Free The Most They Ever Had by Rick Bragg Page A

all there was to it, this village, it would only be a story of misery and nothing more.
    “Gosh,” Homer said, “it was their life.”
    On Sunday, his mother cooked feasts from beans, cornbread, and potato salad, cheap, filling, delicious, and made banana puddin’ in a wash tub.
    “I ate till I made myself sick,” Homer said.
    She made tall stacks of graham crackers and peanut butter, and that was better because it was travelin’ food. Homer hated to stay still for long, then, because he might miss something. Like all the children here, he roamed through the yards and houses, welcome at every door.
    “I had 136 mommas and daddies,” he said.
    One day a week, just one, Homer was a prisoner in the house, forbidden to roam the village and hear its stories and greet its people, and could only stare out the window, and watch the mill workers file by.
    “Momma washed my underwear that day,” he said. There was only the one pair, what people here called their long-handles. “And I had to stay in the house till they dried.”
    No one was better than anyone else in that grid of small houses, because everyone was the same.
    “I used to tell people I lived on May Pops and artichokes till I was in third grade,” Homer said. “Daddy would give me a nickel to go to bed without supper, during the night he’d come in an’ steal it, then charge me a nickel and whip me for losing it.”
    You smiled at poverty, the way you whistled walking past a graveyard.
    “I always walked in the shade,” he said.
    His Momma, Bertha, had a Sunday dress, and two dresses she worked in. “There wasn’t no clothes closets in them houses,” Homer said. What would they have used them for?
    It is the only time his smile slips, and he almost cries.
    “But there was so much love in that place, a transfer truck couldn’t haul it out,” he said.
    He cannot remember exactly when he first realized the cost. He does remember a day, just another day, his father had sunk down on the porch, exhausted after walking home from his shift. Something made Homer look up the street, then down the street, and there he saw the same scene on porch after porch, as women and men made it only as far as that and melted onto the stoops. It was as if some painter had captured the same scene on canvas a dozen times and hung them in a long, bleak hall.
    His father’s health worsened in the lint, heat, and damp.
    He never complained, just accepted it as his fate, his place.
    “Daddy wasn’t a talker,” said Homer. He was so quiet that, to this day, Homer has trouble remembering things he said. But he never knew his father when he did not cough.
    “I saw him so tired he couldn’t get up the steps,” said Homer. “He’d just sink down there on that first step,” and try to breathe.
    There were mornings when he was, at first, unable to get out of bed, but there was never a morning he did not get up. A man who was too sick to work was no use to the mill, and a waste of a good house.
    “You couldn’t lay out,” Homer said. “Nobody laid out. There was too many people wanted your job.”
    Homer’s mother never denied her children anything that was in her power to give them. There was never money, so the only precious thing left was time.
    “She’d come home wore out, and we’d be settin’ on the back porch, and we’d beg her to take us swimmin’,” Homer said. She would get up without a word and lead them down the road.
    “If there ever was an angel on this earth, it was my momma,” he said.
    His mother and father kept him out of the mill when he was a child. But when he was sixteen, he took a job carrying lunches into the mill. There was no lunch hour, not even a break to clean the webs of cotton from their faces, so they would eat at their machines, picking cotton out of their food. “They used a whisk broom to try and brush each other off,” said Homer, who delivered sandwiches and drinks from machine to machine.
    “Mr. Woodall, at 8 A Street,