EDITOR’S CORNER
It’s been awhile since I turned this column over to one of The Reporter’s most faithful readers.
Fate Arnwine is a graduate of Aycock High School and periodically sends in reminiscences of growing up in Rockdale in the 1940s and 1950s.
He lives in upstate New York. (Yes, there is more to the Empire State than that big city).
He previously wrote about recollections of the George Sessions Perry Farm northwest of town.
This piece picks up where that left off with memories of the adjacent Homer Reed Farm. Fate is a wise man.
Here he is:
The line of demarcation between the Perry Farm and the Reed Farm was the main road.
The fi rst stop during the many times I walked from Rockdale to the farm was the Reed place. There, I would have a drink of water and Mrs. Reed would always have a sandwich for me.
Homer’s living was growing cotton. His son Bill; was a younger version of him. Younger son Clyde liked to drink and somehow picked up the nickname “Juggy.” I wonder how. There was also a daughter.
Homer hardly grew anything but cotton, year after year. We often picked and chopped cotton for the Reeds.
Bill’s wife, Nana, and my mother became very good friends. They often exchanged recipes and, of course, gossip.
Mrs. Reed had a clock on her mantle. When you got a phone call, and could hear a clock ticking in the background, you knew she was listening on the party line.
One morning, chopping cotton on the Reed Farm, an ominous cloud appeared. A bolt of lightning came out of that cloud and struck the ground a few feet from me.
I felt like I had been hit on the head with a heavy object. I truly thought I had been killed.
The Reeds were good neighbors and became better friends. We came to depend upon one another.
While the Reeds were a gregarious bunch, not so much were most of our other white neighbors.
Some I never saw or talked to.
As I often walked to the San Gabriel property a couple of miles away, I would pass a house.
The kids would be outside, playing. As I got near the house there would not be a kid in sight until I was well past.
One time a man gave me a ride. His young daughter, who was sitting in the back seat, compared her arm to mine.
I can only imagine what she may have heard about my family. She must have been quite confused when she saw her tanned arm was as dark as mine.
Living on the farm brought one revelation that had eluded me for the fi rst six or seven years of my life.
Up to that time I considered all white people as having money, never experiencing the pangs of hunger and hard work.
At seven, I became cognitively aware this was not the case.
It was at that time I met white people who were in far worse shape than a lot of blacks.
It was then I realized that people were people.
Circumstances can dictate life to us all.
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