Commentary 

   *Percy Williams was a neighbor who lived on the Jerusalem Church road, just down the road from Susie. While living, he worked at Johns Mansville plant up in Jarratt. He was among the few men in the community that had one of the better jobs to be had in Jarratt. But everyone in one way or another either worked in the agricultural or the timber industries. Two of Mr. Percy’s children, Diane and Percy Junior, were about my age and we all attended Creath Elementary, a two room school with seven grades about two miles from the church, on the other side of the main Creath farmhouse. 

Actually, the school was built on Creath family land, about a mile before one came to Grandma Mary’s house or the Owens’ farm. Daddy and Mama sharecropped for the Creaths and worked on the Owens farm during the Great Depression. They lived in a house near Sansee Swamp, where the mosquitoes were as large as eagles. It was during this period when my mother, then a teenager, remembers working ten hours a day for seventy-five cents. She has never forgotten the harshness of her childhood. 

The house that they and their daughters lived in had fallen in by the time I was walking to Creath Elementary. There was still then evidence, however, that a house had been there. It was much later than I learned that my family had lived there. It seem that that family history they had all wanted to forget. It seems it was my prying that brought it all back to consciousness, the painful memories of subservience and poverty. But it was such details I needed to make sense out of my life and theirs.