While siting and visiting with Lucinda Berryhill in her home recently, I was delighted to find my kindred spirit of shared memories but sad we didn’t share them together 60 years ago.
Just outside of Tutwiler, I lived on one side of Highway 3 and Lucinda lived on the other, so she was unknown to me. My brothers’ best playmate was Jesse Lee Tyler, who lived just a quarter-mile away on the same side of the highway.
Lucinda called our place the plantation and, in the beginning, it was; my oldest sister always called it the plantation. I just called it the farm. Lucinda shared stories and names, stirring up memories like a good pot of stew, getting to the bottom. Some good, some not, all true, all shaped our common lives like the sisters we should have always been but have become. The dead are long gone, no one around to fuss over the truth, yet the truth holds lessons good or bad. In the end, it often makes us stronger and kinder if we learn and get to the other side.
My Uncle Pel ran the place for my grandfather, one of those men whose word was his bond. As I have come to understand, my Uncle Pel did not always walk in his father’s footsteps.
Lucinda was born seventh of 13 children to Maude and Sam Berryhill, right across the highway, delivered by Dr. Brock on April 29, 1955. Dr. Brock said of all the babies he delivered she was the only one he didn’t get to help scoop out; all he had to do was cut the cord.
Maude ran the home and family and was outspoken, the opposite attraction to her quiet husband Sam, who drove the tractor for Uncle Pel after the mules left and the tractor came. Uncle Pel drove around in a Chevy pickup my grandfather paid for.
If there was something her family needed, Maude would talk to my uncle directly and straight out ask for what she wanted. She got gas heat, running water, indoor plumbing and things from the commissary she needed. She flat out told my uncle at the end of the crop year when it was time to settle up that her family was not working for nothing. That, yes, their share of the crops may not have settled out, but all of the work they did for him mattered.
I could not imagine this conversation. This was my mother’s brother just one year older. My mother looked up to him, but she never asked for what was rightfully hers the way Maude did.
I was left trying to figure out why or how I came up with respect. Maude must have been humble yet respectful and firm, and Uncle Pel may have had a soft spot because one of Maude’s daughters was the playmate to my uncle’s daughter who died of leukemia at age five. At any rate, my mother had a lifetime of receiving less than fair treatment because she never stood up for herself.
Maude instilled in her children that a good education was important and they were not expected to work on the plantation farm. They helped raise the family garden, tend the family hogs, can the garden crops and never knew hungry times living on bountiful land. Neighbors’ children were welcomed playmates and often fed. Neighbors often borrowed without working for their share. Maude was generous and loving.
Lucinda’s grandparents, Arthur and Rosa Tyler, lived on the place. Rosa had come from Grenada and been a Fisher. Arthur was Bigun Tyler’s brother. He tended our cows, milking them daily, and was the father to Jesse Lee, my brother’s playmate.
Jake Stringer lived down in the brake part of the field and was the blacksmith, strongest man I ever saw. There was also Bit Knight, but I forgot his job. I just remember it all coming together like a big organization. On hog-killing day, everybody got meat and crackling and lard.
On sorghum making day down in the brake, we had to stand back because of the hot fires. Lye soap being made from lard, chickens being slaughtered, eggs being gathered, butter being made. And home remedies for ailments. And the bell being rung when folks died. Mama rang it herself for Jake Stringer, however many years old he was.
Eventually, Lucinda left her mama’s with her two children and went to Chicago to her sisters but only stayed a year, because it was too fast and too loud, too hot and too cold. She returned to Tutwiler and found herself her own little house outside of town a bit. As time passed, Lucinda had three children. Tragedy struck in 1990 when her 19-year-old daughter, a student at Northwest Community College, her sister and a family friend were killed by a drunk driver.
True to Maude’s teaching, Lucinda’s other two children have received advanced degrees.
Bernard has a degree from Jackson State in math and a Master’s in physical education from Delta State. You will remember his undefeated coaching honors at West Tallahatchie.
Daughter Courtney Berryhill Reynolds holds her Master’s degree in business and accounting, and my brother-in-law is proud to call her neighbor.
Lucinda brought up my mama working at Head Start and her little brother Tony. She went on and on about how my mama would just kiss his cheeks and love on him, her pet. I told her how it wasn’t all good days with grant money and mama not getting paid for a time and my uncle going around to all the storekeepers to cut off her credit. My mother had some hard times. Folks in town turned their backs on her for working with Head Start. My mother became an embarrassment to her brother, who basically ran her out of town.
This was about the time I decided to get married at 17 and not come back for 35 years. This was also about the time my mama gave her brother the bell because he wanted it and he moved it across the highway. This was when my mother had no food in the house and my sister in Iowa came and got her out of Mississippi for 35 years.
Maude had gotten my uncle to promise to deed the home place she raised her family on to any Berryhill who chose to live there, and remodeling started with new kitchen cabinets.
My uncle bought up the land from the railroad that was adjacent to my mom’s land, telling the railroad she wasn’t interested. He then went to Sam and offered Sam the railroad land with no house in exchange for the homestead land with a house. Sam being a meek man and Maude having passed, Sam agreed, but instead his daughter moved him to town and Uncle Pel simply backed out of all deals. Sam’s family never got the deed to the homestead, not even the kitchen cabinets, but Sam took the corner cabinet anyway.
My mom wanted to return to her home built by her daddy before she died. Her three daughters came to be with her in 1999. Mom got to spend three years with her remaining family.
The bell was gone. Her brother either sold it or gave it to the farmer who rented the land. She buried her brother and a few months later we buried her. Her children made her proud.
One of my uncles’ adopted children, who is now passed, was in prison during this time for sex crimes, and the other had a career as a crossing guard in Texas.
Mom lived 30 years or so on a little over $230 to $250 a month farm rent for her 280 acres, or one-third of the place. She never believed her brother would cheat her.
Had a highway not separated us, had Lucinda and I been playmates and Maude drank ice tea with my mom daily, I guarantee my mom would have never been hungry and she would have found her voice. Yet, God has always put me where he wanted me, and my mama said she never had to lift a finger to get even.
