2024-10-02 “Thinking Of Vicksburg” by Emma

THINKING OF VICKSBURG—You pro’lly saw my post ‘bout Jacob Brown coming up to me at the theater yesterday. Seems he went t’ school with the 2024 version of Emma—she was born in 2005. He graduated in 2020.

Well, a lot more was said than I could write about. He was real friendly with me and even touched my shoulder at one point when he was saying “Us Gators gotta stick together.” Devon tol’ me later it musta been the name of our school team, an’ we asked Google an’ Devon was right.

I had to play along a lot, an’ all the while, my mind was going back to my version of Vicksburg. I’ll just start by saying that if my ol’ granny new that a n… black boy come up t’ me and started talking an’ even touched my shoulder, she’d spring up outta the grave and be ready for a fight.

I was born in 1861, so slavery was still a part of life. My daddy worked on a plantation and partly kept up with slaves’ doings. Well the Civil War started the year I was born, and Vicksburg was sieged until 1863, and them Union soldiers really tore things up. Then, all the Reconstruction started, an’ that ended in 1877.

Now, I guess it goes without saying all the white folk wanted to keep the blacks down, but they was a lot of freedmen blacks ‘round Vicksburg. Let’s say things were really tense. I know a lot of my readers aren’t from USA, so I Googled a little fact that might give a little flavor of how bad things were. Between 1882 and 1968 Mississippi had 581 lynchings. 

For a poor white family in 1880, we weren’t live much better than the freedmen blacks, but we still looked down on ‘em ‘cause that’s how it was. My family shared a barn with a… black family that sharecropped the field beside ours. But we still looked down on ‘em.

Now, I show up 144 years later and… everything seems different. If a black boy in 1880 had come up to me and started talking and touched, me, he’d’ve been drug off for sure. I know it ain’t right that it was that way, but I got 19 years of just accepting it as the way things are… were… still in my brain.

Seeing a boy from Vicksburg sure has put my head to turning.