Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [6]
If one had to be poor and black and a Mississippian in the late 1950s, he could do much worse than Bluff Road. Kids were everywhere, dashing barefoot through the neighborhood, fishing gaspergou and catfish along the muddy red banks of the Pearl, planning one adventure after the next. The Payton household was bordered by the river on one side and an enormous pickle processing plant on the other. To most adults, the factory was an eyesore—a gray slab of rank dreariness. Yet for the neighborhood children, it offered a maze of wonderment. Bubba and his playmates would dash among the salt barrels, trying to elude the night watchman. “If either he or your parents caught you running around the pickle plant,” Payton once wrote, “you were in for it.”
When Walter and his Bluff Road pals weren’t weaving through dill stacks, they could often be found at the nearby slaughter pen, where truckloads of cattle and pigs arrived several times per day. To be a kid in Columbia at the time was to be regularly exposed to a certain brand of carnage. There was no squeamishness when it came to killing. Fathers and sons hunted and fished for meals. Mothers and daughters sliced and diced the meat. As soon as the boys heard even the faintest hint of a moo or an oink, they’d charge the pen and climb the iron-barred siding for a peek. The show was bloody, disgusting, and absolutely riveting. One by one, the cows stepped forward, and a man with a sledgehammer slammed them atop the skulls. The pigs received slightly more humane treatment—they were shot in the head with a .22 caliber rifle. Once, in an episode he would recall nearly twenty years later, an enraptured Walter saw a large Brahman bull take two sledgehammers and a .22 caliber shot to the head without falling. “I could watch them slaughter pigs and cows and bulls for hours,” he wrote. “I’m convinced that none of those animals felt anything other than fear when they saw another animal go down.”
For the boys and girls of Columbia’s Quarters, segregation and bigotry failed to crush their youthful vigor. There was an innocent joy to their lives, one that transcended prejudice. They could run through the streets and play football in the fields and experience the same glee as their white counterparts on the other side of town. James Meredith, who in 1962 became the first black to attend the University of Mississippi, explained it perfectly when he said, “I can love Mississippi because of the beauty of the countryside and the old traditions of family affection, and for such small things as flowers bursting in spring, and the way you can see for miles from a ridge in the winter. Why should a Negro be forced to leave such things? Because of fear? No.”
The Payton family moved for a third—and final—time in 1962, when Walter was nine, building a house with green siding at 1410 Hendricks Street. Peter, Alyne, and their boys—with the help of Martin Lenoir, Jefferson High’s shop teacher—built the home themselves. “I told my children I was going to raise them the way my mother raised me,” Alyne said. “They’d say, ‘That’s old fashioned.’ I told them, ‘That’s OK, I’m going to do it anyway.’ You don’t change things because you won’t know what you’re doing.”
The Payton house was the largest on the block. It also happened to be located directly behind John J. Jefferson High, giving the kids access to a limitless play space. Walter and Eddie were forced to share a small bedroom in the back of the house. “It was a plain room,” said Eddie. “We had a bunk bed, with Walter on top and me on the bottom. There were no posters on the wall. Pretty simple.”
In black Columbia, neighbors watched neighbors and everyone knew everyone. The houses were modest and the businesses limited. (“We didn’t have shops