Hamilton Drinkwater
Hamilton Drinkwater grew up in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, and has been working cotton as long as he can remember. His father moved around the county sharecropping, a big man, good with mules, and Ham was right in the middle of twelve kids. There were still good places for hunting and fishing when he was a kid and that’s what he loved the most, out bobbing for catfish or cooters, chasing rabbits, watching the hawks overhead. And he was good with mules too, and grew big like his father who even in the middle of the Depression could make a paying crop on twenty acres of sand. The people who owned the land pretty much left his father alone, in fact the white people fought with each other sometimes to get him to work shares on their old plantations, and for a couple years they had a wagon and three mules and tools enough to rent and keep the whole crop themselves, but the bottom fell out of the cotton market and one of the mules got sick and died and another was bit by a rattler. Ham was as much help as he could be but as his mother always said, it was tough for his abilities to keep up with his appetite. They were respected people in the area, though, and people would come to his mother for cures that she cooked up from roots and bark. Ham grew up thinking he would do all right living the same kind of life, especially if he could get Hallie Gaines who stayed out on the Tutwieler place to live it with him. He saw her at church or now and then at a dance, and she maybe liked him because she always looked back and smiled and would say hi whether he did first or not.
But the draft found Ham just after the War started up and he was put in the Navy, shipped off to California to load ammunition onto ships. It was hot and dangerous work and the men beside him, from everywhere in the country that had colored people, weren’t always so friendly. There were some fights, and Ham always did fine till once he got knocked cold from behind with a lug wrench and vowed never to step into battle again unarmed. The officers called them deck apes and there was only one or two little sad-ass places they could drink when off-duty. There was a lot of drinking, and the girls who weren’t much to write home about but not too expensive on Navy pay. Then that ship blew up while being loaded at Port Chicago and it felt like they were on a prison gang, shore patrolmen always around with their rifles, a sour mood all the way up until they dropped the A-bomb on the Japs. It took almost another year before they let him out and by the time he made it back home things had changed. His father wasn’t so big any more, looking kind of broken and struggling to get by on ten acres, and Hallie Gaines had married one of the Rice brothers and had babies, and a lot of the plantations in the county were going over to tractors now for plowing and some even had the machine pickers which tore hell out of the plants but was so much cheaper.
Ham began to drift with the crops, hiring on to do whatever needed a lot of muscle and not much sense. Being good with mules doesn’t count for much anymore. He has the slow burning resentment of a man who has been made useless for a few years now, just living along, and if he knew a way out he would take it. Maybe after this harvest season he can get something together, maybe even save up to buy his own land like his father always wanted to do. At least here in Alabama it’s legal to drink and the migrant housing doesn’t smell bad. There’s always the Army again- word is they’re letting black men carry a rifle in this one. There certainly are days when he wouldn’t mind killing somebody.
