"In The Snuff Dust"

My father used to beat my mother savagely. I remember, as they say, like yesterday when daddy threw mama off of the back porch, stalking her down the stairs, pulling her up by her hair, and dragging her into the field behind our outhouse. The crops, depending upon the time of year, were about six feet tall. My father stood six-feet-five and could see clearly enough over the crops to drag mama for what seemed like miles sometimes. Local legend amongst the folks in town was that my father laid the blow that killed the son of the man who owned his parents.

Plotted and carried out alone, whoever killed that Thurmond boy did it with a rage that only a slave would have had. Thurmond was armed, and yet, simply no match for the man that torched him—and twenty acres of Virginia’s finest tobacco. That shotgun that Thurmond carried was buried under a patch of the red clay that made as the floor of what couldn’t be called anything but slave huts. I put it to my father’s throat one night as he watched that pitiful black and white television in our living room area. My brothers and I beat him severely enough that he never hit my mother again. As a matter of fact, he just began to stay at home less and less after I left. Later on, sometime after my twenty-first birthday, he was found in an outhouse in between a white woman’s legs, with a gunshot wound to the back of the head. The woman was left with a matching one on her forehead.