had to do. We walk two, three miles over to a guy's house and got our water 'cause they had a well. We used to have to go down to the creek, haul our wash water. We used to struggle, and saw our wood, and work like men-and the two boys wouldn't do a damn thing. She keep throwing it off, we throw it back on. We reloaded it, and reload again, till we got home. She would drop to throw the wood off, and when the wagon was empty, she'd go on. And every time we would put it on there, she wouldn't pull away. We had to saw them up and put them on the wagon that the damn horse wouldn't pull. We always had to go in the woods and we had to saw trees down-big trees. We had everything to do, and it was really hard. So we just suffered along the way, and we had to be our own parents. Except I always seemed to be able to get to myself and correct myself.Īs we grew on up, it stayed rough. You have to have stability and attitude about you to raise children, to know how to make picks and chooses between them, and everything went bad. There's a adult part and a child part in everybody, and when adults act worser than a child, they can't raise a child. They was children themselves, if you want to know the truth. We had a lot of us, and the parents didn't know how to discipline. Growing up, it was horrible it was terrible. I don't know why, they just popped out on my head. Everybody else got that long straight Indian hair, and I just got me these old knots. We got plenty of Indians back in the family but I can't rake them up. She had fourteen children herself, I think she said. My grandmama had been a white man's daughter, and my mother had the white folks' hair. My mama did tell me that I was born anemic and had pneumonia, and the doctor had to come to feed me three times a day. She says it was somewhere down here in the woods somewhere, in a house that burned down.

I was born here in Hale County somewhere, in a old house burned down, over where I call 'the swamp.' I don't know exactly where.

Souls Grown Deep, Vol. 1 by William Arnett