Baptism

1 Sunday Today is Sunday. The only day of the week that we don't have to work in the fields. The only day we get to wear our nice, nice clothes. We do not have church this Sunday, so Ma said we can go fishing. We have fishing clothes just like we got Sunday go-to-meeting clothes. There will be no fishing next Sunday morning, because me and my twin brother Luke Curry will get baptized. We ain't saved or nothing like that. We just doing what our ma, Lemuel Curry, telling us that she wants us to do. What she calls the "Christian" thing to do. She says if that ain't reason enough for us to want to get baptized, then we best remember that she is the one who puts the food on the table in the old house where we live. She says for us to remember that she wash the clothes that we wear to church, school, and everywhere else. The clothes that she buys with money she gets for washing and ironing clothes for white folks. Money she gets for baking and walking all over town to sell her baked goods to anybody that got some money. Ma said she wash the sheets that we sleep on. In the house that she pays the rent. If all of that ain't enough, she says to think about the old oak tree in the backyard. On that tree there are many limbs. On the limbs there are many small branches that make perfect switches. She cuts three at a time. First she cuts them, then she braids them, and those switches can make you remember anything that you have forgotten. When she finishes all her braiding, she yells, "All right, twins, these switches got your names written all over them." Now, that really ain't Christian-like at all, but me and Twin Luke get the point. We will do as she tells us as long as we live in her house back here in the Occoneechee Neck. This is the house that me and Luke were born in. The white folks who own these Neck houses don't care nothing about us or the house we live in. Oh, but the land, well, that's a different story. See, they own the land, too, and they take care of the land because that's how they make their money. That's just the way it is in the Neck. The Occoneechee Neck is as strange as it sounds. "Occoneechee" is an Indian name that means "powerful river." Now, long before the white folks came and took the land, the Indians lived back here. White folks took the place the Indians called home and turned it into cotton plantations, including the Wells plantation that we live on now. The Vernona plantation that was once owned by General Matt Ransom is right down the road. I reckon Matt Ransom is as famous as anyone in these parts will ever get. White folks around here talk about him like he was a god. During the Civil War, when white folks didn't want slavery to end in the South, he fought Yankee Colonel S. P. Shear and his army from the North, at Boone's Mill down the road. It was there that Matt Ransom and his soldiers turned Colonel Shear and his Yankee troops around after a three-hour bloodbath. Matt Ransom and his boys could not let the Yankees into this county because they were coming to blow up the railroad over in Seaboard. The railroad that was bringing General Robert E. Lee, his Southern troops, and their guns to Northampton County to help Matt Ransom keep slavery alive and well. In other words, Matt Ransom kept my grandma and all her kin as slaves a while longer, after the big fight at Boone's Mill. After slavery Ma said that poor colored folks sharecropped because they didn't have no place to go. All these years later, ain't much changed. We still work for white folks and take their orders all day. At night we go home and Ma tells us what to do. But she loves us and they don't. Ma says that the way white folks treat us ain't going to last always. She says a change is going to come, and until then, God will take care of us. But she says in order for God to take care of us, we got to do right. Right by Ma means, "You twins are twelve now and it's time to getMoses, Shelia P. is the author of 'Baptism' with ISBN 9781416958338 and ISBN 1416958339.