Carolyn Ruby

The Sharecropper's Daughter Carolyn Ruby

The first thing I think of about my childhood was that I thought we were like everyone else. I did not realize that we were poor. Mom and Dad had 14 children, 9 daughters and 5 sons. I was born in Tennessee. My parents moved to a small town when I was 14 days old. It was a poor part of the country called the Bootheel in Southeast Missouri. I was the 6th child born. One brother died when I was 4 years old. My Mom said I was too small to remember Michael, but I can remember him crying, and Mom saying he would not eat. He only lived 14 days. He starved to death. In those days, you never went to the doctor. The doctor did come to our house and pronounced Michael dead. We took him to Tennessee to be buried in a grave that belonged to my Dad's family, where another brother of mine by the name of Jerry was buried. He died when he was 3 years old of heart problems. Dad was married before he met Mom, but he never talked about his first wife. Dad had a restaurant before he was married to mom. I don't know what happened to the restaurant. I was told he drank heavily, but I don't remember. Dad's family had a little money. His sisters lived in Chicago and had good jobs. His mother died when he was very young, and his father remarried. Dad said his stepmother was very mean. I know one thing, Dad could not stand for mom to spank us. He would always get upset and tell her not to kill us. Mom's mother also died when she was thirteen. She talked about her mother having tuberculosis and that all of her clothes had to be burned. Her brothers raised her and one sister. Mom never talked about her Dad. Maybe it was too sad for her to talk about losing her parents when she was so young. I think back to growing up in the cotton fields with my sisters and brothers. We worked hard but also had fun, burying frogs, hoping it would rain so we would get out of the field, etc. The long hot summer is what I remember most, chopping cotton from sunup to sundown with temperatures over 100 degrees.