When I left home: my story (2015)

Before I Left Home

The Rouge

The idea was simple: move to Baton Rouge, go to high school, and learn something better than farming.

“Farming ain’t getting you nowhere,” said Daddy. “You gotta get some schooling, boy. We gonna be living hand to mouth long as we on this land. The business is set up to keep us down. But I don’t want you down, son. I want you up.”

Sister Annie Mae was happy to take me in. She had a decent job at LSU, and her husband worked at Standard Oil. She gave me fifteen cent a day for my little expenses and a rollaway bed where I slept in the front room. Annie Mae was wonderful to me. She was also something of a mess, but what I’d call a beautiful mess. Come Saturday night, she’d be deep into the wine and beer. She could get wild. Many were the times when the police had to put her in jail for getting crazy in the barrooms. She never did get violent on me, though, and for those first months that I was away from home she became my second mom.

I finished out eighth grade at McKinley High and had every intention of going on with my schooling. Then one day Annie Mae came running in the house. She had just been out to Lettsworth. Her eyes were wet with tears.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Mama just took a stroke.”

“What’s a stroke?” I had to ask.

“They say it’s when the blood doesn’t flow to your brain right. Everything gets thrown off.”

“I don’t understand.”

“She can hardly talk. Can hardly move.”

“Is Mama about to die?” I asked.

“I don’t think so, but I don’t really know. All I know is that the doctor says she’ll never be the same.”

That same day I went out to Lettsworth and saw that Mama couldn’t talk and could hardly walk. Her mouth was droopy and her eyes were far away. She’d always been a woman up and working before anyone. She looked after her husband and kids with all the love and care in the world, and seeing her like this broke my heart. Broke Daddy’s heart too. Never seen my father look helpless before—he always knew what to do.

“Doctor says ain’t nothing to do,” said Daddy.

But I knew what I had to do.

I had to go home.

When Mama took her stroke, everything changed. She could no longer smile. I’d seen that smile my whole life. It was my sunshine. That smile told me the world was alright and that I could get through anything. I’d be hungry for that smile for the rest of my life.

We tried, but without Mama we couldn’t go back to our old lives. I left Baton Rouge and went home to work the fields, but the Guy family could never be what it once was.

One night after we’d been picking cotton all day, me, Daddy, and my brothers were sitting around, tired in our bodies and our minds. Mom was in the bed. Daddy went and took her hand.

“You know, Isabell,” he said, “you’d never let any of us come home to a dirty shirt or a dirty sheet or a dirty dish. Never did happen. You never did miss a day of work. And on most days you did more work than three or four strong men. Ain’t that right, honey?”

Mama couldn’t answer, but Daddy kept talking.

“You gonna be all right,” he said. “We all here for you. We waiting on you, Isabell. We waiting for as long as it takes. We right here. I know you hear what I’m saying.”

Daddy looked at Mama in her eyes. I thought I saw her eyes smiling, but her mouth couldn’t make a smile.

We went on wishing and praying that Mama would return to her old self. Even though the doctor said that wasn’t gonna happen, we wanted to believe it would. We had to believe it would. We had to hold on to hope.

But hope lasts only so long before cold reality sets in. Reality told us that living on a plantation with a very sick woman wasn’t fair to that woman. She needed to see a doctor on a regular basis.

Daddy decided to leave the plantation and move the family to Baton Rouge. Him and us kids getting different jobs would mean more money to help care for Mama. The landowners were sorry to see us go—we were their best workers. They wished us good luck and loaned us a truck to move our stuff. Daddy found a small house to rent, I went back to sleep on a rollaway at Annie Mae’s, and our life in Lettsworth was over.

My life in Baton Rouge began and ended with me working. I worked a conveyor belt in a beer factory, where the temperature had to be 110. The job was monotonous and taxed me a hundred more times than working on the farm. On the farm I was outside. I could hear the birds and see the animals. I dealt with live crops growing or dying according to the weather. I had the sky over my head, not a dirty ceiling in a factory that smelled like it hadn’t been cleaned in a year. Farm work was hard, but I was seeing that farm work could feel free. This factory work felt like jail. The job didn’t last long.

Service station work was a little better. At least I was outside. I’ve always been good with cars, so dealing with them was okay, except during the dog days of summer. In those years customers couldn’t pump their own gas. The attendants did the pumping. That was easy and so was checking the tires. But when it came to checking the battery and water, the second I popped open the hood of the car the 96-degree day turned to 120. I did good not to pass out from the fumes. The average sale in those days, when gas cost twenty cents a gallon, was under a buck. The owner of the station also had me doing tow truck service. Before long I knew every street and back alley in Baton Rouge.

I also found work at LSU. I was a maintenance man. The atmosphere on a college campus was calm, and I didn’t mind cleaning and sweeping and driving their utility vehicles to do all kinds of odd jobs. They even had a tractor I could handle good as anyone.

For the next years the routine would have me working at the school during the day and at the gas station at night. In between this work, though, my passion for the guitar heated up even more. The records from jukeboxes kept me locked into Muddy and Lightnin’, Wolf and Little Walter. Jimmy Reed was coming up strong. They said he could blow harp and pick his guitar at the same time. His main guitarist, though, Eddie Taylor, gave off a twangy sound different from anyone. Reed had a nasal voice, thick like Mississippi mud, that sang over the funky rhythm to where you had to reach for a drink or a woman.

I loved these people. But I loved them from far off. I dreamed of seeing them, but they didn’t come to Baton Rouge. In the meantime, though, a famous guitarist did come, and I did go see him. I had heard his record, and I liked him. I knew he was good. Until I saw him up close and in person, though, I didn’t know that he would change all my ideas of what it meant to play the blues. I didn’t know that he’d rearrange my brain and set me soaring in a new direction.