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wasn’t just us black kids getting whooped, either. Down south, the belt was an equal opportunity means of discipline. The white kids were getting it, too, and it sort of linked us all up together in that way. It created a sort of unspoken (perhaps even unrealized) bond that transcended skin color. Whether your skin was black or white to begin with, after the belt, everybody’s skin was the same color—red.
    Daddy was a God-fearing, sometimes-churchgoing man. He was a good man. He knew his Bible, and he believed in the King James Version. His favorite verse was Proverbs 13:24, which states, “ He that spareth the rod hateth his son; but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes .” Daddy’s paraphrase: “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” My daddy was not one to spare the rod. No, sir.
    To us kids, Daddy seemed as big as Goliath. In reality, he was a slightly built, thin man of 5'6" or so. So, maybe he was more like David than Goliath. I know one thing to be true: he sure could swing a belt like David could sling a rock!
    The sound of leather flogging flesh filled the house that day, along with my daddy’s words. When he got going, it was sort of a conversation combined with the ass-whoopin’. A whack per word, if you will. My daddy was yelling and whacking on Walter, “I (WHACK) told (WHACK) you (WHACK) not (WHACK) to (WHACK) steal (WHACK)! We (WHACK) don’t (WHACK) steal (WHACK)!” There was always one more WHACK after the last word for good measure.
    At that point, Walter sort of got off script. He wasn’t going down alone. During Daddy’s string of sage words, Bubba was screaming, “Edward Charles was there, too! Edward Charles was there, too!”
    After that, I had to pee again. And I was wishing right about then, too, that Reverend Hendricks would’ve just shot me there in his garden!
    I didn’t even have time to say, “Stop, it’s my fault!” before our plan was ruined. It was my plan, I know, but I still felt like Walter ratted me out since he’d agreed to go along with it. Didn’t really matter, though, because I knew that belt would soon be upon my nekkid butt, too.
    Momma stood in the hall bawling and hollering at Daddy, “That’s enough, Edward! That’s enough! Stop now!” Momma was crying for what was happening to Walter. Walter was crying from the pain of child “rearin’.” I was crying for what was about to happen to me. Everybody was crying. Everybody except Daddy.
    Then Daddy stopped on Walter, turned, and grabbed me. He slung me to the bed, and it was on. “Get them britches down, boy! Ain’t that plum juice on your pants?” Now, say that last sentence again with a WHACK between every word.
    Those plums were good, but they weren’t that good!
    My only strategy during a whoopin’ like that was to reverse the guilt, try to throw it back on Daddy. I’d always attempt to make Daddy feel guilty by bawling out things like, “Don’t beat me no more, Daddy, don’t beat me! I won’t do it again, I promise!” The “please don’t beat me” plan seemed to fail like all of my other plans on that day. Nothing was working right for me. To Daddy, this one wasn’t a beating, and he wasn’t going to feel bad about it. We had stolen (from a reverend, no less!), and this was a whoopin’ we had earned. We just had to take it.
    All bad things come to an end eventually, and that plum whoopin’ finally stopped, too. The one-and-a-half-inch belt marks swelled into red welts that faded in a few days, but that whoopin’ is still imprinted on my soul nearly 50 years later. I will never, ever forget it. That was a defining moment of growing up in Columbia, Mississippi, with my little brother, Walter “Bubba” Payton.
    For those never receiving the business end of a deserved ass-whoopin’, you won’t understand what I’m talking about here, but Walter and I both had a great relationship with our father despite the pain of his belt. He cared about us. He got angry at us because he cared.