S ometimes, Mr. Ricky, when Satan gets hold of a body, he just won’t let go. Case in point being that young boy right over there,” Reverend Henry Holmes declares with a high level of religious certitude. 

     Henry – that’s what I call him – should know. He’s the minister of the all-black Congregational Church of God and Christ, located on Route 75 just around the river’s bend from Coldwater. Henry continues, his tone a little less preacherly, “I know, for a fact, Satan is making trouble for that boy, trouble for him and his whole family. Busy lips ’round church keep saying if he don’t leave, he will be dead before my coming-up Sunday sermon.” So that I would know for certain who he says is most certainly heading for trouble, Henry points toward a young black boy climbing into the back of a pickup truck parked across the road from us.  We were – as we did almost daily – observing the world from  our vantage point, that being the bench on the front porch of the Coldwater Dry Goods Store. Today, Henry seemed to be a little more bothered than usual. He was noticeably angry – the whites of his eyes turning a slight reddish brown.  It was as if Henry was pointing his finger toward the devil himself, as if to say, “I see you, Satan. I see you, Satan!!”  If he gets any more upset, I will have to leave.

     “Henry, is that the Rawlings boy?” His revelation are setting me back a bit, and I need to take some of the talk about the devil out of our conversation.

     The Rawlings family is a black family that lives less than a quarter-mile  down the road from my house and I live about that distance from Henry and Berth.  We are all a bit of a family. I see this boy walking past our house time and again, shuffling along, as if he has nowhere to go, but has all the time in the world to get there. In fact, the only places I have ever seen him, with the exception of walking in front of our house, is at the Coldwater Store and in various cotton fields in and around the community. He doesn’t go to school—isn’t allowed to—and from what I can tell, that shack they call their house is where he spends most of his time—that is to say, where he spends his time when he isn’t chopping and picking cotton.