Childhood

When I was a child I knew red miners dressed raggedly and wearing carbide lamps. I saw them come down red hills to their camps dyed with red dust from old Ishkooda mines. Night after night I met them on the roads, or on the streets in town I caught their glance; the swing of dinner buckets in their hands, and grumbling undermining all their words. I also lived in low cotton country where moonlight hovered over ripe haystacks, or stumps of trees, and croppers’ rotting shacks with famine, terror, flood, and plague near by; where sentiment and hatred still held sway and only bitter land was washed away.