This is the story of a skinny little country boy, born in a little community called, Swift, Missouri. Swift wasn’t big enough to be a town. It was just a dusty piece of farm land just off highway 61. That is not even charted on the map anymore. My Dad was a farmer. Not unlike most black men during that time in the south. He earned his living, (that is, if you could call it a living) by the sweat of his brow, plowing up farmland during the fall of the year, and planting come the spring of the year, and then came harvesting time a few months later. That was the ritual for blacks, and a few whites for the rest of their lives. That is, unless they were fortunate like some others, and got a chance to leave that hell hole called a farm. My dad, I’m sure like his father, and grand father before him did the same thing. Walking behind a plow and mules, planting then came the chopping of the cotton and after that came the picking of the cotton. Now that was a life’s ritual from the time you were big enough to walk and talk until you were ready for the grave. What a life. Now the Crume’s were fortunate enough to break that cycle at some point in life .