My maternal grandfather was a storyteller, or a griot. His name was Homer Jefferson, and he was born in Carroll County Mississippi on December 3, 1900. Good friends knew him as “Homebone.” He never learned to read or write, but he was known around Greenwood and Avalon (the Mississippi delta) for his ability to spin a yarn. He’d sit and begin, and whether he was musing about haints (spirits), hoodoo, local affairs, lynching or the Bible, people crowded around for the entertainment. The magic was never in the story itself, but in its telling.
The subjects were usually trivial, involving simple folks, but the lessons in them were insightful and often profound. The fantastical haint stories bridged the real and spirit worlds, with warnings against greed, pride, lust and anger. Many of these involved community ancestors, with commentaries provided by “goathead-sinners,” or cats, opossums, panthers, bulls and snakes. Those stories scared us kids to death, but we couldn’t help listening.
Hoodooing in Mississippi was as real as medicine, and where medicine and science couldn’t provide acceptable explanations, it was all done in the hoodoo stories. He told stories of ceremonies that could make wives never leave husbands, make husbands cheat on wives, put a man in the road, make a person’s teeth fall out, let a person speak face to face with Beelzebub or cause a painful death.
He also told of local folk tales in the Uncle Remus tradition, stories of bootleggers outsmarting the law, sharecroppers one-upping landowners and blacks getting the better of whites. He had a series of stories about a bungling local sheriff (Sheriff Vodderman) whose catch phrase was, “Ev’ry time I see a damn nigga and a dog, I like the dog the best.”
He told of being in the town of Money to watch teenager Emmit Teal’s bloated body dragged from the river and a story about Gold-toothed Annie, a niggah-chasin hound with a complete set of gold teeth. He told stories about lynching and about the time a white man cheated him out of a cow. Yet despite the challenges and injustice of the times, he was never bitter. Instead, he said he knew plenty of good and bad people, both black and white.
He even had slave stories. I remember one in particular about two women, his grandmother and her sister, separated at the auction block. After slavery ended, they spent more than ten years trying to find each other. In tragedy, at the moment of their reunion, one sister’s petticoats fell against the fire. She fled in panic, causing the fire to consume her.
As Homer was the second of nine children, he started working at twelve or thirteen to help pay to raise his siblings. He picked cotton on the plantations and apparently learned to cook along the way, because later in life, he accompanied white men on hunting expeditions to specially prepare wild game feasts.
At twenty-three, he met twenty-one-year-old Martha Liddell, wanting to court her, but she already had a suitor, a young man named John Hurt. Soon thereafter John, a frugal man, bought a meager sized watermelon for Martha as a token of his affection. Not to be outdone, Homer gave her a much larger watermelon, throwing John’s gift to the hogs and his own hat into the ring as a suitor. Homer married Martha two weeks later and John became one of his best friends. Over time, “Mississippi John Hurt” became a world-famous guitar player and folk singer, recording six albums and performing on numerous tours.
Homer and Martha had eleven children, seven girls and four boys. My mother, Sora, was their third child and I am the fourth of my parents’ seven children. Throughout my life, I’d heard talk of my grandfather and his stories. I saw him at occasional family reunions, but I didn’t get to know him until my early twenties, when he moved out to California.
By that time, I knew I wanted to be a writer, so I was obsessed with stories and eager to listen to him. I spent hours and days and years listening to him, fascinated by the way he put it all together: the language, the characterizations, the rhythm and the magic of storytelling. Some stories made an unambiguous point, while others just flowed languorously, soothing the soul and filling the imagination. I can only hope to have learned something from that great man. The most important lesson he taught me was the final one.
Even at eighty-three years old, Homer was a vibrant man. He rode a bike, challenged roller coasters and went all over the city by bus. One day, he missed his regular stop and got off the bus in seedy area of town. I’m certain the young man who mugged him had no idea, but when he punched my grandfather, knocking him down, he killed my grandfather. My grandfather rose and lived on for six years after the attack, but the better part of his spirit never rose from that blood-stained sidewalk. From that day on, he ceased to adventure, withdrew and ultimately began to accept his mortality.
He still told his stories, but they were different. It seemed they were dourer and more reflective, though he always tempered them with an occasional humorous observation or a witty old saying. I took him to the zoo regularly because he loved watching the animals. He also liked watching Sanford and Son and would sit through taped episodes from morning till night, providing commentary for whoever was in earshot.
He also liked to sit listening to Mississippi John Hurt. My sister and I found the John Hurt DVDs at a record store downtown and bought them for him. Best friend John was long dead. My grandmother Martha had passed almost ten years earlier. In fact, all my grandfather’s contemporaries were gone. So he’d sit listening to John Hurt all day long, and sometimes I’d sit with him. I had heard the music my whole life, but I had never really paid attention to it. Listening for the first time, I came to the immediate conclusion that many of John Hurt’s songs were about death.
Bereft of his former sense of adventure, at eighty-seven, my grandfather had finally become an old man. He drank and smoked since he was a teenager, but he suddenly quit both. I tried to find more positive, upbeat music for him, but he was more at peace with his old best friend. Sitting in silence by the stereo, I’d sometimes ask what he was thinking. About old friends and fishing, he would answer. On some occasions, I even got a story.
When I asked why at the end of his life he seemed to dwell so much on death, he told me I had missed the point of the stories and the songs. He said death was the only way to measure life, that death was the final accounting. He said, Ev’ry story that has a beginnin has gotta have an end, or there’s no point in tellin it. I was at his hospital bed on the night before he died, and when I heard the news the next morning, I understood what he meant.
According to African tradition: As long as there is someone left to tell your story, you will never die. So this is the gift I give to my grandfather. I have shared the story of his life with you, and in so doing have made him a part of your living history.