Copy of The Bug Truck – Chapter 3 Free Read
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Chapter 3: The Bug Truck — a free excerpt from I Will Not Pray in My Father's House by Stephen Pierre Sainte-Martin.
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On Wednesdays the mailman made his rounds in his old and rusted government truck. He was an employee of the United States Postal Service and emblazoned on the outside of his truck was the emblem of the American bald eagle carrying a letter in his beak. The mail was delivered once per week to Brownsville, but delivered daily to other towns where white folks lived. The mailman was white; about 30 years old and Beatrice knew that he was married because of the ring he had on his finger. It wasn't gold but some kind of cheap metal; probably tin. No one knew his name because everyone called him "Mr. Mailman". He would drive along route 1 and stop at the various mailboxes dotted along the rural highway and deliver mail and small packages.
On rare occasions he stopped at Box 420 East. That was my grandfather's address. He'd walk up the short dirt road, and hand deliver the mail. He would pull up his pants high enough so that the hem of his pants hovered over his dusty brown brogans, while Beatrice anticipating his coming, would be primping her hair and aligning her undergarments to look presentable. Beatrice could sometimes within the hour, time when the truck would arrive. When the mailman reached her house, Beatrice, also known as Effie, would be in the yard primping. "Her go yo mail" said the mailman as he passed her one letter. Effie gently reached out her hand to receive the mail and touched his hand slightly. She blushed. So did he. It was widely known except to Grandpa.
When Effie died all three brothers migrated from Tennessee except for Richard. He stayed but moved from Brownsville to Stanton. He fell in love with Laverne who gave him 11 children, one of whom was Verma-lee. Ben moved to Ohio where he met and married Francis who gave him two children, and my father Pink, enlisted in the United States Army at the Wyatt-Duke National Guard Armory. He had worked all of his life and had experienced an array of complex emotions on the farm and had been placed in a battery of inexplicable situations while in the Army in World War II. He experienced segregation and racism and was treated less than the German prisoners of war. His platoon was sent to France to assist on the Allied front, and his comrades the white soldiers were telling the French women that Negroes had tails like monkeys.
This rumor was dispelled when the French women began to investigate for themselves. My father and his fellow Negro soldiers found that the French were more civilized and treated them fairer than the hostile white Americans who lived in the same country, saluted the same flag and pledged allegiance to it because "all men are created equal."
He discovered separate and unequal accommodations, lesser quality of food, inferior clothing, the absence of dignity and the lack of respect, all routine infractions imposed upon him as Whites didn't acknowledge him as being made in the image and likeness of God.
Many refused to salute him. Dad didn't speak much about racism and its atrocities. The accounts were brief and abridged. American Negro soldiers were willing to give their lives for the country that had enslaved their ancestors, stolen their names and systematically ripped families apart, obliterating the cohesion all needed and extensively longed to imbue. Those scars in addition to living in the Jim Crow era in Tennessee made his expectations limited. The cicatrix remained yet the healing was tethered to dreams of freedom, outlasting slavery.
My Father was a munitions loader in the United States Army. His munitions were rationed and he was not allowed to have excess ammunition for fear that he and his fellow comrades would "rise up and turn on white soldiers." When he came close to depleting his supply, he had to ask his white counterparts for more ammunition to kill the enemy, the Germans. He spoke grimily about Negro soldiers exclusively having to perform mortuary services and retrieve the dead and mutilated bodies of fallen comrades. Americans were fighting the Germans, and some white Americans were demoralizing their fellow dark-skinned comrades and were expecting the Germans not to see the disparity. The Army became a loose link in the chain of brotherhood and perched her nakedness high on foundations of racist columns, and centuries of emasculation were displayed for the world to see. "America, America, God shed his grace on thee, and crowned thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea." When he was honorably discharged from the Army as Private First Class (PFC), he moved to Chicago and to Detroit and then back to Tennessee and finally to Boston where he had nine children with Mildred.
I was born in 1957 in Detroit Michigan in Wayne County where I had an older brother Oliver and a younger brother Darius. My father had become a young minister at the Detroit church and wanted to return back to his roots and start a church in Tennessee. His Bishop, Samuel Nathaniel Hancock admonished him that he was not ready to start a church, but he went on to pursue his vision and pressed on with his wife and three boys in tow.
One of my earliest memories in Tennessee was of the white church that my father had been installed as Pastor. I remember getting baptized in that church at the age of six and recalled a handful of people attending services; and one lady in particular called Big Mamma. She baked cakes and would bring them by the house for us to eat. There were live ants in the cake always. I remembered being disturbed by the live ants, but my mother just pulled them out as if no big deal and gave us ant free slices to eat. After getting over the fact that ants had gotten there first, we found the pound cake delicious. We were poor and sometimes my father would shake the apple tree for us to have food enough to eat and my mother would bake her mother's favorite dessert recipe; a brown betty or she would fry apples. When there were no apples, she prepared boiled corn meal called mush. The Saints from the Church were always giving us food. They enjoyed giving food to their interim Pastor and his wife and four children.
John had been born around this time. He was the baby. Outside of our little house, which was built on boards, there was enough room to crawl underneath the house. Often times we'd squeeze under and play. Our house was built on boards which kept water from running on the ground into the front and back doors. When it rained everything became muddy. One particular time after it had rained a couple of days, the grass and weeds grew up very high in the backyard. Rather than my father getting a sling to cut the grass, he opted to pour gasoline all over the yard in an attempt to burn the grass and weeds. He lit a match, and the fire ignited the grass which burst into a huge ball of fire and almost burned the house down. In the meantime, the fire burnt all of his facial hairs, including his eyebrows, mustache, and sideburns. I remember my mother chastising him and letting him know "how foolish his actions were" and that he nearly caused us to be without a home. A short time after that, we moved up the street to a larger house that had an embankment and a pecan tree. The previous landlord probably figured that we were a risk.
In the backyard of our new house was another house where another family lived. They had three little ones and a lot of running space for children to play and chase chickens. These children were younger than we were. On the right side of our house was a huge pecan tree. We had a larger yard than before, but the house was on a hill and at the bottom of the hill was a ditch just before the dirt road and across the road were other small houses. We were admonished not to cross the road. We were now in a little community. People generally would help if needed, but at night it was dark and distressing, wet, and uncomfortable. The nights were muggy, and we'd sweat in our sleep, and at dinner and on the porch and near the outhouse. Everyone sweated unlike the sophisticated cologne adorning the people of the proletariat. We sweated. Families were blessed if they had a fan. There were no such things as air conditioning for poor folks although air conditioners had been invented in 1904 no one in our area could afford them and after all it was 1963. Adding to the extreme discomfort of our hot summer nights was feeding time for mosquitoes. They came out right before dawn. They were aggravating and annoying and pestering and they sucked the blood from Negroes who had already paid their dues.
My father was relaxing in an old raggedy chair as we watched a mosquito crawl among the hairs on his arm. It identified a spot as we all stared in amazement. Piercing my dad's flesh the mosquito began drawing blood. I saw the sanguine filling the insect's translucent body in a bright infusion of red. I can only imagine that the mosquito thought that there would be no consequences for his extraction. Down came the hand of my father, squashing the mosquito before he could fly away. Dad declared it "a sacrifice." He flicked the insect to the floor.
The only relief that we could expect from this nightly plague was from the Bug Truck; another contrived government experiment that was tested first on the Negro community. We loved the action and excitement of the Bug Truck which came down the dirt road. It was an old converted green army truck containing a large canister strapped to the truck bed with a twin nozzle attached. It generated great plumes of gray and black smoke. These fumes would fly high into the air and cover the lawns bushes and houses. Some folks would open their doors so the smoke could blow inside their homes. Smoke simultaneously covered both sides of the street. The street looked like midnight, but it got rid of the insects. The reprieve was short lived, however people learned to appreciate that momentary lapse of inconvenience as the bugs returned the next night as the mosquito sacrifices continued. The town endorsed the killing of flying insects by this method, and we enjoyed watching the creaky Bug Truck go slowly down the dusty road and disappear under the dimly lit streetlights. The community was shrouded in a fog of DDT.
The smoke would kill the mosquitoes and give immediate relief to the people, but the long-lasting effects of cancer were not known at this time and would be revealed only later in our lives as many Negroes died from yet another government experiment reminiscent of the Tuskegee Experiment.
[CHAPTER 4: THE FIRE]