Jessie Augustus Reid
Jessie Augustus (Gus) Reid with his brother Monroe (Mun) Reid and Mun's wife. The only photo known of Gus.
Jessie Augustus Reid (1879-1942) -- he lived and he died. His was not a big mark left on this world. What did he do in between that time? I wish I could tell you, but I can't because I don't know. I was born 2 September 1934 and lived with him until he died in September of 1942, so you see I was only eight when he passed on. He was a poor man, a tenant farmer. I don't know if you know what a tenant farmer is -- he is someone who farms for half the profits and a house to live in.
He was born in 1879 and died at the young age of sixty-three in 1942. He married Dolly Greer sometime in the early 1900s. They had five children. What he did as a child and young man, I have no idea. They lived in Kokomo, Mississippi, some time between 1910 and 1920 and then they moved to the Delta. I don't know if he was a landowner then or not. Either way, it doesn't make any difference, in 1927 they lost everything in the Great Yazoo Flood. After that they moved back to Marion Walthall County (now it is just Marion County) in the Sartinville Community.
When his work didn't keep him busy on some Saturday afternoons he would walk to the Sartinville store to watch the local baseball team play. Sometimes he would umpire the games. Maybe in his younger days he played baseball. About once a month he would catch the school bus on Saturday morning and go to Tylertown to buy some staples (groceries, not the kind you put in a stapler). The school bus would go through the community picking up the people who needed to go to town -- hardly anyone owned a car back then. He bought me my first hamburger and my first ice cream cone there. I have been told that where he went, so did I. They would say, "Here comes big cotton top and little cotton top." In the fall when the crops were laid by, we would go fishing if he didn't have to cut firewood or stove wood for the winter. There were not electric lights, no gas heaters, no iceboxes and TV hadn't even been invented yet. He did have a battery-powered radio, the battery was bigger than today's car batteries. The radio was only used for the Grand Ole Opry and heavyweight fights. The one fight I remember is Billy Conn and Joe Louis, the first one. After the war (WWII) started, he would listen to the news sometimes. I don't remember what the news was about but I do remember having nightmares about German paratroopers landing in our corn field and him comforting me. Telling me they weren't coming, but if they did, he would protect me.
He would go out at night and kill a rabbit or two. I guess that was poaching, but it was for food and the game warden looked the other way. In the winter, he would go quail and rabbit hunting, this was in the day time. There were no deer or turkeys left, they had all been killed off years earlier. Now in that area there are plenty of both, but that was the Great Depression.
Also in the fall the sugar cane was cut and made into syrup. My grandmother would can butter beans, field peas, string beans, squash, corn, tomatoes, peaches, apples, pears, blackberries, huckleberries and watermelon preserves. There were probably some things I left out. The crops were harvested, the corn was put in the barn along with the hay, the cotton picked and sold, potatoes (Irish and sweet) were put in the potato house and covered with hay.
He never had much money, but we never went to bed hungry. He had a milk cow, chickens, hogs and two mules. He took corn to the grist mill to make corn meal. He had to by staples such as flour, rice, salt and so on. The flour sacks all came in different colors and my Grandma made clothes from them.
He had a sense of humor, I remember when I would be bad I would go under the house to hide from Grandma and when she would look under the house he would say "Throw dirt in her face, son" and laugh and laugh. When I did it, Grandma didn't think it was funny. Nor did I when she finally caught up with me. She would say, "Gus Reid, you should be getting this instead of the boy." I agree, but I sure got it and he would laugh again and she didn't whip me very hard.
We had a chinaberry tree in the back yard and he would make me pop guns out of a reed like bamboo to shoot the chinaberries with. To me as a small boy he was the greatest thing in the world, like a god. Sometimes he took me with him hunting, fishing and to town and the ball games. People would say, "Here comes big cotton top and little cotton top."
I remember once when my Uncle Kermit was visiting he brought me a little red wagon. I had a big old hound dog named Fido. They had this great idea to hook Fido up to this little red wagon and have him pull me around. All the time my grandmother was yelling, "Don't get that boy hurt!" Everything was all right until that dog saw this hog across the road and he took off! Grandma was screaming and so was I. When he hit the ditch and me and that wagon parted company, Grandma was really screaming then. Yelling, "You killed the baby!" No one was laughing then, but when they found out I was all right, the laughing started again. Even Grandma laughed then.
When my cousin, Jessie Walter, was born, he hooked up the mules to the wagon to take my Grandma to see the baby. It was about five or ten miles and took us half a day to get there.
This is about all I can remember about him. He was a hard working man. The day he died he was picking cotton, him and my grandmother. I got off the school bus by the cotton field and he told Grandma his chest hurt and he wanted to go to the house. So we walked home about a half a mile and when he got home, he went to bed and Grandma started supper. I went behind the chinaberry tree and was crying because I knew something really bad was going on.
In a little while my grandmother was screaming for me to get help, that my granddaddy was dying. I ran to the first house about a half a mile away and I told Jab Harvey what she said. He told me to go to someone else's house to get them to bring their car and he would go see what he could do. Then I told Mr. Bracey and we got in his car and rushed back, but when we got there it was too late -- he was gone. I had lost the most important person in my life.
He was born and he died. In between he worked hard. If you think life is a bitch now, try his. I never heard him say that the government should come and save him or give him charity. Nor did I hear him complain of the hand he was dealt in life. He just lived it to the best of his ability, may God rest his soul and have mercy on him. He was a good man, not a church-going man, but a good man. If there is a heaven and hell, which I believe there is, he is with God now, watching out for me and all my family. This is all I can remember. I know it isn't much for sixty-three years of a man's life.
Written by Walter Singleman Jones, December 1999, at Kenner, Louisiana.