11/29/2024
This is the story of Jim Crow.
My uncle, Burnace Farley, Eddie Farley’s eldest son, was a coal miner in Crystal, West Virginia. Occasionally, the coal miners would come out of the mine to eat their lunch. One day, a wild crow, started flying down to where they were eating and the coal miners started feeding him breadcrumbs. The crow got used to this and started coming around every time the miners were outside. Some of the miners then started throwing little pebbles toward him and he would pick them up and try to eat them. This upset Burnace, that it would hurt the crow eating small pebbles, so he decided to rescue the crow. On Friday afternoon, he managed to catch the crow and put him in his lunch bucket and carry him home. When he got home he took the top off of his lunch bucket and replaced it with piece of screen and a rock so that the crow couldn’t get out, but that he would be able to breathe. The next morning, which was a Saturday, he took the crow to Princeton to his father’s farm and let him go. The crow flew up onto the electric wires and watched all the people down below. Burnace explained to Poppy what had happened and so Poppy started throwing dried corn out of his corn crib down on the ground for the crow. The crow realized Poppy was a friend and eventually started flying down and landing on Poppy’s hat. Poppy started carrying dried corn in his shirt pocket and the crow began to eat the corn out of his shirt pocket. When I was a little girl, I have this distinct memory of sitting on the stone steps in front of the house up on the hill with my granddaddy next to me and the crow on my granddaddy’s shoulder eating corn out of his pocket. My granddaddy was trying to teach me how to put a blade of grass between my two thumbs and learn how to whistle. I never learned that, but I still remember the lesson. I was told that every time my granddaddy came home from work and got out of his pickup truck, the crow, which was now called Jim Crow, would fly down either out of the large cherry tree in the lane or off one of the electric wires and would land on my granddaddy’s hat which was a Fedora. My granddaddy would go head for the house and shoo the crow away off of his hat, before he went in the house. When my granddaddy came back out of the house to start his farm chores, Jim Crow would fly back down onto the top of my granddaddy’s hat. My granddaddy would continue doing his farm chores with the crow riding on top of his hat.
Unfortunately, the crow came to a very violent end. One day, he flew down over the hill to a neighbor’s house. The neighbor had left the window open and the crow flew into the window, spying a shiny necklace on top of the dresser. The crow took the necklace in his beak and proceeded to fly out of the window. One wonders if he was taking it to my granddaddy since crows liked to bring gifts to those they liked. But, the neighbor was outside, cleaning his guns, spied the crow with his wife’s necklace in his beak and shot him! My granddaddy found him dead in one of his fields, filled with buckshot. The neighbor’s wife told my grandmother what had happened. They never found the necklace!
