Mrs Jones Story:

One day, my Pa took my siblings and I to the grocery store. We lived in a very rural area in Georgia back then with a lot of poor black folk. We were going to do our monthly grocery shopping and as we walked into the store I saw a black family- a man, his wife and four kids . They were doing the strangest thing. Usually farmers who sold corn at the market threw the rotten ,pest infested and ruined cobs into the back of their carts. These were usually processed into livestock feed. This family was eating the corn right out of the back of the farmers cart- gobbling up the grains with relish and without a hint of self conciousness. Of course, I didn’t know exactly why they were doing it or the aspect of shame until I tugged at my Pa’s sleeve and asked him “Pa- why those folks eating that raw corn?”
My Pa looked at the family, and his face instantly crumpled, and he looked so so sad. He went to the family, and asked them to come with him into the store. They looked decent enough-as decent as poverty would allow.The children couldn't have been older than us, probably 5 to 9 years old.They stared at our well pressed shorts and dresses,our clean shiny faces, and well oiled plaits and pigtails.They had terrible hair- uncombed, unplaited, and bleached to dirty brown by the sun. My Pa told them they could choose anything they wanted from the store. They looked at him in disbelief- “Anything?”. My Pa didn’t even wait for them to realize what was happening- he began to throw everything within his reach into their basket- cucumber, cabbages, peaches ,okra- he even walked round to the corner butcher and got them a hog leg! He was in a frenzy-doing everything so fast, and I was so confused, because while Pa was doing all this, he was weeping. Streams of tears ran down his face and dripped off his chin into the big basket of groceries he had bought for these strangers.
As we stood outside the store, watching the family trudge away into the distance laden with food, our own shopping not yet done, I tugged at my Pa’s sleeve and asked “Pa? Why did you buy all that food for them folks?”. He stared at the family fading into the distance and said in a choked voice, with tears still flowing down his face “Chile…you don’t know what it is to be hungry”