Excerpt from An Hour Before Daylight by Jimmy Carter, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The Clarks' house was the one I knew most intimately, because I spent a lot of time with them. Only about a third the size of ours, it followed the standard design of the other tenant houses on the place. There was a small private bedroom where Jack and Rachel slept, one end almost completely filled by a bed frame on which was a tick that could be stuffed with either corn shucks or wheat straw. A large pine chifforobe in the corner held some clothes and the Clarks' other personal belongings; with no closets in the house, most of their clothing and other possessions were hung on nails or placed on shelves along the walls. The main room, much larger, contained a rough-hewn four-foot-long table with a bench on each side, and two straight chairs that could be moved near the fireplace or out on the front porch. Next to one wall was a pallet on the floor, which consisted of a narrower mattress similar to that in the bedroom. This is where I always slept when my parents were away, dragging it near the fire on cold nights. Jack and Rachel had a kerosene lantern that hung from the ceiling over the table, and a lamp that could be moved around the house.

Sometimes Rachel's mother, Tamar, or her grown daughter, Bertha Mae, came to stay with them for a few days, and there were often other farm workers visiting in the Clarks' house. As in the fields or woods when no white adults were around, the place would be filled with a natural exuberance, loud talk and arguments, and subtle jokes that I enjoyed even though I didn't always understand them. Except in my own room in our house, this is where I felt most at home. At the table, three or four of us played a card game called Seven-Up; it was similar to rummy, but every card could be played with emotion. There was also a checkerboard, used for playing "pool," a fast-moving form of checkers where even the uncrowned pieces could be moved forward to the limit of the unoccupied diagonals instead of just one space at a time. Crowned pieces could move both forward and backward, of course.

An enclosed shed on the back of the house served as the kitchen and held a woodstove, a wood box, a wide shelf against the wall, and a churn. A back door opened onto a tiny back porch, where the major item was a washbasin on a shelf, with a towel hanging on a nail. Just below was Rachel's bait bed, where the red wiggler worms were fed discarded water, coffee grounds, and any food scraps available from the kitchen. The house also had a narrow porch extending across the entire front, very close to the road, where we sat on the steps or on the chairs and benches that were moved back and forth from inside.

A different kind of special family lived in the smallest cabin on the farm, also facing the main road and next door to the Clarks. Fred Howard was relatively young, quiet, and one of the most dependable workers on the farm. He minded his own business, settled his accounts on time, barely made a living, and every now and then mentioned how much he wanted children. His wife, Lee, was some kin to Rachel Clark, and extraordinarily beautiful. She was light-colored, small, and slender, and wore her long, silky-looking hair under a flower-printed bonnet and pulled back from her ears, either in a bun or a long ponytail. It never mattered that her dresses were made of printed flour- or guano-sacks. Lee always seemed timid to me, glancing downward whenever she talked to another person. It was difficult for other eyes not to follow her as she walked or worked in her graceful manner. For some reason, I was rather uncomfortable in her presence, and resented the comments I heard from both black and white men insinuating that they would be glad to help if she decided to earn a little extra money with her beauty. Lee's Aunt Rosa was widely known as an expert in tatting, and my mother helped her sell her beautiful lace to supplement the family's budget.

One of the most interesting men on the place was called Tump (he said he didn't have another name). He lived by himself, claimed to eat rats, and was even less educated than the other workers. It was especially difficult to understand what Tump was saying, because he used the intonations of the Gullah dialect of the Georgia coast. He eliminated all "unnecessary" words, such as prepositions, adjectives, and adverbs, and spoke in a strange rhythm with varying tones and pitches to express his meaning. Respected as by far the strongest man on the place, he was called on to do special jobs that were beyond the capability of others. For some reason, Daddy had a big iron weight under the windmill, with an eyebolt on top and "500 pounds" stamped on it. Tump was the only one who could pick it up and walk with it. He seemed to be a special friend of my Uncle Lem, Mama's brother, who helped Daddy one or two seasons at the peanut picker and the sugarcane mill.

Copyright © 2001 by Jimmy Carter