PART 1

SURVIVAL,

Memoir of A Black Man in America

Chapter 1
BLUES ALLEY

My unique and often troubled journey on this planet began on April 6, 1942, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, a.k.a. Blues Alley. Located seventy-two miles southwest of Memphis, Tennessee, fifty-five miles east of the Mississippi River, in a place called the Delta. It is the original birthplace and ‘World Capital of the Blues’, where the Highways 61 and 49 intersect.

There exists a folklore it is the crossroad where Blues musician Robert Johnson made a deal with The Devil; in exchange for his soul, he would receive unique musical gifts.

Among the famous people to call Clarksdale home are Gospel-Soul singer Sam Cooke, McKinley Morganfield, a.k.a. Muddy Waters, Hollywood film producer/entrepreneur Larry A. Thompson, writer Tennessee Williams, musician Ike Turner, and legendary Blues artist John Lee Hooker. At the time of this writing, it is the site of actor Morgan Freeman's Ground Zero Blues Club.

Twenty-three minutes from Clarksdale is Mound Bayou, the hometown of Ko-Ko Taylor and the undisputed ‘King of the Blues’ and principal character in the motion picture Cadillac Records, Willie Dixon. Dixon is the writer of Blues classics such as Hoochie Coochie Man, Wang-Dang-Doodle, and Rolling Stone Singer Mick Jagger and four others became one of the most marketable names in Rock & Roll when they called themselves The Rolling Stones.

On my official birth certificate, Shelley Dal Fisher appears as Father, age 23 years, occupation, odd jobs. In the section reserved for Mother, Martha Ann Fisher, a twenty-two-year-old homemaker assisted by midwife, Mary Jamison. The handyman and the homemaker were Negros, who made their home at 434 McKinley Street.

Mother lived only two months after I was born and died of untreated complications from childbirth. A visit from the county general practitioner and a series of antibiotics probably would have saved her. Times were hard, and the doctor would visit only as a last resort, usually when it was too late to treat the sick and required only to sign the death certificate.

I weighed just four pounds nine ounces at birth, two months prematurely, with weak lungs. Mother had breastfed me until the final two months of her life, so I was susceptible to respiratory illness from the very start. Ironically, all the crying I did in the first six months of my life helped to make my lungs stronger.

Nevertheless, I was not my mother’s first child. She had given birth to a son named Robert Lee Simpson one and a half years before I was born. He remained in the custody of her parents in Mound Bayou. We would meet only three or four times before he died tragically of a heroin overdose at sixteen years old in Maywood, Illinois.

In 1942, a child born out of wedlock would bring shame not just for the mother, but the entire family. My Mothers parents were not about to raise two bastards, especially one with questionable health. Neither were they about to allow my mom to continue to live in their home. Fathers routinely kicked their unwed pregnant daughters out of the family home.

So, they hastily arranged a Come to Jesus, right thing to do marriage before she started to show. My maternal grandfather, a Baptist ‘jackleg’ preacher, officiated the ceremony six months before my birth. His name was George O. Robinson, a Creole from Louisiana with a fierce reputation for being a strict disciplinarian who would not hesitate to use his belt or his hand to punish his family members.

Silas Fisher was born December 31, 1882, seventeen years after slavery ended in Mississippi, allowing Negro men to own land. He was an extremely dark-skinned man who stood at around five feet nine inches tall with a medium build.

The story is Silas had met Icy Bell Hemphill over in Starkville, Mississippi, a small town in the hills close to the Alabama state line. She had been a young mother with two small boys, the eldest my father and Uncle Johnny, three years younger — no husband and on hard times.

Silas was more than just a few years older than Icy Bell, 22 years to be exact, and had adopted the young family, given them his last name, and moved them to Crenshaw some sixty miles West, where he had lived for some time.

Icy Bell could read and write, and Silas could not, so she was a significant asset. The world was changing, and if a man could not write his name, he needed a wife that could. It was not unusual for a man in his position to adopt her children when she moved in with him, and since a preacher had married them, it was a blessed union. These two people would save my life, and when I began to talk, I called them ‘Mama’ and ‘Granddaddy,’ and they nicknamed me ‘Sonny’ and sometimes called me ‘Shelley Jr.’

They had settled down in a sleepy little town called Crenshaw, about thirty-two miles Northeast of Clarksdale in the Delta where the hills stopped, and the flatlands, also called ‘the bottoms', began. A town so small the messages, ‘Welcome and Hurry Back’ were printed on the same sign.

At that time, Crenshaw had a total population of roughly three hundred and fifty people, a little more than half of them classified as 'colored’. Anyone with one drop of African blood in their veins including some native Americans, The Choctaw tribe, and the Creoles, belonged to this group.

The Illinois Central railroad track still runs through the center of Crenshaw, but in 1942, it separated the races. The coloreds lived on the Westside and had to be back on their side of the tracks after sundown during the week unless they worked late on the other side.

The boundaries of the law surrendered to the power of lust: the races mixed behind closed doors, at least for some white men and a few women of color with reputations. Now and then, a mulatto baby would be born to a colored woman, and she would move up North where she and the child would not be outcasts.

Everyone in my family had light hazel eyes except Granddaddy. Even though both had hazel eyes, I would question whether my father and uncle were from the same father. The two of them differed from day to night.

Crenshaw's small community was aware Silas Fisher had another family over in Tunica, Mississippi. Her name was Maddy, a high yellow Choctaw Nation woman with a gold tooth at the top front of her mouth. It was a relationship that had begun before he and Mama met and continued because she was the mother of his two biological children, a boy, and a girl, who were almost grown.

Cotton was the primary industry in Crenshaw. Just two families, the Clayton and the Crenshaw families from which the town got its name, controlled it. Together, they owned the bank and the thousands of acres of land in two counties, worked by the Negros.

Even though slavery formally ended with the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865, and the Fifteenth Amendment became law on February 3, 1870. Black people were still subservient to whites. They remained dependent on an unjust relationship with the plantation owners for their meager existence.

No longer called slaves, now they were known as sharecroppers. Sharecroppers received credit for seeds, tools, living quarters, and basic food needs. In return for the credit, they would work the land and receive a share of the crop minus its value. It was unusual for the plantation owners to settle the debt at the final tally. It was legal slavery.

The cottonseeds were planted in the spring, cultivated in the summer, and harvested in the fall. When the children were out of school in the summer, they chopped alongside their parents and grandparents. They pulled and pushed the dirt and small rocks around with the hoes that required sharpening at least twice a day.

The workers stood on their feet for nine of the ten- hour days with only two fifteen- minute breaks and a half-hour for lunch, depending on the weather and the mood of the straw boss, usually a teenage white boy.

Chopping cotton paid five dollars a day and picking the textile fiber produced two and three dollars per hundred pounds. Some of the stronger men could pick over four hundred pounds of cotton before quitting time. A member of the Methodist church drove the truck that delivered the workers to and from the fields was mainly responsible for the quota. He was also the fiduciary and paid daily.

In the fall, the sun would rise just after six-thirty in the morning, and the pickers would already be in place to begin to pull the soft wet cotton from the plants. And at that time of year, a thick gooey mud called gumbo, stuck to the rubber boots, making it tough to put one foot in front of the other. It would be bitter cold in the morning and scorching hot in the afternoon, so everyone picked their hardest in the morning.

Silas Fisher may not have been a scholar, but he was a wise man who could look at a problem and see the solution. One great lesson I learned from my grandfather was when he took me to pick cotton for the first time. After choosing two cotton sacks, an eight-footer for me, and a larger twelve-footer for himself; he carefully picked out three adjacent rows. He looked down at me and said, "Now Sonny, you want to try and pick yo' hardest in the mo'ning; that way, you won't haf'ta work so hard in the eb’ning time. I never forgot those pearls of wisdom, not that I thought very much about evening in the morning of my days.

Every summer, a couple of people would suffer from heatstroke and never fully recover. A young boy carried a bucket filled with...