2 Chapter 2- Life in Mississippi

Ruby was her parent’s first child and she was born on September 8, 1954, in a town called Tylertown in Mississippi. Tylertown is a very small town with a very small hospital. After she was born, her parents brought her to the farm where her dad’s mother and father lived.

Her parents were farmers near Tylertown, but they did not make very much money. They were very very poor. The farmers they worked for started using machines and because of that Ruby’s father lost his job. That was when her family had to move to a bigger city with more opportunities. So, when she was four years old they moved to New Orleans.

In New Orleans, Ruby’s mother, Lucille, worked as a domestic helper (or maid )in Mississippi. She cleaned houses for white families, took care of their children and cooked meals. Ruby’s father, Abon, worked as a gas station attendant. The family was very poor, but they always told their children that education was very important.

Every summer though, Ruby returned to her grandparent’s farm in Mississippi. Her parents did not come with her, they had to stay in New Orleans to work. On the farm, her grandparents worked the land. They were not the owners; they were sharecroppers. That means they paid the real owner some of what they earned from the crops for using the land. They worked hard in the Mississippi heat.

She has a lot of memories from her summers farm. When she got bigger her family moved to New Orleans, but she still spent summers on the farm in Mississippi with her grandparents. It was a place with lots of vegetables and dairy cows. And she wasn’t alone; many of her mother’s family and her cousins were there too. Her grandma, Amy, had the children work hard. Ruby and her cousins learned how to plant and harvest crops, like corn and okra, from their grandmother. They picked vegetables and helped with canning. Canning is how you make food last a long time.

The weather in the summer was very hot and the kids worked hard in the sun. But, they also enjoyed their time and Ruby looked back on those summers with happy memories of her cousins and grandmother.