The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing

The Life and Times of Delta Bluesman Honeyboy Edwards

By David Honeyboy Edwards

Chicago Review Press Incorporated

Copyright © 1997 David Edwards, Janis Martinson, and Michael Robert Frank
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55652-368-7

Contents

Foreword,
Acknowledgments,
Preface,
Chapter One All the people flowed to the Mississippi Delta.,
Chapter Two The water overflowed her heart.,
Chapter Three I kept that guitar in my hands.,
Chapter Four Honey can play now!,
Chapter Five I wasn’t going back to them fields.,
Chapter Six The world don’t owe me nothing!,
Chapter Seven I was just up and down the road.,
Chapter Eight I had three ways of making it.,
Chapter Nine Everything sounded good to me.,
Chapter Ten Robert was crazy about women and crazy about his whiskey.,
Chapter Eleven We was all just country boys.,
Chapter Twelve Daddy you can be my lemon squeezer!.,
Chapter Thirteen I didn’t give a damn about nothing.,
Chapter Fourteen I had to go back to Coahoma before I got found.,
Chapter Fifteen He didn’t know how good he was.,
Chapter Sixteen We did so good together, I kept her.,
Chapter Seventeen The blues is something that keeps you moving.,
Chapter Eighteen It don’t always matter how good you play.,
Chapter Nineteen Chicago used to be a music town.,
Chapter Twenty I never doubted myself.,
Chapter Twenty-One I just got lucky when I got Bessie.,
Chapter Twenty-Two I stayed with the blues.,
Appendix One Miscellany,
Appendix Two Musicians,
Appendix Three Songs,
Discography,
Bibliography,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

All the people flowed to the Mississippi Delta.

The Delta is a wide, flat country, running from the Mississippi River clean up to the hills in the East. When I was young it was full of people, living and working on the plantations. In the Delta we raised so much cotton and corn and pecans and potatoes. People out of the hills used to come in by the truckloads to pick cotton in the Delta, because they couldn’t raise no crop in the hilly land. They come to the flat land and stay all the fall — pick cotton by the hundred all the fall. On Saturday nights, they have balls, country dances, and they dance and drink that white whiskey all night long. When all the cotton’s picked, they go back to the hills. They made enough money to get them through the winter.

On the farm in the Delta, in the wintertime we don’t do nothing — not till about March. In March, around the fifteenth or twentieth or so, We start breaking up the land, burning stalks off the land, turning the ground over. At the time I was, we used both mules and tractors. At the end of April when it done got warm, we’d start planting cotton. Cotton comes out in a sprout, comes up sprouting. There was sometimes a cold draft would catch it in the crook, and if that cold catches it, then it wouldn’t come out. We’d have to plant back over again, come right behind and put some more seeds in. And hope it rains.

We plant it, chop it, keep the weeds out of it up until around about the last of August; that’s lay-by time. Then you start to vining cotton. You knock the vines so when you get to picking there won’t be no vines in the way. When the vines start to growing, you cut them. In the sun they just die. And you can get to the cotton when it opens up. You can start to picking then.

My mother, she told me she was born in Kentucky. Her family moved to Mississippi sometime in the 1800s. My mother was twenty-six years old when I was born and my father was in his forties, so she told me. My father, he was from New Orleans. He worked on the boats down there as a roustabout. He went to school in New Orleans. He had a pretty good education. He could read and write. Back at that time, didn’t too many blacks have a good education. I was surprised after I got grown and seen how things used to be, I was surprised that he had that education. And his brother was a schoolteacher, L. D. Edwards. All of them come up from New Orleans. They left the low lands and come up to the Mississippi Delta, looking for work.

My papa, Henry Edwards, drifted up to the Delta. Papa was dark and low, little. He was part Creek Indian. My father was a black Indian and a Mollyglasper. Mollyglasper, that’s like a nation of people. Some of them come from New Orleans, from the coast down there, black people. My dad was real black. And his hair was straight just like white folks’ down there. That’s Mollyglasper. We’re all mixed up a little bit.

My daddy come to the Delta and Mama was already there. Her name was Pearl Phillips. She was a young woman then. My father met her in Shaw, Mississippi, where I was born at. My mother had another old man before they got together but she wasn’t married to him. She met my daddy, they hooked up together and married and started a family. I was the oldest boy. I was the first one and my sister Hermalie, she was the second one. I was three years older than her.

My father already had two girls from his first wife, Lou. My mother raised them. My mother said when they got together he was a bachelor staying by himself. His wife had died and he had them two girls and he was doing the best he could with them, twisting their hair into braids.

They was Blanche, she got killed in Greenwood by her husband. Blanche was born in nineteen ought eight, she was. Blanche had one daughter, Clarine. The other was Lessie, that was the oldest of my dad’s children. We called her Kid. Her husband, Sam Gilmore, was from Dubbs. He used to drive a cattle truck. She used to go with him in that truck to Missouri to get cattle, and sleeping on old blankets in the truck she caught pneumonia. She caught her death of cold following that man. She died in 1928.

My father had three sons by his first wife, too, Willie, Bat, and Louis. After I got up kind of big-sized, Willie come around and stayed a while with my daddy in Shaw. After a while he disappeared. Louis and Bat lived around Vicksburg. They was my half brothers.

I was born in 1915 on the twenty-eighth day of June. I was born out in Sunflower County. There was me and Hermalie and Altie and Mack Henry. I remember in 1920 when the man come around taking up census. That was before Mack was born. The man come around in the wintertime taking up census with a book under his arm, wearing blue pants and a clean white shirt. It had been a flood and my sister was giving me a ride on a float out in the field, pushing me with a hoe. We lived in Bolivar County then, Mama, four girls, and one boy.

My daddy, I didn’t know his people. But I knew my mother’s mother. Her name was Sarah Phillips. My grandmother was born a slave. My mother told me her mother was sold a couple of times, sold like a horse or a mule. My mother’s father was a Indian, Aaron Phillips. He was from Kentucky. Mama had a brother named Aaron and one named Sylvester. Sylvester’s last name was Jeeter. They had the same mama but different daddies. Sylvester married a lady called Irene Hills and they had one girl, Katrine. Aaron and his wife had Magnolia, Joseph, Eddie, T.C., Ollie (we called him Man Son), Daniel, Riley — they had fourteen kids. I used to go to sleep over at their house and wouldn’t have nowhere to sleep! All us kids would sleep on cotton sacks on the floor. Aaron’s wife, Cornelia, was the only somebody who ever called me David.

They always called me Honey, all the time; white and black called me Honey. When I was trying to walk, just toddling like a baby, Mama and them said my older sister Lessie said to me, “Come here, baby. Come here, baby,” trying to make me walk. And I tried to take a step and run and she said, “Mama, look at little old Honey!” That’s what they told me; that’s why they started calling me Honey. When I started to recording I gave the name of Honeyboy, but my people only knew me by Honey.

Mama also had a sister, Beatrice. We called her Aunt Daughter. And Magnolia, Aunt Mag. They was Jeeters. Magnolia had four sons, Quincy, Nathan, Mannie, and Elijah. And one daughter, Sarah. Beatrice’s daughter is Willie Mae. Me and Willie Mae was raised up together till I got grown, running all up and down the roads.

The Phillips was all of them real yellow with straight hair. Except Mama, she had black curly hair and she was red. I don’t know how we got so black; my mama was red. She could play guitar and harp. She’d put a guitar across her lap with a pocket knife and play “Par-a-lee” on it.

We was all kind of musical people. Didn’t none of her family but her play music, but on my father’s side was musicians. He played violin and guitar but he got rid of them after I got up to be a little size; he quit playing.

Papa used to hold country dances on a Saturday night, sell whiskey and play guitar at the house. Sometimes he’d go off to play at jukes. He got in a fight one time at one of them Saturday night dances. My daddy got to fighting and hollering with a guy and they run out of the dance and into the field. My daddy had a plaid shirt on and this guy Jack shot at him with a Winchester rifle. The bullet just missed Papa, but it shot a hole through his shirt! Then he quit playing.

I can remember when I was four years old, just as good. I can remember back before 1919, when my daddy moved over to the Dave Bishop Plantation and over to a place called Meadow Place. Guy Dean run that. That’s out from Shaw. I can remember in 1920, when my sister Altie was born. I was five years old. I can remember that. Me and my sister Blanche was on the stairs, looking. Matty Scott, the midwife, was catching Altie.

All of us was born at home. My grandmother waited on me, my mother’s mother. My grandmother was a midwife. That’s what they told me. My grandmother was my granny. Back then we called a midwife a granny. A black midwife caught my sisters, but Dr. Field, a old white doctor, he waited on my mama with her other kids.

When I was real small there was bears, panthers. When I was small out there on the Bishop Plantation, Mama and Papa used to go to Shaw and my daddy used to have to wear a headlamp, a old hunting light, when he come through that part of the country called the Deadening. That’s where a lot of woods was, before you got to where the farming was at. Come through the Deadening and them panthers be in the trees, you had to watch for them. They’d be up in the trees at night and you shine your light and see their red eyes shining back at you. They’ll jump! You had to know what you was doing with them panthers and bears out there then. But I was real small then. After ’22, they started to cleaning that up.

I remember when I was a little boy, about six years old, at Christmas my mother used to buy us toys. The toys they made back then wasn’t like the toys now. They made them out of wood. I had a truck with wooden wheels, a little bed, little man sitting up in there. And the dolls the girls had had a hole in the top of the head you could put your hand in, to hold that little head up. They told me there was Santa Claus. I lay down in the bed one Christmas night, I never will forget it, and Mama said, “You go to sleep and Santa Claus will come to you if you go to sleep early.” I went and jumped in the bed and listened at my sister and my mother putting up the stuff, the toys. And I heard my mama say, “This for Hermalie; this for Altie; this for Honey.” I said, “Where mine at?” She said, “You bastard, get up from there!” She thought I was asleep! “You bastard, get up from there!” She was trying to hide Santa and I’m laying there watching! I always been funny like that. When you say that’s mine, I want to see it! We used to have funny times back then.

I was seven years old when my grandmother died. I can remember that night in 1922. My mother walked out of Shaw, about three miles to where my grandmother lived over in Sunflower County. When they called on my mama and told her that her mother was dead she left there crying. I never will forget it. She put on her yellow jacket and walked out of Shaw, went on over to Sunflower, where her mother was. My grandmother died in 1922, and that’s the year Mack Henry was born, my brother.

Papa didn’t make no money. He was a sharecropper. He rented once when I was eight years old. He had two mules and a cow then. That was in ’23 and ’24 in Dubbs, Mississippi, between Lula and Clarksdale. In ’24 he moved to Coahoma, stayed one crop in Coahoma, then he wasn’t doing no good. Sharecroppers move every year to make a little money. How it works, the white man would furnish the sharecropper with money all the winter to take care of himself. And in the fall the sharecropper would have to pay him back that money. A few sharecroppers would raise their own food and hogs, and wouldn’t owe the man too much, but if they didn’t want to do that they’d have to go to the white man for everything. So that made him owe the white man at the end of the year. You would work the white man’s land, and sharecrop means when you make cotton, if you make twenty bales, ten go to the white man and ten go to the sharecropper. The white man sells the cotton, and out of the sharecropper’s ten bales, he had to pay off the money he got all that winter. When I pay the man out of my ten, I ain’t got nothing. I might clear two, three hundred dollars, a hundred dollars all the year to feed that big family. Clear nothing, go somewheres else. Papa left Coahoma and went back to Dubbs, stayed one year, 1925, and I went to school.

Sharecroppers, they don’t cut no money one year and don’t like the boss, they carry the contract out and jump up and try to do better somewhere else. Renters could get ahead of the sharecroppers. Renters had mules, tractors, because they had enough money to take care of theyself — they didn’t borrow the white man’s money. When they made something it was clear. And then they raise a lot of hogs, chickens, and the only thing the renter would have to buy then sometimes was a little flour and a little rice. I knew just one man who started working share-cropping and come out making some money, got to be a big renter. Lawrence Johnson, that man would eat dry bread. If he cleared two hundred dollars out of his crop he had that next year when he’d make another two or three hundred dollars. He kept on like that and that man bought himself two mules, and then he started to renting, started selling his own cotton. He went to Leland and bought eighty acres and got a tractor, and that’s when he was on his own. Had a car, wagon, mule, everything. But that was by starving himself to death, near about. But most, they never did do better, do worse and worse all the time. But they wasn’t in the same place doing worser. So Papa shift around.

Papa always got a double house when we moved. In a single house, on them plantations, they’d have one big room for the family and a kitchen. But a lot of people on the plantations would have big families and get those double houses, have a couple of rooms. The boys would sleep in one and the girls in another. And have a big porch to set on and talk all night long. All we had for light was lamplight, oil lamps that set on the mantle, and to keep warm we had them old potbellied stoves. In the summertime we would cut oak wood for the winter. And to keep us warm at night, Mama would make quilts. Mama would go to town and buy scraps and then after the fall of the year, she’d have quilt parties. Four or five women would come over and they’d sit up all night and quilt and drink and tell lies. Sometimes they’d get through with a quilt in one night. The next night they go to another woman’s house and make one there.

When I was nine years old I was working in the field. I was running a plow behind the mule to drag the grass out of the middles. Then when you get out to pick cotton there ain’t no grass in the middle of the rows. My daddy, he’d put me behind a mule, and I used to just hold that plow and go right down that row. I get to the end and say, “Whoa, yea,” and that mule come right on back, go right down the next one. I been in fields when I was small, I did. So I know all about that farming thing. I helped Mama trying to pick cotton out in the fields with a little old flour sack around my shoulders. Wasn’t no real cotton-picking sack, just a little old sack I’d fill up, then I’d go and put my cotton in her sack.

Us kids would have a good time, though. I learned how to swim when I was around ten years old. My cousin Riley throwed me in the water out in a big old deep hole, called a blue hole. The boys would get on a tree limb hung over the water, get up on that limb and jump off and dive. And Riley got me up there and chunked me off. I come up drinking water and fighting. And he just laughed; he just killed himself laughing. I started swimming then. I could swim any way, on my back, any way. I learned how to do all that.

I fished a whole lot, too. I used to like to fish when I was young. We’d dig around the house blocks to get baits, night crawlers. We’d fish with them and fish with crickets, too. Put it on your hook, they be flying around and them fish would grab them. We used to muddy, too. When the river get up real high, it would spill out in the branches and over the land. Then, when the river go back in the bank, the fishes would still be over there flopping around in them shallow holes. We called them gully holes. We go there and muddy them gully holes. When you stomp around in the water, the fish come to the top to catch some air. We get in there and muddy the water, and them big buffalo catfish rise to the top. We’d just stick a gig in them or reach in and pick them up. You got to ease behind him, catch him behind the head so he won’t see you.

I’d hunt, too — take my papa’s shotgun and go out with my dog Joe and hunt birds and possums and coons. Coons you hunt at night, but you find the possum in the daytime. Kick over them old stumps where they lay out during the day and he’s sitting back there grinning at you. My mama would singe his hair off and soak him and bake him with potatoes.

Mama raised chickens in the yard. My mother used to bring the eggs to town to sell, fifteen cents a dozen. And chickens, yellow buff chickadees, fryers, pullets, she’d sell them chickens for thirty-five cents apiece. That was money! She’d get two or three hundred little old biddies for two or three dollars a hundred, order them from Sears Roebuck, from Chicago. She’d get the chops and grind from the corn what they raised in the field, put it in her apron, and feed the chickens in the yard. And in the spring and summer, we’d sell them fryers. Mama would carry them to town, sell them to the little stores and restaurants for thirty-five cents apiece. She could take two dollars and get enough groceries to do for us. When she get ready to kill those chickens she’d feed them with chops all the week, clean them out. She wouldn’t let them eat all them worms and bugs then. Give them clean food all week then she kill them on Friday or Saturday.

(Continues…)Excerpted from The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing by David Honeyboy Edwards. Copyright © 1997 David Edwards, Janis Martinson, and Michael Robert Frank. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
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