When I left home: my story (2015)

Before I Left Home

Flour Sack

You might be looking through a book of pictures or walking through a museum where they got photographs of people picking cotton back in the 1940s. Your eye might be drawn to a photo of a family out in the fields. There’s a father with his big ol’ sack filled with cotton. There’s a woman next to him—maybe his wife, maybe his sister. And next to them is a boy, maybe nine years old. He got him a flour sack. That’s all he can manage. After all, it’s his first day picking.

That little boy could be me. I started picking at about that age. I stood next to my daddy, who showed me how to do the job right.

Depending where you coming from, you could feel sorry for that little boy, thinking he’s being misused. You could feel he’s too young to work like that. You could decide that the world he was born into—the world of sharecropping—was cruel and unfair. And you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. Except that if that boy was me and you were able to get inside my little head, you’d find that I was happy being out there with my daddy, doing the work that the big people did. I wanted to be grown and help my family any way I could. Didn’t know anything else except the land and the sky and the seasons and the fruits and the fish and the horses and the cows and the pigs and the pecans and the birds and the moss and the white cotton that we prayed came up plentiful enough to give us enough money to make it through winter.

I saw the world through the eyes of my mama and daddy. Their eyes were looking at the earth. The earth had to yield. If it did, we ate. If it didn’t, we scrambled. Because we didn’t have no electricity—not for the first twelve years of my life—we were cut off from what was happening outside our little spot in Louisiana called Lettsworth. I didn’t know it at the time, but we were living and farming like people lived and farmed a hundred years before. When I got my little flour sack and went out in the field, I was doing something my people had been doing ever since we were herded up like cattle in Africa, sent out on slave boats, and forced to work the land of the southern states of America. That fact, though, was something that came into my mind when I was an adult playing my music in Senegal. Someone brought me to the Point of No Return, one of the places where slaves were sent off to make that terrible Atlantic crossing. Maybe that’s where the blues began.

But to me—nine-year-old George Buddy Guy, son of Sam and Isabell Guy, born July 30, 1936—black history was not part of the elementary schooling I got at the True Vine Baptist Church. That’s where I was taught to use utensils and read little books about white children called Dick and Jane. Black people weren’t in those books. Blacks weren’t part of history. All we knew was the present time. We knew today, and today meant shuck the corn and feed the pig and go to school in the evenings after our chores were done.

I had fears—snakes and lightning and ghosts who were said to haunt the graveyards. But I had something bigger than those fears—a feeling of family. Back then, family feeling was stronger than it is today. If you had a righteous mom and dad like I did, they could make you feel that, no matter what, everything was all right. If you had two older sisters like mine—Annie Mae and Fanny—and two younger brothers—Philip and Sam—who always had your back, you felt protected.

We lived in a wooden shack built up on pillars. We didn’t have no indoor plumbing. When it was blistering hot and we wanted to escape the heat, we’d go under the cabin where the dirt was cool. The inside was just a couple rooms and a wood-burning stove. No running water. We pumped the water into a number-three tub for our weekly baths. We also used those tubs to soak the pecans we picked so that when we sold them by the pound, they weighed a little more.

I didn’t know about glass windows. Our windows were made of wood. When it rained, we shut the windows and, if it was summertime, we sweated bullets. The crazy Louisiana weather had all kinds of storms rolling through. I once saw a killer hurricane tear the porch from the rest of our cabin and blow it some twenty feet away—with Daddy and Fanny standing right on it! When lightning ripped open the sky, I ran to Mama, who held me in her arms and whispered, “Don’t say nothing, boy, that’s just God doing his work.”

Our work never stopped. The business broke down like this: a family owned the land and got half of everything we produced. When I was younger we lived on a smaller farm. But when I turned eight we moved to a larger plantation. That land was enormous. There were cattle and horses and acres of corn and cotton. On a good day I could pick seventy pounds of cotton. (My brother Sam got up to two hundred pounds.) I learned to rope the cow and ride the horse. I had a pony of my own. I ran around the land barefoot and learned to shoot a barrel shotgun. If I went out in the woods with my dog and came home with a bird or rabbit, I’d get a pat on the back from Daddy and a hug from Mama. During dinner that night I might get seconds.

We farmed six days a week. There were no such things as parties on Saturday night. Sunday was the True Vine Baptist Church. Church was happy because the music was happy. I was taught that we didn’t use just our voices or tambourines to praise God—we used our whole bodies. Wasn’t no shame in jumping and shouting for the Lord. Jesus was so good, such a beautiful feeling of pure love in our lives, that he got all of us, body and soul.

I believe it was Jesus that got us through the tough times. We didn’t have no irrigation. We didn’t have the technology people got today. Any long spell of bad weather meant disaster. And we had many a bad spell. I remember the look on Daddy’s face when a long drought killed the cotton crop. There were no other jobs to get—the land was all we had. There were five growing kids to feed. Seeing that they had to do something to keep us from starving, the landowners might give Daddy a few dollars to buy a sack of flour. Mama could make that flour go a long way.

Mama grew the sweet potato, and when she cooked it in the wood stove it came out so sweet we didn’t need no sugar on top. Her biscuits were light and fluffy, and her cornbread put a taste in our mouths that had us smiling for the rest of the day. The greens came from the yard. If we had enough money to buy feed, the chicken grew until it was time to wring its neck. That was the kids’ job. With blood squirting and feathers flying, we plucked it clean. Then I’d drive the horse and wagon to fetch wood for Mama’s stove. She’d cook it juicy good and brown. You never did hear of the salmonella.

You never did hear of the cancer. The food could be sparse, but it was fresh. Mama got up at 4:30 to cook for the sharecroppers, so when the troops—me, my brothers and sisters, and our dad—came in from the fields for lunch, those good beans and rice kept us going for the rest of the day. No one talked about peptic ulcers or irritable bowel syndrome. If someone got really sick, the landowners would rustle up a doctor from somewhere, but that could take days. Better stay healthy.

We were isolated. No newspapers. In my early years, no radio. When I was five I heard talk about America being attacked at Pearl Harbor, but I didn’t really understand. The war was in another world. Our world was farming. Our shack was at least a mile away from our nearest neighbor. I could see their shack from the porch of our cabin when the corn wasn’t up. But when the crop came in, looking out from our porch I saw nothing but tall, yellow stalks waving at the sun.

We ate fresh nonbird meat but once a year: pork at Christmas. Fact is that there were only two holidays on the plantation—Christmas and Easter. They didn’t tell us about Thanksgiving and turkey. And if the crops were right for picking, no one was about to take off no Fourth of July. Christmas was special, not because we had money for presents but because it was time to slaughter a pig.

Because no one had refrigeration, meat had to be eaten quickly. Salt could preserve it some, but nothing tastes better than fresh pork. That meant everyone had to cooperate. My folks and our neighbors would get together a few weeks before Christmas to work out the pig-killing schedule. Mr. Johnson, for example, would slaughter his pig on December 10, keep a good chunk for his family, and give the rest to us neighbors. Five days later Mr. Smith would do the same. Then it was our turn. I spent so much time feeding our pig that he became a friend. Pigs have personalities. Some of them are real friendly and cute. When I was told to cut his throat, I had to pause. Had to think about it. Was the last thing in the world I wanted to do, but despite my feelings, I grabbed hold of the knife and did it.

First music I heard—first music that touched my heart—wasn’t made by man. It was the music of the birds. They was singing in the morning and singing at night. They caught my ear and had me wondering about all the creatures made by God. Some crawled and hissed and poisoned you with their bite; others flew and sang and serenaded you with their sweetness. I could follow the different melodies made by different birds. How did they learn their songs? Why were they pretty? When they sang I’d close my eyes so that everything disappeared except those little chirpy songs that made me realize that the world was filled with beautiful sounds.

My folks only had a third-grade education, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t appreciate talent. There was a man named Henry Smith who had talent. Daddy called him Coot and made sure he came over every Christmas with his two-string guitar. They’d give him wine and have him play. His was the first guitar I ever saw, the first one I ever touched. I watched him pick the thing with his fingers and produce a sound that gave me goose bumps. He sang a song called “Tomorrow Night.” Later I learned a blues singer called Lonnie Johnson recorded it. When I first heard Coot we still didn’t have no electricity, which meant no radio or records. Coot would take a wooden chair, sit himself down, put the guitar on his lap, and make it talk. Just two strings. His voice wasn’t big, but it went good with the music. Told a story. Made you stop and listen. Naturally he had no drummer, but when he kept time by stomping his foot on the wooden floor, you felt like dancing. You felt like playing and singing yourself.

You best believe I studied Coot. I saw how him and that guitar were connected. It was his woman, his baby, his friend. He stroked it like you stroke a dog. He made it cry and he made it laugh. He had it telling stories that I never heard before. He made me wanna get one.

When Mama bought her first set of screens for our windows, I saw my chance. The screens were a blessing. They protected us from those Louisiana skeeters that were big enough to carry us out the room. Studying them closely, though, seemed like the screens were made from guitar strings. At least that’s how I saw it. When my folks were gone I’d take down a screen and pull out a couple of wires from the top. Then I’d string ’em between two tin cans and pretend it was a guitar. I saw how different degrees of tightness gave different sounds. But come morning, Mama and Daddy saw how we was eaten up by the skeeters.

“Who been fooling with the screens?” asked Daddy.

I kept quiet as his eyes darted from child to child before settling on me.

“Why don’t you fix these, Buddy, and make sure it don’t happen again.”

I fixed the screen, but the next day I was fixing up a new contraption—rubber bands stretched out and tacked to the wall. I kept plucking them just like I’d plucked the strings, looking to make the kind of melody that I heard from Coot. Late at night, under the light of a full moon, you’d find me out back sawing off chunks of wood, hoping to put together something that resembled a guitar. Every time, though, I made a mess of it.

But those ringing sounds that Coot made, together with the sweet songs of the birds, never left my head. My head was filled up with music I couldn’t play.

After doing our farm work, we walked many miles over gravel roads to school at the True Vine. On the way, a yellow school bus crowded with white kids passed us by. They was on their way to a regular schoolhouse. Sometimes those kids leaned out the window and threw rocks at us. All we could do was jump out the way. I wanted to throw rocks back at them: if a snake bites you, your natural reaction is to crush it dead. But in this case we were outnumbered twenty to one, and there wasn’t a chance in hell to retaliate. I didn’t think that much about it. I was taught that some white folks were decent and some were downright nasty—just like colored folks. I was taught to avoid the nasty folks of both races.

In our part of Louisiana I never heard stories about the Ku Klux Klan. My father instructed me to address white men as “mister,” but he gave me the same instructions about black men. No color deserved more respect than any other.

The most respect I earned came from taming horses. As a youngster, I got me a reputation as someone who could tame a wild animal. Neighbors would bring me their spirited horses. Can’t exactly explain how I did it, but it came natural. I could talk to a horse. I could even reason with a horse. I’d say, “I feel that you’re wild. I like that you’re wild. But listen here, boy. I’m gonna let you take me on one last ride, and then I’m gonna make you behave.” I felt a kinship with wild horses—something I understood a little better when I got older and started playing guitar. At a young age, I could see wildness in horses, but I couldn’t see it in myself—at least not yet.

I loved baseball, but in the backwoods of Louisiana we didn’t have no Little League. We didn’t even have a regular hardball. We mashed up cans to hit with a broomstick. We put down rocks for bases. And when it came to listening to games, we went with our dads where we stood in the backyard of the white man who put his radio on his windowsill so we could hear the broadcast. From faraway Brooklyn, we heard how the Dodgers had signed Jackie Robinson, the first black to play in the majors. I could feel the pride in my daddy’s heart. I could feel my own heart beating fast when Jackie slapped a double against Warren Spahn of the Boston Braves or stole home against the Phils. When Jackie won Rookie of the Year in 1947, I was only eleven, but you’d think that it was me, along with every black boy in America, who had won the award. I guess the award was for all of us who didn’t have the money to buy a mitt or the means to ever see a big league game.

I was too young to remember when Joe Louis fought Max Schmeling in the 1930s, but as a youngster, I was out in the backyard, standing next to my father and grandfather as Louis beat down Billy Conn in the thirteenth round. I remember all of us hooting and hollering for a man who, before Jackie Robinson, was the only American hero with skin the color of ours.

When I think of tough characters, my Daddy’s mama comes to mind. I never saw her without a corn pipe in her mouth. When the pipe was smoked out, she’d take the burnt ashes and spread them over her lips. If any of us misbehaved, she was the first to notice. She wouldn’t think twice about grabbing the biggest switch off the tree and tanning our bottoms.

On the other hand, Grandpa was more a talker. He liked to tell stories. His favorite—the one that spooked us out—was about the Jesse James days, when white folks was scared to keep their money in the banks. Instead they buried their cash in the ground around certain graves. To keep the black man from digging up that cash, the white man spread a scary story—that ghosts guarded the burial grounds. They said that if you wanted to hunt for the money, you had to leave out shots of whiskey. Give the ghosts whiskey and the ghosts wouldn’t bother you none. As a child, these stories messed with me. They crept inside my mind and stayed there. I had dreams of drunken ghosts chasing me all over the chicken house.

Just as bad weather led to the death of the crops, bad circumstances led to the death of people I knew. In the country, death comes often. I remember putting my uncle George in a plain pine box when he died a young man. When I heard that a neighbor, sick of mind, slit his own throat and bled to death, I thought of Christmastime when I had to slit the throat of the pig. Why would anyone slit his own throat?

A little friend of mine, Grant Clark, went hunting in the woods with his dad. Many times I’d done the same thing. But my friend never came back. In a terrible accident that was no one’s fault, a gunshot blew off the top of his head. That also haunted my dreams for months afterward.

Life in the country is set by the seasons. In the early months we sit behind the mule as he pulls the tractor to cut furrows in the soil where we’d soon be planting seeds. The mule ain’t easy. The mule don’t like to be told nothing. “Stubborn as a mule” ain’t no lie. The mule likes to fart in your face and piss in the wind. He got the foulest-smelling shit of any animal on earth. And all the time that I’m shouting for him to get done with this dirty work, I’m whipping his fat butt so I can get home and play baseball or run into the woods with my rifle with the hope of bagging a bird for dinner.

Life was steady. We grew the greens, we picked the cotton, we planted the corn. It was a cycle that didn’t stop. We watched the sky, hoping that the weather be kind. We watched the fields, hoping the crops would grow.

In a world without changes, one change did come. It didn’t keep us from farming like we’d always farmed, but it did give us something we’d never had before.