The Last Children of Mill Creek by Vivian Gibson

Author:Vivian Gibson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Belt Publishing
Published: 2020-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Daddy’s job was “a good job for a colored man.” We knew this because he told us so often. His job took him far beyond the cultural boundaries of Mill Creek. He went to work early to “drink coffee and shoot the breeze with the white fellas at work.” We hardly ever saw these almost mythical white fellas. They were shadowy figures behind the wheel of a pickup truck that sometimes dropped Daddy off with big bushel baskets of sweet potatoes, corn, tomatoes, or squash that they grew on farms in St. Charles or some other faraway county we had never heard of. Other times the truck would pause at the corner of our street just long enough for Daddy to jump out and pull from it burlap sacks that were too heavy to carry on his regular streetcar ride home. The sacks were sagging with skinned rabbits and possums, and deer meat from weekend hunting trips. The other men never got out of the truck, so I didn’t really know what a white fella looked like.

Daddy’s job was steady work with overtime pay in the winter when it snowed, and he worked from 4:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. clearing snow and salting streets. He got two weeks vacation that he took just before Christmas so he could work as a seasonal worker sorting and bagging mail at the main post office during the holiday rush. And there were health and disability benefits that paid for his time off after the accident.

After thirteen months of hospitalization and recuperation, Daddy returned to work with a pronounced limp, a mangled ear, and the promise of an even “better job” as one of the first black truck drivers for the St. Louis Public Service Company. He and Mama had spent an evening sitting on the side of their bed, using the hard-sided suitcase as a writing surface, and completing documents required for him to return to work. The next day he took Ferman and me on a streetcar ride to the Public Service Offices on Park Avenue. After turning in his paperwork, we walked a few blocks to the truck garage on Thirty-Ninth Street, behind the Pevely Milk plant on Grand Avenue near Chouteau.

The garage had doors that were bigger than our house and trucks with tires that were taller than my brother and me. Men in bib overalls and oil-stained coveralls greeted Daddy with slapping handshakes and pats on his back. While Ferman stared slack-jawed at the big red trucks, I searched the faces of the men, wondering if these were “the white fellas” that Daddy talked about—because they didn’t look white to me.

When the greetings slowed, my father palmed my and my brother’s heads with his fingers spread wide apart, rotating Ferman’s butter-colored face away from the trucks that he had not taken his eyes off of since we entered the garage. “These are my two youngest,” Daddy said by way of introduction. The men looked down at us, there was

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