Fifteen

            While I was in the company school we used to get pencils for getting good marks every week and on the way home there was three of four colored boys at wanted to take them from me.

            After a couple of weeks I started fighting back and started swinging my lunch pail. I came home quite often with it all bent and Father had to straighten it out but they soon left me alone after they found out how much it hurt them when I did get a lucky swing in. Anyways, I kept my pencils.

            I became friends with a colored boy a couple of years older than me. He was even helped me fight my battles. We spent quite a lot of time together. I went to his house one time to visit. They were a little better off then most of the colored people and had a nice home. His Father was a foreman at one of the mines and he invited me over whenever I could come. They never had the other colored people at their place. They kind of stayed to themselves.

            He showed me one day how to wing and snap the heads off the black snakes. The skin was tough and wouldn't let the head come off but when it broke the neck so the head hung limp, but they would make a loud snapping noise just like a whip.  So we tried to find the big, long ones. They would make the loudest noise.

            Then we took some of the carbide our Fathers had for there carbide lamps they wore on their caps in the mines, and took a can that had a cover on, put a nail hole in the bottom. We'd put carbide in it, pour a little water in and put the cover on, lay it on the ground, light a match and hold it next to the hole. It would bang like a big firecracker and blow the cover right off. We always had plenty of carbide as our Fathers bought it in 25 lbs. cans. They used it all the time in the mines for their lights.

            There was nothing much to do around the house while we lived there, but there was an old railroad track that went by the back of the house. It wasn't used. I spent a lot of time looking for snakes. They'd like to lie on the old ties in the sun. There was a lot of them all summer long. Most of them were the big, black snakes. They'd be about four feet long when full grown.  I had one or two in a box in the cellar. A lot of times Mother didn't now about them. It was a walk-in the cellar so I came and went when I wanted to with snakes. 

            One day I had one around my waist like a belt. I sued to sand on them. They were strong enough to pull me along for a few inches pull them out from under my feet. I put one in a gallon jug over time but I didn't know he had to have air and he died because I put the cap on the jug and shut the air off.

            There was one kind that was a nice blue color but they were so fast I couldn't catch them. I told Father and Mother about them. Father said the people around there just called them the blue snake and that they were poison if they bit you so I didn't bother with them.