The Prince of Frogtown by Rick Bragg

Author:Rick Bragg
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780307269324
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-05-12T16:00:00+00:00

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CHAPTER EIGHT

The Hanging

FROM THE CRADLE, they had been taught that their very worth as a people was tied to their ability to labor. Their fathers told them, sometimes with a ragged Bible or a fresh-cut hickory in their hands, that a shirker was a pitiful and a sorry thing, and sloth was not only a sin but a deadly one. They would stripe the legs of a lazy child as quickly as they would a mean or mouthy one, and quote from Ecclesiastes as the stick hissed through the air.

The sleep of a labouring man is sweet…

And there would be the sting, and the rising welt…. whether he eat little or much.

Grandparents, their lives and fingers shortened, their eyes red-streaked and hard as peppermint candy, would pull frightened grandchildren close, and whisper:

“You are as good as anybody.”

But the one true thing you learned in the village, as real as the whistle that shook you from bed, was that a lot of people who lived outside the alphabet streets believed, really believed, they were better than you. Because their world was cleaner, nicer, they believed their lives held more value than Bill Joe Chaney’s people, than my father’s, who did the dirty, dangerous work and came home to identical rooms that smelled of snuff and bacon grease and Mentholatum. You could not make them look at you differently. You could only punish them, for the way they did look at you.

The rigid caste system, as hard-stuck then as racial segregation, had not flexed in fifty years. After a crime was committed in town or in the outlying county, investigators came to the village first, even pulled workers from their stations, lined them against the wall and questioned them or compared their faces to the police artist’s sketch. Across generations, town boys in their daddies’ cars egged houses in the village for sport, and yelled “Linthead!” at old women walking home from a twelve-hour shift.

In fifty years, there had not been a homecoming queen from the mill village, or a cheerleader. The people of the mill village took revenge, but it would be wrong to say they got even. In those days, a vending machine at the mill routinely cheated workers out of nickels and dimes. “It would keep your money but it wouldn’t give you nothin’ to eat,” said retired mill worker Donald Garmon. One day, Garmon’s brother Eugene and a friend, Alan McCarty, dropped nickels in the slot and the machine hung up again. It was all they could take. “They throwed the machine off the third floor,” he said.

Town boys who wandered into the mill village on foot were chased and beaten. “You didn’t come here if you was town,” said my father’s friend, Bill Joe. Even if you had a rare friend outside the village you could not side with them against your own. “We stuck together,” Bill Joe said.

My father hated the swells, hated the stigma, and hated himself, a little, for his place in it.

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